Treehouse Remote

An Android app that communicates with headless Raspberry Pi mobile server running treehouses image via Bluetooth.

Get detailed software and hardware information of a Raspberry Pi.
Configure a Raspberry Pi through user-friendly interface.

Check our issues to see what features we are working on.

Setting Up the Raspberry Pi

Prerequisites

We will need a few hardware and software components as follows:

Raspberry Pi 3 (or Zero W) and 5V 2.4A (1.2A for Zero) power supply with microUSB connector
A microSD card reader
A Class 10 microSD card (minimal 8GB, but we strongly recommend 16GB or greater)
Software for burning OS image to microSD card. We recommend Etcher, but there are many from which to choose
The latest version of Treehouse image
Wi-Fi or a ethernet connection

Get It Up and Running

Burn the treehouse image to the microSD card. This is a simple process with Etcher - select the treehouse image, select the microSD card and burn the image;
Once it's done burning, remount the microSD card if its unmounted by Etcher, so that you can view the contents in the boot partition. You will see a long list of files.

Create a file named autorunonce.txt and place it in the boot partition of the microSD card:

treehouses rename treehouses # rename the raspberry pi so we could easily distinguish the bluetooth device
treehouses bluetooth on # enable bluetooth and our bluetooth-server on the Raspberry Pi
# treehouses wifi ssid password # if you do not have ethernet cable/access to router, uncomment this line and replace with your wifi ssid and password

Unmount and remove the microSD card from the card reader and place it into the RPi.
Connect a RJ45 network cable to the Ethernet port on the RPi (skip this step if you have Wi-Fi configured in step 3.)
Connect the RPi to power.
Wait for a minute or two and look for treehouses in your Android device's Bluetooth pairing screen.

Setting Up the Android Device

We assume you've already installed Android Studio on your machine and enabled USB debugging on your Android device.

Connect to Raspsberry Pi via Bluetooth

1.In the android bluetooth settings, scan and pair with the Pi device.

Click on the three dots (menu icon) at the upper right corner of the app.
Click on Connect a device - Insecure to display paired Bluetooth devices or scan for new devices around you.
Select raspberrypi or whatever name that is given to your Raspberry Pi device to connect to the Raspberry Pi.
If it does not work, please click on cmd button and repeat steps 1 through 3.

Features

The connection status is shown on the action bar.
In cmd
- Use the Wi-Fi icon on the action bar to comfigure the Raspberry Pi to connect to a Wi-Fi network.
- Use buttons on the lower part of the screen to performe various commands.
- The circle on the upper left corner shows the Raspberry Pi's internet connectivity status using color green and red.
- To return to dashboard, click on the back button at the bottom of the device.

Tools

Vysor

Vysor A software that helps display your Android screen into your computer. You will find this software very helpful as it helps you explain the issue more in detail. Plus, everybody in the team can see what is happening on your screen, therfore we can help each other in debugging.

i5o/remote