Raspberry Pi is a $35 USD credit card sized computer that can be used to control PIXEL. There are currently three ways to use PIXEL with a Raspberry Pi.
Method 1: Command Line – Remote shell into your Pi and play GIFs and scroll text from the command line
Method 2: GUI – Start X-Windows on your Pi and use the GUI
Method 3: iOT/Server with Rest API – You will control PIXEL over the Web via the Pi and developers can also take advantage of the REST API. pixelweb.jar REST API Docs
Follow the instructions below to setup your Raspberry Pi. Raspbian is recommended for Raspberry Pi and PIXEL, other distributions most likely will work but have not been tested. Works and tested on the Raspberry Pi B+ and older Raspberry Pi models.
If you are running your Raspberry Pi headless (no monitor or keyboard), use the following commands to access and control your Raspberry Pi. The PIXEL console app may be run remotely from a SSH session and does not require an X Windows session (startx).
Optional: Assign the .local domain to your Raspberry Pi so you don’t need to remember your Pi’s IP address and instead access using raspberrypi.local
sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon
If you don’t remember your Raspberry Pi’s IP address, you may use this command to scan your network
nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24
Remotely access your Raspberry Pi from your PC/Mac. Note the default password is: raspberry
ssh pi@your_raspberrypi_IP_address
To remotely transfer a file from your PC/Mac to your Raspberry Pi’s home directory
scp /localpath/filename pi@your_raspberrypi_IP_address:/home/pi
ls /dev/ttyACM0*
You should get back:
/dev/ttyACM0
Step 2. If you have a recent Raspian image on your Raspberry Pi, Java 8 will already be installed and you can skip step 3. Check by issuing this command:
java -version
Step 3. If Java 8 has not been installed, follow these instructions to install Java 8 on your Raspberry Pi. PIXEL’s apps do require Java 8.
java -jar pixelc.jar --gif=your_animation.gif