This is another long-ish process, requiring several minutes to complete.
Once complete, the window will display a “Flash Complete!” message.
By default, Etcher “ejects” the card after it has created the image, so you’ll
need to pull it out and reinsert it to get your computer to reload the disk.
Edit the “config.txt” File on the MicroSD Card
To continue, we’re going to need to edit a file on the microSD card. This file
will be visible from any operating system, although on a Linux system it’s in
a slightly different location.
On a Windows or Macintosh, the files will be loaded in the root directory of
the microSD card, so when you open a window of the drive, you’ll see them
directly. In Linux, the card will be mounted, and you’ll have to navigate to
the “Boot” directory on the card to find the file we’re looking for.
Here’s a list of all the files in the directory of interest.
Click the image for a closer look.
Open the file “config.txt” in your favorite text editor (i.e. Notepad++,
TextWrangler, ConTEXT Editor, etc.) and add this line to the very end:
enable_uart=1
Note: Despite the presence of a hash ('#') in front of the other lines in
this file, you must not put one in front of this line. That would
comment it out, causing it to be ignored. Adding this line will enable
the UART on the GPIO pins so you can complete the rest of the
process without having to hook your Pi Zero W up to a monitor and
keyboard. Pretty nifty!
Create a “wpa_supplicant.conf” File on the
MicroSD Card to Enable WiFi
The last thing we need to do to prepare the microSD card is to create a
“wpa_supplicant.conf” file on the card. This file contains the information
needed for your local wireless network setup.
Create a new file using your favorite text editor. On Windows we
recommend Notepad, as it provides WYSIWYG content and allows you to
save a file with an arbitrary file extension. On MacOS, TextWrangler seems
to be the easiest. For Linux, your default system text editor should be fine.
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