aw-clock | Astronomy/weather clock | Bot library

The following instructions are primarily aimed at turning a Raspberry Pi into a dedicated Astronomy/Weather Clock, meaning serving as a clock will be the Raspberry Pi’s primary, if not sole, function. The Pi will boot up directly into full-screen kiosk mode running the Astronomy/Weather Clock software. The first step, if you want GPS support, is to install a GPS device according to the manufacturer’s instructions. This device must provide a PPS (Pulse Per Second) signal for precise time keeping (something USB dongles do not provide), and must be configured to work with ntpd. I recommend the Adafruit Ultimate GPS HAT, not only because it works well, but because it’s the only GPS hardware I’ve tested. I’ve also provided notes on the Adafruit GPS HAT installation at the end of this document. In my own case I needed to use an active GPS antenna to get a good signal, but you might not need one, depending on where you locate your device.
For reference, here’s a breakdown of the steps performed by a full installation:.
Node.js is installed if not present, or updated if earlier than version 14. A switch to Node 14 using nvm (Node Version Manager) may occur if nvm is installed.
If Node.js is greater than version 14, nvm will be used to step down to version 14, installing nvm if necessary to do so.
For Node.js version 14, substitute version 12 in the descriptions above for a Raspberry Pi with less than 2 GB RAM.
An npm install is performed to bootstrap the rest of the installation process, which is written in TypeScript and requires Node.js and several npm packages to function. This can be very slow the first time.
A check for GPS configuration is performed.
If running in interactive mode (‑i), the user is queried about various configuration and installation options.
If the weatherService service is running, it’s stopped.
apt-get update and apt-get upgrade are executed, unless defeated with the ‑‑skip‑upgrade option.
The following packages are installed, if not already present: pigpio, chromium-browser (just plain chromium on Debian), unclutter, forever (a global npm package, not via apt-get), and a few fonts as well.
xscreensaver is then disabled. Why install a screen saver just to turn around and disable it? To make sure no other screen saver blanks the screen - the display of the clock is intended to stay on 24/7.
The application client is built.
The application server is built.
If you’re running build.sh, your Git branch was clean before running the installer, and the only thing that changes as far as Git is concerned are your package-lock.json files, a git --reset hard will be performed to revert those changes and keep your branch clean.
If specified, server options for wired and/or wireless sensors are installed.
A combined client/server distribution directory is created.
If any of the options ‑‑ddev, ‑i, or ‑‑sd are used, the distribution is copied to the ~/weather directory (typically /home/pi/weather), deleting anything which might have previously been present in that directory.
The file weatherService (located in the raspberry_pi_setup folder) is copied to /etc/init.d/, and changed to root ownership.
Server set-up options are saved to /etc/defaults/weatherService, which is also owned by root. Rather than re-running the installer to change the server set-up, you can edit this file directly, update the service with sudo update-rc.d weatherService defaults, then restart the server either by rebooting your system, or using the command sudo service weatherService restart.
The commands sudo update-rc.d weatherService defaults and sudo systemctl enable weatherService are performed to establish and enable the service.
An autostart file is created in ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/ (no -pi on the end for Debian), or the existing autostart file is modified, to launch the Chromium web browser in kiosk mode, displaying the Astronomy/Weather Clock.
The included file autostart_extra.sh is also copied to the above directory. This adds code to make sure Chromium doesn’t launch complaining it was shut down improperly, which could interfere with an otherwise smooth automatic start-up. . The options ‑‑launch or ‑‑reboot are performed if specified.