Brewery build pt 3: software setup

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:

1. 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.
2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Run raspi-config to expand your file system so you may utilize the full storage capacity of your SD card

   raspi-config

   Follow the raspi-config menu to the Expand 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 the reboot command once you exit out of raspi-config).

6. 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

7. Now, edit etc/modules using the nano text editor

   nano /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.

8. Similarly, edit boot/config.txt using nano:

   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.

9. 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”.

10. Reboot your system using the reboot command, and reconnect following step 2, before navigating into the Strange Brew Elsinore directory

    cd SB

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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

14. Done! You may now reboot your device, and access Strange Brew Elsinore on the port you have specified in the service script. Good work!
15. 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.