At a minimum, you’ll need a power supply, a bootable microSD card, and an Ethernet connection (must be on the same network as your Windows 10 computer). A USB WiFi dongle is optional. An HDMI monitor is a good idea, along with a USB mouse.

The HDMI monitor will allow you to see the progress of the boot. Once booted, you’ll be able to view useful status information about the IoT device, such as system name, the Ethernet configuration, and system version. You’ll also be able to set your language preference and network preferences.

With the power disconnected, insert the Ethernet cable and the microSD card into the Pi. Connect the power, and wait about five minutes for IoT to boot (this will be faster on subsequent boots).

Device Portal

Windows IoT Core devices support a special webserver called the Device Portal. These pages give you a full set of tools for monitoring and configuring your device. The Portal allows you to monitor, start and stop processes and apps, change your device name and password, configure your network settings, etc.

Open the Core IoT Dashboard. On the left, select “My Devices”. You should see a list of all the IoT devices on your network. On each line, you’ll see a clickable icon for “Settings”.

Click the “Settings” icon for your device. This will bring up a page which allows you to change the name of your device, along with the username of the administrator. The default name of the device is “minwinpc”, and the user name is “Administrator”. 

Click on the line “Open Windows Device Portal in browser”. Your browser will pop up a login screen. The default user name is “Administrator” and the default password is “p@ssw0rd” (that's a zero instead of an o) You should change these later, but leave both alone for now.

You can browse the device portal, but most of the pages contain advanced debugging and status information. For example, this is the page that shows which apps are currently running (we will be making use of the Apps page later on):

PowerShell

PowerShell is a command-line utility for your device. You can remotely configure and manage your IoT device using PowerShell. PowerShell was installed when you installed the Core Dashboard. You can find it in your list of Apps on your computer as “Windows PowerShell”. You can read more about PowerShell here. 

We have an overview of PowerShell in this tutorial

Our next tutorial walks you through developing your first Windows IoT application