Prerequisites:

1 x VM running Ubuntu 20.04 – I tested using a Cloud Compute server on VULTR, but you could use any VM that is on the same network as the RPi.

1 x RPi – As long as the RPi is on the same network it will be good to go. I tested over a VPN and it worked also.

Software Stack:

Influxdb – As usual the time series database.

Grafana – My favorite program for displaying this kind of data.

Telegraf – A plugin server agent for collecting and passing hardware metrics such as CPU, Temps, RAM, Storage, etc…

Install InfluxDb on VM/Host

Install Grafana on VM/Host

Install Telegraf on Raspberry Pi (RPi)

Configuration – Telegraf on RPi

Telegraf.conf

Configuration – InfluxDB on VM/Host

Configuration – Grafana

Navigate to your Grafana Install: http://<server-ip-address>:3000

Login: default login is admin:admin

The first step is to add the Influxdb data source:

The second step is to import the Dashboard – We used this dashboard from the Grafana Library:

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/10578/reviews Props to Jorge

To import the dashboard, navigate to DASHBOARD > MANAGE > IMPORT

Insert 10578 into the field and click ‘Load’

Make sure you then select the datasource to associate with the dashboard.

You should now be greeted with a Dashboard that is connected to the RPi.

The rest is now up to you! Add multiple RPi’s. You can switch between them at the top of the Dashboard.

A big thanks to Dorian Machado and his article. Also Jorge de la Cruz and his Dashboard! These guys did the real heavy lifting.

So what were my first thoughts about Home Assistant? Well, the installation of HassOS on the hardware of choice is actually the easy part. The Learning Curve for configuration of the devices you want to add to Home Assistant was easily the most challenging. My aim for this post is to help you out a bit with the on-boarding. Here are my top tips for an easier onboarding experience to Home Assistant:

What are (Device) integrations?

Ok, so now that HassOS is installed we navigate around the software and easily start to get confused about what the heck we are meant to configure. If you head over to this webpage, you will be greeted by sheer volumes of possible devices and hardware that Home Assistant allows you to control. For example, your goal may be to use Home Assistant to Automate some lighting. Under the “Light” tab you will see 76 different integrations. Ranging from IKEA Tradfri smart bulbs through to the more common LifX and Phillips Hue integrations. These integrations pages are basically guides or configurations that you must follow to allow Home Assistant to control the devices.

What is YAML?

YAML stands for “Yet Another Markup Language”. It is a human-readable, data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and yes, we use YAML for the configuration of our Integrations! In a nutshell, YAML is not a programming language, but a configuration language. It certainly is not hard to pick up and if I can manage to nut it out, then I’m sure you can too.YAML configuration exactly like above, be it a very simple example, the idea is the same throughout. Of note is the configuration.yaml document. The majority of all your integrations will end up inside this file, or similar .yaml files. YAML does follow a certain syntax, I would suggest having a read through the Home Assistant YAML page prior to diving in.

What are Entities?

Each individual device you add to Home Assistant via an Integration and Entity ID. (Yes, every single item, device, switch and automation, even non-physical items can have entities!) When you first install HassOS and run it, you may find that some devices are automatically found on your network are assigned an entity. As long as you remember that an entity represents a particular device then you cannot go wrong. For example, you may have 15 Phillips Hue Globes on the network, (Via a Bridge) each globe will have its own entity. It is this entity that defines the particular device. example “light.lounge” represents the Phillips Hue light in the lounge and you will need to reference that in your configuration integration.

Love Lace UI

You will hear the term ‘Love Lace UI” thrown around the forums and web a fair bit. This User Interface is somewhat newish to Home Assistant and is the main user interface that we see on the startup of Home Assistant. Everything we do generally speaking is via the Love Lace UI. A Demo of the Love Lace Ui can be found here.

