I was surprised at how much of a *pain* it was to get one set up. I could either hook it up to an external keyboard/monitor/mouse, which was cumbersome, and then I'd have to get rid of all the UI stuff, or I could grab an image like OctoPi, figure out how to mount it in an editable way, edit the network settings, and then flash it to an SD card. And by the way my laptop doesn't have an SD card reader, so I had to buy one!
And if I want to change my wifi password, I better make sure to change it on the Pi first and not make any typos, or else I have to go through all that again! Too much!
So I made a custom OS for Raspberry Pi that allows for easy provisioning and recovery. Upon bootup, it will launch a WiFi hotspot with SSID "WiFiPi" and password "luggage12345" so you can connect to it right away, without having to hook your Pi up to 30 peripherals, or having to make a custom image. Once you're in, there's easy options to connect it to your home network, and if you screw anything up, it will relaunch the hotspot, so you can get back in patch things up.
You can get the image from the first version here: https://github.com/nbelakovski/WiFiPi/releases/tag/v0.1
I will soon start selling SD cards preloaded with this image, so that you won't even have to buy an SD card reader in order to be able to provision your Pi. If you're interested in buying one, please let me know! It would really help me gauge interest in the product and plan accordingly.
Feedback is always welcome. Please share your thoughts and ideas! And if you have any issues using it, please let me know, preferably by creating an issue on the project's github page.
Credits:
Made with big help from roboberry's articles at raspberryconnect.com, and also based on guysoft's amazing CustomPiOS
