OPERATING THE PI FROM MY LAPTOP

Moving the pi has been very cumbersome because until now I have been using a small TV as my monitor at home with a separate usb keyboard. At, school I use one of the school keyboards and monitor. Connecting and disconnecting the cords has been somewhat of a hassle so I decided to connect my laptop to the raspberry pi on a VNC network. This allows me to display the raspberry pi screen on my laptop with full access to files and features. I read many internet sites and tutorials to accomplish this. It was a fairly straight forward process, and although many small details did cause various problems, I was eventually able to figure it out. I now have a much more compact an movable raspberry pi hardware setup.

The most helpful guide I found to help me with setting up wireless screen sharing on my laptop is here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/

and then here(for a mac computer): https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/mac.md

In short, steps to set up a VNC network with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse:
1. Connect Raspberry pi to monitor
2. Install tight vnc to the raspberry pi
3. Locate and remember the IP address of your pi
4. Start a vnc session on the pi
5. Install a VNC viewer or screen sharing app on your mac or pc
6. Connect to the VNC server with your computer using the IP address of the pi.

I used the secure shell (SSH) to access the raspberry pi's terminal from the terminal on my mac, however this can all be done directly through the pi with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard attatched.

Steps to set up a VNC network without a monitor:
1. Connect Rpi to laptop through ethernet and usb power
2. Enable internet sharing on your laptop
3. Use the app called Pi Finder to locate the IP address of the raspberry pi
4. SSH into pi console with ssh pi@192.168.x.x(IP address)
Continue with steps 4 an beyond above.