Developing and Deploying devices

[Robert Helling]

Hi everybody,

> On 12.04.2016, at 16:35, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> 
> As for the development process, right now I consider this the "storming" phase

A quick report from my side: Since that was easiest, I got hold of a RPi3 (which has both wifi and BT on board) to get started with something (and not waiting for some other, maybe better suited hardware to arrive at my doorstep). Plus I had an evening free to spend on subsurface.

Too bad I did not get very far since I realized to late that version three wants a micro SD card and I only had an ordinary SD card ready. So no booting tonight.

I was hoping I could present a prototype very soon but rather I will talk about what I had in mind:

I wanted to investigate how far one could get with wifi. I don’t want to join some existing wifi (at least for now), rather turn the RPi into an access point running with its own DHCP server and BIND (and no internet uplink). So a phone can connect (yes, that is somewhat inconvenient) to that wifi and then sync the subsurface git repository with one on the RPi (after getting rid of Dirk’s server name hard coding in the code).

Second, (actually that should happen first), maybe triggered by HTTP to a web server running on the RPi, it downloads dives from a dive computer connected via USB (for starters), possibly (again, for starters) using default vendor/model into its local git repository (which is later synched with the phone, see above).

The way this would look for the user would be: Download our image file and write it to a (micro!) SD card using one of the available graphical tools. (This assumes we don’t want to get into hardware production mode but rather point the users to one of the usual sources). Put that flash card in the device and boot it up. Connect to its access point, start subsurface-mobile. That’s all. Nothing to configure. We could also try to write the image from the desktop program but again I would leave that for later.

To be able to track the steps that I needed to do to get the RPi to this behavior (not for the end user, but for us), I started
http://trac.subsurface-divelog.org/wiki/Subsurface%20on%20RPi
with so far not much there, but I hope that will change as soon as I have bought a micro SD.

Best
Robert
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