Having trouble getting Emoncms working on RaspberryPi 5

Hi all,

I have bought a raspberry 5, there is an ebus adapter shield 5 on its way. My only intention for the time being is to be able to read as much as possible data communicated via ebus between vaillant heatpump components.

The raspberry works fine with sd card with original os. However I struggle with setting up emon software,
I have flashed a new 64G sd using balenaetcher feb 24 emonsd, actually done that few times to start from scratch again. Via usb card reader. Finding out and learning continuously, with only some ms dos and visual basic experience long time ago.in windows only the folder bootfs seems to be there which gives little insight. Have created wpa conf file once within windows, but could not get that to work. current sd card flash without manual added files. Bit confusing by the way whether double quotes should be used in the code or not.

The Rpi boots, monitor , mouse, keypad work, ethernet work, via a switch and router. I can ping a server. Rpi does not seem to update. There is no /var/log/emoncms/update.log… I am asked to login, which I do with pi as user and password as per feb 24 description. Via raspi-config, I can run some updates like the raspi config itself and via the adviced apt-get install lightdm command. I would have thought there should be some executable emon software, but I am not sure what and how to run. I am not able to get wifi going, not by editing wpa_supplicant.conf in etc/wpa_supplicant folder. Also via raspi-config an error is created. Have also tried nmcli commands, but got stuck there as well. Via raspi-config, I can get the reboot to start with GUI, howver that returns a very simple logon screen that leads to nothing. My interpretation is that I shouldnt do anything with emonscripts, since I use the emonsd image. It is suggested on the website that I could look at the local emoncms admin interface, but wouldnt know how to get there. I did not get to a screen asking to setup a local account in emoncms, nor to any other emoncms screen as pi user.

Clearly being fully in the dark, can somebody help me where I should look first?

Apologies if this is not the right place to post the question.

Hi JGJ,

this might get moved to another subforum more suitable for this general setup question, but at least from my cursory glance at the compatibility list the RPi 5 is not yet listed as compatible in the image from Feb 24, so this might be the issue.

I’ve moved this post into its own topic. Hopefully someone will be able to help.

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If it’s really a case of emonCMS not being compatible, then surely this is a question for @TrystanLea.

However, from the last part @Jaspers156, it looks as if emonCMS is running. But how are you connected to emonCMS and your RPi5? - normally, emonCMS runs “headless” and you communicate via your LAN from another machine running a web browser. The way to set it up initially from the SD downloaded image is you look for a new access point and connect to this via your other computer to enter your Wi-Fi credentials. Then, you can access emonCMS on your RPi5 via the IP address that your router gave it.

This is detailed here: emonSD Download — OpenEnergyMonitor 0.0.1 documentation, and it’s most important you give it PLENTY of time to do its “First boot update”.

When this completes, your router should tell you the RPi5’s IP address for you to access emonCMS.

Executable? - emonCMS works pretty much like a website on a server: something comes in - data via serial or Ethernet and it responds. Your browser requests a web page and it responds. Is it just a basic misunderstanding that causing the problem?

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Thank you Robert!

Indeed I had that misunderstanding. I thought EmonSD would setup the raspberry similar to raspberry OS, where one can use it as a computer with monitor and so on but also access it via another computer. I can now access emoncms running on the RPi in a browser on a laptop.

I was looking at the same page you are referring to.

Within the browser, as admin, I could request an update. This has run, on the Rpi the update.log file now actually exists and can be checked. I had given time for update, probably more than 1 hour against 10 min as mentioned in the documentation

There seem to be files in the firmware folder for each RPi version, including version 5.

Thanks again, will wait for ebus adapter and then take next steps.

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Yes it did, plus Apache as a web server, and emonCMS (plus a lot of other things I don’t understand) on top. I gather you can use it as a computer with monitor and keyboard, run a web browser and then access emonCMS (as localhost) in the browser.

Good to hear that it works on a RPi 5 , I think Glyn tested the latest image here as well but looks like we havent updated the image download info with this yet.

The only thing you will see if you connect a monitor to the Pi is the command line login, not a full desktop environment. We build the images using the Raspberry Pi Lite base images.

Thanks.

I had flashed the image. The pi version references are in the feb 2024 download area, build your own os with emonscripts. That seemed not relevant to me.