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.

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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 thesource’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

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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

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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

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