Rachel on a raspbery pie zero w

Thanks James,

I was able to flash the image you provided. See attached photos. However, I am such a novice I don’t know how to move past the required login and then be able to add RACHEL Spanish modules as described on the how to page: …l og into the RACHEL-Pi (user/pass: pi/rachel) and rsync content from our module repository. Modules must be downloaded to /var/www/modules I realize this is remedial stuff, so if there is a place you suggest I do some homework, I’d appreciate it. Thanks, PatIMG_1591 IMG_8632 IMG_9915

Hi @Patrick_Coyle1,

Glad it worked. Don’t feel bad at all! The default login/pass for the RACHEL admin user interface is “admin/Rachel+1”. I usually include tutorials with instruction pdfs with the images that contain walkthroughs but since this one is an unofficial image it’s not included. I will upload the new tutorials when I put up official images in the next few days.

It’s actually not remedial because the Pi Zero W can make things very complicated. RACHEL is using the wifi to create a hotspot and there is no ethernet connection. That means there’s no way to download anything to it without turning off the hotspot and setting it up to connect to a wifi router. Since the downloads require an internet connection, you’ll either need to download the modules and put them on a USB stick and connect the USB stick to your Pi Zero W to copy them, or turn the wifi hotspot off and connect to wifi with it for downloading then turn it back on, or you can get a USB Ethernet adapter for the pi zero which is the easiest option long term.

Let me know and I’ll give you step by step instructions to help whichever way you want to try. It’s also very helpful to have a USB Hub when working with the Pi Zero W so you can get your keyboard and other things plugged into it at the same time.

Hope this helps.

James

Thanks James,

I appreciate the help. I was able to download the Wikipedia ES module as zip file and have expanded it so shows as a directory “var”., w structure as shown in screenshot: Screen Shot 2020-06-25 at 8.21.34 AM

I have a USB hub, so instruction steps to transfer via USB stick would be appreciated.

Pat

Hi @Patrick_Coyle1,

You’re welcome. Glad to help. First, by default NTFS and exFat support are not included with the Raspberry Pi OS so you will need to use a FAT32 formatted drive and you will need to use a tool like one mentioned here to do it. With that ready, these are the instructions

  1. Copy the “es-wikipedia” folder to the USB drive.
  2. Boot your pi first then plug it in
  3. Run command “lsblk”
  4. Check the output for your USB device’s name. It should be something like /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2
  5. Run command “sudo mkdir /media/usb”
  6. Run command “sudo chown pi:pi /media/usb”
  7. Run command “sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb -o uid=pi,gid=pi”, where /dev/sda1 is the device name from the output.
  8. Run command “cd /media/usb”
  9. Run command “ls” and check if you see the es-wikipedia folder so we know the device is mounted properly
  10. Run command “sudo cp -R /media/usb/es-wikipedia /var/www/modules”
  11. Run command “sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/modules”

That shoulld be it. You may need to reboot for the module to work properly.

I should mention some things before you download a bunch of modules that

  1. This is a KA-Lite image and doesn’t include Kolibri so don’t download Kolibri modules for this one.
  2. The Pi Zero W has extremely limited resources so you may want to disable KA-Lite entirely and use en-kaos instead

Hope that works.

James

Thanks James, I appreciate the tips. One clarification: For the Wikipedia ES module, as shown in my prior post screenshot, for the first step, Copy the “es-wikipedia” folder to the USB drive; is it the 3rd level folder “es-wikipedia” that is in “modules” which is in "“var”?

You’re welcome Patrick. Yes you’ll want the third level folder. The folders you want in the /var/www/modules folder on your RACHEL-Pi device should always be the ones that start with the language code and then the module name. So “es-wikipedia” should be placed on the USB drive without the /var/modules folders it’s in. The final directory on your RACHEL-Pi should be /var/www/modules/es-wikipedia.

I believe the “/var/modules” namingi in the downloadable zips was for Windows support a long time ago. Hope that helps.

James, I’ve been slow getting to point where ready to try to copy the module folders.

However, I am at display line “Rasbian GNU/Linux 10 rachel tty1” and when enter return am prompted with "rachel login:

I’ve tried but admin
then Rachel+1 for password

generates “login incorrect”

Suggestions?

Thanks, Pat

Hi Pat,

The login/password at that screen should be “pi/rachel”. That should work. Let me know if you have any issues.

James

James,

Finally got back to this and was able to get the ZeroW working with two modules. However, adding them one at a time is slow for a novice like me. Is there a preferred way to get an image like the previously available Spanish one (don’t find it anymore). In any case, pleased to get this going on such an inexpensive platform. See:



I tried the card in a Zero W 2, but didn’t boot. Then tried the rachel-pi_09_06_2021 image. Booted but issues with not allowing the sudo chown pi:pi /media/usb. Said operation not permitted.

These small inexpensive cases are an aside, to demo the lowest cost options. We are working with Mundo Posible to submit a second phase Rotary Global Grant for RACHELs and Chromebooks for another ten schools in Solala Guatemala. We also just got a complementary Rotary International District Grant approved which will fund another school installation.

Thanks for all the work by so many to make this resource available. Pat

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Hi Pat,

That’s great! Bringing support for RACHEL-Pi on the Raspberry Pi Zero W and newer Pi models was one of the first things I worked on with RACHEL. Great to see people are still interested.

Initially I created separate images for the Zero model, but as things progressed there wasn’t a need to anymore. We haven’t had specific language images for the RACHEL-Pi since about 2017 or so and none of those supported anything past a Raspberry Pi 2 I believe.

The way to set up a RACHEL-Pi now is to write the small image without content to a MicroSD card or a USB stick first. Then when you’re up and running use the “Install” tab from the admin area to install content. If you already have the latest content offline, you can follow this tutorial but with your Pi’s IP and “pi/rachel” as credentials to transfer content over. With this method you can install the Spanish content you need alongside other content that might be useful.

The limitation with setting up the Zero W models is they don’t have ethernet. Rather than mounting the USB like before, I highly suggest using a Raspberry Pi with an ethernet connection to set up and install content, then transfer that MicroSD to the Zero W model when it’s complete.

These models are very low on resources and may not be able to run Kolibri very well for instance. I’m hoping to get a Zero W 2 to test with and fix the issues you’re seeing, but they’re still sold out here.

Great to hear about your next project with Mundo Possible. If there’s anything I can help with on that project please feel free to cc me on email, james@worldpossible.org.

James

Thanks James,

I have USB/ethernet adapter on order, so will try that route. I appreciate these are low resource devices. I also have a 3B or two around. Romeo at Mundo Posible said he’s working on an image with their Guatemalan custom content for a 256GB MicroSD card, so that could be a better bet for the smaller use cases. We’re using latest Plus units in our Rotary classroom projects, but some Canadian colleagues are targeting smaller community groups with the RPi-based systems.

But I was delighted to at least get a couple modules running on the origina ZeroW.

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You’re welcome Pat. I’m always happy to help.

That ethernet adapter should make it much easier to move things to and from the Zero W. It really is amazing that you can take a $5 piece of hardware and put RACHEL on it. If you find it slow you may want to disable/stop Kolibri

sudo systemctl stop kolibri
sudo systemctl disable kolibri

Romeo and Juan are doing great work with Mundo Possible. Glad to hear they’re working with you on that. Hopefully the 256GB RACHEL-Pi image is stable enough for those small deployments. Making sure the Pi is powered on and off properly is the most important thing due to the SD corruption. I’d consider sending a backup card just in case.

James