My suggestion to most brewers running Strange Brew Elsinore is to set up their Raspberry Pi as a headless Linux server. This is a incredibly light weight linux installation that is without any graphical user interface.
There is now a light weight version of Raspbian released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation called Raspbian Lite. Prior to the release of this, we relied on unofficial releases such as Minibian for light weight installs (Minibian remains even “lighter” than Raspbian Lite).
So to get Strange Brew Elsinore running, if you’re starting with a blank SD card, do the following:
- Download a version of Raspbian – I’m using Minibian – and set up the Raspberry Pi’s SD card with the steps found on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s website here.
- Insert the SD card into your Raspberry Pi, connect it to your local area network with an ethernet cable, and power it up. Then, connect to the Raspberry Pi using SSH with the default login and password for your Raspbian image (with Minibian you log in as root, with password “raspberry”). Using terminal on OSX the command is as follows if you are using Minibian
ssh [IP.ADDRESS.TO.RPI] -l root -p raspberry
- Once logged into your Raspberry Pi, perform a quick update. It is very important to note that if you are not logged in as root, many of the following commands, if not all of them must be prefixed with
sudo
. If you do not you will receive an error due to insufficient permissions!apt-get update
- If your version of Raspbian does not include
raspi-config
(Minibian doesn’t include this), you’ll want to install it:apt-get install raspi-config
- Run
raspi-config
to expand your file system so you may utilize the full storage capacity of your SD cardraspi-config
Follow the
raspi-config
menu to theExpand Filesystem
item, execute it, and then reboot your Raspberry Pi when you are finished (raspi-config
will likely ask you if you would like to reboot your system, alternatively you may use thereboot
command once you exit out ofraspi-config
). - Reconnect to your Raspberry Pi as you did in step 2, then ensure your system has the requirements of Strange Brew Elsinore installed using the following command:
apt-get install git-core oracle-java7-jdk lshw sudo nano
- Now, edit
etc/modules
using thenano
text editornano /etc/modules
and ensure that the following lines are present:
w1-gpio w1-therm
Then press CTRL+O to ‘write out’ the edited file, using the same name. Followed by CTRL+X to exit
nano
. - Similarly, edit
boot/config.txt
usingnano
:nano /boot/config.txt
such that the following line is present in the file (either edit an existing line or add if necessary)
dtoverlay=w1-gpio,gpiopin=4
And again, press CTRL+O to ‘write out’ the edited file, using the same name. Followed by CTRL+X to exit
nano
. - Now, we can actually get around to downloading Strange Brew Elsinore! For this, we use
git
:git clone https://github.com/DougEdey/SB_Elsinore_Server SB
The above command will copy the Strange Brew Elsinore github repository to a folder called “SB”.
- Reboot your system using the
reboot
command, and reconnect following step 2, before navigating into the Strange Brew Elsinore directorycd SB
- You can now run the software:
./launch.sh
Follow the details that show up on screen on to access the web interface from other devices on your network. By default, you will access the web user interface on port 8080 of your Raspberry Pi:
[IP.ADDRESS.TO.RPI]:8080
You can exit the process by pressing CTRL+C in the terminal window showing the Strange Brew Elsinore process running.
- By running Strange Brew Elsinore as in step 11, the process will quit when your computer connection to your Raspberry Pi closes – perhaps caused by your computer sleeping. Presumably everyone will want to be running Strange Brew Elsinore as a service. This is detailed well in other places, but to ensure this guide is complete, I will include it here as well. First you will want to edit the service script such that the directory specified in the script matches your path to the Strange Brew Elsinore launch file, and you will also want to comment out or delete the lines in the script which are specific to Beaglebone Black devices. You can also edit the port on which Strange Brew Elsinore launches on during start up in this file. To make the necessary edits, we use
nano
again.nano extras/elsinore.debian
Exit
nano
and save the edited file in the manner we are now familiar with from steps 7 and 8. - Now that the required edits have been made to the service script, we can copy the script to the initialization path, and formally add it as a service, which we will call
elsinore
cp extras/elsinore.debian /etc/init.d/elsinore
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/elsinore
update-rc.d elsinore defaults
- Done! You may now
reboot
your device, and access Strange Brew Elsinore on the port you have specified in the service script. Good work! - As a final step, it is always a good idea to change the default password of your device, and in the case of a Minibian install, to create a username and password so you may access the Raspberry Pi without being logged in as root. I will not detail that here, but please search for instructions on how to do this!
And so this post has some sort of picture. Here is a picture of my completed panel running. I hope this has helped demystified Strange Brew Elsinore software installation on the Raspberry Pi.
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