[Initial Release] RaspberryPints - Digital Taplist Solution

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i went through a few pages as well as the site and didnt see an answer . So this may sound like an odd question but does the unit need to have wifi connection at all times? i have canceled internet at the house so i wouldnt have the ability to run a web based software. but i do have an old wifi router if the software is just transferring data from one local pc to another local pc. or can you just hook up a USB cable to transfer the data to the pi?
 
You don't need Wifi at all. But you do need some sort of network to operate the webpage on other devices. But no, internet isn't required. You can just load up the page directly on the pi hooked up to a monitor.
 
Thanks, just need the display not needing to share the tap list. So updating the list would I use a networked PC to connect to the pi or just use the mini key board to access and update the actual pi it's self? If I use the mini key board I guess I see no need for the wifi at all? I know it's weird this day and age not to have internet but it's a life choice I guess.
 
If you use a local keyboard & touchpad/mouse then you don't need any sort of network connection to display and maintain the tap list...

Cheers!
 
Browningbuck said:
Thanks, just need the display not needing to share the tap list. So updating the list would I use a networked PC to connect to the pi or just use the mini key board to access and update the actual pi it's self? If I use the mini key board I guess I see no need for the wifi at all? I know it's weird this day and age not to have internet but it's a life choice I guess.
Click to expand...

You would need an internet connection to get the Pi OS updated and install the other required software packages. Once that is done and you have RPints downloaded you can do everything off the network.

If you hook a keyboard and mouse to the pi, you can do everything from there, network connection (local, not necessarily internet) is only needed if you want to manage it from elsewhere in your house. You could use your old wifi hub and not connect it to the internet to do so if you wish. Otherwise, unplug all internet and just plug in the keyboard/mouse when you need to manage the taps.
 
thanks everyone, sounds like ill be giving this a go. Ill download everything at work and bring it home to install. guess now i need to buy the Pi ;)

also the motion detection; does it put the pi in screen saver mode where the monitor hibernates or does it just bounce a logo or picture around the monitor until its triggered?
 
There are OS updates and applications that, at least in the directions, require the Pi to be running and connected to the internet to perform. I am not a genius with the *nix OS so I am unsure if you can download the packages for offline installation. If you can maybe it wouldnt hurt to set it up at a library or Panera or some place with free wifi.
 
Browningbuck said:
[...]also the motion detection; does it put the pi in screen saver mode where the monitor hibernates or does it just bounce a logo or picture around the monitor until its triggered?
Click to expand...

Your choice. The script utilizes the x-screensaver, and while I set mine up to just blank the screen, you can use the gui to select a background image or cycle through a series of images, moving graphics, etc...

Cheers!
 
Browningbuck said:
well looks like ill do it at work then.. so it seems like i DO have to have the Wifi USB part?

edit: ive ordered everything but this, so i guess should i spend the $9?

also followed the instructions and am not seeing the SD formatter in the dowloads sust NOOBS and Raspibian
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
Click to expand...

No, wifi is not necessary, there is a Wired network port on the pi that you could use instead. I had trouble with the wifi stuff so skipped it entirely
 
day_trippr said:
Your choice. The script utilizes the x-screensaver, and while I set mine up to just blank the screen, you can use the gui to select a background image or cycle through a series of images, moving graphics, etc...

Cheers!
Click to expand...

great wanted the screen to go into hibernation/power saving mode. so what i am assuming here is the sensor is a relay to tell the gui to kill signal(or go to screen saver mode, basically this is the display settings on a standard PC but with a sensor rather than monitoring a key stroke or movement on a mouse to awaken the system)


DrunkleJon said:
No, wifi is not necessary, there is a Wired network port on the pi that you could use instead. I had trouble with the wifi stuff so skipped it entirely
Click to expand...
great will avoid the wifi as well then.
 
Browningbuck said:
great wanted the screen to go into hibernation/power saving mode.
Click to expand...

LOL! Not what I said - "blank screen" /= "DPMS low power state".

And so far all attempts to get the RPi graphics subsystem to actually put a directly attached monitor (hdmi or dvi) to "sleep" have been thwarted due to a variety of apparent show-stoppers. I might get back on that one of these days, but with all the other things I've been playing with it got back-burnered.

So what i am assuming here is the sensor is a relay to tell the gui to kill signal(or go to screen saver mode, basically this is the display settings on a standard PC but with a sensor rather than monitoring a key stroke or movement on a mouse to awaken the system)
Click to expand...

Simpler. You set x-screensaver time-out to whatever you want, then a PIR-sensor trigger will cause the RPi to issue a "wake out of the screensaver state" command...

Cheers!
 
My sd card got corrupted this weekend and I had to reinstall RaspberryPints from scratch. :( Seems this happens regularly with the RPi platform if you don't change your partitions or read only.

