Raspberry PI Zero Introduction and Setup | WILL IT RUN A MINECRAFT SERVER?

In upcoming videos at planet utilize the raspberry pi 0 as the main computational driving force for these projects being a programmer I feel much more at home with code and operating systems that I do with electrical components and microcontrollers thus the Raspberry Pi zero lets me leverage my skills while

Still being able to learn and use electrical components via GPIO pins coming in at only $5 with Raspberry Pi zero and ten dollars for its Wireless PI 0w sister board these boards are cheap and pack at decent punch they feature a single core cpu ran at 1 gigahertz and

512 megabytes of RAM they also include two micro USB ports one mini HDMI port a CSI of video character and 40 GPIO pins all of this for less than the cost of a ticket to the movies the PI 0 however isn’t going to be replacing your computers or phones in any stretch of

The imagination but what is the limit for this little computer while I plain like exploring its uses in future videos that do push this device but today I want to visit a classic computer question of but can it run Crysis well unfortunately I’m running this device as

A headless unit so the answer to that is no but as a programmer and a minecraft mod maker I thought I’d take my own spin on this and ask the question but can I run a minecraft server honestly I have no idea what to expect and I know that

The server probably won’t be very playable by am curious if I can even start up the server and connect to it so without further ado let’s get this pi 0 set up and find out the answer so the first thing we need to do is to flash

Our OS onto our SD card I’m going to leverage the Raspberry Pi imager they give you simply because it’s a built-in solution you don’t need to download any of the OSS it does it for you and it writes your SD card and formats it properly so I’m gonna use this and the

First thing we’re going to do is to select our OS this tool provides you a few different OSS you can choose however for this we’re just going to be using raspbian so we’re actually to go to raspbian other and select raspbian lite this is a no desktop version so it’ll

Run headless which means it doesn’t have a GUI or desktop for you to interface with and set it we’re doing this all over command line let’s go ahead and hit write and it will slowly begin the process of writing and actually downloading the OS so if you haven’t set one up afford

So I’ll probably take longer for you than it for me I’ve already downloaded the latest version because I did write this a little bit ago so it’s still cached however this is your first time of this tool it’ll probably take much longer than it did for me but this tool

Go ahead and write and setup your SD card so I will catch you guys once this is finished so now that our OS has been written to our SD card we need to go ahead and unplug and replug or SD card in do grant Peter morning after a PI

Imager finishes it actually unmount the SD card from the OS or the computer you’re on so we need to do that to remount it and we can actually then see the SD card in your file explorer however that might be so now that you have a tree plugged in find it in your

Browser your file browser should be something like a removable disk just like any USB the plug in your computer is once you find that you should see a folder with a bunch of contents in it so this is what mine looks like your should actually almost look identical to this

Just a bunch of boot files and stuff at the US or allies upon so the first thing we need to do is because this is headless we need to enable SSH to work to do this we actually just simply create a file in this folder called SSH

No file extension no nothing just a file named SSH that will enable SSH when we put up our PI the next thing we need to do is to create a file that will allow the PI to connect to our network that we’re on to allow us to SSH to it when

The PI starts up so go ahead and make a file called WPA underscore supplicant conf this will all be linked down in the description below as long as it with a tutorial that goes over all this so if you don’t catch this here just read that

It’s a very basic tutorial so tells us it’s all up headless so don’t worry about it too much you can get this code here that I’ve copied and pasted it in so if we don’t get this in here don’t worry too much just go to that link in

The soil it’ll help you out alive so basically we’re in this config here this is what the hotel’s of the PI to connect to the network so with this specify the country and also the specify the network name and network password obviously I’m not going

To show you that here but that’s why I put it in there so now we have both the SSH and that be a supplicant file in this SD card so go ahead and unmount it like I just did and go ahead and unplug the SD card from

The computer and then just insert it into your Raspberry Pi and power it up so once the PI powers up give it a few minutes because it has to do with the initial startup initial setup but after a minute or two you should see it pop up

On your network if you have a way to see all the devices on your network just monitor that until you see it because from that you’ll need all so then grab the IP address of your PI I’m not going to go over how to do that I you should

Sort of know how to do that so I’m your computer for you kind of doing this but there’s again two Toros out there that will go more in depth over this than I am so now that we have the device on the network I have actually opened up to

Command prompts here these are get bashas you need something that will be able to allow you to SSH into your device again tutorials will help your friend here I’m assuming you know how to but at any rate on their first bash or shell or whatever you have opened it

Cactus is a just run SSH space PI and then at with the IP address that you’re connecting to so this is the IP address of the Raspberry Pi on your network you should you get some bunch of text here basically just telling you introduction to the PI when it promised you the

Password the password by default is just raspberry it’ll tell you to reset it using that command just highlighted there to being a more secure that way your password isn’t the default one but anyway this is just a demo so I don’t really matter too much so the first

Thing is going to do is I’m going to run sudo amp’d update this will make sure that everything in the raspberry pi is up to date and if anything is not the next command sudo apt upgrade will then actually upgrade it and update it to the

Latest versions this is a new version of raspbian directly from latest so everything should be up to date but whenever I do a new instance of an OS of raspbian like this I just always didn’t have it running one of these two commands just to be sure of it

So like I said I have two windows or two bashes open here the first one will be when I’m running commands on the second one will be a monitoring one so when I’m actually running the minecraft server the top believe we’ll have h top running that

