After just twelve months of public testing, Raspberry Pi Connect—the company’s browser-based remote-access service—officially graduated from beta with the release of version 2.5.
According to Raspberry Pi engineer Chris Lowder, the platform’s install base has already topped 100,000 registered boards.
Earlier iterations of the software relied on frequent polling: each Pi woke up at regular intervals to ask Raspberry Pi’s servers whether anyone wanted to connect. That design was easy on the cloud side—traffic remained predictable—but it quietly chewed through users’ data plans and power budgets.
Version 2.5 replaces that pattern with a single, persistent HTTP connection. Now, when a user presses “Connect” in the web dashboard, the server broadcasts a wake-up event to the board, initiating the handshake on demand instead of on a schedule.
Beyond wake-ups, every Connect client has been sending status heartbeats to keep the dashboard in sync. The new release debounces that chatter, dropping superfluous packets and compressing each remaining heartbeat by roughly 50 percent.
For most users, upgrading to the new version is as painless as running two APT commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --only-upgrade rpi-connectCode language: Bash (bash)Those using the headless “Lite” client simply substitute rpi-connect-lite for rpi-connect. Alternatively, the freshly minted Raspberry Pi OS image published this week already ships with Connect 2.5 pre-installed, so a full OS refresh will also do the trick.
For more information, see the official announcement.
