Post #5 - Raspberry Pi Setup

As I am the one working with the majority of the programming for this project, I have began setting up the Raspberry Pi.

Issues:

1.

WIFI!! - I got it connected originally using this article:

http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-add-wifi-to-the-raspberry-pi/


Worked fine for a week solid. Then our router at home got reset and things got all messed up. After debugging for 2 hours I still had no resolve. The next day I checked up on it and it was working again. I BELIEVE the issue was caused by the DHCP lease not renewing (the default lease renewal is 36000 seconds, or 10 hours!), so I changed that to 600 seconds for any future problems. (see next post -- NOT WORKING)



Installations:

1. Arduino IDE

Followed this guide to install and connect Arduino:

http://razzpisampler.oreilly.com/ch10.html


2. Raspberry Pi to Arduino connection:

http://blog.oscarliang.net/connect-raspberry-pi-and-arduino-usb-cable/


3. MySql was needed (simple installation). All MySql is done locally right now. We may move to online servers later on.

4. Adafruit IDE - probably the best find of this entire project. I was having problems figuring out how to program efficiently, timely, and making sure it would work on the Pi. I tried setting up a similar environment on my Windows (tried a VMWare box, all on Windows, etc) and my first conclusion was to use TightVNC which is a remote controller to the Raspberry Pi. This allowed me to work on my PC that I was comfortable using, while working directly on the Pi. However, the Pi has minimal hardware so the speeds that I could program at were drastically reduced. ALSO, I couldn't find any Python IDE to work on the Pi, so I was just coding in a simple notepad file. Not good!

Then, I came across the wonderful Adafruit IDE. Wow is it incredible! This allows me to program on my desktop computer all via my BROWSER. The code I change in the browser is automatically pushed to a Bitbucket repository, which is then automatically pushed onto the Pi. Talk about cool!

http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-add-wifi-to-the-raspberry-pi/

6. Apache and PHP5 installed


7. Other miscellaneous things were installed. Not much importance.


Edit: Through a lot of pain, I've found out that you should install the WebIDE LAST before anything else. It's caused a lot of problems with other installations and is done best when it's installed last.