The User Interface is made up of a few components:

• Cards – These are a bit like tiles that can be laid out in the UI to display different information. HA has 24 predefined cards. The HA community, however, has many more. I use cards to display switches which I can tap to turn lights on and off. I also use cards to show the current weather forecast and check the temperatures around the house. One card even lets me view the IP CCTV cameras I have around the house.
• Customization – The customization section allows you to change the layout of the cards to suit the view you want. You can add tabs and change the layout as you see fit. If you decide to run the Love Lace UI on a tablet, then you may need to customize the look and feel.

Well, I hope I have not scared you off or bored you to death, but these are the things I wish were explained to me a bit better before getting stuck into Home Assistant. Stay tuned for more on Home Assistant!

How to configure TVheadend via the wizard

If you are unsure how to get to the web GUI for TVheadend, I would suggest a quick review of this post. Particularly looking at step 3. In a nutshell, you need to use a web browser to configure TVheadend. Go to the IP address you set on your device. If it is your first-time use, you will not get a login screen, however, you should get the wizard to come straight up. If for some reason you canceled the wizard, you can find it by clicking ‘Configuration > Start Wizard’

Open up a web browser and enter the IP address of your TVheadend Server. Also, use the port number ‘9981’. (For example http://192.168.1.168:9981) This will bring up the TVheadend Web GUI. On the first startup, you will be presented with the setup wizard.

Select the web interface language and the EPG language if different. In most cases, you will only need to select the web interface language. Click next.

This section allows you to set ‘allowed’ networks to use the server. You can insert 0.0.0.0/0 to allow all networks, or you can use something like 192.168.1.0/24 to allow anything on that network to access the server. This is a personal preference. You might also notice an open IPV6 entry separated by a comma. This is also acceptable. You can add multiple networks this way. Add an admin login, keep this super strong, especially if you plan to stream content via the internet. If you plan to allow other users into the network, then set them up here also.

The next section will give you an insight into how many adapters the server has picked up. You should see all of them plugged in. If not, then check your connection to the tuner (USB) and ensure the RPi operating system has loaded the drivers. Some TV tuners may not be picked up by Linux. Network 1 always defaults to IPTV, disregard this and continue to your adapters/tuners. Assign each adapter to a network. In my case, it is DVD-T which is Digital Terrestrial TV in Australia.

Because terrestrial television is transmitted on different frequencies dependant on your location, you need to select a profile that matches the location you are in. This will tell the tuner to look at these frequencies. Go ahead and select the correct profile for your area.

This next screen will begin to scan for all services available for the area that you selected. If you accidentally select the wrong location, then you may run into issues. Also, ensure that your TV antenna is connected at this stage. Some of the tuner details can be found in the window behind the wizard. We can revisit this screen later to fault find signal quality issues.

Now that we have found the desired TV channels, we need to map out all the tags and channel names/numbers. This can be done automatically by selecting the 3 check boxes. It is possible to re-sort these at a later date. For now, it is easier to allow TVheadend server to sort it out.

Congrats, your server is now set up! Be it at a basic level, you should now be able to consume some IPTV. The next section will cover off on some ways to do this!

Watch a stream with VLC

Now that you have done all the hard work, its time to consume some IPTV. This section will outline how to view a channel with VLC. If you have not downloaded VLC, then you will need to do this first. https://www.videolan.org/ For those of you who are not aware, VLC is a media player that is very popular and compatible with a LOT of different media types. We can use VLC media player to open our TVheadend streams.

Open up the TVheadend web GUI and navigate to the channel you want to watch. Click on the small ‘info’ button on the left-hand side of the screen. This will open up a modal window with which you can grab the stream.

Select the ‘play program’ button. This should initiate a download. This file is basically a .m3u which can be opened by VLC. VLC will then be pointed directly to the stream you selected.

Open the downloaded file with VLC.

Your stream should then begin to play in VLC.

Some additional credits for the pics and info:Adafruit.com, Raspberry Pi Foundation, elinux.org

This post will go through the basics of setting up a simple VPN server on a cheap raspberry pi. This example uses the older RPi 2, which is more than sufficient for accessing a few IP cameras and other devices remotely.