Fortunately I had backed up all my mods for the dual column display, but I had to reenter my beers/kegs.

I took the opportunity to install LAMP + Pints onto an Ubuntu VM and am now going to just use the Rpi as a browser client.
 
JonW said:
My sd card got corrupted this weekend and I had to reinstall RaspberryPints from scratch. :( Seems this happens regularly with the RPi platform if you don't change your partitions or read only.

Fortunately I had backed up all my mods for the dual column display, but I had to reenter my beers/kegs.

I took the opportunity to install LAMP + Pints onto an Ubuntu VM and am now going to just use the Rpi as a browser client.
Click to expand...

This is a known issue with the pi. kind of frustrating but nothing to do with RaspberryPints.

The good news is that if you setup a VM to server the data, you can use an inexpensive tablet to be the client. It's what I have done and is fantastic (low power, easily movable).
 
tssgery said:
This is a known issue with the pi. kind of frustrating but nothing to do with RaspberryPints.

The good news is that if you setup a VM to server the data, you can use an inexpensive tablet to be the client. It's what I have done and is fantastic (low power, easily movable).
Click to expand...

Since I already have a monitor mounted to my kegerator, I'll continue using the Pi as a browser client to display RaspberryPints. I just won't be hosting Apache, MySQL and PHP on it. It should help with browser performance as well.
 
JonW said:
Since I already have a monitor mounted to my kegerator, I'll continue using the Pi as a browser client to display RaspberryPints. I just won't be hosting Apache, MySQL and PHP on it. It should help with browser performance as well.
Click to expand...

Jon,

Since you already have hosting at surfcitybrewing.com, would it be hard to host it there?

That way you'd have easy access to it from any internet-connected PC, anywhere in the world...

I'd definitely consider doing this since I've got at least one unused domain that I could pretty easily set it up with...
 
bwarbiany said:
Jon,

Since you already have hosting at surfcitybrewing.com, would it be hard to host it there?

That way you'd have easy access to it from any internet-connected PC, anywhere in the world...

I'd definitely consider doing this since I've got at least one unused domain that I could pretty easily set it up with...
Click to expand...

I am running it on the same physical server. I have a pretty beefy Hyper-V server running about a dozen VM's. The Ubuntu VM is the one hosting RaspberryPints and I can expose it via any of the domains I have.
 
Ok, I don't get it. :drunk:

I've had a pair of full-blown RPi-based systems both running all kinds of quasi-real-time stuff with R'Pints and multiple (like, four in one case) instances of BrewPi and temperature loggers and minions on Bluetooth links, all of it intertoobs accessible. So two database engines and sometimes a half-dozen pages being served on each machine. I flog the hell out of these things!

And I've never lost an SD card. I've had to re-image a bazillion times when I've dumb-thumbed the software side of things (I'm a hardware guy, dammit! ;)) but otherwise these li'l dudes have been amazingly stable.

So, no, I can't relate, and as far as "known problem", well, I apparently my machines are outliers. I have no clue how..

Btw, what does this actually mean: "Seems this happens regularly with the RPi platform if you don't change your partitions or read only."?

Cheers!
 
This problem does (or used to) occur fairly frequently. I started playing with the pi right after introduction and it was a commonly seen issue.

That said, I've had a pi running for a couple of years, as a DNS, DHCP, and PXE server with zero issues so I never really investigated it. Maybe it boils down to the SD card?
 
...or any number of possible implementation causes.
Dirty power, poor wiring, bad connectors, bad coding (I presume - god knows I've been able to kill mine ;)) who knows...

My only experience is with the Model B. It's a rock, imo...

Cheers!

[edit] Hadn't even considered the possibility of the flash card actually reaching the end of its useful life due to wear-out. I don't know enough about Raspian to know if the OS does anything stupid like swapping executable pages. And then there's bad user-space code that generates excessive writes to storage. If wear-out is in play there's a hella lot of places to look...
 
I am having trouble uploading images to RaspberryPints
When I'm trying to change taplist logo and background image I get this message:
Sorry, there was a problem uploading your file.
Any help would be apreciated
-Tore-
 
kalvegjerdet said:
I am having trouble uploading images to RaspberryPints
When I'm trying to change taplist logo and background image I get this message:
Sorry, there was a problem uploading your file.
Any help would be apreciated
-Tore-
Click to expand...

Do you know the permissions on your /var/www folder? There is a command in the instructions for "sudo chmod 777 /var/www" which you may have missed or didn't execute properly.

To find out the permissions, from a command line run "ls -l /var". There should be an entry there for www, and the permissions should read drwxrwxrwx.
 
bwarbiany said:
Do you know the permissions on your /var/www folder? There is a command in the instructions for "sudo chmod 777 /var/www" which you may have missed or didn't execute properly.

