Network Simulations in Python on Rasperry Pi

An ongoing project for a networks class at Olin College of Engineering.

Raspberry Pi Setup

Install Arch on your Raspberry Pi SD card following this guide: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi.

If your SD card is larger than 2GB, you'll want to resize the root partition to take up all the space on your card. You can use gparted, or (risky) resize it while mounted.

Create a non-root user

useradd -m -g users -G wheel -s /bin/bash cypressf
passwd cypressf

Now install sudo, and edit the sudo config file to give the wheel group sudo privileges.

pacman -S sudo
pacman -S vim
VISUAL="/usr/bin/vim -p -X" visudo

Then uncomment the line that says

%wheel      ALL=(ALL) ALL

to give wheel sudo privileges.

exit

Now you can login as cypressf.

Install necessary packages

sudo pacman -S python git python-virtualenv base-devel python-virtualenvwrapper

Add the following lines to ~/.bashrc:

export WORKON_HOME=~/.virtualenvs
source /usr/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

Create your virtualenv

mkvirtualenv networks

You need the RPi.GPIO python package in order to control the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. I had an error when I tried installing it using pip. Now the error has a workaround, you can easily install using pip.

pip install RPi.GPIO --pre