Installing and running Eclipse Kura on a Raspberry Pi B (Model 1)

Now that I have a running Kapua instance, its time to look at the network edge to gateways and devices.

Eclipse Kura is a Java/OSGi-based framework for IoT gateways. A gateway is a devices that is distributed at the network edges and communicates with sensor or steering devices using cables, Bluetooth or other private networks.

Sins Kura supports a rather broad range of small devices, my plan is to use a spare Raspberry Pi as gateway hardware.

Unfortunately my old Raspberry PI B is from the first generation, based on the ARMv6 architecture with 512 MB RAM. Therefore I cannot base the OS on Fedora that needs at least Model 2 and ARMv7 or ARMv8 architecture, so that I need to use Download Raspbian for Raspberry Pi  for this. I choose the small server set and write that to the SD card:

unzip -p 2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch.zip | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress

Now inserting the SD card into the Pi, connecting LAN and booting. By default, ssh is disabled so I had to connect a keyboard and monitor and do that manually.

Login as user “pi”, password: “raspberry” (this should be changed asap!)

systemctl enable ssh.service
systemctl start ssh.service
hostname -I

(this will give you the IP address where to connect to.

Now the fun can begin. I typically copy my ssh-key and login from my workstation:

ssh-copy-id ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub pi@<ip_of_pi>
ssh pi@<ip_of_pi>

Now its time to install Eclipse Kura! Get the latest version from here. Since I have the old Raspberry model I choose this one.  For the installation I mainly followed the Raspberry Pi Quick Start documentation but I will show the steps here, too.

After booting the Pi several steps are needed on the Raspbian OS: At first, the dhcpcd5 packages needs to be removed:

sudo apt-get purge dhcpcd5

then its useful to install the gdebi command tool to find all dependencies needed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gdebi-core

And finally install Java:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jre-headless

Finally, the package can be downloaded and installed:

wget http://download.eclipse.org/kura/releases/<version>/kura_<version>_raspberry-pi-2-3_installer.deb

Note: replace <version> in the URL above with the version number of the latest release (e.g. 3.1.1). Install Kura with:

sudo gdebi kura_<version>_raspberry-pi-2-3_installer.deb

Since Kura will make use of a wifi card to connect to devices, I also inserted a wifi dongle. And now its time for a reboot!

Kura starts up automatically and presents a web UI:

http://<ip-of-pi>

Username: admin

Password: admin

That’s it! Stay tuned for the next part: Connecting Kura to the central Kapua instance.