Measure the Future Raspbian Image Editor

Requirements

• Raspberry Pis with all the necessary hardware to be MTF sensors
• A routable ssh server that allows the user pi to login via key-based authentication.
• This tool expects to be run on Debian Buster.

Raspberry pi configuration

Under boot you can place:

• wpa_supplicant.conf that will get included in the image and written into the boot partition of the sdcard, meaning you don't have to copy it over to each sd card individually.

MTF-specific configuration

Under boot/mtf there are several files you should create:

• id_rsa and id_rsa.pub should contain ssh keys for ssh tunnels. This pubkey should be in the authorized_keys for the user pi on the ssh server
• ssh_server should contain the routable hostname or IP address of the ssh server

Usage

Creating an image

You can specify an image, or run without arguments to have the tool download a raspbian buster image automatically and then edit it.

sudo ./mtf_img_edit.sh [image file (optional)]

You can then copy the resulting image to a usb key. To do so:

Plug the key in and identify it by looking at it's storage capacity.

lsblk

In this case, the primary partition of the usb key is located at /dev/sda1

Mount the device and copy the image over to the key

sudo mkdir -p /media/usb
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb/
sudo cp 2019-04-08-raspbian-stretch-lite.img /media/usb/

Unmount the usb key when you are finished.

sudo umount /media/usb

You may now remove the usb key and use a real computer to write the image to sd cards for use in sensors.

Connecting to the sensors.

Upon bootup, each sensor will connect to the wifi and start a reverse ssh tunnel on the ssh server. It will then write its own configuration file to enable convenient connections back. Assuming you correctly configured wpa_supplicant.conf and have functional Wifi, you should now be able to connect to your sensors shortly after booting them up. To do so:

• connect to your ssh server as the user pi using the ssh key you provided earlier
• see which sensors have contacted the ssh server: ls .ssh/config.d you'll have one file per sensor, with names like lib-mtf-xxxxxx
• connect to a sensor: ssh lib-mtf-xxxxxx