

So on the Raspberry Pi, you can still make direct TCP connections the way you’ve always done with VNC. While this convenience is great for a lot of our standard home users, it’s not enough for the demands of the Raspberry Pi community! The Raspberry Pi is a great educational platform, and gets used in inventive and non-standard ways all the time. Our cloud service brokers a secure, end-to-end encrypted connection back to your Pi, letting you take control simply and securely from wherever you happen to be. The main change in VNC Connect is the ability to connect back to your Raspberry Pi from anywhere in the world, from a wide range of devices, without any complex port forwarding or IP addressing configuration. What’s more, we’ve added some extra features and functionality tailored to the Raspberry Pi community, and it’s all still free for non-commercial and educational use. I’m delighted to announce that VNC Connect is available for Raspberry Pi, and from today is included in the Raspbian repositories. This is why we developed VNC Connect, a brand-new version of VNC that allows you not only to make direct connections within your own networks, but also to make secure cloud-brokered connections back to your computer from anywhere in the world, with no specialist networking knowledge needed. In particular, you need a bit of networking knowledge in order to connect to a Pi on the same network, and a heck of a lot to get a connection working across the internet! We’re always looking to improve things, and one criticism of VNC technology over the years has been its steep learning curve.

As the original inventors of this technology, RealVNC were happy to partner with Raspberry Pi to provide the community with the latest and most secure version of VNC for free. Since September 2016, every version of Raspbian has come with the built-in ability to remotely access and control your Raspberry Pi’s screen from another computer, using a technology called VNC. In today’s guest blog, Andy Clark, Engineering Manager at RealVNC, introduces VNC Connect: a brand-new, and free, version of VNC that makes it simple to connect securely to your Raspberry Pi from anywhere in the world.
