Kristjan Komlosi
6.5 KiB
TeraHz build guide
The recommended way of getting TeraHz is the official Raspberry Pi SD card image provided under the releases tab in the GitHub repository. Installing TeraHz from source is a time consuming and painful process, even more so if you don't know what you're doing, and whatever you end up building will not be officially supported (unless you're a core developer).
With this warning out of the way, let's begin.
Getting the latest sources
The most reliable way to get working source code is by cloning the official
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GitHub repository and checking out the development-stable tag. This tag marks
the latest confirmed working commit. Building from the master branch is somewhat
risky, and building from development branches is straight up stupid if you're
not a developer.
Make sure that the repository is cloned into /home/pi/TeraHz, as Lighttpd
expects to find frontend files inside this directory.
GitHub repository and checking out the development-working tag. This tag marks
the latest confirmed working commit. Building from the master branch is somewhat
risky, and building from development branches is straight up stupid if you're
not a developer.
After cloning and checking out, check the documentation for module dependencies
and the required version of python in the docs/dependencies.md file.
Installing Python
This step depends a lot on the platform you're using. TeraHz was developed with
Raspberry Pi and Raspbian in mind. If you're familiar with Raspbian enough,
you'll know that the latest version of Python available is 3.5, which is too
obsolete to run TeraHz and the required modules consistently. This leaves us
with compiling Python from source. This step is guaranteed to be slow,
overnight compiling with something like tmux is recommended.
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Pre-requirements
Installing python without most C libraries will lead to a rather minimalistic Python install, missing a lot of important modules. To prevent this, update the system packages. After that, reboot.
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo reboot
Install the required build tools, libraries and their headers.
sudo apt-get install build-essential tk-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev \
libreadline6-dev libdb5.3-dev libgdbm-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev \
libexpat1-dev liblzma-dev zlib1g-dev
Compiling
Compiling Python from source is, in fact pretty easy, just time-consuming. To combat that, using tmux to detach and later reattach the session is advised.
Python is packaged in many forms, but you'll be using the most basic of them all: a gzipped tarball. Download and decompress it, then cd into its directory.
wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.6.8/Python-3.6.8.tgz
tar -xzf Python-3.6.8.tgz
cd Python-3.6.8
Python's build process is pretty classic, a .configure script and a Makefile.
Using the -j option with Make can reduce the compile time significantly. Go
with as many threads as you have cores: -j 4 works great on the Pi 3 B/B+.
./configure
make -j4
When the compilation ends, install your freshly built version of python.
sudo make altinstall
"Altinstall" means that the new version of Python will be installed beside the
existing version, and all related commands will use the full naming scheme:
think python3.6 or pip3.6 instead of the shorter python3 or pip3.
Modules
Another painfully slow part is the installation of all the required modules
needed by TeraHz. Luckily, pip3.6 takes care of the entire installation
process. As before, using tmux is advised.
pip3.6 install smbus pyserial flask pandas
Raspi-config
For some law-obeying reason, Raspbian locks down the Wi-Fi interface card until
the Wi-Fi country is set. This means that we will need to set it manually through
the raspi-config program. It requires superuser privileges.
sudo raspi-config
TODO: add images and setup walkthrough - Wi-Fi country, Partition expand, SMBus enable, etc.
Installing packages
In addition to what's already installed, TeraHz requires the following daemons to run:
- Lighttpd - Frontend HTTP server
- Dnsmasq - DNS and DHCP server, used to redirect the
terahz.sitedomain - Hostapd - Wi-Fi access point
They are available from the Raspbian repository. Install it via apt.
apt install hostapd dnsmasq hostapd
Copying configuration files
To simplify the process of configuring Raspbian to run TeraHz, sample configuration file are provided
Pre-requirements
Installing python without most C libraries will lead to a rather minimalistic Python install, missing a lot of important modules. To prevent this, update the system packages. After that, reboot.
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo reboot
Install the required build tools, libraries and their headers.
sudo apt-get install build-essential tk-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev libreadline6-dev libdb5.3-dev libgdbm-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev libexpat1-dev liblzma-dev zlib1g-dev
Compiling
Compiling Python from source is, in fact pretty easy, just time-consuming. I'll
advise you again to use a terminal multiplexer like tmux to start the build
process, detach the terminal session overnight and reattach it some time later
to check on it.
Python 3.6.8 can be downloaded in many forms, but you'll be using the most basic of them all: a gzipped tarball. Download and decompress it, the cd into its directory.
wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.6.8/Python-3.6.8.tgz
tar -xzf Python-3.6.8.tgz
cd Python-3.6.8
Python's build process is pretty classic, a .configure script and a Makefile.
Using the -j option with Make can reduce the compile time significantly. Go
with as many threads as you have cores: -j 4 works great on the Pi 3 B/B+.
./configure
make -j4
When the compilation ends, install your freshly built version of python.
sudo make altinstall
Altinstall means that the new version of Python will be installed beside the
existing version, and all related commands will use the full naming scheme:
think python3.6 or pip3.6 instead of the shorter python3 or pip3.
Modules
Another painfully slow part is the installation of all the required modules needed
by TeraHz. Luckily, pip3.6 takes care of the entire installation process. You might also want to run this command through a terminal multiplexer overnight, as it takes a few hours to complete.
pip3.6 install smbus pyserial flask pandas