If you got one of the Jupiter Boards and you want to get started quickly, we've wrote this simple step-by-step guide for you.
STEP 1 - Hardware Setup
Once you get your board there are few hardware things missing before you can actually get started doing applications with Jupiter System. The minimum additional hardware required to actually run the board consists of:
A Power Supply with a micro-USB cable. You may have it already, as you can simply use your phone battery charger.
A Raspberry Pi Compute Module. This is the module the Jupiter System boards are based around. You can buy it from many electronic distributors (RS Components, Mouser and Farnell, just to nominate a few). At the moment of writing of this post we strongly reommend to use the CM3+ model.
An SD card to store the operative system. The Jupiter board is 100% compatible with Raspberry Pi Foundation suggested OS.
Addional hardware depends on you specific application requirements and may include USB keyboard and mouse, HDMI cable, Cameras, Display, etc. And, of course, you have an almost countless choiche of click boards that can be fitted in one of the mikroBUS sockets present on the Jupiter Boards. You can check the complete list here: https://www.mikroe.com/click.
STEP 2 - SD card preparation
Once you have completed your hardware setup, before to actually start, you need to prepare an SD card with the selected Rasoberry PI operative system. You can either download the OS image from the Raspberry foundation website and flash the SD card using an appropriate software (like Balena Etcher, for example) or use the newest Raspberry PI imager software.
You can download the needed software from this page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
You can download the Raspberry Pi OS from this page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-os/
You can find addtional information from this page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/README.md
STEP 3 - Network Connection
Once the image is ready you have to stick the Compute Module inside the SODIMM-200 socket, plug the SD card inside the SD socket and give power connecting the USB micro cable. Then, most of the cases, to effectively use the board, you need to connect it to your home WiFi network.
Method 1: Network connection via GUI
If you have an HDMI monitor and a USB keyboard and mouse, you can simply setup the network details by following the wizard that opens at the first Raspberry OS startup. It's very simple, you only have to follow the steps!
Method 2: Network connection via serial console
If you don't want to use the GUI or don't have monitor and keyboard/mouse, but you have an USB-to-Serial adapter you can configure the network SSID and password using the serial console. The serial console is enabled by default on Rapsberry Pi OS and we routed the default UART to the connector CN11 (UART). You only have to connect the USB-to-Serial terminals to the CN11 connector (only Tx, Rx and GND) and follow the instructions of this guide: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md
Method 3: Headless network connection
Last but not least, if you don't have anyone of the abovementioned additional hardware, no worries, you can go completely headless. All you have to do is to follow the below procedure and this will allow the Jupiter Board to connect to a predefined WiFi.
First of all, once you have done with the SD card falshing you have to re-insert it on your PC SD socket. Your system should recognize that the SD now have a Boot partition inside. At this point you need to create a file called wpa_supplicant.conf inside this partition, and copy/paste the below snippet, where you have replaced your-network-name and your-network-password with your wifi name and password.
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=IT
network={
ssid="your-network-name"
psk="your-network-password"
}After that create also a file called SSH without extension. This will also enable the SSH interface by default, so that you can open a remote SSH session with the Jupiter System board and install whatever software you need from command line.
STEP 4: Have Fun!!!
You have done now, just plug the power, retrieve your board IP address on your network and open an SSH section to work from console.
There are serveral programming lanaguages and environments you can use with Jupiter System, below some examples:
- Node-RED: this is an innovative framework based on Node.js and Javascript. Its programming interface is completely visual and made by "so called" nodes, that encapsulated functionalities. A program is made by connected nodes, and is called flow. We will use this environment extensively in our examples, and they are marked as Nr_Ex_<example-numbe> in the blog posts. Coupled with Jupiter System it is one of the most simple and powerful HW/SW combination that you can build.
- Python: one of the most common and more powerful scripting language used worldwide. It is one of the most powerful combination with Jupiter System. The post that uses this language are marked like Py_Ex_<example-number> in the blog post title.
- C: one of the most popular programming language in the world, widley used in embedded system. Even if it requires more time to be fully understood, it is one of the fastest and reliable programming lanaguage in the world. The example in the blog are marked like C_Ex_<example-number>.
Just choose one of them and get started!!!
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