Setting up your RaspberryPi and Installing TerrariumPi

In my first post I gave a little context for why I am interested in the TerrariumPi project and provided some information on the vivarium setup I have for my pair of Ackie Monitors.

In this post I’m going to briefly go over setting up the RaspberryPi and installing TerrariumPi on it. There’s really not much to this so it’s going to be a pretty short post!

Setting up Your RaspberryPi

I am using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ with a SanDisk Ultra 16GB microSDHC card. In order to get TerrariumPi set up on a new RPi you will need to:

1. Install an Operating Systems on the RPi. TerrariumPi is tested to run on Raspbian Stretch Lite so the first thing to do is head there and download Raspbian Stretch Lite (you can download other versions with a desktop GUI but that’s not really required for what we’re doing here).
2. Format your SD card — the best bet is to go with the formatter tool available from the SD Association .
3. Once that is done you can flash the OS to your RPi using Etcher
4. Your next steps are to enable SSH access, connect to wireless network etc. Rather than cover that here I’ll just point you to a tutorial on desertbot.io that should get you up and running.

Installing TerrariumPi

Again, rather than repeat what has already been written perfectly well I’m just going to point you to the installation instructions on the Terrarium Pi project.

Once you’re set up it might be worth making sure that you set your RPi with a static LAN IP in your router so that you can reliable address it via the same LAN IP address.

That’s it, you now have TerrariumPi all set up on your RPi and you should be able to access the user interface at <yourraspberryPILANIP>:8090 or http://raspberrypi:8090. Of course the real power of the TerrariumPI project will come when you set up the sensors etc (something I’ll try and puzzle that out over the next few posts) but if you want to try get weather information about a geography where your reptile you can do this quite easily.

Within the TerrariumPI interface expand the Home menu on the left and select ‘Weather’. In the box headed weather hit the spanner icon and click settings. Then in the ‘Weather location’ field add the URL of the location you want to get the conditions for. Just visit https://www.yr.no/ search for the location and then copy the link — for example my Ackies come from the Australian Northern Territories so I searched for Katherine and got the URL https://www.yr.no/place/Australia/Northern_Territory/Katherine/. Pasting this into the ‘Weather location’ field pulls all of that data into TerrarumPI. Very cool!

One thing that might catch you here is that you will need the username and password to save the changes. It wasn’t apparent to me what these were, but as mentioned in this issue https://github.com/theyosh/TerrariumPI/issues/14 they are admin / password (definitely worth changing, especially if you ever think about opening your RPi to the internet).