Setting up a Raspberry Pi with Python 3.7+ using Ansible

Here's a set of files to automatically setup bricknil on a Raspberry Pi. These Ansible playbooks will help you take a clean Raspbian image and compile Python 3.7+ along with all the Bricknil required libraries. You just need a Raspberry Pi; these instructions do not require you to plug in a monitor and works over Wifi. This compilation of Python is necessary because the raspbian distro does not ship with the latest version of Python at the time of this writing. And it took me a little bit of effort to figure out how to compile Python with the SSL libraries (so pip works), so I hope this might be of use to some folks.

The steps required are listed below in order, and you can find the Ansible yaml playbooks in the Bricknil source under pi_setup.

Steps

Download a Raspbian image and burn it to a SD card

1. Download the Raspbian Stretch Lite image

2. Burn it to a suitable SD card. On OS X, Balena Etcher is a good tool to do this.

3. On the newly imaged SD card's /boot folder:

   1. Make an empty file called ssh to enable SSH access.

   2. Make wpa_supplicant.conf file to supply your wifi credentials:

      country=US
      ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
      update_config=1
      
      network={
            ssid="NETWORK_NAME
            psk="WIFI PASSWORD"
      }
      

4. Now, you should be able to use this SD card to boot your raspberry pi. After giving it a few minutes to boot, you can login in by doing the following on your local machine:

   ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
   <enter 'raspberry' as the default password
   

Install Ansbile on your local machine

You can just type pip install ansible

Change the default password on the Pi

1. You may need to modify the hosts file in pi_setup directory to put in your own IP address for the Pi.

2. You will need to install the python library passlib by running pip install passlib on your local machine (not the Pi)

3. Use the change_password.yml playbook to test your ansible install and change the default password on the pi (use raspberry for the ssh password when prompted, and then enter your new password):

   ansible-playbook -i hosts change_password.yml --ask-pass
   

   The playbook being run is simply:

.. literalinclude:: ../pi_setup/change_password.yml
    :language: yaml

Run the setup playbook

1. The final step is to just run the the install playbook. This will install all the packages, download Python 3.7, compile it, and set up a virtualenv to run bricknil from. The actual playbook is in tasks.yml, shown below and included in the source, and the command to execute it on your local machine is:

   ansible-playbook -i hosts tasks.yml --ask-pass
   

   The install will take around two hours, so please be patient. Most of the time is spent compiling and installing Python from source. Here's the playbook being executed:

   .. literalinclude:: ../pi_setup/tasks.yml
       :language: yaml
   
   

2. And that's it! Your raspberry pi should be ready to go as a networked appliance to run your Lego controller scripts from.

Running Bricknil examples on the Pi

1. The script installs a virtualenv called bricknil, so you can activate it in the normal way to get access to Python 3.7+ and the python dependencies for running bricknil.

2. The script also installed the bricknil source from github, so all the examples should be ready to go. Just ssh into the Pi and:

   cd bricknil
   

3. On linux, you need to run as sudo to access the bluetooth libraries; after you login to the Pi over ssh you can do the following to run the virtualenv installed Python as sudo:

   sudo ~/.virtualenvs/bricknil/bin/python examples/train_all.py