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Raspberry Pi Dashboards

There are a few Raspberry Pi dashboards (a.k.a 'radiators') around the office - a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a spare monitor, showing useful information to the team, but there can be a few hiccups getting them going, here's a guide you might find useful.

Setting up the Raspbian operating system

raspbian_logo

There any many custom operating systems for the Raspberry Pi, including FullPageOS (sadly currently distributed over insecure HTTP) which are tuned for dashboard/kiosk use, but it turns out that the default Raspbian operating system can work fine for these purposes (mostly because of Chromium support for 'kiosk mode').

Getting on to the network

Getting onto the Guest network is easy, and might be sufficient for you, if you can set your dashboards up right (eg. using Librato's shareable read-only dashboard links, aka Shared Spaces). Note that you won't be able to SSH into the Raspberry Pi across networks.

For further details on networking, and how to get on to the internal network, see this doc.

Clock time!

or: why does the Raspberry Pi think this HTTPS certificate is invalid?!?

Raspberry Pi computers don't come with a battery-backed clock, so when they turn on they have no idea what the time is - they have to connect to an NTP server in order to find out what the time is. Here in the Guardian offices, we've mysteriously seen Raspberry Pi devices fail to do this - because of network or firewall reasons? - and so they don't know the correct time, and when they try to visit HTTPS pages they declare the certificate invalid because it seems to have been signed in the future!

One way of getting round this problem is to add a battery-backed clock to the Raspberry Pi. We've done this successfully on the Data Technology team, there's a small bit of configuration to get it working but after that it's one less thing to worry about!

raspberrypibatterybackedclock

Setting up Chromium in kiosk mode

There are several good references for this, including:

nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

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