Setup RPI

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Meteohub can be ported very easily to your Raspberry PI. Simply setup a SD card insert the card into your Raspberry Pi and reboot it.

Copy Meteohub Image on a SD Card

Meteohub needs a SD card of a minimum capacity of 4 GB (8 GB or 16 GB recommended). You find the nedded Meteohub image for download here. When you have downloaded the compressed image file, decompress it with winrar (on Windows) or unrar (on Linux). Resulting file is about 2 GB in size named like "mhrpi-vxyz.img". Next you have to put this file onto a SD card. As this is not a regular file, but a multi-partition disk image, you need a special tool to make a low-level copy to the SD card.

Windows

On Windows you need to download and run a special tool to do the required low-level writing to the SD card. The tool of choice is "ImageWriter" from SuSE (you find additional information about this tool here). Please download ImageWriter.exe to your Windows PC. It does not need to be installed it is just a small executable to run. Please insert the SD card into your PC wait a few seconds and then start downloaded "ImageWriter.exe". Wait until a dialog like this pops up:

Imagewriter1.png

Please select the inserted SD card from the target drop-down list. Then open the file browser by clicking "Select" button. "*.img" files are not displayed by default so first thing to do is to enter "*.*" as file name. Having done that you will see the file "mhrpi-vxyz.img" on the list. Select and open this file. Dialog should now look like this:

Imagewriter2.png

Press "copy" and the image data will be written to SD card. When operation has finished without error, you are done with this step. Please pull the USB stick from your Windows PC.

Linux

On Linux you use the "dd" command. Please insert the SD card into your Linux box and check via "dmesg" what device the stick has been mapped to. In the following example it has been mapped to "/dev/sdj"

# dmesg
...
[708634.148013] usb 2-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
[708634.566078] usb 2-8: New USB device found, idVendor=058f, idProduct=6387
[708634.566082] usb 2-8: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[708634.566084] usb 2-8: Product: Mass Storage Device
[708634.566086] usb 2-8: Manufacturer: JetFlash
[708634.566088] usb 2-8: SerialNumber: Q05E7OLZ
[708634.566409] scsi24 : usb-storage 2-8:1.0
[708635.613921] scsi 24:0:0:0: Direct-Access     JetFlash TS4GJF130        8.07 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[708635.614072] sd 24:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg9 type 0
[708635.617302] sd 24:0:0:0: [sdj] 7987200 512-byte logical blocks: (4.08 GB/3.80 GiB)
[708635.617910] sd 24:0:0:0: [sdj] Write Protect is off
[708635.617913] sd 24:0:0:0: [sdj] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[708635.617915] sd 24:0:0:0: [sdj] Assuming drive cache: write through
[708635.621534] sd 24:0:0:0: [sdj] Assuming drive cache: write through
[708635.621538]  sdj: sdj1 sdj2 sdj3
[708635.624279] sd 24:0:0:0: [sdj] Assuming drive cache: write through
[708635.624281] sd 24:0:0:0: [sdj] Attached SCSI removable disk

We are just looking for "sdj" and are not interested in the partitions recognized on the SD card (sdj1, sdj2, sdj3). The print out above tells that "/dev/sdj" is the target device. To make sure that the device is not mounted by some background processes you should manually unmount all partitions by "umount". In the given example this will be

umount /dev/sdj1; umount /dev/sdj2; umount /dev/sdj3

When this throws errors about not mounted file systems that is fine. Don't worry. Now it is time to bring the Meteohub image onto the SD card. In the example above this will be done by

dd if=mhrpi-vxyz.dd of=/dev/sdj bs=1M

Please be careful with that command. When you choose the wrong "of=" target (i.e. your system drive) this will be overwritten without further notice and you will have to restore your Linux box! As dd has to transport about 2GB of data to the SD card this will take a few minutes. When finished dd will report number of written blocks. If it reports that not all blocks could be written, something is wrong with your SD card (may be less than 4GB in size?).
When "dd" has completed without error, this step is finished and you can pull the SD card from your Linux box.

Start Meteohub

  1. Turn off the Raspberry Pi.
  2. Connect the Raspberry PI with your Ethernet.
  3. Plug the SD card into the card slot of the Raspberry PI, connect your weather station to one of the USB ports and power on the Raspberry PI. During boot the data partition will be generated according to the size of your SD card. All that will take some time and will include an automated reboot of the Raspberry PI. So please allow up to 5 minutes until you try to connect it with your browser for the first time. When boot is finally done the isolated green LED beside bright red one will stay constantly on.
  4. You can now reach the Meteohub system by your desktop's/laptop's browser at the emergency IP 192.168.1.77 ("http://192.168.1.77") and if you have a DHCP server in your LAN you also can find your Meteohub at the address given by the DHCP server. [b]User name is "meteohub", password is "meteohub"[/b]. To reach the emergency IP with your browser you probably have to do reconfigure the IP address of your desktop/laptop as described in #Setup of unmodified NSLU2 in your LAN (explains how to bring you desktop into the same subnet as Meteohub). Having reached the Meteohub web interface you can set the IP persistently.
  5. Furthermore, the Windows tool "ipscan" (download here might be helpful to examine the IP that the router has given Meteohub via DHCP, if Meteohub is configured to make use of a dynamic IP via DHCP.
  6. About a minute after reboot Meteohub signals its IP by blinking with the isolated green LED next to the bright red one.


Read the Blinks

About one minute after starting reboot Meteohub signals its IP by blinking the isolated green LED next to the bright red one.

Signaling of the IP starts about one minute after boot. Sequence begins with LED going off, then each of the four numbers (delimited by a dot) will be signaled one by one. The dot between the numbers will be signaled by a "H" (LED shines bright). Each number is signaled by blinking digit per digit. Each digit is represented by a "M" (LED shines medium dimmed) repeated as often as the digit tells us. The zero digit is signaled by ten blinks. After having done this for all digits of all numbers of the IP, the end is signaled by LED staying off a while like it started with. When sequence is done, the LED is constantly turned on again.

Example: IP 192.168.10.77 Legend: M = LED medium dimmed, H = LED shines bright, _ = LED is dark

Signal:                                          Comment
___M___M_M_M_M_M_M_M_M_M___M_M___H               192
___M___M_M_M_M_M_M___M_M_M_M_M_M_M_M___H         168
___M___M_M_M_M_M_M_M_M_M_M___H                   10
___M_M_M_M_M_M_M___M_M_M_M_M_M_M___              77

When Meteohub does not have a valid IP this will be signaled with three blinks shortly following each other.