Installing the AURORAL Node in a Raspberry Pi

This tutorial covers the installation of the AURORAL Node in a Raspberry Pi.

Minimum hardware

Preparing the Raspberry

1 – Install a fresh Raspbian image in your Raspberry

Here it is the official support site The recommended Raspbian version is Raspberry Pi OS Lite 32bits based on latests Debian release (At the time of writing 11 bullseye)

Note: After burning the image into an SSD card, it is helpful to create a file called ssh into the boot disk. This action will enable ssh connection to your Raspberry. As an alternative, it is possible to connect directly using a keyboard and screen. Note: On the first startup the Raspberry will not connect to your WIFI unless you provide the proper configuration beforehand (Updating wpa_supplicant.conf in boot disk). As an alternative, connect via ethernet cable to the router.

2 – Connecting to the Raspberry

Connecting to the Raspberry is typically done through ssh or directly if you have a spare keyboard and screen. If the connection is done through ssh it is necessary to find the IP of the Raspberry. A possibility is calling the following command.

ping raspberry.local

This command does not work in some scenarios, other tools like nmap can be used to find the Raspberry IP.

Once connected to the Raspberry, the default user and password is user: pi and pwd: raspberry.

For more information on connecting or basic usage of the Raspberry please refer to the Official documentation.

3 – Preparing Raspberry to install the AURORAL Node

When the Raspberry is up an running the first recommended step is to update the Linux package registry.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Then, it is necessary to install Git and recommended to have some text editor such vim or nano.

sudo apt-get install git vim

The next step will be installing Docker and Docker compose. These tools allow to run containerised software. Refer here for more info.

In order to install Docker follow this tutorial or just use the convenience script (Always examine scripts downloaded from the internet before running them locally).

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh sudo sh get-docker.sh

After installation, add your user to the Docker group and restart the Raspberry

sudo usermod -aG docker

Verify that Docker is working

docker —version

Now we are ready for the last step, installing docker-compose.

First install several packages needed.

sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libssl-dev sudo apt install python3-dev sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip

Then install docker-compose using python package manager

sudo pip3 install docker-compose

Finally enable the Docker system service to start your containers on boot

sudo systemctl enable docker

And verify that docker-compose is working

docker-compose —version

Congratulations, the Raspberry is ready to install the AURORAL Node 🎉

4 – Downloading the AURORAL Node

In this tutorial we will use Git to get the code, however it is also possible to use wget to download the zip file containing the AURORAL Node.

Navigate to the folder where the Node should be installed and run the following command

git clone https://github.com/AuroralH2020/auroral-node.git

5 – Installing the AURORAL Node

Now you are ready to install the Node. Follow the original Node installation [lesson] (https://blog.bavenir.eu/auroral/installing-node) from the section 2.

Brought to you by the AURORAL community, keep posted! 💪