Written for an tested on Raspbian GNU/Linux 9.4 (stretch) Kernel version: 4.14
The installation is the first step to get your Phoniebox up and running. Once you have done this, proceed to the configuration.
And Once you finished with the configuration, read the manual to add audio files and RFID cards.
This project has been tested on Raspberry Pi model 1, 2, 3 HiFiBerry and Zero.
Quick install script: after you installed Raspbian and are online with your RPi, you might want to proceed to the install script for Stretch. Having said this, if you are new to your Raspberry, you will learn more going through this step by step.
There are a number of operating systems to chose from on the official RPi download page on www.raspberrypi.org. We want to work with is the official distribution Raspbian.
Install and configure via SSH: if you need to install and configure the Phoniebox via SSH, you might want to jump to the headless installation towards the end of this document.
IMPORTANT: if you want to be sure that you have the same system running that this documentation was written for, you need to use the stretch distribution which you can download here: 2018-03-13-raspbian-stretch.zip.
After you downloaded the zip file, follow the instructions on the official INSTALLING OPERATING SYSTEM IMAGES page. I have used etcher to make the SD card as described.
Before you boot your RPi for the first time, make sure that you have all the external devices plugged in. What we need at this stage:
- An external monitor connected over HDMI
- A WiFi card over USB (unless you are using a RPi with an inbuilt WiFi card).
- A keyboard and mouse over USB.
Now you have installed and operating system and even a windows manager (called Pixel on Raspbian). Start up your RPi and it will bring you straight to the home screen. Notice that you are not required to log in.
In the dropdown menu at the top of the home screen, select:
'Berry' > Preferences > Mouse and Keyboard Settings
Now select the tab Keyboard and then click Keyboard Layout... at the bottom right of the window. From the list, select your language layout.
At the top right of the home screen, in the top bar, you find an icon for Wireless & Wired Network Settings. Clicking on this icon will bring up a list of available WiFi networks. Select the one you want to connect with and set the password.
Note: Follow this link if you have trouble with a USB Wifi card.
Disable WiFi power management
Make sure the WiFi power management is disabled to avoid dropouts. Firstly, check if it is switched on, type in the terminal:
iwconfig
This should return something like the following:
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 34:31:C4:0A:8F:83
Bit Rate=72.2 Mb/s Tx-Power=31 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=63/70 Signal level=-47 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:2 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
The line Power Management:on is important: out of the box, it seems to be switched on, so let's switch it off, type:
sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off
And then check again with iwconfig that the line now says: Power Management:off.
SSH will allow you to log into the RPi from any machine in the network. This is useful because once the Phoniebox is up and running, it won't have a keyboard, mouse or monitor attached to it. Via SSH you can still configure the system and make changes - if you must.
Open a terminal to star the RPi configuration tool.
sudo raspi-config
Select Interface Options and then SSH Enable/Disable remote command line... to enable the remote access.
You should also change your password at this stage in raspi-config. The default password after a fresh install is raspberry.
Find out more about how to connect over SSH from Windows, Mac, Linux or Android on the official RPi page.
When you start the Phoniebox, it needs to fire up without stalling at the login screen. This can also be configured using the RPi config tool.
Open a terminal to star the RPi configuration tool.
$ sudo raspi-config
Select Boot options and then Desktop / CLI. The option you want to pick is Console Autologin - Text console, automatically logged in as 'pi' user.
To be able to log into your RPi over SSH from any machine in the network, you need to give your machine a static IP address.
Check if the DHCP client daemon (DHCPCD) is active.
sudo service dhcpcd status
If you don't get any status, you should start the dhcpcd daemon:
sudo service dhcpcd start
sudo systemctl enable dhcpcd
Check the IP address the RPi is running on at the moment:
$ ifconfig
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 74:da:38:28:72:72
inet addr:192.168.178.82 Bcast:192.168.178.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
...
You can see that the IP address is 192.168.178.82. We want to assign a static address 192.168.178.199.
Note: assigning a static address can create conflict with other devices on the same network which might get the same address assigned. Therefore, if you can, check your router configuration and see if you can assign a range of IP addresses for static use.
