Node Prebuilt Images

SolarNode Prebuilt OS Images

The fastest way to get started with a SolarNode device is to use one of the prebuilt OS images. If your hardware is supported, then getting a SolarNode up and running using one of those images is the easiest way to get started.

The standard SolarNode images are available for download on SourceForge for the following device families:

• Raspberry Pi — this is the best device family to start with
• Orange Pi
• eBox 3300 (or generic i386)
• Beagle Bone
• Android Mini PC

Copying an image to an SD card

A tool like Etcher makes it pretty easy to copy the image to an SD card. The images files are compressed using xz (which Etcher supports). Alternatively, most POSIX systems include the xz and dd command line tools and those can be used to copy the image.

⚠️ NOTE: the OS images have a minimum size included in their file name (often 1GB) however it is generally helpful to use a larger SD card to give SolarNode more room to handle updates over time.

Command line copy

First make sure you have xz available.

# macOS using Homebrew
brew install xz

# Debian linux
apt install xz

Then insert the SD card into your computer. If your computer does not have an SD card reader, then use something like a USB SD card adapter. Next, follow the steps for macOS or Linux.

macOS

Use diskutil list to find the name of the device for the SD card. You'll see output like this:

diskutil list
...
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *2.0 GB     disk3
   1:             Windows_FAT_32 boot                    58.7 MB    disk3s1
   2:                      Linux                         935.3 MB   disk3s2

In this example, /dev/sidk3 is the name of the SD card device. Make sure the SD card is not mounted and copy the image to it like this (substitute the actual name of the image file you have for solarnode-XYZ.img.xz):

sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk3
xz -cd solarnodeos-XYZ.img.xz |sudo dd of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=4m

⚠️ Note that the dd command added an r into the device name: /dev/rdisk3. This makes the copy run much faster.

Linux

Use lsblk to list the disks on your system. You'll see output like this:

NAME      MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda         8:0    0   50G  0 disk
├─sda1      8:1    0   48G  0 part /
└─sda5      8:5    0    2G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb         8:16   0   20G  0 disk /opt
sdc         8:32   0   20G  0 disk
sdd         8:48   1  1.9G  0 disk
├─sdd1      8:49   1   56M  0 part /media/matt/boot
└─sdd2      8:50   1  1.8G  0 part /media/matt/SOLARNODE

In this example the sdd disk is the 2 GB SD card we're interested in. It might be sdb or something else entirely on your system.

Make sure the SD card is not mounted by unmounting any partitions listed for that disk (sdd1, sdd2 in this example) and then copy the image to it like this (substitute the actual name of the image file you have for solarnode-XYZ.img.xz):

sudo umount /dev/sdd1
sudo umount /dev/sdd2
xz -cd solarnodeos-XYZ.img.xz |sudo dd of=/dev/sdd bs=2M

⚠️ Note these commands are using sudo for administrator access. If your system does not have sudo installed, remove sudo from all commands and run them as the root user.

Setup WiFi

If your device will use WiFi for network access, you can configure those credentials now by creating a /boot/wpa_supplicant.conf file on the SD card. For Raspberry Pi images, you can simply pull the SD card out and then re-insert it and your computer will mount the appropriate disk for you.

Once mounted use your favorite text editor to create a wpa_supplicant.conf file with content like this:

country=nz
network={
    ssid="wifi network name here"
    psk="wifi password here"
}

Change the country=nz to match your own country code.

Boot SolarNode

Unmount/eject the SD card from your computer, insert the SD card into your device, and power the device on. SolarNode will boot up, and eventually a login prompt will be available. The default login is solar and password solar.

The node will also attempt to acquire an IP address via DHCP, using a hostname of solarnode. After a few minutes (the first boot especially takes longer than others), depending on your network setup the SolarNode web GUI will be available at http://solarnode/. If that doesn't work, use the IP address of the node, e.g. http://192.168.1.5/ (substituting the node's actual IP address).

If you don't know the node's IP address, you can log into the node and run ip addr to show it.

To continue, you will want to associate your SolarNode with SolarNet.