Find this project on my github here!

…post updated 07/19/2020

An efficient toolset for Pi devices

Emulate, organize, burn, manage a variety of distributions for Raspberry Pi.

Choose your own adventure….

Emulate:
clipi virtualizes many common sbc operating systems with QEMU, and can play with both 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems.

  • Select from any of the included distributions (or add your own to /sources.toml!) and clipi will handle the rest.

Organize:
clipi builds and maintains organized directories for each OS as well a persistent & convenient .qcow2 QEMU disk image.

  • Too many huge source .img files and archives? clipi cleans up after itself under the Utilities... menu.
  • additional organizational & gcc compilation methods are available in /kernel.py

Write:
clipi burns emulations to external disks! Just insert a sd card or disk and follow the friendly prompts. All files, /home, guest directories are written out.

  • Need to pre-configure (or double check) wifi? Add your ssid and password to /wpa_supplicant.conf and copy the file to /boot in the freshly burned disk.
  • Need pre-enabled ssh? copy /ssh to /boot too.
  • clipi provides options for writing from an emulation’s .qcow2 file via qemu…
  • …as well as from the source’s raw image file with the verbatim argument

Manage:
clipi can find the addresses of all the Raspberry Pi devices on your local network.

  • Need to do this a lot? clipi can install itself as a Bash alias (option under the Utilities... menu, fire it up whenever you want.

Shortcuts:

Shortcuts & configuration arguments can be passed to clipi as a .toml (or yaml) file.

  • Shortcut files access clipi’s tools in a similar fashion to the interactive menu: 
# <shortcut>.toml
# you can access the same tools and functions visible in the interactive menu like so:
'Burn a bootable disk image' = true  
# same as selecting in the interactive cli
'image' = 'octoprint'
'target_disk' = 'sdc'
  • clipi exposes many features only accessible via configuration file arguments, such as distribution options and emulation settings.
# <shortcut>.toml

# important qemu arguments can be provided via a shortcut file like so:
'kernel' = "bin/ddebian/vmlinuz-4.19.0-9-arm64"
'initrd' = "bin/ddebian/initrd.img-4.19.0-9-arm64"

# qemu arguments like these use familiar qemu lexicon:
'M' = "virt" 
'm' = "2048"

# default values are be edited the same way:
'cpu' = "cortex-a53"
'qcow_size' = "+8G"
'append' = '"rw root=/dev/vda2 console=ttyAMA0 rootwait fsck.repair=yes memtest=1"'

# extra arguments can be passed too:
'**args' = """
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd-root \
-no-reboot -monitor stdio
"""

# additional network arguments can be passed like so:
# (clipi may automatically modify network arguments depending on bridge / SLiRP settings)
'network' = """
-netdev bridge,br=br0,id=net0 \
-device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0
"""

  • Supply a shortcut file like so:
    python3 clipi.py etc/find_pi.toml

  • take a look in /etc for some shortcut examples and default values

TODOs & WIPs:

bridge networking things:

  • working on guest –> guest, bridge –> host, host only mode networking options.
    as of 7/17/20 only SLiRP user mode networking works,
    see branch broken_bridge-networking
    to see what is currently cooking here

kernel stuff:

  • automate ramdisk & kernel extraction-
    most functions to do so are all ready to go in /kernel.py

  • other random kernel todos-

    • working on better options for building via qemu-debootstrap from chroot instead of debian netboot or native gcc
    • add git specific methods to sources.py for mainline Pi linux kernel
      • verify absolute binutils version
      • need to get cracking on documentation for all this stuff

gcp-io stuff:

  • formalize ddns.py & dockerfile

  • make sure all ports (22, 80, 8765, etc) can up/down as reverse proxy 

# clone:
git clone https://github.com/Jesssullivan/clipi
cd clipi

# preheat:
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
# (or pip install -r requirements.txt)

# begin cooking some Pi:
python3 clipi.py