4. Administrators Guide

This section of the manual deals with configuring Picroscopy either via the command line switches or via a configuration file specified on the command line. It also provides rudimentary guidance on configuration of the Raspbian operating system under the assumption that this is the operating system most users will be using for Picroscopy.

Note

If any users wish to use Picroscopy with Arch Linux (the other major distro available for the Raspberry Pi platform), please feel free to submit documentation patches to the author. If you are reading this on ReadTheDocs, this can be done trivially with the Edit on GitHub link on the left of the page.

4.1. Network configuration

The /etc/network/interfaces file holds the network configuration under Raspbian. The default configuration which is shown below, attempts to obtain an IP address via DHCP:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

Should you wish your Pi to use a static address you will need to edit this file. A typical static address configuration for the private 10.0.0.0 network is shown below:

iface eth0 inet static
    address 10.0.0.150
    netmask 255.0.0.0
    gateway 10.0.0.1

Another static configuration is shown below, this time for the private 192.168.0.0 network typically used by home routers:

iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.1.3
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 192.168.1.1

After changing /etc/network/interfaces you will need to restart the networking service for the changes to take effect (note that if you are connected to your Pi via SSH this will very likely break your session):

$ sudo service networking restart

Alternatively you can simply reboot:

$ sudo reboot

4.2. Command Line

Picroscopy is started from the command line with the picroscopy command. Typically, options for the application are either passed as command line switches, or are specified as entries in a configuration file which is specified with the picroscopy -c option. If an option appears both in the configuration file and as a switch on the command line, the command line switch will take precedence. Specifically, the order of precedence for options is:

  1. command line switch
  2. configuration key
  3. default

The Picroscopy application does not fork like a daemon once started. As it is a single user application that utilizes the Raspberry Pi’s display there is little point in running as a system daemon, despite using a web interface. Furthermore, as the system monopolizes the Pi’s display output, it is reasonable to expect that the application will be the only (visible) application running at any given time.

To this end, you may wish to configure the system to start Picroscopy at boot time, and shut down (or reboot) the Pi when the application terminates. A simple method for accomplishing this is to write a bash script similar to the following:

#!/bin/bash
picroscopy -c myconfig.ini
poweroff

Simply change the last line to reboot if you wish to reboot when picroscopy exits instead of powering off the computer. Save this script as /root/run_picroscopy.sh and make it executable by running the following command:

chmod +x /root/run_picroscopy.sh

To run this script on startup (without interfering with the rest of the boot sequence), add the following to the end of /etc/rc.local:

/root/run_picroscopy.sh &

The ampersand (&) at the end of the line ensures the script is started in the background, permitting the rest of the boot sequence to continue.