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SenseHatShowIP

Small program for the Raspberry Pi with Sense Hat: Displays IP address on the Sense Hat, useful for headless operation esp. for events like training workshops

Purpose

The intended usage is as a program that can be included during startup of a Raspberry Pi with Sense Hat attached, enabling the Pi to announce its' IP address so that a remote system can use the IP address to connect to it (using ssh etc). The program logic relies on the target address in external_IP_and_port being routable, so if you're running this on a network not connected to the Internet or lacking a default route you'll need to alter external_IP_and_port to use an address that the Pi can reach on your network.

It should be helpful for workshops using Raspberry Pis with Sense Hats allowing the Pis to be used 'headless' via ssh - which is what I wrote this utility for.

Usage

Here's how to get this program to run at startup-time on the Pi,

  • Place the program in /home/pi on the Pi [SD card]

  • Edit /etc/rc.local (put this line just before the final exit 0),

    python3 /home/pi/sense_hat_show_ip.py 2>/var/log/hatlog.txt

(logging helpful for troubleshooting: If it doesn't work for you, checkout the contents of /var/log/hatlog.txt).

The above instructions work with the latest (2015-09-24) version of Raspbian from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ which already includes the Python libraries used by the program. Note that the program should work with Python 2.6 upwards or 3.

Different versions

There are 2 versions of the program using pygame and threading libraries respectively.

The initial version I wrote uses pygame for keyboard monitoring (esp. the Sense Hat joystick which is mapped to the keyboard) - allowing the user to press the joystick button to stop the program. I then wrote a version using threading which is more responsive to the joystick button (scrolling message stops straightaway) and doesn't need X to be running on the console. Both versions are available in the GitHub repository as branches: pygame_version and threading_version; the default version (master) is threading_version.

License

Gnu Public License v3, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html this should also be provided as a text file along with this program; contact the author if you need a different license.

Author

Andrew Richards 2015

http://free.acrconsulting.co.uk/