We purchased recently a Raspberry Pi Shake 3D to be used at our university. We’re having trouble trying to get the video to show up on a monitor via the HDMI connection. We’ve been told by the lab that the device cant be unplugged as it might damage the device, hoping that by restarting the device we can get video to start.
We need video so we can get the network information. The IT department needs to lock down the network connection from external threats.
The Shake is designed to run “headless”. Unless an HDMI cable is plugged in at boot, there will be no video output. You can unplug the device and plug it back in to restart. It’s recommended to use the web front end for restart/shutdown, but the chances are pretty low that you’d mess anything up by unplugging it once.
A side note here: since school and university networks are often pretty restrictive, we typically suggest setting the device up on a home router first, where you should be able to see the web front end at http://rs.local without any additional configuration. The MAC address (which I’m assuming is what the IT department is asking for) is displayed right on that page.
If you do decide to do this via HDMI, you will need a keyboard as well. Wait until the Shake boots to the login prompt, type the default username and password (assuming you haven’t changed the password), then type ifconfig. Assuming I am correct that the IT department actually is looking for the MAC address, you will be looking for the 12-character code after the word ether, which will look like b8:27:xx:xx:xx:xx
When you’ve written that down you can type sudo shutdown now to shut the device off.