How to install the Windows 10 IoT Core on the Raspberry Pi 2

Several months ago Microsoft announced that Windows 10 for the Raspberry Pi 2 will be free. In the last weeks I started working on some Internet of Things (IoT) projects, just to figure out how good the Microsoft story is and how simply I can connect devices for example to Microsoft Azure. First step in the scenario, I bought my self a Raspberry Pi 2 to start with and checked out the Windows IoT dev center for some more information. Now in this blog post I will describe how you can install Windows 10 IoT Core on your Raspberry Pi 2.

First make sure you have the following things ready:

A device running the Windows 10 Insider Preview – must be a physical Windows machine (not a VM).

– must be a physical Windows machine (not a VM). Raspberry Pi 2 .

. 5V micro USB power supply – with at least 1.0A current.

– with at least 1.0A current. 8GB micro SD card – class 10 or better.

– class 10 or better. HDMI cable (if you want to use a display).

(if you want to use a display). Ethernet cable .

. Windows 10 IoT Core Insider Preview Image for Raspberry Pi 2” from Microsoft Connect

After you have download Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2 copy it to a folder for me this was C:\WindowsIoT. Make sure you have the flash.ffu file in it.

Insert the SD card to your device and open PowerShell and checkout which disks the SD card is running the following PowerShell commands:

Get - Disk

Now you can see which disk number is your SD card. This is important for the next command. First navigate to the folder where you have stored the flash.ffu file for me this was C:\WindowsIoT. Now you can run the following command to copy the image to your SD card, change \PhysicalDriveN to the Drive with the disk number in my case this would be \PhysicalDrive1:

dism.exe / Apply - Image / ImageFile:flash.ffu / ApplyDrive:\\.\PhysicalDriveN / SkipPlatformCheck

Now safely remove your SD card from your PC.

You can now insert the SD card to your Raspberry Pi 2 and connect the network cable, screen via HDMI and the USB power adapter to boot the device up. After you have connected the power supply your device will automatically boot up. On the very first boot Windows 10 IoT Core will do some first boot configurations and it will display a blue default application while this is happening. Wait for a few minutes and the board will automatically restart. This will happen only once and then DefaultApp should show up, displaying the IP address of the Raspberry Pi 2.

I will show you how you can connect to your Windows 10 IoT Core device using PowerShell in another post.