3. Quick Start

By far the easiest method of configuring a fleet of Compound Pi servers is to get a single Pi running the Compound Pi daemon successfully, using an automatic network configuration, then clone its SD card for all the other Pis.

This quick start tutorial assumes you are using the Raspbian operating system on your Pis, and Ubuntu as your client.

3.1. Client Installation

Ensure your Ubuntu client machine is connected to the same network as your Pis (whether by Ethernet or Wifi doesn’t matter). Then, execute the following to install the client and an NTP daemon:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:waveform/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install compoundpi-client ntp

The NTP daemon will most likely be installed to synchronize with an NTP pool on the Internet (e.g. pool.ntp.org). This is fine, but check that it’s working with the following command line:

$ ntpq -p
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
*aaaaaaa.aaaaaaa nn.nnn.nnn.nnn   3 u  109 1024  377    4.639   -2.101  21.233

3.2. Server Network Configuration

On the Pi you intend to clone, configure networking to use DHCP to automatically obtain an IP address. Edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and ensure that it looks similar to the following:

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

This configuration should ensure that the first Ethernet and/or WiFi interfaces will pick up an address automatically from the local DHCP server. If you are using WiFi, complete the WiFi configuration by editing the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file to look something like the following:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

network={
        ssid="my_wireless_ssid"
        psk="my_wireless_password"
        proto=RSN
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        pairwise=CCMP
        auth_alg=OPEN
}

3.3. Server Installation

Execute the following command to install the Compound Pi server package and the NTP daemon (the latter is required for time-synchronized image capture):

$ sudo apt-get install compoundpi-server ntp

This should pull in all necessary dependencies, and automatically install an init-script which will start the Compound Pi daemon on boot-up. Test this by rebooting the Pi with a camera module attached. You should see the camera module’s LED light up when the daemon starts. If it doesn’t, the most likely culprit is the camera: try running raspistill, ensure you’ve activated the camera with sudo raspi-config, and ensure the CSI cable is inserted correctly. You can control the Compound Pi daemon as you would any other system daemon:

$ sudo service cpid stop
$ sudo service cpid start
$ sudo service cpid restart

Ideally, you want all your Pi servers to sync with the NTP time server you set up on your client. Edit the /etc/ntp.conf file and repalce the server lines with the IP address of your client (ideally you should configure your router to give your client a fixed address):

...
#server 0.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#server 1.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#server 2.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#server 3.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 192.168.1.2
...

Restart the NTP daemon to use the new configuration:

$ sudo service ntp restart

3.4. Clone the SD Card

Once you’ve got a Pi running the Compound Pi daemon successfully, shut it down and place its SD card in any Linux machine with an SD card reader. Unmount any partitions that auto-mount, then figure out which device node represents the SD card. For example, the following would tell you that the SD card is sdd:

$ dmesg | tail | grep "Attached SCSI removable disk"
[    3.428459] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk

Clone the SD card into a disk file:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdd of=server.img

This will take some considerable time to finish. Once it has done so, eject the source SD card and insert the target one in its place. Remember to unmount any partitions which auto-mount, then execute the reverse command:

$ sudo dd if=server.img of=/dev/sdd

Repeat this last step for all remaining target cards. Finally, install the SD cards in your set of Pi servers and boot them all to ensure their camera modules activate.

Warning

Ensure your target SD cards are the same size or larger than the source SD card. If they are larger, they will still appear the same size as the source after cloning because you the cloning also duplicates the partition table of the smaller device.

3.5. Testing the Servers

Back on the Ubuntu client machine, execute cpi to run the client. You will be presented with a command line like the following:

CompoundPi Client version 0.3
Type "help" for more information, or "find" to locate Pi servers
cpi>

Firstly, ensure that the network configuration is correct. The config command can be used to print the current configuration:

cpi> config
Setting       Value
------------- --------------
network       192.168.0.0/16
port          5647
bind          0.0.0.0:5647
timeout       5
capture_delay 0
capture_count 1
video_port    False
time_delta    0.25
output        /tmp
warnings      False

Assuming we’re using a typical home router which gives out addresses in the 192.168.1.x network, this is incorrect. In order for broadcasts to work, the network must have the correct definition - it’s no good having a superset configured (192.168.0.0/16 is a superset of 192.168.1.0/24). To correct the network definition, use the set command:

cpi> set network 192.168.1.0/24
cpi> config
Setting       Value
------------- --------------
network       192.168.1.0/24
port          5647
bind          0.0.0.0:5647
timeout       5
capture_delay 0
capture_count 1
video_port    False
time_delta    0.25
output        /tmp
warnings      False

To make permanent configuration changes, simply place them in a file named ~/.cpi.ini like so:

[cpi]
network=192.168.1.0/24
timeout=10
output=~/Pictures

With the network configured correctly, you can now use find to locate your servers. If you run find on its own it will send out a broadcast ping and wait for a fixed number of seconds for servers to respond. If you know exactly how many servers you have, specify a number with the find command and it will warn you if it doesn’t find that many servers (it will also finish faster if it does find the expected number of Pis):

cpi> find 2
Found 2 servers

You can query the status of your servers with the status command which will give you the basics for the camera configuration, the time according to the server, and the number of images currently stored in memory on the server. If you only want to query a specific set of servers you can give their addresses as a parameter:

cpi> status 192.168.1.154
Address        Mode        Shutter AWB    Exp  Meter   Flip Time Delta     #
-------------- ----------- ------- ------ ---- ------- ---- -------------- -
192.168.80.154 1280x720@30 auto    auto   auto average none 0:00:00        0

If any major discrepancies are detected (resolution, framerate, timestamp, etc.), the status command should notify you of them. The maximum discrepancy permitted in the timestamp is configured with the time_delta configuration setting.

To shoot an image, use the capture command:

cpi> capture

Finally, to download the captured images from all Pis, simply use the download command:

cpi> download
Downloaded image 0 from 192.168.1.154
Downloaded image 0 from 192.168.1.168

You can use the config and set commands to configure capture options, the download target directory, and so on.

Since version 0.3 a GUI client is also provided. The basic operations of the GUI client are essentially the same as the command line client, the only major difference being that download is performed automatically after capture. You can start the GUI client with the cpigui command.

3.6. Troubleshooting

Compound Pi provides some crude but effective tools for debugging problems. The first is simply that the daemon activates the camera by default. If you see a Pi server without the camera LED lit after boot-up, you know the daemon has failed to start for some reason.

The identify command is the main debugging tool provided by Compound Pi. If specified without any further parameters it will cause all discovered Pi servers to blink their camera LED for 5 seconds. Thus, if you run this command immediately after find you can quickly locate any Pi servers that were no discovered (typically this is due to misconfiguration of the network).

If identify is specified with one or more addresses, it will blink the LED on the specified Pi servers. This can be used to quickly figure out which address corresponds to which Pi (useful when dynamic addressing is used).