Nexstar Raspberry Pi Controller

[Gina]

Oh dear   Seems stable enough on my Linux Mint laptop.

OOOPS!!!  Better not say that - tempting fate!!

Edited October 7, 2016 by Gina

[Gina]

Blink set up now   Now where's that oscilloscope probe gone...

[tekkydave]

CdC connects fine from a Windows VM running on the same PC. Unfortunately it only allows mount control so not an integrated solution. I'll have to persist with KStars for now.

[Gina]

How do you get out of blink?  I tried installing Astroberry without leaving blink and got errors.

[Gina]

Found the oscilloscope probe but I see I was still working on the battery casing and the switch levers need putting back in.  I could use my DMM but need to exit blink before I can edit the file.

[tekkydave]

27 minutes ago, Gina said:

How do you get out of blink?  I tried installing Astroberry without leaving blink and got errors.

Control-C

[Gina]

Have oscilloscope working but no output on pin 11 with blink running   I'll try a reboot,

[Gina]

Seem to have crashed the system

[Gina]

I could go back a stage and restore the previous backup or I could start again from scratch with a new micro SD card.  May leave it for now - very tired today - too many late nights

[Gina]

I guess I ought to do something really but I don't feel up to much today...

[Gina]

Looks like it's just no good trying to get anything at all to work today coz' it just won't.  I could do with going out and getting some groceries but I don't feel up to driving

Back on topic... I thought I'd do a fresh Ubuntu Mate system and wrote the image to a micro SD card.  That worked but when I tried the card in the RPi 3 nothing worked properly.  First job was to get WiFi working which I did after five attempts with lots of rebooting.  The tried starting FireFox to download TeamViewer so that I can set up remotely with my decent monitor.  I had to reboot twice before FireFox would start.  Also, everything is running extremely slowly - even slower than windoze and that's saying something!!!  Previous RPi systems have flown compared with windoze.

I just don't know what to do - I'm fed up

Edited October 7, 2016 by Gina

[Gina]

No - it's not a cheapo card it's a Kingston Class 10

[tekkydave]

I've spent the afternoon fiddling with Ekos trying to work out how it all works. Kstars seems to be behaving itself. I think I'll hold fire now until I have built the HAT electronics. Sorry you are feeling down Gina. I've got another 9hr shift tomorrow so having a break from it all.

[Gina]

Bit better now thank you Dave   Not going to try anything heavy but might just have a play.  May try Raspbian Jessie Lite which I gather is a headless distro and tiny - downloading it now and it's only a few hundred megabytes.  Seems it will fit in just 2BG micro SD card but other stuff like INDI library etc. will add to it.  I'm quite used to CLI working so headless should be OK - just a couple of things I need to know to set things up. 

Setting up WiFi but I think you covered that earlier - if I can get it to work.  And I would like to control and install stuff remotely - wonder if TeamViewer would work   Doesn't matter very much - I can sit at the table and use the human interface hardware rather than working from my main desktop PC

Edited October 7, 2016 by Gina

[Gina]

Install and configure Raspbian Jessie Lite

How to setup WiFi on Raspbian Jessie Lite

[Gina]

Remote control :-

1. From Linux ssh
2. From Windows Putty

[kens]

I found setting up a headless Pi very frustrating as the SD card kept getting trashed when I had to power down/up to reboot. I switched to a bootable USB and haven't had a problem since. If you're interested I can dig up the instructions. In a nutshell you still need a SD card but it doesn't need a boot sector. You edit config.txt to point to the USB drive and write your image with boot sector there. USB drives seem to be more robust to powering down without dismounting.

[tekkydave]

I usually just ssh from a linux terminal window. From windows if you want a fancier terminal emulator than putty look at mobaxterm

[Gina]

A modicum of success   Installed Putty in my Win7 desktop and connected RPi 3 running Raspbian Jessie Lite to the router by Ethernet cable.  Using desktop, logged into router with FireFox and read the IP address it had assigned to the RPi 3.  Ran Putty and put the IP address into Putty, confirmed that I was connecting to the right computer and the RPi CLI window came up.  Logged into the RPi using default username and password (pi and raspberry) and - voila! - connected and logged in to RPi from the desktop.  Now I can copy/paste command lines from web pages to RPi CLI.

Next operations I have in mind are to change user to root with NOPASSWORD to save fiddling with permissions and set up WiFi with fixed IP.  Then I can install bcm2835 library followed by INDI library and Astroberry.  No need for GUI or TeamViewer nor other apps such as FireFox as I presume the CLI will automatically connect to the net and download apps and libraries as required.

Edited October 7, 2016 by Gina

[tekkydave]

2 minutes ago, kens said:

I found setting up a headless Pi very frustrating as the SD card kept getting trashed when I had to power down/up to reboot. I switched to a bootable USB and haven't had a problem since. If you're interested I can dig up the instructions. In a nutshell you still need a SD card but it doesn't need a boot sector. You edit config.txt to point to the USB drive and write your image with boot sector there. USB drives seem to be more robust to powering down without dismounting.

Best thing is not to just power off. Use

sudo shutdown -h now

 

[kens]

Indeed but that can be hard on a headless setup when you lose network connectivity

[tekkydave]

11 minutes ago, Gina said:

A modicum of success   Installed Putty in my Win7 desktop and connected RPi 3 running Raspbian Jessie Lite to the router by Ethernet cable.  Using desktop, logged into router with FireFox and read the IP address it had assigned to the RPi 3.  Ran Putty and put the IP address into Putty, confirmed that I was connecting to the right computer and the RPi CLI window came up.  Logged into the RPi using default username and password (pi and raspberry) and - voila! - connected and logged in to RPi from the desktop.  Now I can copy/paste command lines from web pages to RPi CLI.

Next operations I have in mind are to change user to root with NOPASSWORD to save fiddling with permissions and set up WiFi with fixed IP.  Then I can install bcm2835 library followed by INDI library and Astroberry.  No need for GUI or TeamViewer nor other apps such as FireFox as I presume the CLI will automatically connect to the net and download apps and libraries as required.

Yes, the apt-get utility will connect to the repositories that are set up by default and download the packages.

[Gina]

Seems to me if you have a static IP set up and use the CLI to shut down and reboot properly the SD card should not be trashed - but what do I know about it

I don't remove the power to reboot I use sudo reboot in the CLI (or if available, the GUI).  And now I shall use sudo shutdown -h now to shut down.  Using windoze a fair bit has got me used to not just pulling the plug to shut down or reboot.

Edited October 7, 2016 by Gina

[Gina]

Regarding setting up headless or using the GUI and disabling the GUI later, I think overall I would prefer setting up headless.  But then I was brought up on machine code, assembler and the CLI   Always my overriding consideration with programming was to avoid bloat.  This resulted in my software being smaller and faster than most

Edited October 7, 2016 by Gina

[Gina]

After changing options I did :- sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && reboot