RuuviTag on Kubernetes

A system for gathering measurements from RuuviTag (https://ruuvi.com/) via bluetooth, saving them to InfluxDB and showing them on Grafana. All running on two node cluster on Raspberry Pi 3 B+ or Raspberry Pi 4 B.

This is not a production ready system: RBAC is not used, grafana and influxdb passwords are not managed, all Ansible automation is not idempotent etc..

The Ansible automation:

1. Setups ssh keys and disables password access
2. Installs Kubernetes with kubeadm
3. Creates local persistent volumes to kubernetes
4. Builds the ruuvi docker image and starts up the services.

Why was this done:

• To learn more about kubernetes
• To use RuuviTag for something fun

Steps for getting the system up and running

Prepare your controller machine (tested on WSL):

1. Install Ansible (2.8)
2. Run ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
3. When running on windows WSL run export ANSIBLE_CONFIG=./ansible.cfg to use the config file regardless of the file permissions.

Set up the raspberry pi:

1. Download raspbian lite (buster) image and flash the sd card
2. Create empty file ssh to the boot partition of the SD card to enable ssh
3. Boot up the rasberry pi
4. Create Ansible inventory for your environment.
   • See inventories/inventory-template dir for example
   • Create ssh key and configure the needed variables to the group vars
   • Save the inventory to inventories/inventory folder or change ansible.cfg to match your dir
5. Run ansible ansible-playbook install.yml -k. For the first run you'll need to use -k and give the raspbian's default password raspberry when asked.
6. Login to grafana with admin:admin http://host_ip:30000/

Remember to remove the old fingerprint from ~/.ssh/known_hosts after reflashing or you will just get SSH Error: data could not be sent to remote host when running Ansible.

TODO list

• ruuvi container hangs sometimes
• Use fancier storage plugin for persistent volume support
• Use helm
  • InfluxDB and Grafana charts. InfluxDB didn't work straight out of the box because of missing arm images.
  • Create chart for the ruuvi deployment
• Reclaiming persistent volumes does not work
• The ruuvi container is run as root because of ruuvi library limitations
  • https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/96106/bluetooth-le-scan-as-non-root