README.md

Imagine Easy Monitoring Dashboard

This is an ansible playbook that sets up a Raspberry PI with a full-screen browser pointing to a configurable URL.

(Version 0.0.1 used to set up a Dashing Dashboard, and run that directly on the PI. But the current master doesn't do that anymore).

It also sets up a VNC server on the RPi, so you can view the dashboard on your own monitor if you want (FIXME: that doesn't make sense).

Hardware

• a Raspberry Pi (model not important)
• a microSD card
• (optional) WiFi adapter (EDIMAX EW-7811UN seems to work well enough)
• a screen

Initial Setup

You need to do this only once:

• download + copy raspbian to the SD card
  • https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
  • https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/
• connect the RPi to ethernet and a screen, boot it up, it'll print its IP address
• if you need WiFi, GOSUB Setup WiFi
• important edit the hosts file (in this repo) and put in the RPi's IP address
• install ansible on your machine
  • sudo apt-get install ansible sshpass
  • brew install ansible

Provisioning

You probably also only need to do this once.

• make 'URL=http://example.com/your-dashboard-url'

This will take a while.

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Setup WiFi

The easiest way to get wifi to work, is to connect a keyboard and screen to the RPi, log in, and run startx (or, should that not work, sudo raspi-config and select "boot to desktop").

Once in LXDE, you can join a network via the networking applet in the panel. This will persist reboots and also still work if you don't start LXDE again.

Important: If you changed that, run sudo raspi-config again afterwards and set it back to "boot to console".

RET