smart-clock

Software for a Raspberry-Pi powered smart clock

Raspberry Pi Configuration

Operating System

This software should be compatible with any ARMV7 OS image. I would recommend DietPi, since it's very lightweight.

• Flash DietPi to an SD card
• Unplug and plug back in to remount the SD card
• Edit dietpi/dietpi.txt to suit your needs, and then copy to the root of SD card
• Edit dietpi-wifi.txt at the root of the SD card
• Disconnect SD card from PC and install in the Raspberry Pi
• Power on Raspberry Pi, wait ~5 minutes for installation to complete

Default static IP: 192.168.1.77
Default username: root
Default credentials: ssh-key

Why not bare-metal?

It's quite possible to compile a Rust application into a micro-controllers bare-metal kernel. The main issue is that when targeting bare metal you lose access to the Rust standard library that . Additionally, there's some hardware that my software ideally doesn't want to be responsible for such as the WiFi adapter

Ansible

To deploy the software we will utilise Ansible to make the process streamlined and repeatable.

• Install Ansible on your host machine
• Add ssh connection details to /etc/ansible/hosts, under a new smart-clock
• Execute Ansible playbook: ansible-playbook -i smart-clock ansible/main.yml

Building

Built with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Building on other platforms will require modification to .cargo/config.toml

• Install the Rust ARM7 toolchain (supports Pi 2/3/4)
  • rustup target add armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
• Install ARM GNU toolchain
  • Should be labeled (arm-none-linux-gnueabihf)
  • May be available in your package manager (eg. sudo apt-get install g++-10-multilib-arm-linux-gnueabihf)
  • Should be a C++ compiler (to build dependencies)
• Build
  • For development: cargo build
  • For deployment (cross-compilation): cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf