Monthly Archives: June 2022

Kootnet Sensors Networking

It is complete! The networking configuration overhaul that is. Networking before this change only allowed you to configure a single wireless network to connect to and set it as either DHCP or Static for its IP address. It also used a ‘template’ of the wpa/dhcpcd system configuration files, so if you manually changed any settings in the OS config files, it would overwrite them. This also had the downfall of not adjusting for any future default settings that may be used in Raspbian.
Those downfalls have now been rectified! I have made Kootnet Sensors load the OS wpa/dhcpcd files and search for the specifics it’s going to do, adjust them and leave everything else intact! This means you can manually edit the files without worry, and also allow future default changes from Raspbian itself. Networking can now do the following.

  • Edit ALL network adapter IPv4 settings (minus the loopback adapter)
    • The network settings on each adapter will auto-populate if they are available, showing IP/Gateway/DNS/etc.
    • Changing between adapters will refresh network settings for each adapter
  • Add/Edit/Remove wireless networks to auto-connect to, allowing, for instance, auto network connectivity at the site you are recording data and when you bring it back to your shop.

There are some other minor changes I’ll be looking into, such as seeing if I can set priorities for the wifi connections, allowing for example the sensor unit to prioritize connecting to a laptop with an AD Hoc wifi network configured over the usual wifi, letting someone easily connect up for diagnostic purposes.

The new version is in the Development channel, so feel free to check it out, it should be pretty stable.

I’m not dead!

It’s been about half a year since my last post, but I’m not dead! I did run into some family and personal issues, so I have taken a lot of time to get some of that sorted out. I’m happy to say I should be getting back to programming soon. I have been doing a bit of programming during that 6 months as well but I kinda forget most of what was done. When I was programming last, I was re-working the networking in Kootnet Sensors so you can adjust multiple adapters for the IP address and also add/edit multiple wireless connections. This way you can have your sensors connect to different available networks. It’s about 1/3 done now as you can already edit all network adapter IP addresses.

I just wanted to do this quick post to let people know I’m still here and plan on doing more work on both Kootnet Sensors and the Raspberry Pi Network Testers.