Raspberry Pi Setup: tools to make your life better

If you set up a lot of Raspberry Pis you start searching for tools to make your life easier. Here are a few of mine:

Mini keyboard and mouse combo

Although I mostly set things up headless, occasionally it's helpful to have a USB keyboard and mouse that you can simply plug in and go. Mines looking a little battered now but it still works really well and because it's so small I can easily carry it around to assist me when I'm setting things up on site. Amazon link (not the exact one I have): Rii i8+ 2.4Ghz LED Backlit Mini Wireless Keyboard With Touch Pad Mouse.

MicroSD > USB adapter

I can't begin to tell you how much better this tiny gadget has made my life. The standard adapters are erratic, and easy to lose - although I have at least 4 of them, this is consistent and mine conveniently has a little flashing light on the side so that I can see what it's doing. Example on Amazon (this isn't the exact one I have): MicroSD USB Memory Card Reader

SD Card Imagers

Apple Pi Baker

MacOS only (sorry everyone else) this is a free tool for writing, freezing and restoring Raspberry Pi disk images. It took around 30 minutes to copy a disk image onto a fresh sd card, when I did the same thing using dd it took 3 hours! Download it direct from Tweaking4All.com

Etcher

This is an open source cross platform SD Card burner that takes less than 10 minutes to image a card. Download it direct from etcher.io