Part 8 - eInk Weirdness

In Part One we talk about the hardware
In Part Two, We got Ubuntu on your MicroSD card.
In Part Three We get everything set up to my personal liking, but ymmv.
In Part Four We get CoreDNS built
In Part Five We deploy and configure CoreDNS
In Part Six We add a few odds & ends to make the host more durable
In Part Seven We add the bits for the eInk display

Here in Part Seven We’re going to set up the eInk display →→→

Part Eight

Papertty
- Pre-reqs
  - Install Packages
  - Install Poetry
- Clone the repo

🐺🔥⚗️

eInk and PaperTTY

PaperTTY¹ is a nifty python tool to display a console TTY on an eInk display. Here we’ll walk through setting it up to give us an easily viewable status indicator

I wanted some mechanism of easily assessing the health of the DNS hosts…

I didn’t want to spend too much time on it, but I wanted it to be robust enough that it would ‘just work’ consistently.

I ended up trying a few different tools, but ended up landing on a combination of PaperTTY and DNSTop. There are definitely other ways to achieve this goal, and I will likely play with others later..

…This works well for the moment.

So the general process here is:

PaperTTY
- Get the necessary dependencies for PaperTTY set up
  - Apt Packages
  - Poetry
- Clone the repo
- setup papertty
  - test that it actually works with THIS eink display.
  - install some fonts
- and make it start at boot on a specified vty.
DNSTOP
- Install it
- get it running properly automagically

PaperTTY

Install Pre-Reqs

Apt Packages

apt-get install libjpeg-dev libjpeg-turbo8-dev libjpeg8-dev \
libopenjp2-7 libtiff5 python3-pip python3-pip-whl \
python3-setuptools-whl python3-venv python3.10-venv \
python3-rgpio python3-rpi.gpio rpi.gpio-common \
rgpio-tools librgpio1

Poetry

Poetry is a packaging and dependency management toolchain for Python.

I do not advocate running random shit on the internet piped into an interpreter sight unseen.
I STRONGLY encourage you to look at the script (found here) before running the install one-liner below:

Install Poetry

curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -

Quickly test/validate Poetry’s functionality

root@coredns-03:~# poetry --version
Poetry (version 1.2.1)

Clone the Repo

root@coredns-03:~# git clone https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY.git
Cloning into 'PaperTTY'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 801, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (29/29), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (21/21), done.
remote: Total 801 (delta 13), reused 20 (delta 8), pack-reused 772
Receiving objects: 100% (801/801), 7.00 MiB | 13.36 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (497/497), done.
root@coredns-03:~#

Build PaperTTY

root@coredns-03:~# cd ~/PaperTTY && poetry install

root@coredns-03:~# cd ~/PaperTTY && poetry install
Creating virtualenv papertty-uSU0pReX-py3.10 in /root/.cache/pypoetry/virtualenvs
Updating dependencies
Resolving dependencies... (163.6s)

Writing lock file

Package operations: 1 install, 9 updates, 0 removals

  • Updating attrs (19.3.0 -> 22.1.0)
  • Updating idna (2.9 -> 3.4)
  • Updating setuptools (65.3.0 -> 50.3.2)
  • Updating six (1.15.0 -> 1.16.0)
  • Updating hyperlink (19.0.0 -> 21.0.0)
  • Updating incremental (17.5.0 -> 21.3.0)
  • Updating pyhamcrest (2.0.2 -> 2.0.3)
  • Updating zope-interface (5.1.0 -> 5.4.0)
  • Installing rpi-gpio (0.7.1)
  • Updating spidev (3.4 -> 3.5)

Installing the current project: papertty (0.1.8b)

Waveshare recommendations

According to [WaveShare’s guidance][waveshare-docs] [^waveshare-docs^], the following are necessary:

The latest version of [libbcm2835][lib-bcm2835-site][^libbcm2835site^] here’s a link to the [src tarball][lib-bcm2835-tarball][^libbcm2835tarball^],
The version of WiringPi [specifically from this repo.][wiringpi-repo][^wiringpi-repo^]

I don’t think this was strictly necessary though. In fact, I’m fairly certain this was a red herring. Nevertheless this was the install process.. it’s useful so as to be able to ascertain if the problem is papertty or the eink display / pi

BCM2835

CopyPasta:

cd /usr/src && \
wget http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/bcm2835/bcm2835-1.71.tar.gz && \
tar xzvf bcm2835-1.71.tar.gz && \
cd /usr/src/bcm2835-1.71 && \
./configure && make && make install && \
ls -la /usr/local/lib/libbcm2835.a /usr/local/include/bcm2835.h

Acutally running the commands:

root@coredns-03:~# cd /usr/src
root@coredns-03:/usr/src# wget http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/bcm2835/bcm2835-1.71.tar.gz
root@coredns-03:/usr/src# tar xzvf bcm2835-1.71.tar.gz
root@coredns-03:/usr/src# cd bcm2835-1.71/
root@coredns-03:/usr/src/bcm2835-1.71# ./configure && make && make install

Inspect them for good measure:

root@coredns-03:/usr/src/bcm2835-1.71# ls -la /usr/local/lib/libbcm2835.a /usr/local/include/bcm2835.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 430648 Sep 18 23:21 /usr/local/lib/libbcm2835.a 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 105329 Sep 18 23:21 /usr/local/include/bcm2835.h

WiringPi

Copypasta:

cd /usr/src && git clone  https://github.com/WiringPi/WiringPi.git && cd WiringPi && /usr/src/WiringPi/build

root@coredns-03:/usr/src# cd /usr/src && git clone  https://github.com/WiringPi/WiringPi.git
Cloning into 'WiringPi'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 1730, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (613/613), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (112/112), done.
remote: Total 1730 (delta 554), reused 501 (delta 501), pack-reused 1117
Receiving objects: 100% (1730/1730), 802.92 KiB | 3.72 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1186/1186), done.
root@coredns-03:/usr/src# cd WiringPi && /usr/src/WiringPi/build
...

sysctls

TBD

oepn files network buffers calomel tips

Prometheus

apt-get install bwm-ng libconfig9 libfreetype-dev libio-pty-perl libipc-run-perl libpng-dev libpng-tools libsnmp-base libsnmp40 libtime-duration-perl libtimedate-perl lldpad lldpd moreutils nfs-common prometheus-node-exporter prometheus-node-exporter-collectors python-is-python3 python3-pip smartmontools snmp snmp-mibs-downloader sockperf spi-tools

Extra Credit

WTFUtil

https://wtfutil.com https://github.com/wtfutil/wtf.git

⬅⃖⃖ Back to Robustify

…Continue ➡⃗⃗

https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY ↩︎