Turning your Raspberry Pi into a Dashboard

A dashboard in the Scrivito office at Infopark, Berlin

In the Scrivito office at Infopark in Berlin, we love dashboards. We’ve put a lot of them in our office so everybody knows if our systems are up and running, if our office internet connections are doing okay — or sometimes people just take a look know what time it is. Short: A dashboard is a must-have for any SaaS company.

We’re using Geckoboard to cloud-power our dashboard. It’s only $25/month and it includes great functionalities. They offer you a lot more out-of-the-box than you could manually build for 25 bucks. So get an account and sign up.

A Raspberry Pi 3

But having a great dashboard only brings you so far — the question is, how to visualise it. We’ve already got a lot of TV screens in every room (which are powered by AppleTVs and AirPlay, so we don’t need any HDMI cables).

So we looked for a cheap, reliable and easy solution to display our dashboards on these screens. And what could be better suited as a Raspberry Pi 3.

Of course you don’t want to spend a lot of time to manually set up a dashboard — and you’d like to display it automatically in full screen on your beautiful HD display.

So here’s our recipe how we set up our Raspberry Pi’s for Geckoboard. It only takes about 10 minutes.

SD card preparations on your Mac

Find out using Disk Utility.app or diskutil list, which /dev at device your SD card is mounted. Mine mounts usually at rdisk2, so first download the package, unzip it and transfer it to the SD card:

wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_latest
unzip raspbian_latest # and insert SD using an adapter into MBP
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/rdisk2
dd bs=1m if=2016-09-23-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/rdisk2
diskutil eject /dev/rdisk2

Pro tip: After the installation is done, you can again clone the SD card using dd, copy it to more SD cards and effectively cloning your Pi.

Remote Installation via ssh

Hook up your Pi via Ethernet to your network, find out its IP and do the rest of the installation via SSH and change your password immediately (Tip: Use 1Password to create and store secure passwords):

ssh pi@<ipaddress> # password: raspberry
passwd

First of all you should create an ssh directory and upload your ssh keys, e.g.:

mkdir .ssh
cat >.ssh/authorized_keys <<EOF
ssh-ed25519 ssh-ed25519 AAAAC__REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_KEY__pm4tj56K87GzrK
EOF

Backup the autostart file and replace it with your own so that Chrome boots up straight when booting the Pi (change your URL to your Geckoboard sharing URL):

cp .config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart .config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart.dist
cat >.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart <<EOF
@chromium-browser --kiosk --disable-overlay-scrollbar --noerrdialogs --disable-session-crashed-bubble --disable-infobars https://mycompany.geckoboard.com/dashboards/YOUR_URL
@unclutter -idle 0
EOF

If you’ve got a fixed IP internet connection, you might want to set up IP restrictions to access the dashboard in your Geckoboard configuration.

Afterwards we’ll secure the system, update to the latest package versions and install some convenience stuff:

sudo su -
passwd # Change to your new root password
apt-get update -y ; apt-get dist-upgrade -y ; apt-get autoremove -y
apt-get install x11-xserver-utils unclutter ttf-mscorefonts-installer x11vnc xterm vim screen dnsutils rcconf silversearcher-ag mlocate

Then start raspi-config and do some basic configuration:

• 7 Advanced Options > A2 Hostname > dashboard (or whatever)
• 3 Boot Options > B1 Desktop/CLI > B4 Desktop Autologin
• 4 Intl Options > I1 Change Locale (I usually disable en_GB using the space key, enable en_US.UTF8, fallback C.UTF8)
• 4 Intl Options > I2 Change Timezone (in our case Europe/Berlin)
• 4 Intl Options > I4 Change Wi-fi Country (in our case DE — Germany)
• Reboot now

After rebooting, your dashboard should already show a Geckoboard screen. It still looks ugly, has scrollbars and no fullscreen, but no worries, we’ll get there in a moment!

