Manual Installation

Note

Once installed, you’ll need to configure with a service account; follow the setup steps using your own terminal and system environment variables.

Warning

It’s possible to manually install gateway code to any machine (eg your own laptop) but by far the easiest way, even for development purposes in the lab, is to use balena to deploy the code straight to a raspberry pi.

Installing manually (on a Raspberry Pi 4)

Although data-gateway can be run on a wide range of hardware, it’s generally aimed at being run on a Raspberry Pi on board a turbine (in the base station box on the tower).

It’s anticipated that you’re using:

  • Raspberry Pi 4

  • With at least 2GB ram

  • Python >= 3.8

You’ll need to install Raspberry Pi OS (formerly “Raspbian”, which was a much better name) onto your pi. Use the current instructions from raspberrypi.org, and follow their setup guides.

When booted into your pi, use the following commands to install…

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libhdf5-dev libhdf5-serial-dev

git clone https://github.com/aerosense-ai/data-gateway.git
cd data-gateway
pip install -r requirements-pi.txt

This installs the CLI Gateway CLI, which enables you to start the gateway.

Installing on Other Hardware

There’s no reason data-gateway can’t be run on a wide range of hardware, or your own development laptop in the lab.

However, we’ve only tested it for the Raspberry Pi 4, which has a quad-core processor and is unix-based.

The main consideration when choosing other hardware is that a dual-core CPU is probably a conservative choice: data-gateway uses three processes and multiple threads. Additional vCPUs will always reduce the likelihood of the packet reader being blocked, improving stability of the system. In reality these processes are both sufficiently lightweight that they’d probably be just fine on a single core, but we haven’t tested that, so please run extensive tests prior to field deployment if you go down this route!

Installation for developers

If you’re developing data-gateway code itself you’ll need to follow the instructions for developers in the repo’s README.md file.