2019-07-18, 09:28 PM
(2019-07-18, 12:50 PM)ironman Wrote: Hi syohana,
In the recently released tinypilot image the wifi client option seems to work out of the box. This invalidates some of the postings above. Tinypilot would then get a random IP address from the access point, in this case your xb8000, and with that ip address you can access the tinypilot web interface through the access point that you have chosen. This way you would not need to use the usb dongle, a road I would not choose as I've pulled many hairs on that one.
The fact it's a random ip address is a bit awkward. On openplotter you can fix an ip address to a mac address (under the hood, still). I'm not sure you can do that on your xb8000, but it may be possible. If not, it leaves you with the option of fixing it on the tinypilot side, changing for instance /opt/bootlocal.sh as below, add 'opt/bootlocal.sh' to /opt/.filetool.lst, run filetool.sh -b, and reboot.
ifconfig wlan0 10.10.10.4 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
#sv u dhcpcd
I think it would be quite handy (i.e., feature request ;-) if a new tinypilot image would allow for specifying a fixed client ip address.
Hi ironman, thanks very much for the ideas, unfortunately the xb8000 isn't a fully featured router and can't allocate a fixed IP address.
One alternative would be to have both of them as clients to another wifi router which does allocate fixed and reserved IP addresses. I think that's just too many points of failure, extra power consumption and if the central router went down then nothing would work.
The key is to make it redundant so that if either the xb8000 or the pypilot fails then the other one is still accessible in an intuitive way to non-technical crew. They'll never think to turn it on holding a button. Having both of them in access point mode better satisfies that redundancy requirement.
Maybe I'll just have to run a very long serial cable all around the boat and hope it doesn't transmit or receive too much RF interference. Part of my reason for choosing pypilot was to get rid of all the long cables though. it would be about 10m cable which might be pushing the limits of nmea0183 and would certainly upset the SSB.
I'd be very reluctant to try fixing the IP address on the client side as it won't be reserved in the router. Seems like it could break if the router has already allocated something else to the IP address the client demands.
Hmmmm. Still not sure which way to go!