Getting started

14 Jan 2014 - Chris Brown

This is a quickstart tutorial intended to get your Raspberry Pi up and running as quickly as possible, including:

• Raspbian (the Debian-for-Pi linux distribution)
• Wifi
• Pi camera
• AWS config
• eye-pi

Raspbian

We’ll start with an SD card loaded with NOOBS Raspbian.

In addition to the Raspberry Pi and SD card, you’ll need:

• A USB power source (5V, at least 1.0A).

  Many phone chargers, and Apple iPod/iPad/iPhone chargers, will do just fine.

• USB (normal, Type A) to USB 2.0 Micro B cable.

• USB wifi, like the Edimax EW-7811Un.

  The EW-7811Un is really handy because it doesn’t need an external power source, and the Ras Pi distro has the required drivers already)

And, temporarily, you’ll need (to borrow) these:

• USB keyboard
• Monitor and HDMI cable

Hook these all up and plug it in.

It’ll boot up and send you to an OS config page. The important settings are:

• 3 Enable Boot to Desktop/Scratch

  You want the “Console Text console” boot option. Do not boot to the graphical desktop, which requires a mouse.

• 5 Enable Camera

  Select <Enable>

Once you select <Finish>, it’ll install and start up and should have you enter a password for the pi user.

Once you’ve done that, it’ll leave you at a basic shell prompt.

If you selected “boot to graphical desktop” … find a mouse and a USB hub.

Wifi

Raspbian has WPA supplicant enabled by default. To configure:

sudo vim /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

This snippet should already be at the top:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

And add this snippet:

network={
  ssid="My wifi's name"
  psk="keepitsecretkeepit123456"
  proto=RSN
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  pairwise=CCMP
  auth_alg=OPEN
}

Troubleshooting. In case your Raspberry Pi doesn’t have WPA supplicant setup already, you can add it:

sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

And make sure it has all of these lines, generally at the end:

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

The easiest way to let all these changes sink in and create the connection is to restart the Pi:

sudo reboot

Package update

Because the Pi camera is somewhat new, the pre-installed NOOBS setup you got on the SD card may not have all of the required support / drivers. So just to ensure that you’re up to date, run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

(The -y option mean “yes I really do want to upgrade packages”, as if sudo weren’t enough of an indicator.)

This may take a while, 15 minutes or so, depending on your internet connection.

If you have a really old setup distribution and Enable Camera wasn’t available before, run this:

sudo raspi-config

Go to 5 Enable Camera, select <Enable>, then <Finish>, and reboot again.

Other packages

You’ll also want to install some other packages:

sudo apt-get -y install git python-setuptools python-numpy python-opencv

SSH access

On the pi, run ifconfig to show the configured interfaces.

Look for something like inet addr:192.168.1.150, though this may be different, based on your wifi. Usually, though, it’ll be something that starts with 192.168.1. (but not the one that ends with .255).

This displays your LAN IP address, which is important. I’ll assume it’s 192.168.1.150, for the steps below.

AWS credentials

AWS config, for boto

eye-pi needs Boto configuration variables to be available in a predictable place. ~/.boto is one such place.

Create a file like this:

[Credentials]
aws_access_key_id = AKASOMETHINGA11INH3X
aws_secret_access_key = But4hisC4nB3AllK1nds0fCharact3rs/YouKn0

And either scp it:

scp botoconfig.txt pi@192.168.1.150:.boto

Or create and save it directly on your Pi:

sudo vim ~/.boto # etc.

pi-eye package

To get a sane /usr/local directory, so that we can install the pi-eye console command without root:

sudo chown -R pi /usr/local

We’ll install directly from the source (and not as root!):

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/CapitalFactory/pi-eye.git
cd pi-eye/
python setup.py develop

The pi-eye script should now be on your PATH, so that you can run:

pi-eye timelapse --verbose --interval 60 --id pi-01

This will start up a process that will take a snapshot with your Pi’s camera every 60 seconds, immediately uploading them to S3. (That’s what the AWS+boto part is for.)

You can run pi-eye --help to show other commands, or see the README for more extensive documentation.