TrueNAS Linux VM in lieu of Raspberry Pi

General
1

Hello team BrewPi,

I recently placed an order with you guys and can’t wait for the equipment to come in! :drooling_face: <-- this is my excited face. In the meantime I’ve been playing around with BrewBlox and a few simulated Spark 3’s on a TrueNAS VM - so far so good.

As I read through the “Getting Started” guides, section 6 talks about flashing the firmware. In this step one of the first things mentioned is the Spark should be connected to a Raspberry PI via USB cable. Long story short, I have opted to forgo the RPi and instead I spun up a Linux VM on my TrueNAS server. Question I have is, is it possible to flash the firmware without connecting RPI to Spark 3 via USB? If so, what would be the steps needed to achieve this?

2

You can also use a Windows machine for updates / setup that requires USB.
We ship Sparks with firmware pre-installed, so you won’t immediately need to update the firmware. You do need to configure Wifi.

Install

Wifi

  • Connect Spark over USB
  • Run particle usb listen
  • Run particle serial wifi
  • Follow instructions.

Flashing

  • Download files from https://github.com/BrewBlox/brewblox-devcon-spark/blob/edge/binaries/
    • system-part1-p1.bin
    • system-part2-p1.bin
    • brewblox-p1.bin
  • Connect Spark over USB
  • Run particle usb listen
  • Run particle usb dfu
  • Run particle flash --usb --yes system-part1-p1.bin
  • Run particle flash --usb --yes system-part2-p1.bin
  • Run particle flash --usb --yes brewblox-p1.bin

Bootloader

Have fun =D

Edit: I’m not familiar with TrueNAS, but it’s often a toss-up whether mDNS packets are forwarded to VMs. We use mDNS for device discovery.

In non-technical terms, this means:

  • Check if there are mDNS-related settings for your VM. Enable them if present.
  • If brewblox-ctl add-spark doesn’t discover any devices, run the command again with --device-host=SPARK_IP as additional argument.
3

Thanks for the quick reply. Once my equipment comes in I’ll give this a shot and report back.

4

Received the equipment today. :tada: No problems with mDNS. brewblox-ctl add-spark worked like a charm.

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