raspberrypi-deployment.md

Raspberry Pi Deployment

Deploy the Bobcat Autopilot to a Raspberry Pi for unattended automation and monitoring!

Assumptions

• Operating System: Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye).
• The Raspberry PI is on the same network as the Bobcat.
• You want to run bobcat autopilot as a Docker container.
• You want to schedule bobcat autopilot to run 4 times a day.
• You want remotely monitor the Bobcat Autopilot with Discord.

Setup

Install the Docker Community Edition.

$ sudo apt install -y docker-ce

Pull the bobcat image

$ sudo docker pull aidanmelen/bobcat

Create a file called /home/pi/bobcat.env with your configuration information. For Example:

BOBCAT_HOSTNAME=192.168.0.10
BOBCAT_ANIMAL=fancy-awesome-bobcat
BOBCAT_LOCK_FILE=/etc/bobcat/autopilot.lock
BOBCAT_LOG_STATE=/etc/bobcat/autopilot.json
BOBCAT_LOG_FILE=/var/log/bobcat/autopilot.log
BOBCAT_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL=https://discord.com/api/webhooks/xxx
BOBCAT_LOG_LEVEL_FILE=DEBUG
BOBCAT_LOG_LEVEL_CONSOLE=INFO
BOBCAT_LOG_LEVEL_DISCORD=WARNING
BOBCAT_TRACE=TRUE
BOBCAT_VERBOSE=TRUE

ℹ️ Run sudo docker run aidanmelen/bobcat --help for more information about the environment variables.

Next we will verify the configuration file with a dry run

$ sudo docker run \
-v /etc/bobcat:/etc/bobcat \
-v /var/log/bobcat:/var/log/bobcat \
--env-file /home/pi/bobcat.env \
--env BOBCAT_DRY_RUN=TRUE \
aidanmelen/bobcat autopilot

Finally schedule Bobcat Autopilot with Cron using this script

# write out current crontab to a file
crontab -l > mycron 2>/dev/null

# append the bobcat autopilot command to the crontab
# AKA 4 times a day: at minute 0 past hour 0, 6, 12, and 18.
echo "0 0,6,12,18 * * * sudo docker run \
-v /etc/bobcat:/etc/bobcat \
-v /var/log/bobcat:/var/log/bobcat \
--env-file /home/pi/bobcat.env \
aidanmelen/bobcat autopilot &> /dev/null" >> mycron

# install new cron file
crontab mycron

# clean up
rm mycron

Now the Bobcat Autopilot will run 4 times a day and will send logs events to Discord for remote monitoring ✨ 🍰 ✨