Skip to content

Admin Guide

Jump to bottom
Vault2501 edited this page Oct 3, 2022 · 5 revisions

Instructions for setting up and common administrative tasks on the MeshedBanana.

Flash reticulum firmware to ESP32

In order to use the ESP32 LoRa device with reticulum, you need to flash the corresponding firmware on it first. Currently this is not possible from within the Meshed Banana itself (this will be addressed in future versions).

In order to flash the firmware, please follow these steps:

  • Unplug the Meshed Banana from power
  • Connect the ESP32 via the usb connector on the side of the Meshed Banana to a Linux system
  • run rnodeconf -a to detect the ESP32 and flash it. For details please see the rnodeconf documentation
  • Unplug the ESP and connect the power again to the Meshed Banana

Copy image to SD Card

  • Build or download the Meshed Banana Armbian OS image
  • Extract the image 
    unxz Armbian_22.11.0-trunk_Bananapim2zero_bullseye_current_5.15.68_minimal.img.xz
  • Copy it to a micro SD card using dd or any other imager tool and boot it in the Meshed Banana. 
    sudo dd if=Armbian_22.11.0-trunk_Bananapim2zero_bullseye_current_5.15.68_minimal.img of=<SD_CARD_DEVICE> bs=1024k status=progress

Access

There are several ways to access a Meshed Banana

HDMI

Connect a hdmi monitor and a mouse/keyboard via an otg adapter and a usb hub. Then boot the Meshed Banana

Serial Port

You can use a serial<->usb adapter connected to the serial debug connection.

  • Plug a FTDI Serial<->USB adapter into the serial debug port of the Meshed Banana. Make sure the voltage is set to 3.3V!
  • Connect the adapter to the usb port of a computer running linux
  • On the Computer, start a serial console program, like e.g. screen to interface with the Meshed Banana. Please set <USB DEVICE> accordingly, like e.g. /dev/ttyUSB0 
screen <USB DEVICE> 115200

You should now just see a black screen. Now power up the the Meshed Banana by plugging a USB power supply into the Banana Pi zero. If everything is working, you now should see the Armbian boot messages. It will hang for some time at starting kernel, this is expected and might take up to 2 minutes on the first bootup.

SSH

You can ssh into a Meshed Banana.
Access Point mode ssh nomad@192.168.1.1
Client mode `ssh nomad@

Initial Boot

Upon the first boot, Armbian provides a setup process for configuring the root password, as well creating a user and connecting to wifi. After this setup is finished, logout and login as the newly created user. At this first login, the reticulum files are copied into the users home. After that, please logout and login again, to have the reticulum binaries in your PATH.

Administrative commands

Please run these commands as root.

Passwords

Default

root:meshedbanana

Change root Password

passwd

Change user Password

passwd nomad

Switch to Access Point mode

To switch MeshedBanana from WiFi Client to Access Point, run

wifi_mode.sh ap

Change Access Point settings

SSID

Edit value for ssid in /etc/hostapd.conf

WPA passphrase

Edit value for wpa_passphrase in /etc/hostapd.conf

Apply changes

systemctl restart hostapd

Switch to WiFi Client Mode

To switch MeshedBanana from Accass Point to WiFi client, run

wifi_mode.sh ap

If you already had a WiFi connection configured, MeshedBanana will connect to it.

Connect to Wifi Network

nmtui-connect

Change LoRa Device

By default the internal ESP32 connected to ttyS3 is configured as LoRa device. You can change this to use other devices via USB:

USB RNode:

set_lora_device.sh ttyACM0

USB ESP32:

set_lora_device.sh ttyUSB0

Apply changes

systemctl restart rnsd
Clone this wiki locally