Create PicoChessWeb images based on DietPi

This repository uses Ansible to automate the creation of SD card images for PicoChessWeb based on the repository at https://github.com/gkalab/picochess and based on the DietPi distribution for Raspberry Pi.

Base installation of DietPi

Last DietPi version tested: DietPi v8.12.1

• Download the latest DietPi image for Raspberry Pi (ARMv7 32-bit image or ARMv8 64-bit image) from https://dietpi.com/.
• Flash the image to an SD-card (8GB minimum size).
• Replace the dietpi.txt on the FAT32 partition with the file from the config folder.
• Adjust the config.txt in the same FAT32 partition to your system. Example configurations I am using are in the config folder.
• Enter the SSID and wifi passowrd in the file dietpi-wifi.txt in the same FAT32 partition.

First boot

Boot the Raspberry Pi with the SD-card, wait for the initial installation to complete (about 15 minutes). Upon completion you should see a running Chromium browser with a page load error.

Make sure you can connect to the Raspberry Pi via ssh as root (see root password in ansible/files/boot/dietpi.txt).

Update engines, audio files (optional for 32-bit image)

From an existing PicoChess installation:

• Copy the files from the talker directory into the ansible/files/talker/ folder of this repository.
• Copy engine binaries from an existing PicoChess installation to the files/engines/ directory. The files/engines/ directory will get copied to /opt/picochess/engines/ on the device. Make sure to include the correct engine binaries for your platform.

Adjust picochess.ini file (optional)

Some PicoChess options can only be set via the picochess.ini file. Adjust the settings in ansible/files/opt/picochess/picochess.ini for your system.

Add Komodo 13.02 engine binary (optional, only if ARMv8 64-bit image is used)

Download Komodo 13 from https://komodochess.com/pub/komodo-13.zip and place the included komodo-13.02-linux in the directory ansible/files/extra_engines/komodo13/ .

Add Pedone 3.0 engine binary (optional, only if ARMv8 64-bit image is used)

Download Pedone 3.0 from https://drive.google.com/file/d/17ImH_wz4b5FAvDJH_UTHfQkjk5Ijl0vv/view?usp=sharing and place the included Pedone_armv8 in the directory ansible/files/extra_engines/pedone/ .

Installation

pip3 install ansible
apt-get install sshpass rsync

• Install requirements: cd ansible; ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml
• Make sure you can connect to your Raspberry Pi via ssh: ssh root@<IP-address>
• Replace with the IP address of your Raspberry Pi in the file inventory.ini

Start Ansible

Run the playbook: ansible-playbook --ask-vault-pass main.yml

You can run the playbook again if you update engine or audio files. The first run on a freshly installed system takes a little over 20 minutes using wifi.

Note: You can ignore the warning about the sftp and scp transfer mechanism. The warnings are there due to missing openssh libraries that will be installed later in the system task.

Cleanup

Check the /boot/config.txt file for changes. I need to remove the line dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d to make audio work over HDMI on my system.