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Development on a Raspberry Pi

Developing without hardware​

If you have a Raspberry Pi available, you can quickly boot up a near-exact environment to a Pioreactor. We can mock out the hardware needed, but everything else will work: networking, the Pioreactor UI, MQTT, running jobs, plugins, etc.

  1. Install the Pioreactor software on to a microSD card by following the instructions here.
  2. Power the Raspberry Pi. Since there's no HAT hardware, there won't be a blue blinking LED. The Raspberry Pi will still connect to the network you provided in the setup.
  3. SSH into the Raspberry Pi. Instructions on how to SSH in.
  4. Once SSH'ed in, we need to add some "mocking" packages. Enter the following:
    • sudo pip3 install fake-rpi

The environment variable TESTING will determine if the Pioreactor should run in "testing" mode (i.e. mock out hardware required, and fake some data). We also need to specify the location of the config.ini file with the GLOBAL_CONFIG env variable. For example, we can mock the stirring job by entering:


TESTING=1 GLOBAL_CONFIG=/home/pioreactor/.pioreactor/config.ini pio run stirring

However, the experiment needs to be mocked out too:

TESTING=1 \
GLOBAL_CONFIG=/home/pioreactor/.pioreactor/config.ini \
EXPERMENT="Demo Experiment" \
pio run stirring

That's a lot of typing variables, so you could move these environment variables to ~/.profile:

nano ~/.profile

And add anywhere:

export TESTING=1
export GLOBAL_CONFIG=/home/pioreactor/.pioreactor/config.ini
export EXPERMENT="Demo Experiment"

And finally enter:

source ~/.profile

Now you can do pio run stirring without having to enter in the environment variables.