Seeed Studio reComputer R1000 Setup - nygma2004/km GitHub Wiki

This page documents my setup process of my reComputer R1000 from Seeed Studio which will be used an an edge data collection device and reporting dashboard. The reComputer is a computer designed around the Raspberry PI compute board, (CM4 in my case) but it adds additional functions like a real time clock, backup power for safe shutdown, PCI-Express slots for NVMe M.2 drive and other expansion modules like Lora or Zigbee. The computer also has 2 Ethernet ports and 4 RS485 ports for serial/modbus communication. I choose this because of the NVMe expansion, so I can run my system from an NVMe drive instead of the build in eMMC storage and also have lot more space for the InfluxDB database. I specifically got the R1035 model which has the highest memory 8GB CM4 compute board and 32GB eMMC storage. Later will not be used, as I will utilize the NVMe drive.

This setup will do the following:

  • Setup NVMe to be the primary boot device
  • Install Raspbian OS on the NVMe
  • Install reComputer specific drivers
  • Install Node-Red
  • Install Influxdb 2.x
  • Install Grafana

General

FYI, if you turn on the reComputer, it will boot into Raspbian which is pre-installed on the eMMC storage on the CM4 module. The default user and password for this Linux installation is recomputer / 12345678, in case you want to use SSH. This should be fine for testing.

NVMe Setup

Use this post, and execute the steps described. Also perform the steps of this section

Install Raspbian OS on the NVMe

The same document (as used above) has a section how to install the system on NVMe, but it was not working for me. I was recommended to do the installation using an external USB NVMe enclosure.

  • Get an external USB NVMe enclosure, and install the drive.
  • Connect it to the computer.
  • Download the Raspberry PI Imager, install and launch it.
  • Select "Raspberry PI 4" for device, "Raspberry PI OS (64-bit)" for operating system, and the NVMe driver as storage.
  • Press Ctrl + Shift + X for advanced options where you can enable SSH, set the userid and password, etc. Check this article for more details.

Use the documentation provided to install the NVMe drive into the reComputer.

Turn on the reComputer and execute the following command:

df /boot

This should show the boot device, and it should be somethink like /dev/nvme0n1p2. That confirms that the system booted from the NVMe storage.

Install reComputer specific drivers

Execute the steps detailed in this article. No need to do any of the of the 32-bit section, or the V1.0 section, and the model I got was already a V1.1 variant.

Install Node-Red

For the Node-Red install, I just executed the Node-Red install/upgrade script which is in this article. That also installed the latest version of Node.js. Since this is a new install, the script also executed the node-red-init which is going to ask for a few questions. I left everything on default, specified the flow password and that was it.

Install InfluxDB

As explained in the video, the newest version of InfluxDB 3.0 does not support the Flux query language any more, and I wanted to stay with it for this project. Therefore I installed the "older" InfluxDB 2.5 on this machine.

Follow this article for the details. Here, I have gone for Linux installation, "Install InfluxDB as a service with systemd". I did not do any of the configuration options step, just the installation.

During the installation, I got some errors about GPG error. Use this post to delete some of the files, wget the new keys and install again using this:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install influxdb2

That should complete the installation without any issues the second time.

Last time when I installed InfluxDB I had to install the UI (CLI) separately. But did not do this any more this time.

If all good, you should be able to access the UI on: http://localhost:8086/ (of course change it to the IP of the reComputer).

This page should take you to the initial setup of InfluxDB (e.g. specifying the admin user and password) and also it will show you the admin token which you should note down in a safe place!!!

Install Grafana

For this, I used my older document to setup Grafana. In my earlier document I said install Grafana Enterprise, but the self-hosted version is the OSS version. Therefore from the installation steps, step 4 (beta release) and step 7 (Enterprise version) is not applicable, skip those steps. After that also go through this section to set up a Flux connection between Grafana and InfluxDB. The difference this time, that I created a new API token for Grafana which only has read access to all buckets and used that token instead of the admin token.