How to Turn your Raspberry Pi 4 into a Steam Link

As of this day, most of us have been spending our days at home. Where parks, restaurants, cinemas, and among other things, are restricted to us due to the COVID-19. While the warnings are greatly heeded, being home isn’t such a bad thing.

While I would “love” to spend my time outdoors, I’ve got much better things to do. Like, tell those of you reading this, how to set up your Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 as a Steam Link! So! With your patience, let’s get right to it.

Install Raspberry Pi OS to an SD Card

Before you can begin installing Steam Link — the application from Valve Software — You’ll need to ‘Flash’ the Raspberry Pi OS to an SD card of choice.

You can download the Raspberry Pi OS here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-os/

You can choose either version to download, however, we recommend the Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) with desktop. After it downloads, you’ll have a .zip file. Don’t open it.

Once installed, we’ll need to ‘Flash’ our bios to the SD card. In laymen, we just need to get the operating system loaded up into our SD card so that the Raspberry Pi will recognize it.

We use BalenaEtcher, it’s free, easy-to-use, and has a simple user interface that should get us what we need in a short amount of time. You can download it here: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

After installing balenaEtcher, we’ll need to open it. You’ll be given the option to “Flash from file” we’ll select this option. Choose the Raspberry Pi OS .zip file you downloaded earlier.

At this point, with the file loaded, we’ll insert our SD Card. Once inserted, we can click the ‘Select Target’ option in balenaEtcher. After choosing the card, click ‘Flash.’ It’ll start working on flashing the OS.

Once the flash had been completed. Insert your sd card into your Raspberry Pi, you’ll need a keyboard and mouse. When you turn on the Raspberry Pi, you’ll be greeted with a desktop and a few icons. You’ll want to click on the ‘Terminal.’ It’s the black window icon at the top of the screen.

You can also search for it by clicking the raspberry icon > highlight over the accessories option > and choose ‘Terminal.’

Installing SteamLink to your Raspberry Pi

A screenshot of the Raspberry Pi Desktop.

Now in our terminal window, we’ll need to run a few easy commands to get started:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install steamlink

Entering into the command line, the commands needed to install SteamLink.

Enetering into the command line, the needed text for getting Steam Link installed.

The first command means, “Get the latest package information.” The second command is pretty self-explanatory. We at this point install steamlink.

Once you see the steam link image pop-up, you’ll be able to open it up. Now here comes the trick. For Steam Link to scan the computer running Steam, you’ll need to go to your Steam client on your hosting computer. (The computer that you play your Steam games on)

Select, “Steam”, then “Settings” if you’re on Windows or “preferences” if on Mac, select “Remote Play”, then you’ll need to click the checkbox to “Enable Remote Play.” Finally, you’ll need to pair your Steam link using the code you get once you start scanning for computers in your network through the Raspberry Pi’s SteamLink software.

Going into Steam's settings to pair the raspberry pi and steam.

Now you’ll be able to stream your games from your computer to your TV. We hope this guide helps you. We will update this post if there are any updates regarding how to set up Steam Link on your Raspberry Pi.