Bring your own Raspbian?

General Discussion Getting Started
#1

Hello all,

Sorry if It’s a dumb question - but I’m just new here :wink:

I just received and soldered my flashy-new autopi, DYI edition, following the nice guide here:

I understand that in order to start, I’m supposed to flash on the SD Card the autopi-core image…

Wandering: is there any way I can instead just install the autopi software on a pre-existing raspbian stretch lite version ?

R.

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Definitive answer on the OS question and several frustrations
#2

Hi Riccardo

Welcome in the club :smiley:

In theory yes, but we don’t have any instructions for starting over with a clean raspbian.
At some point I expect that we will have a guide that lets you install it on most distributions, but we are not quite there yet - to achieve this, for one, we will need to create an installable package with all the low level power management services, so I don’t think it’s something that we will work on in the near future.

We of course welcome all contributions, so if you do decide to investigate the provided image, we’d love to hear about it. (Most of the logic is located in /var/cache/salt/)

Best regards
/Malte

#3

Thanks for the pointer: I am not familiar with the salt stack tool-chain, so I think I’ll pass for the moment being ;-).

I’ll start using the pre-cooked image to familiarize with the dongle features.

PS. I’ll keep monitoring this thread in case somebody from the community is interested in joining forces to make some deb packages to freshly install on a new raspbian.

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#4

I’m happy to work on this with you and come up with installation scripts to replicate all the needed configuration. No background with salt stack tool-chain but there’s always something to learn!

#5

Hey, I dont suppose you are any closer to providing some instructions for a DIY install of autopi?

Many Thanks :slight_smile:

#6

Hi @gecko242,

At the moment we dont have instructions for a clean install, so you are still (unfortunately) on your own here. However, I do recommend that you flash the current image and then take what you can from this. It will give you a good head start. Once the device connects to the AutoPi Cloud, most of the configuration will be downloaded from the cloud, so you’d only need the basic functionality to get the device working.

To get started with the Hardware, see here:

best
Peter

#7

Hi @Peter

Thanks for your prompt reply. No worries, I will see what I can gleam from the prebuilt image.

Cheers,
Sam

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#8

@gecko242,

If you could write this up it would be awesome. I have been putting off doing the a clean build myself (but a capability I would love to have)

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#9

@Peter

How far am I going to get running the prebuilt image without hardware, just on a bare Pi?

Do you have catches in the case of missing devices?

Sam

#10

Whenever I have tried booting the Pi without the hardware attached it typically goes immediately to sleep/shutdown.

I don’t believe the software was intended to work without the communication from the OBD controller and other modules on the HAT.

#11

I notice that there is a deploy.sh script in the root of autopi-core. I am fairly familiar with salt as I use to manage my various home computers. Is all the autopi functionality contained in this repo - at least as far as getting started?

I’m going to have a go at the following:

  1. Restore my saved /etc/minion hierarchy
  2. run the salt bootstrap to install 2019.2
  3. see what happens :slight_smile:
#12

Update on this. It starts, but the pi shuts down before the salt minion completes its highstate.
ISTR there are sensors that shutdown the pi if the engine is not running. In my case, I’m running on the bench using the approved 12V supply plug (currently at 13.6V).

I know I can disabled the timers that cause this shutdown, but not until after the UI is installed - Catch-22!

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#13

I’m very invested in this topic, as I feel I have just made a mistake in purchasing this device. My ultimate goal was to create an automobile entertainment system with an amp capable of driving the speakers, and a GUI capable of managing media files. I purchased the Autopi in the hopes that it would add ADDITIONAL telematics functionality to my set up that I could use to make widgets and what have you… After scouring this community and reading several threads, it is seeming more and more likely that I’ve gone in the wrong direction.

I really hope that you are able to get a full OS working on your rig that also allows you to operate the Autopi functionality side by side.

#14

OK, I think I’m going to give up on this.

I’ve tried to start from a baseline of raspbian stretch, restoring my salt config, installing salt-minion and kicking off a highstate. I’ve tried with the 2019.2, 2018.3 and 2017.7 minion releases. All fail.

  • V2017.7 fails due to missing features specified in the state files (specifically the tojson filter, which came in V2018.2).
  • V2019.2 fails because the sls specify features that were removed in V2019
  • 2018.3 gets the closest but right at the start, the highstate tries to patch salt-minion.py and fails because of a checksum error.

I can only assume that autopi based their efforts on a version of the salt-minion that is not available anymore.

#15

How sad. It’s a shame that the Autopi cannot be be easily integrated into other projects. It seems it is designed to be the base hub, and projects should be built around its limited functionality