To find out the permissions, from a command line run "ls -l /var". There should be an entry there for www, and the permissions should read drwxrwxrwx.
Click to expand...

The line for www reads: drwxrwxrwx 9 root root 4096 feb 11 01:41 www (where www is in blue letters marked green)
 
I need some help. I have gone from this. To that.

20140812_102852.jpg


20150219_202544.jpg
 
I was trying to make some changes to flip the screen horizontal and have two rows of taps. I made a copy of the disk with Win32 Disk Imager before I started. I hope that worked. One of the other problems is when I try and format the disk to start with a clean slate before writing the image to the SD card I get an error message. "The disk is write-protected. Remove the write-protection.
The little lever is in the unlocked position and I have tried multiple solution from google searches. Nothing is working and I don't have another SD card on hand to write to that.
 
TripleHopped said:
I was trying to make some changes to flip the screen horizontal and have two rows of taps. I made a copy of the disk with Win32 Disk Imager before I started. I hope that worked. One of the other problems is when I try and format the disk to start with a clean slate before writing the image to the SD card I get an error message. "The disk is write-protected. Remove the write-protection.
The little lever is in the unlocked position and I have tried multiple solution from google searches. Nothing is working and I don't have another SD card on hand to write to that.
Click to expand...

I had a problem like this before. Delete the partitions on the card before reformatting. For some reason you tend to end up with two on the card after setting up NOOBS. If you deleted them both (I used windows disk mangler) and then the format worked.
 
I've tried windows disk manager. I've gone through several walk trough's with diskpart. Ran it through a camera and selected format and then format it through a computer and nothing is working. It keeps telling me it is write protected.
Here is a pic of it in Computer management.

20150220_091413.jpg
 
TripleHopped said:
I've tried windows disk manager. I've gone through several walk trough's with diskpart. Ran it through a camera and selected format and then format it through a computer and nothing is working. It keeps telling me it is write protected.
Here is a pic of it in Computer management.
257883d1424450856-initial-release-raspberrypints-digital-taplist-solution-20150220_091413.jpg
Click to expand...

So when you right click on one of the 3 partitions you can't remove them? Odd. I would re-check the write protect switch on the flash card.
 
From diskpart I've tried to clean, delete, delete partition and nothing is working. The little slide on the side is in the unlock position. Moved it to the lock position and then back many times, just to double check. This is what I get with trying to delete the partition.

20150220_110028.jpg
 
Jon I went to that link and followed the steps to here. I selected part 1 and deleted it twice like they show. Then I get.

"DISKPART> create part pir
Virtual Disk Service error:
The operation is not supported on a non-empty removable disk."

When I try and format it in SDFormatter
I get the message:
The Memory Card is write-protected.
Please release the write protect switch.

The switch is in the unlock position.
 
Can you use a hex editor like HxD to overwrite the first 10000 sectors or so of the thumbdrive? That will overwrite the partition table and the drive will then be "raw" and you should be able to format.

If a low-level hex editor (or the linux 'dd' command if you have a linux box) can't write to the raw device, then your SD Card is probably hosed.
 
TripleHopped said:
Jon I went to that link and followed the steps to here. I selected part 1 and deleted it twice like they show. Then I get.

"DISKPART> create part pir
Virtual Disk Service error:
The operation is not supported on a non-empty removable disk."

When I try and format it in SDFormatter
I get the message:
The Memory Card is write-protected.
Please release the write protect switch.

The switch is in the unlock position.
Click to expand...

Hmm... On a whim, try doing it again when it is in the locked position rather than the unlocked. You never know, write protect always messes me up, ever since the floppy and not so floppy days. When I get home I will dork around with a spare card and see what I can figure out for you.
 
When I have the SD card tab in the unlock position and put it in the computer a window opens up showing the contents of the disk and I select manage then format. I unselect the Quick Format and select Start. It goes through a process and gives the message that Windows was unable to complete the format. In the locked position it won't let me do any of that.

Not sure why it has two 0 partitions. In the DISKPART when partition 0 is selected it is the middle one.
 
Just leave the card with the write protect off. The error saying it is write protected is what Windows does when it doesn't know how to handle the partition - it's normal.

If you deleted the partitions with diskpart, then it should come up in the Windows GUI partition program as an unpartitioned disk, at which point you could create a normal FAT partition and copy NOOBS to it. I just went through this exact same thing when two of my SD cards got corrupt.

The only odd thing here is that yours lists two Partition 0's. I would try deleting partition 1, then partition 0, exit diskpart, then go back in and see if only one part 0 remains, then delete that.

It might take a couple tries. If that doesn't work, you could always try bwarbiany's suggestion, but that will require using a direct disk editor. If you still can't do it after all that - then the SD is hosed.
 

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