The Hardware you will need to gather

• RPi 2 or 3.
• Ethernet cable
• HDMI Cable
• Keyboard/Mouse
• 8Gb SD Card

The Software titles you may want to download

• Etcher (For installing RPi image onto SD Card)
• Latest Raspbian Lite Image
• Putty
• OpenVPN Client Software
• Filezilla FTP Client – Useful for SFTP File transfers
• NotePad++ – Edit config files
• WinSCP – For file transfer from Windows PC to/From RPi

Prerequisite Setup – Because we need to get ourselves ready!

The first step is to prepare the SD card for the PI. A 4 or 8Gb SD card will be suitable for the Pi VPN installation. You will first need to download the latest Raspian Lite image (We do not require the GUI for PiVPN) and a copy of Etcher. Etcher will allow you to install and prepare your SD card. It is super easy to use.

Select Image > Select SD card (Make sure you select Correct Drive) > Click Flash.

How to setup SSH for remote access from our PC

We have chosen to run the Lite version of Raspbian because we do not require the additional overheads of the GUI. The VPN server will sit hidden away and we will connect to is via SSH if we need to. The problem is that SSH is not enabled by default. Thus we require the HDMI cable, a monitor and keyboard to change this first.

Insert the SD card we just made into the Pi and connect the HDMI cable to your monitor. We now need to power up the Pi. You should see the Pi initialize and on first run it may reboot once. The first thing you will have to do is log into the Pi. The default login is:

• Username: pi
• Password: raspberry

Viewing the Pi via the HDMI cable and using the connected keyboard and mouse is a pain in the arse, This is why we are setting up SSH, so we can go back to our computer and do all the configuration from the comfort of any PC.

At this stage, we need to enable SSH. To do this type:

Sudo raspi-config

Select “5 Interfacing Options” > Select “P2 SSH” > Select “YES” to enable SSH

You will get a confirmation saying SSH is enabled. From this point. All our configuration will be done via Putty. Putty is a SSH/Telnet Client that allows us to connect to the Pi via the SSH protocol. This is common for accessing linux machines. You can get Putty here: http://www.putty.org/

How to find the IP address of our Pi so that we can SSH to it

You should still be logged into the Pi, go back to the command line and type:

ifconfig

We need this IP address so that we can log into the Pi via SSH. Look for eth0 and browse across until you see ‘inet’ This is the IP address we require. In this case the Pi IP address is: 192.168.1.154 – Write this down or remember it.

Open Putty and SSH into the Pi

Enter the IP address of the Pi from the ‘ifconfig’ command. Then Click OPEN. You may be asked to accept some authentication keys. You only need to do this once. You will now be greeted with a similar login screen to the previous.

Login as per usual.
Username: pi
Password: raspberry
If you find that some of your keyboard strokes are not the same as mine, you may need to go back into Raspi-Config and change the localization settings or Keyboard options. It also can not hurt to Extend the size of the file system. This will allow the Raspbian build to utilize the full size of the SD card.

PiVPN Install – Now that we are set up, it’s time to install and setup!

Now to installing PiVPN. If you are looking at installing PiVPN, then you have probably already been to the website. I just want to make mention that installing software like this could be dangerous if it is not from a trusted source. Basically we are telling the pi to run a heap of commands that are located on the internet. Be sure to check the source first to ensure it is reputable.

The command we are going to run is:

curl -L https://install.pivpn.io | bash

If you have not run an “apt-get” update today the first thing that the software will do is run this for you. This ensures all packages are up to date before installing. After the install process you will see the following configuration screens:

At this stage, it can’t hurt to upgrade the Raspbian image. Run this command:

Sudo apt-get upgrade

This is one of those administration tasks that should be done regularly to keep the Pi image in good working order. Unless obviously you are against keeping software up to date, or you have something specific happening in which you cannot afford for it to be affected by updates.

