Recently, a coworker brought a raingauge to me that was collecting dust somewhere in a storage room at the office.  After making it work, I thought that I could certainly rebuild it.  Better.  Faster.  With a much cooler interface.

I also thought that this might be a damn good opportunity for my BeagleBoard Black.

Setup

There are a few initial things that need to be done:
ntpdate time.nist.gov
opkg update
opkg upgrade
These commands set the date and time, update the available package listing, and upgrade all installed packages to the latest version.

The next thing I did was edit /lib/systemd/system/bonescript.socket and change the listening port to 8080.  This will break the connection between the board and the website (so you can’t click the buttons on some of the programming example pages and make the LEDs blink… which I admit is a pretty cool feature).  Cloud9 will still remain on port #3000.  More on that later.

Additionally, I changed /usr/lib/node_modules/bonescript/server.js to port 8080.  This was really to try and maintain the connection between the board hardware and the website.  It didn’t work, but I wanted things off of port 80 so port 80 could be used for a website.

After all this I rebooted the board.

When it came back up, I lost internet access to the board, so I edited /etc/resolv.conf to add the local DNS server in my office.

After that, I ran several installs:
opkg install mysql5
opkg install lighttpd
opkg install php php-cgi php-cli
opkg install lighttpd-module-fastcgi
Next, I edited the lighttpd config files per this blog post.  Once those were edited, I restarted lighttpd and brought up my version of index.php (which included the phpinfo() command to show me that PHP was working).

Ruby & ThingSpeak Installation

I installed Ruby and got the Thingspeak source from GitHub (I created some folders for this, I’m assuming if you’ve made it down here you can figure that part out):
opkg install ruby ruby-dev
git clone git@github.com:iobridge/thingspeak.git
gem install bundle
Then I went to the GitHub project page to follow the instructions to install ThingSpeak.  I ran into several problems.  One of them related to a file not being able to find assert.h.  I fixed this by setting the C_INCLUDE_PATH variable:

export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include

The next problem wasn’t so easy.  The linker was having a problem finding one the libgcc_s library.  I ultimately fixed this by linking /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so to /lib/libgcc_s.so.1:

ln -s /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so

Then, I started getting “Command not found” for /usr/bin/mkdir.  That was sort of a “WTF?” moment, considering I created a folder for the ThingSpeak source earlier.  I figured it must be hard-coded to use /usr/bin and the mkdir command was in /bin.  More symbolic links:

ln -s /bin/mkdir /usr/bin/mkdir

Once these symbolic links were in place, I was able to get further in the “bundle install” process, only stopping thrice for the following missing items:

opkg install libmysqlclient-r-dev
opkg install libxml2-dev
opkg install libxslt-dev

After these three items are installed, I could bring up ThingSpeak by running:

rails server -d -p 3001

And bringing up http://localhost:3001

In the next post, I’m going to get into the rest of what I was doing.

-73-