Raspberry Pi Connect is out of beta: simple remote access, now even better

It’s been just over a year since we launched the Raspberry Pi Connect beta, giving you simple, remote access to your Raspberry Pi straight out of the box, from anywhere in the world. The response from users has been fantastic, and we rapidly reached an install base of over 100,000 devices. Today we’re excited to announce that following the recent release of version 2.5, we’re dropping the “beta”.

Smarter wake-ups: data-efficient connections in v2.5

Prior to version 2.5, the Connect client software running on a Raspberry Pi device connected to the service would poll continually Raspberry Pi servers for requests to connect. This worked well for us because it was easy to scale – traffic was a predictable shape; there was just a lot of it. But wasn’t ideal for users – their devices were regularly waking up to make HTTP requests, and data usage was higher than it needed to be.

Starting with version 2.5, the Connect client now holds a single long-lived HTTP connection to a Raspberry Pi server.  Now when you click the “Connect” button on connect.raspberrypi.com, an event is broadcast to the device to wake it up and start the process of establishing a connection.

Optimised heartbeat for leaner dashboard updates

Separately from connection negotiation, the Connect client sends heartbeats to Raspberry Pi servers, periodically and also on startup and shutdown of a device and in response to changes to its internal state. For example, the user disallowing screen sharing via the CLI (command line interface) would trigger a heartbeat. This information is then used to keep your dashboard on connect.raspberrypi.com up to date. 

Prior to version 2.5, the Connect client would send four heartbeats in rapid succession; this wasn’t a conscious design decision, but a side effect of how the client evolved over time. Starting with 2.5, these heartbeats are now debounced, and users should see many fewer requests to the Connect API outside of connection negotiation.

Also starting in 2.5, each individual heartbeat is now compressed before it is sent to the server, making it about 50% smaller.

How to update

To update to the latest version of Raspberry Pi Connect only, run the following commands (if you have installed Connect Lite, replace rpi-connect with rpi-connect-lite):

sudo apt update
sudo apt install --only-upgrade rpi-connect

This week’s other Raspberry Pi software news is that we’ve released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS; this has the latest version of Connect installed, so you might want to consider updating your OS. Read our post about the new release for instructions on how to do that.

If you haven’t tried Connect yet, check out our official guide to get it up and running on your devices.

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