OpenRFSense Image

This repository contains a custom pi-gen stage and necessary automation to create a system image based on Raspberry Pi OS Lite (ex Raspbian). The system comes preconfigured with:

• Anything in the Raspberry Pi OS Lite system before stage2 (debian, systemd, GNU core programs)
• es-sensor and es-sensor-decoders
• OpenRFSense node software (web UI, internal API and MQTT messaging, see openrfsense/node)

Table of contents

• OpenRFSense Image
  • Usage
  • Building

Usage

These instructions are specifically made for Raspberry PIs, support has not been planned for other boards.

1. Flash the prebuilt image with any program (Rufus, balenaEtcher, etc.) or build the image yourself (see below)
2. Plug the card into your board and boot it up
3. After a minute or so (on a Raspberry Pi 3B, YMMV), you'll be able to connect to the board through a WiFi AP named OpenRFSense Node or something among those lines. The default password is openrfsense
   • The AP will disable itself after 30 minutes, and once the setup has been completed it will never turn back on
4. Use the Web UI at 10.1.1.1

As stated above, the board will be unreachable via WiFi once a network has been added. The Web UI will still be served on localhost:80, so it can still be reached by opening the board's IP address directly in a web browser.

Building

pi-gen does provide a build system in Docker (see README) but it requires qemu-static-* packages on the host, and those are extremely distro-dependent. At the time of writing the official build process only works on Debian, which is used in the VM.

Vagrant is required. The image is built in a provisioned virtual machine to avoid polluting the host machine and provide a distro-independent build environment.

The build process will cache as many packages/changes as possible, even inside the VM, so that subsequent builds will take significantly less time. If the VM is deleted (for example with vagrant destroy), the build progress will be lost. And the first build takes about 30 minutes to complete.

You will first have to write yourself a config file using the provided example (config.example). You can just rename or copy the example file without modifying it, but it's absolutely not recommended. The example file contains the necessary documentation for each variable.

To start a build job, use:

$ ./build.sh

By default, a 64bit ARM image will be built. If you need a 32bit image (older Raspberry Pi or other 32bit ARM boards), use the following command:

$ PIGEN_BITS=32 ./build.sh

If you want to allocate more resources for the VM, you can set the following environment variables:

• PIGEN_CPUS: number of processors to give the VM (default: all CPU cores except 2)
• PIGEN_RAM: megabytes of RAM to give the VM (default: 8192)