Raspberry Pi installationđź”—

Graphicallyđź”—

  • Download the VisionAppster Raspberry Pi SD card image.

  • Download and install Etcher. Linux installation instructions can be found here.

  • Find an empty SD card and connect it to your computer (you may need an external SD card reader).

  • Open Etcher and select the disk image file (va-rpi-img-latest.zip) you just downloaded.

  • Select the SD card you wish to write your image to.

  • Click “Flash!”.

  • Insert the SD card into your Raspberry Pi.

  • Connect the power cable.

On command lineđź”—

The downloaded SD card image file is just a zipped disk image that you can also flash with command-line tools. The following instructions are for Linux.

To begin, you need to find out the name of your SD card device. It is crucial to get this part right; you may wipe out your own hard drive otherwise. Open a terminal and type lsblk.

$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0   477G  0 disk
├─sda1        8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2        8:2    0 476,4G  0 part /
mmcblk0     179:0    0   7,5G  0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0  43,9M  0 part
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0   7,5G  0 part

This computer has a hard drive (sda) and an integrated SD card reader, which shows up as mmcblk0. The inserted SD card has two partitions (mmcblk0p1 and mmcblk0p2), which are going to be overwritten. If the same SD card is inserted using a USB card reader, the output will look like this:

$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0   477G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2   8:2    0 476,4G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   1   7,5G  0 disk
├─sdb1   8:17   1  43,9M  0 part
└─sdb2   8:18   1   7,5G  0 part

In this case, the card is accessed through a different bus and hence gets sdb as its name. The two partitions are now sdb1 and sdb2.

To flash an SD card image, you just need to write the image file into the correct device (as root):

sudo -s
unzip -p va-rpi-img-latest.zip > /dev/mmcblk0

The name of the device will be /dev/mmcblk0, /dev/sdb or something similar. If unsure, use Etcher.

Connectingđź”—

The VisionAppster RPi image is based on Raspberry Pi OS. The default username and password are pi and raspberry, respectively. The system has SSH enabled.

Finding out the IP address of the RPi may be a bit tricky. If you have display and keyboard connected to the RPi, open a terminal and type the following command:

ip a

In the output, look for lines like this:

inet 192.168.1.92/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global eth0

Here, 192.168.1.92 is the IP address. eth0 identifies a wired interface. You can modify the network configuration on the RPi using raspi-config. If you do and connect using WiFi, look for wlan0 in the output of the ip a command.

If you are running the RPi headless, you need to have a look at your DHCP server’s log files to find out which IP address was assigned to the RPi.

If you can’t access the DHCP log file but you know the network segment to which you attached the RPi, you may try nmap. On Linux, you can usually install it using your system’s package manager (e.g. apt or yum). A Windows installer is available on the nmap site.

On Linux, give the following command (sudo is needed to display MAC addresses, which reveal the network card manufacturer):

sudo nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24

On Windows, open a command prompt as administrator and type:

nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24

Here, 192.168.1.0/24 is your network segment, which you need to find out e.g. by using ip a or by opening the IPv4 properties of your network interface in a graphical environment.

Once you have found the IP address, you can test the installation by pointing your browser to http://{ip-address-of-rpi}:2015/. You can also add the RPi as a remote in VisionAppster Builder. This makes it possible to use the camera of the RPi as an image source in the Builder and to export packages directly to it.

Installing components and licensesđź”—

To install component packages and licenses (.vapkg files) to the RPi you can either use the management interface with a web browser or the va-pkg command-line tool. Detailed instructions can be found here.

Note that when accessing a remote system you need to give the --remote option to va-pkg. For example:

va-pkg install --remote 192.168.1.12 com.example.component-1.2.3.vapkg
va-pkg license config save --remote 192.168.1.12 --token $TOKEN_ID