I’ve got some convenience dotfiles including aliases in bashrc and my vimrc. I can’t live without these — you might have your own version of your preferred bashrc file, feel free to skip this step:

sudo su -
curl -so /etc/bashrc.local https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomaswitt/dotfiles/master/etc/bashrc.local
echo "test -e \"/etc/bashrc.local\" && . /etc/bashrc.local" >>/etc/bash.bashrc
cp /etc/vim/vimrc /etc/vim/vimrc.dist
curl -so /etc/vim/vimrc https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomaswitt/dotfiles/master/etc/vimrc

Now we’re going to harden the ssh daemon: No root login, only secure ciphers, etc. — Do not skip this step! Security is important! Make sure that you’ve uploaded your ssh key before and tested in a new shell that your ssh login is still working. Otherwise you’ll lock yourself out from your Pi.

cp /etc/ssh/ssh_config /etc/ssh/ssh_config.dist
curl -so /etc/ssh/ssh_config https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomaswitt/dotfiles/master/etc/ssh/ssh_config
cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.dist
curl -so /etc/ssh/sshd_config https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomaswitt/dotfiles/master/etc/ssh/sshd_config | grep -v AllowUsers >/etc/ssh/sshd_config
echo "DebianBanner no" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config
/etc/init.d/ssh restart
# Remove some annoying messages and replace by a security warning
true >/etc/motd
curl -so /etc/issue.net https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomaswitt/dotfiles/master/etc/issue.net

Let’s now fine-tune the X11 config that the screen doesn’t go blank, the cursor doesn’t show and we’re going to have a nice HDMI display:

cat >/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart <<EOF
@lxpanel --profile LXDE-pi
@pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi
@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@xset s noblank
@sed -i 's/"exited_cleanly": false/"exited_cleanly": true/' ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences
EOF
cp /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.dist
sed -i 's/#xserver-command=X/xserver-command=X -s 0 dpms/' /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
cp /boot/config.txt /boot/config.txt.dist
sed -i 's/#hdmi_force_hotplug=1/hdmi_force_hotplug=1/' /boot/config.txt
sed -i 's/#disable_overscan=1/disable_overscan=1/' /boot/config.txt
sed -i 's/#config_hdmi_boost=4/config_hdmi_boost=4/' /boot/config.txt

Then we’d like to check whether our network is already available at boot in order to avoid annoying Chrome error messages:

cat >/boot/IPCheck.py <<EOF
#!/usr/bin/env python
import socket
from time import sleep
def checknetwork():
    ip = False
    try:
        s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
        s.connect(('google.com', 0))
        ip = s.getsockname()[0]
        s.close()
    except socket.error:
        return False
    else:
        return ip
def main():
    x = checknetwork()
    while x == False:
        print "Checking network ..."
        x = checknetwork()
        sleep(1)
EOF
chmod +x /boot/IPcheck.py
cp /etc/rc.local /etc/rc.local.dist
sed -i 's/# By default this script does nothing./\/usr\/bin\/python \/boot\/IPcheck.py/' /etc/rc.local

We’re nearly there. Additionally, we’re blanking our screens at night in order to save some energy:

cat >/usr/local/bin/screen.sh <<EOF
#!/bin/bash

if [ \$# -lt 1 ]; then
  echo "Syntax: \$0 (on|off)"
  exit
fi

if [ \$1 == "on" ]; then
  tvservice -p
  sleep 2
  chvt 6 && chvt 7
  echo "Switched HDMI on"
fi

if [ \$1 == "off" ]; then
  tvservice -o
  echo "Switched HDMI off"
fi
EOF
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/screen.sh
crontab <<EOF
0 19 * * * /usr/local/bin/screen.sh off >/dev/null
0 8 * * * /usr/local/bin/screen.sh on >/dev/null
EOF

That’s it. Let’s reboot one last time:

reboot

… and your dashboard should shine! Happy dash-boarding!

Additional notes

If you’d like to use the WiFi of the Raspberry Pi 3 instead of ethernet, the configuration works like this:

sed -i 's/iface wlan0 inet manual/iface wlan0 inet dhcp/' /etc/network/interfaces
# Change SSID, PSK and country
cat >/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf <<EOF
country=de
network={
  ssid="YOUR_WIRELESS_NETWORK_NAME"
  psk="YOUR_WIRELESS_NETWORK_PASSWORD"
  proto=RSN
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  pairwise=CCMP
  auth_alg=OPEN
}
EOF

If you need a terminal, e.g. to copy/paste login information:

x11vnc -usepw -forever -display :0 # choose password
export DISPLAY=”:0”
xterm

Open the connection on your Mac via:

open vnc://HOSTNAME.local