Getting newmodbus running on OSX

[crunnells]

I'm starting this thread just in case it may help someone else in the future, and it's probably obvious to people who use unix/Linux all the time, but I'm a web designer and rarely spend any time in terminal.

Some quick background, I plan to get a Beaglebone Black and run Blackbox on it. But since the BBB is currently not in stock anywhere, I'm gonna get it running on my iMac (running OSX Mavericks, 10.9.3) and start making some improvements to the Blackbox UI.

First thing I did was read the great Installation page https://code.google.com/p/theblackboxproject/wiki/Installation on the blackbox project page, and was directed to get newmodbus from RossW, which you can download here: http://support.rossw.net/midnite/

Once you've got it installed, you'll need to run Terminal and change the permissions to allow you to execute the file:

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chmod u+x newmodbus-OSX

From there, it should work as directed in the instructions:

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./newmodbus-OSX 192.168.1.150 4101-4111

Now we should be able to get blackbox installed and running! I'll post any more tips I come across as I get this working on my iMac.

[ClassicCrazy]

I have a Beaglebone Black that I have never used and probably won't in the near future cause too busy with stuff. I would be happy to sell it to you if you want it. Especially since you are documenting all the steps to use it.

Would the project you are working on also run on a Raspberry Pi ?

[crunnells]

As far as I know, theblackboxproject works on the rPi... I think TomW uses one to store his Classic logs. Mostly I'll be making UI changes, but after running the setup I think I might make some changes to the installation process to make it a little easier. I'll post my general updates here, and when I get my BB I'll post in that forum.

[crunnells]

Oh yeah, if you're like me and don't know how to setup a cronjob in OSX, take a look here: http://rossb.biz/blog/2011/os-x-cron-jobs-a-simple-tutorial/

I should note that in the step where he uses the command line to add the cronjob, it didn't work for me. Instead I edited the file using Textedit and then it worked.

[zoneblue]

I usually maintain a text file in my user root directory called mycron. If i want to make changes to cronjobs, i go:

nano mycron
crontab mycron.
crontab -l

Great to see some activity on the project. The current UI is no more than a proof of concept, awaiting someone like you to come along

I did do some work on the ramdisk / SD wear mitigation yesterday. And another day should hopefully have the OS on a readonly partition, syncing to disk considerably less frequently than at present.

Re installer, that depends on whether you use newmodbus or the daemon version. The latter requires a good deal more fuss, and im thinking that disk images are really the most practical way of handling that. Its not real easy to get all the permissions and whatnot right. I suppose another approach would be a debian package. I have no experience building those, but all things are doable given time. The package would have to be flexible enough to cope with peoples different webserver setups. Not nice when some package moves your doc root or whatever. OTOH burning an image to the SD card and stickin it in, is about as plug and play as it gets.

[crunnells]

Turns out I wasn't ever able to get cron working right in OSX, but I ordered a BeagleBone right after so I figured it was a waste of time trying to make it work.

I've been meaning to get my BB running again, but I broke it somehow... I have a Rev B, and was wondering why everyone was talking about running the OS off of an SD card... So I filled up the internal memory by trying to install Apache and MySQL, and it wasn't ever able to reboot. I need to try reflashing to Angstrom and then just try to boot it off of the SD card image again.

Lesson learned. I'm kinda excited to try to get this thing working, and I've been brainstorming interface ideas that will work with the 4.3" LCD and possibly the 7" LCD (if I can get the smaller one working first).

I definitely want to improve the installation process of the BlackBox; currently it's not the most user friendly (compared to, say, WordPress) but I'm more interested in improving the UI.

[zoneblue]

RE installer, yes, it may very well be a case of that, linux, small board, etc is the primary hurdle for most people.

Also with the OS customisation that is required for other reasons, that sd images will be the best way to distribute the thing.