Internet and Raspberry Pi enabled model railway @ kevingordon.org.uk

I have been busy writing up my Raspberry Pi project, which is an internet and Raspberry Pi enabled model railway, see it here at http://www.kevingordon.org.uk/articles/raspberry-pi-railway-web-controlled.html In this article you will find the follow;

• The process I went through to create the project
• The source material
• The architecture diagrams of the design as it developed
• The source code, both for the Raspberry Pi (python) and server-side (PHP)
• Videos of the railway working at different stages/progress of the project
• Other relevant images
• The XpressNet API guide for download

I hope you enjoy, would love to hear if you use this to base your own project off of!

Setup a Raspberry Pi for the first time via a Mac

What you'll need;

1. Raspberry Pi (Rpi)
2. Mini USB power supply
3. HDMI cable
4. USB mouse and keyboard
5. 4 GB SD Card (flash)
6. A HDMI enabled monitor or display (or TV)
7. LAN cable

Plug all the items in - but not the power yet. First you need to setup the SD card with the bootable operating system.

Instructions can be found here; http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup Though they sound more complicated than it is.

1. Make sure you've given the SD Card a unique name
2. At the terminal type "df -h" and you'll be able to look up the device name in the format of /dev/diskxsx as you will see the volume name on the right hand side is what you assigned to the SD card in step one.
3. Download Raspbian "Wheezy" from here http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
4. Unzip it by double clicking the zip file that you just downloaded
5. Go into Disk Utility and unmount the partition of the SD Card, if it can't unmount it, eject it and then reconnect and do the un-mounting.
6. Type the following in the terminal "sudo dd if=path_of_your_image.img of=/dev/diskn bs=1m" the diskn should be consistent with what you got in step 2
7. It will ask for your password (the cursor won't scroll) press enter
8. This kicks off the process and it take's 1/2 - 1 hour or so to do the work - a long time, and it does not indicate any progress as it goes a long. You can check that something is happening by inspecting the dd process in active processes in system monitor - to convince yourself it's doing something (you'll see the processor utilisation varying).
9. Once that's complete then you are all set, just plug that in the Raspberry Pi and plug it into the power and you will be ready
10. On first boot it will give you a set of options to set, do so at your pleasure

Transferring from iPhone 3GS to 4 via Windows Guide

The last step in the puzzle was to transfer the contents of the iPhone 3GS across onto the iPhone 4S. I'll talk you through the process we went through as it may be of use to know some of the querks in the process.

Firstly get the iPhone 4 into the correct state, by going into settings and resetting back to the factory settings and deleting the content. This then puts the phone back into factory settings.

This guide assumes you are on O2 and did the sim swap. So make sure you have a full backup of the iPhone 3GS, and then put it into Airplane mode and transfer the sim from the 3GS into the 4.

Pre migration I recommended that the iTunes was updated to the latest version, which is the step that was taken, and the backup done within the new version.

Next we plugged the iPhone 4 into the laptop and requested it to be restored from the backup that we had done of the 3GS. Here is where it should have gone through fine, here is where it went a little wrong.

The progress bar was making little progress and the estimated time until completion went up from 3 hours to 15 hours to 30 hours to 48 hours, so clearly something was not correct.

Under these circumstances look at task manager and check out the memory utilisation and the processor utilisation. It was clear there was a process that was taking up nearly 100% of the cpu utilisation. We tried adjusting the priority up of this process, and the % utilisation increased, and the estimated time of completion came down. But then the iPhone reported that the install couldn't be completed as it failed to communicate with iTunes.

So something was wrong. A google for the problem, showed it was an issue with the latest iTunes utilisation of iCloud, so I was feeling terrible that I had forced the iTunes upgrade. However the worry was short, for google also listed a partial solution which on further thought gave the answer.

To resolve this, just kill the push notifications daemon process that is hogging 100% and you will fix the issue.

However we were now in a state that was a distance away from the initial conditions, and for us to restart we needed to return to that place. This was achieved by resetting the iPhone 4 back to factor settings again, restarting iTunes and the computer, and stopping the offending process.

This time round the restoring of the 4 with the contents of the 3GS began to proceed appropriately. In fact the time for completion of the initial step was reasonably quickly, under an hour. The syncing of media automatically kicked off, and this took a further couple of hours.

Once complete the phone was fantastic, some tips that were required to get the phone ready to use.

1) Setup Email, as was no longer working
2) Put in wifi key
3) Put in passwords to important apps such as facebook and twitter
4) Reorganise some of the apps with the new apps that have come in
5) Demonstration of the notifications centre
6) Demonstration of the reminders
7) Guided tour of the iPhone 4's new features was given.