Lately we've been documenting the steps to setup the Raspberry Pi with emoncms and use with with the RFM12Pi expansion board (available in the shop soon): http://wiki.openenergymonitor.org/index.php?title=Raspberry_Pi
As you can see there is quite a few setup steps to go through! To make it easier to get started we plan to release and SD card download with all of the above setup and installed for the Pi.
However it pay be possible for use something like Puppet to automate the setup. A friend of mine started writing a little example of how this might be done in puppet (see attached). I'm not an Linux expert, I would be interested to hear from anyone familiar with using puppet. Could it be made to work for this task?
Cheers,
Glyn.
Re: Puppet - automating Emoncms Raspberry Pi setup
I use puppet at work for automating system installs and configuration updates. It can be a great time saver when linked up to a versioning system as well (we use subversion).
I did find it ate up memory when running as a daemon (the master, dashboard and clients). This lead to some clients failing to get updates and needing a manual service restart - which sort of defeated the purpose of having a central control.
I ended up creating a cron job to restart this services once a day to eliminate this problem (and pushed it out with puppet!).
You can also run it from a cron job too which is probably what you need.
It was also a pain getting it running on some of our older CentOS 5 systems due to the Ruby requirements. Ended up having to compile all the ruby packages from source for the dashboard.
I can't see that being a problem on the RaspPi though.
Ian
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