Pi UP is a Raspberry Pi startup notification broadcaster and listener designed to solve a simple problem of discovering the IP address of a fresh booted Raspberry Pi running without a monitor. This is accomplished by broadcasting a UDP packet on port 31415 (get it?) from the Raspberry Pi, while the client listens for the broadcast on another machine. Both the UDP broadcast server and the listener client are contained within a single, simple file. Efforts were also made to ensure a minimim of library dependencies to preserve space on the Pi's SD card and also to simplify installation.
Setup is easy but does need to be performed on both the Raspberry Pi and another client machine that will listen for broadcasts. The first step is to get the code on both machines. You can do this in a couple of ways:
- Clone the repo
git clone http://github.com/jfklingler/pi-up.git
- Grab the archive and extract it
wget -O pi-up.zip http://github.com/jfklingler/pi-up/archive/master.zip
You may need to make pi-up executable
chmod +x pi-up
Pi UP does need to be set up initially with a monitor connected of course. On the Raspberry Pi, add the following to /etc/rc.local:
/path/pi-up broadcast
If you're DHCP lease assignment and interface startup is a little too slow, you might not have a IP assigned by the time rc.local runs. I've found this modification to rc.local, while not particularly genius, get's the job done:
_IP=$(hostname -I) || true
while [ ! "$_IP" ]; do
sleep 1
_IP=$(hostname -I) || true
done
Run this on another machine on the same network:
pi-up listen
This will wait for a broadcast from the Raspberry Pi and print out the details of all network interfaces on the Pi. Now just power on the Pi and wait.
You can get help on the tool's relatively few options at the command line via
pi-up --help.
If you find any problems and would like to see any new features or improvements, please create an issue. Or, if you're so inclined, fork it, fix it, and send me a pull request.