Raspberry Pi

Super quick one this time; I’ve been experimenting with MQTT to act as a central messaging broker for “Farset In-Space Related Stuff” as part of the near continuous renovations and expansions. We previously had a well configured EMonPi set up with nice dashboards and things, but that died a death at some point during the move, who knows. Anyway, EmonPi has a built in mosquitto broker, which it uses to keep ‘state’ across several parts of the emonpi ecosystem. ...

Raspberry Pi’s are great, but often have a lot of baggage associated with them, and I keep forgetting all the clever things you can do to get them up and running without having a sea of cables attached… Results Raspberry Pi that can be sshd into from anywhere in the world* without poking any firewall rules or anything other than power connected to it, that works in a range of WiFi access points. ...

I was asked to help out a friend who had an installation in an art gallery that stopped booting properly, and was reminded that I keep forgetting to actually write this post. Running a python script as a reliable, retryable service on a Raspberry Pi that waits for an ‘up’ network connection, because I’m an idiot who keeps changing his mind how to do it. Fail gracefully and with informative error messages: try: ... except:... is your friend ...

Inspired by a pretty good write up by Cynofield as to his setup for getting a Raspberry Pi to “phone home”, I thought I’d set out how I do it. I have a machine that lives behind a ‘security’ infrastructure that makes my life a living hell. As a result, I set up automatic persistent reverse shells going back to other machines I use, so if I connect to those machines, I can get into the secure environment, without anything nasty being able to get in with me. ...