phenobox setup

Setup

This page will outline the required software setup to get the Phenobox up and running.

Prerequisites

• Raspberry Pi 3 with Raspbian
• Network File Share (NFS) to store the taken images to

Installation

1. Allow the user pi access to the GPIO pins without sudo

   • Add a group called gpio and add the user pi to it

       sudo groupadd gpio
       sudo adduser pi gpio

   • Give this new group the necessary privileges for the according memory regions used to access the GPIO pins

      sudo chown root:gpio /dev/gpiomem
      sudo chmod g+rw /dev/gpiomem 

   • Finally if everything went right the permissions should look like this

       ls -l /dev/gpiomem 
       crw-rw---- 1 root gpio 244, 0 Nov 23 19:54 /dev/gpiomem

2. Allow the user pi to shutdown the system without entering a password

   • use visudo to edit the sudoers file and add the following

      pi ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /sbin/shutdown
   

3. Automount the NFS on startup

   • Use an entry to /etc/fstab to accomplish this. Please refer to any tutorial on the web on how to do this.

4. Install zBar

   sudo apt-get install libzbar-dev
   sudo apt-get install git-core
   sudo apt-get install python-dev 
   sudo pip install git+https://github.com/npinchot/zbar.git

5. Install gphoto2

   • To install gphoto2 and libgphoto2 please use gphoto2-updater
   • To install the python bindings use

     pip install -v gphoto2

6. Download the code under /phenobox from the repository onto the Pi and run the following in the root directory of the project

   pip install -r requirements

7. Create a file called 'production_config.py' under 'phenobox/config' and fill it according to the description of a sample file

8. Set up a cronjob for user pi to execute the autorun.sh script on reboot

   • Use the following to create a new cronjob

     sudo crontab -e -u pi

   • Enter the following to run the autorun.sh script contained in the repository on ever reboot

     @reboot cd /home/pi/photobox; /usr/bin/python autostart.py >> /home/pi/phenobox_cron.log 2>&1
     

Congratulations your Raspberry Pi should be ready to power the Phenobox