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Raspberry Pi and Thunderboard help

Thunderboard Setup

I had a very difficult time following this tutorial so I am writing this to help me and other people. I would recommend following the directions in the tutorial using this page for reference if things go wrong.

I did this whole process on my Raspberry Pi 3 with Raspbian OS.

Following the GitHub doc

First things first: clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/SiliconLabs/thundercloud.git

I believe this is what you need to install node.js and npm on the Raspberry Pi 3

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
sudo npm install --global gulp-cli

Once you have installed you will need to run gulp

When I tried to run gulp at first I had issues with missing modules. This is what I used

(xxx) sudo npm install gulp-browserify gulp-plumber 

... including all the rest you will need. You may need to do

(xxx) sudo npm install -g

to add things globally but I don't know what that means so I didn't worry about it.

Here is the reference: installing gulp modules

After you get gulp watch to work (not sure what it does), you will want to run gulp build.

Once this runs you will want to enter your thundercloud folder

cd thundercloud

I extracted the zip file from the tutorial to the the thundercloud folder.

Installing Bluepy

Following these instructions you will see

sudo apt-get install python-pip3 libglib2.0-dev
sudo pip3 install bluepy

Firebase

You will need the command line tools. The link on the GitHub is outdated. Use this one.

Following the directions there all you will have to do is

npm install -g firebase-tools
firebase login

You will then login with your Google account and should now be able to use Firebase commands.

You will then run

firebase deploy --project <your firebase project id>

Make sure you are in the thundercloud folder when you run this.

*When you create a Firebase account you will create a project. The project will have a project ID. This will be "yourprojectname-5555" or something similar. This is the project name you will be using throughout the tutorial. Don't just use "yourprojectname"

Scanning for Thunderboards

Make sure your Thunderboard is turned on and run

sudo python tbsense_scan.py

This script will scan for Thunderboards and every time it detects your Thunderboard it will return the sensing data.

Final notes

I still was unable to get the Silicon Labs app to work on the firebaseapp.com URL. I was able to see the real time database updating in Firebase but I was unable to see the visual Firebase app.

Here are the files from the original tutorial that you will need to download if you didnt already http://community.silabs.com/mgrfq63796/attachments/mgrfq63796/9/513/1/thunderpi.zip https://www.silabs.com/community/projects.entry.html/2017/03/08/thunderboard_sensew-Scqr

Urls

[localhost gulp] http://localhost:8080/#/<Thunder Sense number ex) 20024> [firebase Database] https://.firebaseio.com/#/<Thunder Sense number ex) 20024> [firebase Hosting] https://.firebaseapp.com/#/<Thunder Sense number ex) 20024>

node.js

https://thisdavej.com/beginners-guide-to-installing-node-js-on-a-raspberry-pi/

$ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_11.x | sudo -E bash -

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