teschmitt / meshpi

Build a batman-adv powered mesh network with Raspberry Pis from scratch

UAVPi image build workflow

We'll be building two different images for this setup:

1. A node image that can be flashed onto the devices that are participating only in the mesh network.
2. An ap image that will be flashed to exactly one device which will act as the access points for devices wanting to connect to the mesh but that aren't part of the mesh.

Taking care of steps 1 to 8 of the following prerequesites is required for both types of images/devices, step 9 is only for the ap image/device.

Prerequisites

Building a deployable UAVPi image is aided by the scripts and pre-defined config files in this repository. There are a few prerequesites for starting this workflow:

1. Download a suitable vanilla Raspi OS image, e.g. 2022-04-04-raspios-bullseye-armhf-lite
2. Flash that image to an SD card like so:

$ xzcat 2022-04-04-raspios-bullseye-armhf-lite.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress

3. Then clone this repository

$ git clone [email protected]:teschmitt/UAVPi.git
$ cd UAVPi

4. Edit pi_config/userconf_sample in order to set up a custom default user. Generate the password hash with

$ openssl passwd -6
   ... enter password ...

then save the output to pi_config/userconf:

<username>:<PASSWORDHASH>

5. The self-hosted setup steps require a wifi connection, so edit wpa_supplicant.conf_sample and remove the suffix (remember to wipe all sensitive info from this before creating and distributing the image).
6. If you want to connect to the Pi via SSH, remove the suffix from ssh_sample. These will be copied to the boot partition and will be read out automagically on the Pi's first startup.
7. ./setup_medium.sh expects the DTN7 binaries (from the Rust implementation) to be in a sub-directory called dtn7-rs-release. So please compile them with cross build --release --target arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi and place them there.
8. Go and tell the cross maintainers what absolute MVPs they are. I'll wait.

Important: the following step only has to be performed when creating an ap image:

9. Edit networking/hostapd.conf to reflect the settings you want for the non-mesh connecting clients. Also take a good hard look at setup_mesh.sh starting at around line 70, where settings are getting written to dnsmasq.conf and dchpcd.conf.

The above steps will normally only have to be done once, then you have a working environment for the following workflow.

Image Creation

If everything went well, you should have two partitions mounted and it should look something like this:

$ lsblk
...
sdX      8:16   1  59,5G  0 disk
├─sdX1   8:17   1   256M  0 part /run/media/<username>/boot
└─sdX2   8:18   1   1,7G  0 part /run/media/<username>/rootfs

You can then launch the script to copy all files needed for the self-hosted setup with the details from above:

$ ./setup_medium.sh --bootfs /run/media/<username>/boot --rootfs /run/media/<username>/rootfs

Since we're copying the DTN7 stuff into system directories, you will need to plug in your root password along the way. Don't forget to umount the partitions. You can now boot up the Pi (and connect to it via ssh, if you provided the adequate credentials above).

Creating a node Image

For the ap image, see below.

In order to install all needed software, run

$ ./setup_host.sh

This requires an internet connection and may take a while. When it's done you should see

Setup finished, you can now run the setup_mesh.sh script.

So do that:

$ ./setup_mesh.sh

This will actually muck around in the network configurations and set up all interfaces needed by batman-adv. If you want to change any of the used options, check the networking directory for the appropriate files.

Creating an ap Image

This is largely analog to the node image, but we need to set a flag in the setup scripts to tell them to add additional software, configs, and so on. So here we go:

Install all software:

$ ./setup_host.sh --ap-mode

This requires an internet connection and may take a while. When it's done you should see

Setup finished, you can now run the setup_mesh.sh script.

So do that:

$ ./setup_mesh.sh --ap-mode

Create and shrink an image

Now for the most important part, creating the image:

1. Power down the Pi and remove the SD card. Mount it on the workstation
2. Find out the device ID like above
3. Wipe any sensitive information (e.g. login info to your Wifi in <path_to_rootfs>/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf) you don't want to distribute later on from the SD card data.
4. Fire up the create_image.sh script (this will also require your sudo credentials, so have those handy):

$ ./create_image.sh /dev/sdX imagename.img

It is advisable to do this once for an ap image and once for a node image. This will take a while, but you'll have a ready to deploy image when it's done.

On hostnames

The setup_mesh.sh script will generate a hostname based on the MAC address of the wlan0 interface and write this hostname to /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname. The image you create will have this hostname hard-coded into it. If you want something more generic you will have to alter the appropriate files before ripping the image.

To auto-generate and set a hostname with the schema uav-<last 6 MAC addr digits w/o colons>, simply run the autogen_hostname.sh script.

Deploying the Images

Let's say we have two images from the above setup workflow:

1. meshpi-node.img
2. meshpi-ap.img

We can now flash these images to SD cards as we need them and they'll work. On first boot, make sure to run the autogen_hostname.sh script to give the devices unique hostnames.