Create A User – This is how we add clients/ Users to OpenVPN

We now need to configure the server to accept connections from the client devices or computers. To do this we set up a client OpenVPN configuration file. (.opvn file to be exact) This client file is loaded onto the device that wants to connect to the VPN tunnel. It stores the config and encryption keys to access the VPN.

pivpn help

pivpn add

Moving the client config – we need to move this config file to our device

In this example, we are going to move the configuration file to a Windows PC that we want to be able to access the VPN and the local network. We must now use some of the additional software to move or grab this config we just created. In this case, we decided to use Filezilla as the Pi image already has SFTP enabled by default.

Client Config – We need to set up our client now using that file!

We now have a copy of the OpenVPN config file transferred to our client computer. We will need to go ahead and install the OpenVPN client software located here: https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/downloads.html

Step through the standard hoops for installing a windows application.

I can confirm that this fits onto the rPi3 also.

RPi HAT Files

• Install Notepad++ on your windows PC.?https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
• Download Putty. Link Below
• Ensure your Raspberry Pi is plugged into your network via Ethernet (cat5)
• Power up your Pi
• Ensure your LAN has DHCP enabled…most routers will have this set as default.

If you already have your raspberry pi on the network and you know its IP address then that is half the battle. Alternatively, if you have just finished installing Raspbian and you are not sure what to do from here then do not panic!! Check this article to find your IP address. https://dirtyoptics.com/find-raspberry-pi-ip-address/Method 1: Notepad++ (My Favourite!) Navigate your way to https://notepad-plus-plus.org/?and download the latest release for Notepad++. Install as per any other windows application and run it up. You will notice it looks very similar to the generic windows text editor however it does allow for some syntax highlighting. A handy little editor also if you are just starting to dive into Python and other coding languages.

Once Notepad++ is open, navigate to: Plugins / NppFTP / Show NppFTP Window. (If you do not see NppFTP you may need to go to the plugin manager and install it)]Once you have the NppFTP window open you will need to create an SFTP profile for your RPI. Please note that when SSH is enabled on your Pi it also opens up port 22 for you to utilize SFTP over the SSH connection. (Well that’s my understanding anyhow!).

• Insert Pi IP
• Port 22
• Select SFTP
• Username: pi (If left as default)
• Password: raspberry (If left as default)

After you have set it up, click close/save. Find and click the connect button in the NppFTP window and connect to the profile you just set up. After a few seconds, you should?be able to view a “windows like” file tree of your Pi. You can also double-click on any text file and edit directly in the Notepad ++ editor. When you click “save” it will automatically upload that file back to the Pi. Particularly useful when editing Python code and you want to run directly on the Pi. This can be dangerous at times if updating important configuration docs. Ensure you back them up first.

Method 2: Using SSH/Terminal and ‘Nano’ Editor If you are feeling adventurous, and want to use SSH to edit configuration files then strap yourself in. For the ‘un-initiated’, Linux commands differ heavily from the standard Win DOS commands. You will notice some similarities but for the most part, it’s a bit of a learning curve. We are not going to cover absolutely everything here but the basics for editing files whilst you are in a terminal session. (Accessing you Pi directly)

The first thing you will want to ensure is that your RPI is powered up, Plugged into your network and you know the IP address. Assuming you have installed Raspbian onto your Micro SD and inserted the SD card prior to powering up we can then begin to access the Pi via SSH. (SSH = Secure SHell). This is pretty much a standard way of accessing your Raspberry Pi if you do not have a monitor available. SSH is enabled by default as part of the Raspbian build.

You will now be required to download and open a small terminal program called ‘Putty’ (There are other, but this is the most popular) http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html run the putty.exe from your PC and input the following information.

• Hostname/IP Address – Insert your RPI IP
• Port 22
• Select SSH

Now that you have logged into your Raspberry Pi via SSH its time to start Nano. Nano is a Linux command line text editor. It is pretty simple to get running and use. It can be run in two different ways.

sudo nano

This will create a blank text entry. The correct syntax to follow is:

sudo nano /path/to/filename

If you use a path that is not valid or it cannot find the file you want to edit, then a blank entry will be created.

If you wanted to edit the Raspberry Pi config file, then the command would look like:

Now that you have accessed the config file with nano, you can go through and make your changes. Use the arrow keys to navigate through the text file, and the usual backspace/enter to move things around.

