Write guide for flashing a raspberry pi (zero) from scratch incl. VNC etc.

[adamkewley]

Ensure all Pi Zeros are:

• Clean-flashed with an OS, because student answers from 2022 are still on the existing Pis
• Ideally, the latest Raspbian
• And all relevant platforms+libraries for all labs are installed on all Pis
  • i.e. instead of each student group installing libraries, all Pis should uniformly have all necessary libraries for all labs
• And any system-level changes are already made to each Pi
  • All Pis must have the correct keyboard setup
  • All Pis must have VNC already setup
• (bonus): there exists a script for performing basic hardware tests (e.g. ensure all pins work etc.): this one is more ambitious

Userspace Software

(copied from PortableBalanceLab/PBL4teachers#1 )

• Mu
• Thonny
• python (obviously)
• IMU: ICM20948.py
• IMU: bcm2835 custom build thing
• apt-get install python-pip python-imaging python-smbus
• pip install RPi.GPIO spidev
• pip install matplotlib numpy

[adamkewley]

In S0 the Pi is set with:

• Country: Netherlands
• Language: English
• Password: raspberry
• Keyboard: Generic 105-key PC (intl.), layout = US, variant = US

(flashing can sort this out)

Flashing cannot necessarily handle setting up the WiFi connection, because that will require collaboration from TUD's IT department.

The trick for WiFi that we can arrange as part of flashing is to enable SSHd on the Pi, along with arranging the default user+password, and then use something like Bonjour or IP over USB to:

• Physically connect the PiZ to a laptop (e.g. a macbook)
• Then use SSH to connect to the laptop via the physical connection
• Then use the SSH session to pull the Pi's MAC address
• Then register the Pi with TUD's IoT networking thing
• Then login to the IoT network via the SSH session and ensure that the PiZ has a WiFi connection
• Then unplug the PiZ - it's ready for use

The students will then receive an already-networked Pi Zero. They can then skip the (potentially time-consuming and error-prone) step of network setup and go straight to VNCing into the device.

[adamkewley]

S0 also sets up Mu and Thonny: both should be installed by the pre-flash

[adamkewley]

L3 requires users to clone their own code:

git clone https://github.com/Morrious/hx711-multi.git

[adamkewley]

This isn't an issue from a student PoV, so I'll move this issue to PBL4Teachers.

Effectively, I'm working on a guide for setting up a brand-new Pi Zero such that is has everything already set up (e.g. VNC, libraries, etc.)

[adamkewley]

Related: 0b4f151

[adamkewley]

This guide has now been written, and included directly in PBL (rather, PBLstaging) as X0_SoftwareSetup. The reason why is because there's no (clear) disadvantage to students knowing exactly how the Pi was setup.

The longer-term ambition with this is that all code in PBL will eventually be python scripts that students can freely read, parse, modify, etc. to see the entire stack.

[adamkewley]

Moving back to PBLstaging before closing because it was resolved there.