Tutorials

Set Up a Headless QNX Raspberry Pi

In this post, we'll walk you through the process of setting up a Raspberry Pi with QNX OS 8.0 in a headless configuration.

JohnAtQNX

07 Mar 2025 — 3 min read

Photo by Jainath Ponnala / Unsplash

To connect to your QNX Raspberry Pi without needing an attached monitor, keyboard, or mouse, you'll have to set up your board as a headless device. Below we cover two methods for accomplishing this: setting a custom hostname and Wi-Fi credentials on the Micro SD card's /boot partition manually and using a serial debug probe to do it live on the Pi.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you:

Follow the instructions to obtain the QNX OS 8.0 quick start target image (QSTI) for Raspberry Pi
Flash the QSTI image file to your Pi's Micro SD card

Set a Hostname & Find it With mDNS

If your network supports mDNS (likely the case for most home networks), you can set a custom hostname and simply ping your QNX Pi on the network to find it.

How to set a custom hostname and Wi-Fi credentials

Re-insert your card reader with your Micro SD card into your computer. On most host systems, the /boot partition should become available as a mounted drive. You can edit the qnx_config.txt file there to set a custom hostname. For this example I'm using the hostname qnxpi-john.

HOSTNAME=qnxpi-john

If your Pi is connected to the network via Ethernet, you can skip setting wireless credentials.
Otherwise, in the same mounted drive, find and edit the file wpa_supplicant.conf. (If it doesn't exist, you can create it.) Update the ssid value to the name of your Wi-Fi network, and the psk value to the password:

network={
  ssid="<your-network-name>"
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  psk="<the-password>"
}

Make sure to save and close both configuration files, then unmount and remove the Micro SD card from your host.

You can refer to the Free BSD documentation on wpa_supplicant.conf for more network block options.

Find your Pi on the network

Insert the Micro SD card into your Raspberry Pi and power up the board. Allow about a minute for the boot to complete and for the device to attach to the network. Then you can try to ping it using the hostname you chose above:

$ ping qnxpi-john.local
PING qnxpi-john.local (192.168.1.157): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.157: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=15.574 ms

Voila, we have our IP. You can now SSH to the board and use this IP to set up development tools like the QNX Momentics IDE or the QNX Toolkit extension for Visual Studio Code.

$ ssh qnxuser@192.168.1.157
(qnxuser@192.168.1.157) Password:
...
qnxuser@qnxpi-john:~$

💡

The default username and password for the quick start target image is qnxuser/qnxuser.

Use a Serial Debug Probe

If your network settings prevent you from using mDNS or you prefer to interact with the board though a serial connection, this is also possible. You'll need a USB-TTL converter, which provides a basic serial connection between the Raspberry Pi GPIO and your host computer.

This method is documented in a bit more detail in the quick start target image documentation.

Follow the instructions that came with your USB-TTL converter to connect it. If you're using the Raspberry Pi-branded Debug Probe, the transmit lead goes to pin 8, the receive lead goes to pin 10, and the ground lead can go any ground pin (like pin 6 or 14, for convenience). The power lead should not be connected.

Once you've booted your Raspberry Pi with QNX and connected the USB-TTL converter to your computer, find and connect to the appropriate serial device on your host computer:
1. On Windows, open Device Manager and find the corresponding USB-serial port under Ports (COM & LPT). Then, use a utility such as PuTTY to connect to that serial device with a baud speed of 115200.
2. On Linux, find the USB-serial port that corresponds to your Raspberry Pi then use the screen command line utility to connect to your Raspberry Pi:

$ ls /dev/ttyUSB*
...
$ sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

When connecting to a QNX Pi over serial, you are not prompted to authenticate; you are using a root terminal.

If you wish, follow the instructions above to alter the hostname and wireless network credentials. When you are ready, you can use ifconfig to check the network interfaces for an IP address.