It would be wise to make a backup file of this configuration first.

Once complete, hit CTRL-X to exit, then Y to save. It will overwrite the old file with your new one.

• Download and try WinSCP to transfer images and larger files.
• Setup an FTP server on the?Raspberry Pi.
• Utilize a standalone FTP client to connect to the Raspberry Pi. (Filezilla/CuteFTP etc etc)

• LED Matrix: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/1239156 (P5 32×32 modules with Hub75 are a good starting point.)
• A Raspberry Pi 2 or 3
• A breadboard and T-Cobbler RPI 40 pin Breakout (Just to make life easier! You can grab these from Adafruit.)
• Alternatively, build an Active-3 adapter for easier chaining of Matrix Panels. (See hzeller GitHub page for more details.)
• Some Jumper Wires
• A sense of adventure…..

Code

Assuming you are semi-proficient with Linux and have installed Raspbian than you can follow along here. Otherwise, you first need to set up your RPI and access the terminal/SSH interface. The guide here will get you up and with the “NOOBS” installation for your pi.

Install Henner Zeller’s LED Matrix library onto your Pi:

sudo wget https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix/archive/master.zip

Unzip the Archive:

sudo unzip master.zip

Once unzip completes you should then be able to view the directory and it’s contents:

cd rpi-rgb-led-matrix-master/

You then need to compile the library by running the command:

sudo make

Once compiled, you can run the following command, this will give you an output of all the available switches:

sudo ./led-matrix

This command will output the following for your reference:

$ sudo ./led-matrix
Expected required option -D <demo>
usage: ./led-matrix <options> -D <demo-nr> [optional parameter]
Options:
        -r <rows>     : Panel rows. '16' for 16x32 (1:8 multiplexing),
                        '32' for 32x32 (1:16), '8' for 1:4 multiplexing; Default: 32
        -P <parallel> : For Plus-models or RPi2: parallel chains. 1..3. Default: 1
        -c <chained>  : Daisy-chained boards. Default: 1.
        -L            : 'Large' display, composed out of 4 times 32x32
        -p <pwm-bits> : Bits used for PWM. Something between 1..11
        -l            : Don't do luminance correction (CIE1931)
        -D <demo-nr>  : Always needs to be set
        -d            : run as daemon. Use this when starting in
                        /etc/init.d, but also when running without
                        terminal (e.g. cron).
        -t <seconds>  : Run for these number of seconds, then exit.
                        (if neither -d nor -t are supplied, waits for <RETURN>)
        -b <brightnes>: Sets brightness percent. Default: 100.
        -R <rotation> : Sets the rotation of matrix. Allowed: 0, 90, 180, 270. Default: 0.
Demos, choosen with -D
        0  - some rotating square
        1  - forward scrolling an image (-m <scroll-ms>)
        2  - backward scrolling an image (-m <scroll-ms>)
        3  - test image: a square
        4  - Pulsing color
        5  - Grayscale Block
        6  - Abelian sandpile model (-m <time-step-ms>)
        7  - Conway's game of life (-m <time-step-ms>)
        8  - Langton's ant (-m <time-step-ms>)
        9  - Volume bars (-m <time-step-ms>)
        10 - Evolution of color (-m <time-step-ms>)
        11 - Brightness pulse generator
Example:
        ./led-matrix -t 10 -D 1 runtext.ppm
Scrolls the runtext for 10 seconds

Now its time to get some output onto the panel. If you are running a singular 32×32 panel, you should be able to run the example without issue.

sudo ./led-matrix -t 10 -D 1 runtext.ppm

If your panel is connected correctly and powered up you should see a scrolling image pass through the panel. With the example above it will only last 10 seconds. You can now begin to experiment with the above switches to see what output you can achieve.

• Output RPI GUI to Matrix Panels (Coming Soon!)
• Output Twitter msg to Matrix Panels? (Coming Soon!)
• Use Pixelpusher Protocol on Matrix? (Coming Soon!)