Change the IPv4 configuration inside the file /etc/dhcpcd.conf.
sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf
Don't be surprised, if the file is empty. Then only add the lines below. In my case, I added the following lines to assign the static IP. You need to adjust this to your network needs:
interface wlan0
static ip_address=192.168.178.201/24
static routers=192.168.178.1
static domain_name_servers=192.168.178.1
Save the changes with Ctrl & O then Enter then Ctrl & X.
The following lines will install all the required packages:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https samba samba-common-bin python-dev python-pip gcc linux-headers-4.9 lighttpd php7.0-common php7.0-cgi php7.0 php7.0-fpm vlc mpg123 at git
sudo pip install "evdev == 0.7.0"
git is a version control system which makes it easy to pull software from GitHub - which is where the Phoniebox software is located.
cd /home/pi/
git clone https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID.git
Now you have the code repo of the Phoniebox in the directory /home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID.
To make the Phoniebox easy to administer, it is important that you can add new songs and register new RFID cards over your home network. This can be done from any machine. The way to integrate your RPi into your home network is using Samba, the standard Windows interoperability suite for Linux and Unix.
Open a terminal and install the required packages with this line:
First, let's edit the Samba configuration file and define the workgroup the RPi should be part of.
sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
Edit the entries for workgroup and wins support:
workgroup = WORKGROUP
wins support = yes
If you are already running a windows home network, add the name of the network where I have added WORKGROUP.
Now add the specific folder that we want to be exposed to the home network in the smb.conf file.
[pi_jukebox]
comment=Pi Jukebox
path=/home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/shared
browseable=Yes
writeable=Yes
only guest=no
create mask=0777
directory mask=0777
public=no
veto files=/._*/.DS_Store/
Note: the path given in this example works (only) if you are installing the Phoniebox code in the directory /home/pi/.
Finally, add the user pi to Samba. For simplicity and against better knowledge regarding security, I suggest to stick to the default user and password:
user : pi
password : raspberry
Type the following to add the new user:
sudo smbpasswd -a pi
Python-evdev exposes most of the more common interfaces defined in the evdev subsystem. In other words: in order to read the IDs from the RFID cards, we need to dig deep into the operating system. We need to have an ear at the source of the RFID reader, so to speak. And in order to listen to these events using the programming language python, we need to install the package evdev.
The above installation commands should have installed everything just fine. In case you run into problems, read the official devdev ocumentation
Having said this, the official way did not work for me on the RPI and I did the followng:
Find out the linux kernel release you are running:
uname -r
In my case it returned 4.14.30-v7+. Now I took a look at the header files available:
apt-cache search linux-headers-
The highest version number that came up in the list was linux-headers-4.9:
(...)
linux-headers-4.9.0-6-all - All header files for Linux 4.9 (meta-package)
linux-headers-4.9.0-6-all-armhf - All header files for Linux 4.9 (meta-package)
linux-headers-4.9.0-6-common - Common header files for Linux 4.9.0-6
linux-headers-4.9.0-6-common-rt - Common header files for Linux 4.9.0-6-rt
linux-headers-4.9.0-6-rpi - Header files for Linux 4.9.0-6-rpi
linux-headers-4.9.0-6-rpi2 - Header files for Linux 4.9.0-6-rpi2
(...)
Which I added in the long install line above: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-4.9.
There is a second way to control the RFID Phoniebox: through the browser. You can open a browser on your phone or computer and type in the static IP address that we assigned to the RPi earlier. As long as your phone or PC are connected to the same WiFi network that the RPi is connected to, you will see the web app in your browser.
On Raspbian OS Stretch, some configuration still seems to be based on PHP5. We are using PHP7 and therefore need to make some changes to the configuration.
Open the configuration file:
sudo nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
Change the document root, meaning the folder where the webserver will look for things to display or do when somebody types in the static IP address. To point it to the Phoniebox web app, change the line in the configuration to:
server.document-root = "/home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/htdocs"
Save the changes with Ctrl & O then Enter then Ctrl & X.
The webserver is usually not very powerful when it comes to access to the system it is running on. From a security point of view, this is a very good concept: you don't want a website to potentially change parts of the operating system which should be locked away from any public access.