Just shows me the RAM and CPU usage of the raspberry that way kind of monitor and see if I have any bottlenecks and see where the bottlenecks are and then off to the right there you can see a FileZilla that’s just what its gonna allow me to move files between my

Desktop and the raspberry so just useful programs for me to have and I’ll just go ahead and catch you guys when this is all done and I’m ready to start the minecraft server up so it seems by default Java actually isn’t installed on this raspberry and least in the lite

Version so we’ve actually had to install it so there’s a command I have I have up here that I walked in for the description below this will install open JDK which is the open version of the Java JVM I believe you can correct me if I’m wrong there but we’re gonna stall

The originator this which is just drop at eight this will allow minecraft to run minecraft does need Java to run so obviously we will need this in order to have the server start so you can always just check this by running the command Java and the command prompt if it says

It’s not a recognized command more than likely and nonce you don’t have Java installed so this command here will install Java and then once this is done we will move over the jar to the server and we will run the minecraft server jar and go through the whole process of

Seeing if it starts up alright so I’ve now moved the minecraft server over to my resume pi using FileZilla there I have now just run the command to start the server up including the no GUI command this is a head of the server so we don’t need the GUI and you’ll

Immediately see as soon as I run it the CPU and RAM at the top basically go full red line maxed out never a good sign I was sort of expecting this to happen because the startup of the server is actually pretty CPU intensive because it’s actually starting up it’s just

Trying to start up as fast as possible so I knew this would sort of happen but as you can see there’s the first log of it starting up and then right there it is just gone to the point where I thick cept the EULA whenever you’re running my

Crossover the first time they do go in and actually changed a file to set the EULA to true basically you’ve accepted it usually on your machine it takes basically a fraction of a second here it took a few seconds so that’s already not off to a good start

But of course you know I want to see what happened so I should go through and I do accept the EULA but um yeah I’ll catch you guys up when this is actually started and go from there alright so EULA’s accepted the server is running I’m actually speeding this up a

Lot so this took about 45 seconds and I basically get nowhere as you can see there on the console it’s slowly going you can see there up in the top it is basically redlining the CPU and memory it’s just using it all up it’s it’s not

Going fast at all I pop up minecraft here just to see if I connect to sell my settings up and actually it was very curious to give you a comparison so what I actually do here is I actually am now I’m going to boot up a server from my

Local computer here and I will show you how fast is actually supposed to go on your regular desktop to kind of give you a baseline as you can see it goes pretty quickly it doesn’t take long for it to start up so the Raspberry Pi is definitely struggling a lot and at this

Point it was not very viable obviously it’s been over 45 minutes and this has been booting it’s not really practical at all at this point I’m more of just seeing will even boots and can’t even join the server so I’m gonna let this sit I’m just gonna see how long it takes

And we’re gonna try and go from there so before I let sit and just try and boot up I was curious to see if the memory at all was causing an issue of a bottleneck and so because the memory we can actually sort of mitigate this by creating a swap file which is

Essentially allowing part of your memory to exist on your hard drive I went ahead and put a 1 gigabytes I think it was actually three event do one but I put a swamp file onto my sd card in order to alleviate the memory so I would actually

I could actually run the server and one gigabyte of Java RAM instead of 512 that was limited to here and what I want you to notice is if you watch the CPU you see it balanced between a hundred percent utilization and like 10 20 and 30 percent utilization so now that I

Solace has actually made sense that the SD curves can become the bottleneck now because SD card is just not fast enough to act as a swap file to move memory between our really fast RAM and the really slow SD card and it was actually slow slow in fact that it couldn’t keep

The CPU fed with memory in order to do its work actually was slowing the CPU down because I had to take time to move data from the faster RAM to the slow SD card and back and forth and that back and forth transfer just did not give the

CPU enough to continuous computations so actually adding more RAM to this made it slower so just did something to note there just I kind of found interesting it makes a lot of sense when you think about it but um just something to notice so we are kind of limited mainly by our

CPU here and just the whole process we can’t really improve this at all so just a small aside there I wanted to kind of demonstrate and show but any just any rates let me just let it run let it go and let’s see how long it takes and just

Is it at all workable can we join just what happens if we let this sit and let it finish booting the server up alright so again I sped this all up this is going much much faster this ended up taking like two hours I’ll show you the

Ending log here when it’s finished but it took really long for this to boot up just again not practical in any sense of the imagination and what’s worse is it did boot up it got to the point to where you could join a server however it really just immediately crashed so I

Will show you around the screen here now is the actual ending log I didn’t have a video of this because again I stopped this after basically I was like this is just kind of pointing this is going on forever so this is the very end of the

Log here and as you can see it took I don’t want to do the math on that but you can do the math yourself it took that many seconds there to actually start up the server and as you can see there it basically immediately crashed because the very first tick I’m gonna

Assume took way too long to process the server basically assumed that because it took so long that it was a crash and it just shut the server down so verdict here no you cannot start a minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi zero maybe if you did some very fancy magic with the

Java args and maybe some other stuff in advance raspberry pie settings maybe I’m not saying it’s impossible maybe you could I don’t know but just as a stock as it is and just very basic setup process it it’s not practical it’s not possible and even if you got it to boot

Up it’s just not practical in this Tetris imagination I knew this wasn’t really practical and to begin with but I do some projects coming up that will push this raspberry pi to limit and actually I got some surprising results from what I’ve done so far on these

Projects so any rates stay tuned for that subscribe you four knots and I will see you guys all in future videos with this and hopefully get enjoy I’ll see you later peace out