Emoncms on the RaspberryPI: Partitioned SD - wireless problems

Submitted by emicon on Fri, 25/04/2014 - 16:16

I installed oem_gateway and emoncms in the same SD card and the system works fine: the data are correctly
received by emonTX3 and sent to the local server emoncms built inside the SD card.

Now I need to connect wirelessly my raspberry cause I can no longer use the Ethernet connection. Here are my problems started: IPE1 do not contain wireless-tools so I can not use the commands iwconfig and iwlist. Also it seems this is not the wpasupplicant package.

I was able to load the wireless-tools package and then using iwconfig and iwlist but for some reason I can not upload wpasupplicant.

Has anyone had same problem? We need to have the wpasupplicant package to connect wirelessly?
Any help will be appreciated! (sorry for my bad english)

Thanks

Re: Emoncms on the RaspberryPI: Partitioned SD - wireless problems

Submitted by pb66 on Fri, 25/04/2014 - 17:17.

I'm not sure why you have the (IPE-R1) Rock-solid read-only oem_gateway image and the emonCMS server & database on the same sd card. as they are opposing methods.

The oem_gateway can work well with a local emonCMS install, but ideally on a harddrive.

The read-only version of oem_gateway can be used on an sd card because it is read only.I would recommend reviewing your set-up, as the SD card will fail at some point

I had the same issue with wifi on the Read-only gateway and I made an updated image which is available to download, this has the wpasupplicant package and drivers etc and can be found here Rock-solid Gateway Image but you should read the notes here if you go that route http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/node/4036

If you wish to run a local copy of emonCMS (without the sd card crashing) I would recommend using a small hdd with your pi. instructions for that can be found here Creating a local EmonCMS installation on a Raspberry Pi to which you can add oem_gateway by using

sudo git clone http://github.com/Jerome-github/oem_gateway.git

and following these instructions https://github.com/Jerome-github/oem_gateway

Paul

Re: Emoncms on the RaspberryPI: Partitioned SD - wireless problems

Submitted by ukmoose on Fri, 25/04/2014 - 20:29.

I'm not near my Pi at the moment but have you tried just configuring it in /etc/network/interfaces :

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "network name"
wpa-psk "network password"

Re: Emoncms on the RaspberryPI: Partitioned SD - wireless problems

Submitted by emicon on Sat, 26/04/2014 - 09:08.

hello,

thanks for the quick reply. Maybe I forgot to mention that I have followed this tutorial

http://emoncms.org/site/docs/fullstackpi

which plans to start from an SD card containing a oem_gateway image; this image comes with the
following things pre-installed: ipe debian linux, ssh server, serial settings for rfm12pi,
git and Jerome's oem gateway. In the next step the SD is partitioned to allow the installation
of the local server apache + mysql + redis which will be installed inside the webapp emocms.

For ukmoose: thanks, i already have tried that settings, but i think the problem is the missed wpa_supplicant.

for pb66: thanks, i think i will use the external hard disk but i wanted to do a try with all system
on a card because it sounds very nice to me to have all inside the raspberry. Anyway i will follow
your instructions as soon as possible (today is sunny and i'm out with family ^_^).

Have both a great weekend! :)

Emilio

Re: Emoncms on the RaspberryPI: Partitioned SD - wireless problems

Submitted by pb66 on Mon, 28/04/2014 - 12:14.

Hi Emilio,

I hope you don't mind I have copied and replied to your PM in the forum thread as other users may be able to contribute or find it of interest.

Hello,

i'm sorry but i'm not able to post a reply, a message say that my reply is queued for approval.

I try to posto here in private if you dont mind.

"hello,

thanks for the quick reply. Maybe I forgot to mention that I have followed this tutorial

http://emoncms.org/site/docs/fullstackpi

which plans to start from an SD card containing a oem_gateway image; this image comes with the
Following things pre-installed: ipe debian linux, ssh server, serial settings for rfm12pi,
git and Jerome's oem gateway. In the next step the SD is partitioned to allow the installation
of the local server apache + mysql + redis which will be installed inside the webapp emocms.

For ukmoose: thanks, i already have tried that settings, but i think the problem is the missed wpa_supplicant.

for pb66: thanks, i think i will use the external hard disk but i wanted to do a try with all system
on a card because it sounds very nice to me to have all inside the raspberry. Anyway i will follow
your instructions as soon as possible (today is sunny and i'm out with family ^_^).

Have both a great weekend! :) "

Emilio

If you wish to go down the route of installing emonCMS to a read-only partition and have a data partition to write to, and are unable to resolve the wifi issue using the oem_gateway image used in those instructions, you could build your own image or I can see no reason against using the image I linked to instead. Trystan has also created a RO raspbian image you could start with. All of these are read-only sd card images that in theory you could use to follow thestackpi instructions to add a data partition for emonCMS.to write to.

Make sure you keep backing up your data partition though (this should be done with hdd as well but more so with sd card), the image can always be rebuilt but if you cannot retrieve your data from a failed sd card it's gone for good.

If you use a smallish sd card (to begin with) you can back up your SD image and try another method (or try them all) when you decide on an image you can increase the partition sizes as you need (keep them small to help with backing up)

Paul

Archived Forum