We do need to give the webserver more access in order to run a web app that can start and stop processes on the RPi. To make this happen, we need to add the webserver to the list of users/groups allowed to run commands as superuser. To do so, open the list of sudo users in the nano editor:
sudo nano /etc/sudoers
And at the bottom of the file, add the following line:
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
Save the changes with Ctrl & O then Enter then Ctrl & X.
The final step to make the RPi web app ready is to tell the webserver how to execute PHP. To enable the lighttpd server to execute php scripts, the fastcgi-php module must be enabled. Type:
sudo lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi
sudo lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi-php
The configuration might still be set to use PHP5, we want PHP7. Open the config file:
sudo nano /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/15-fastcgi-php.conf
Edit the content to look like this:
# -*- depends: fastcgi -*-
# /usr/share/doc/lighttpd/fastcgi.txt.gz
# http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/wiki/Docs:ConfigurationOptions#mod_fastcgi-fastcgi
## Start an FastCGI server for php (needs the php5-cgi package)
fastcgi.server += ( ".php" =>
((
"socket" => "/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock",
"broken-scriptfilename" => "enable"
))
)
Save the changes with Ctrl & O then Enter then Ctrl & X.
Now load the new configs into the web server by typing:
sudo service lighttpd force-reload
There is a sample config file in the htdocs folder which you need to copy to config.php.
This assures that you can make changes to config.php which will not be affected by updates
in the upstream repository.
sudo cp /home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/htdocs/config.php.sample /home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/htdocs/config.php
Make sure the shared and htdocs folders are accessible by the web server:
sudo chown -R pi:www-data /home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/shared
sudo chmod -R 775 /home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/shared
sudo chown -R pi:www-data /home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/htdocs
sudo chmod -R 775 /home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/htdocs
Next on the list is the media player which will play the audio files and playlists: VLC. In the coming section you will also learn more about why we gave the web server more power over the system by adding it to the list of sudo users.
The VLC media player not only plays almost everything (local files, web streams, playlists, folders), it also comes with a command line interface CLVC which we will be using to play media on the Phoniebox.
The next step is a severe hack. Quite a radical tweak: we will change the source code of the VLC binary file. We need to do this so that we can control the Phoniebox also over the web app. VLC was designed not to be run with the power of a superuser. In order to trigger VLC from the webserver, this is exactly what we are doing.
Changing the binary code is only a one liner, replacing geteuid with getppid. If you are interested in the details what this does, you can read more about the VLC hack here.
$ sudo sed -i 's/geteuid/getppid/' /usr/bin/vlc
Note: changing the binary of VLC to allow the program to be run by the webserver as a superuser is another little step in a long string of potential security problems. In short: the Phoniebox is a perfectly fine project to run for your personal pleasure. It's not fit to run on a public server.
In order to use an external USB soundcard instead of the inbuilt audio out, you might need to update your system and tweak a couple of config files, depending on your card. The most comprehensive explanation on why and how, you can find at adafruit.
Using the Jessie distribution, you might be lucky and there is a quick fix setting the ~/.asoundrc file.
Ok, after all of this, it's about time to reboot your Phoniebox. Make sure you have the static IP address at hand to login over SSH after the reboot.
sudo reboot
Continue with the configuration in the file CONFIGURE-stretch.md.
Setting up the Phoniebox via a SSH connection saves the need for a monitor and a mouse. The following worked on Raspian stretch.
- Flash your SD card with the Raspian image
- Eject the card and insert it again. This should get the
bootpartition mounted. - In the boot partition, create a new empty file called
ssh. This will enable the SSH server later. - Create another file in the same place called
wpa_supplicant.conf. Set the file content according to the following example:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
network={
ssid="YOUR_NETWORK_NAME"
psk="YOUR_PASSWORD"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
Note: This works for WPA-secured wifi networks, which should be the vast majority.
- Save the file
- Unmount and eject the card, insert it into the Raspy, boot.
- Find out the IP address of the raspberry. Most Wifi routers have a user interface that lists all devices in the network with the IP address they got assigned.
- Connect via ssh with username
piand passwordraspberry. - Jump back to the top of this document to walk through the other steps of the installation.
Sources