I'm working on balloon project with a raspberry pi. When we potentially recover the raspberry pi, it will most likely be in a rural location and I'd like to turn off the pi at that point safely. Without a router or network nearby, I was wondering if there is a way to hook up a raspberry pi with an ethernet cable directly to a laptop? It's a solution for Ubuntu the idea also works for Windows or Mac I just tried today and it works like a charm. Nmap scan report for 10. Nmap done: 256 IP addresses 2 hosts up scanned in 2. Now your RPi is connected to your laptop and RPi can share the WiFi connection. Now you can see the desktop of RPi on your laptop, and I opened my browser to show the shared WiFi connection is working as well. Are you sure that crossover cables are the normal ones? I think not, see: Normal ones do work as you've said on Ubuntu 16. See: — Aug 22 '16 at 18:28 Regular Ethernet cable + RPI 2 + Raspbian Jessie Lite 2017-04-10 + Ubuntu 18. The crossover cable is not required if the host network card supports. This does not use SSH or networking itself, but rather the older, simpler, more direct, more reliable, lower bandwidth, lower distance serial interface. The Pi won't have access to the Internet with this method. Desktop computers still have a serial port which you can connect directly wire to wire with the Pi, but these are hidden in most laptops, and then we need the USB adaptor, see also: Here is a video by Adafruit showing it: I've just implemented and test this successfully. Same situation with my project, want to connect to a Raspberry Pi with no router or wifi. Just a simple ethernet cable. Using ssh putty program put the address as raspberrypi. Alternatively if VNC server is setup, use VNC server and put raspberrypi. In may case it was run scripts in a remote location. In the posters situation, safely shutdown the Pi. Here are the instructions for Windows users on connecting to a RPi by using just an Ethernet cable and a DHCP server. There is no need for a cross over cable, as the RPi can handle it. I have a blog post that documents this with pictures which may be easier to follow. Downloads Download the download link is. Unzip the zip file and open the dhcpwiz application, which will configure the DHCP server. DHCP Server Configuration Hit next on the first screen. Connect the Ethernet cable from the RPi to your laptop, and turn on the Pi. Hit refresh on this screen until the IP address changes to 169. Click on this Local Area Connection row and hit next. Check HTTP Web Server. This makes it much more easy to locate the RPi's IP address. Take the defaults and hit Next until you get to the Writing the INI file screen. Check Overwrite existing file and hit the Write INI file button. DHCP Server and Obtaining the IP Address of your Raspberry PI This launches the actual DHCP server, using the configuration you just created in the previous wizard. Click the Continue as tray app button, and the DHCP server will be minimized to your system tray. Anywhere from 1 second to 5 minutes from now you will see an alert on the system tray with your laptop and your RPi's new IP address. This alert is really quick and you will probably miss it. Normally your RPi's IP is 169. It is easier to access the DHCP server's web UI at. Now you can putty or remote desktop into your RPi, and configure its wireless settings or whatever you want to do. Trouble shooting This can be somewhat finicky. I've had my connection appear to drop and have been unable to SSH back in using the IP address. Normally, I can restart the Pi and get the IP address again. Sometimes I have to restart both the RPi and the DHCP server. Sometimes I have to do this multiple times. At one point when I wasn't getting a connection for 15 minutes, I copied all of the files in the dhcpsrv2. Yes, you can connect the raspberry direct to your PC without router. For this is necessary that the raspberry and your computer are on the same subnet, and they both have a static ip configured And an Ethernet cable connected between the two devices. An ideal configuration would be the following: Raspberry on eth0: IP: 192. When you have configured the two static IP, you can connect to the raspberry via SSH using the IP set 192. Another simpler method is to attach on GPIO a button to turn off the raspberry!