I haven’t booted my Pis in a while, but didn’t Rasbian follow Debian, and switch to systemd? If so, the instructions on that page will probably work for now, but will have to get translated to a systemd “unit” at some later date. Not a blocker issue today, just something to keep in mind.

Many people have created alarm systems using Pis as intelligent controllers; many people have reinvented the wheel, too! I suggest you have a look at these existing projects:

* PrivateEyePi/JemRF Projecthttps://projects.privateeyepi.com/home.php * bkbilly/AlarmPI: 🚨 Home Security Intrusion Detection for Raspberry PI or any other linux OS (github.com)https://github.com/bkbilly/AlarmPI * Konnected Alarm Panel connects a wired alarm system to your smart homehttps://konnected.io/ * Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)https://www.home-assistant.io/

One of the more contentious aspects of inter-building communications – assuming you truly meant that the barn and the house have independent internet connections – is that of communication between the two sites. If both have residential-grade service, you’ll have dynamic, NAT’d IP addresses at both locations, which makes establishing a VPN difficult (although not impossible). You can use web-based “broker” servers, whether running your own or using someone else’s – Google, MS, etc. have proprietary-ish options, or you can run your own MQTT (or whatever you want, really) server in the cloud pretty cheaply – on the order of $5/month.

Apparently network-connected MQTT-enabled alarm *sensors* exist, which might eliminate the need to a Pi at the barn entirely. Or if an Android app will suit instead of an alarm blaring, you might be able to skip the house end entirely.

There’s a million ways to solve this problem, most of them wrong 😊, but many of them right, too. Having said that, unless you’re doing this as an exercise to learn how to use a Pi at a low level (GPIO pins monitoring alarm signals, building your own GUI, etc.) I **strongly** recommend you stand on the shoulders of giants, so to speak, and pick an existing framework and work with that instead. I’m a firm believer in not re-inventing the wheel unnecessarily!

-Adam

From: Roundtable roundtable-bounces@muug.ca On Behalf Of John Lange Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2024 7:32 PM To: Continuation of Round Table discussion roundtable@muug.ca Subject: Re: [RndTbl] Ras Pi Help needed.

I should think the instructions here are what you are looking for?

https://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-tutorials/tutorial-how-to-run-a-prog...

John

On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 6:43 PM Andrew Popowich <Andrew@ebytesonline.commailto:Andrew@ebytesonline.com> wrote: Without going into TOO much detail,

We are using 2 Rasp Pi Gen 4

We are trying to run them connected via the internet.

1 is at a barn. To be used when a sensor is triggered, it sends that alarm to the 2nd ras pi, via the internet to a house 10 kms away.

ALARM will not stop until someone can press a key on ALARM sending machine in Barn. Alarm does NOT play in barn, just at 10km house.

We are at the stage to just see if we can get Terminal to start up automatically when the rasp pi’ s turn on, and if it can auto start terminal, run a script to just say Hello world.

We have tried many “working google solutions” and all have failed. Is there anything we can try to see if getting terminal to autostart at bootup and to write hello world ?

Please any ideas would be appreciated.

Andrew _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.camailto:Roundtable@muug.ca https://muug.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

-- John Lange

On 2024-01-10 Jason Loughead wrote:

Check this tutorial out for creating a systemd unit: https://linuxhandbook.com/create-systemd-services/

Also, forget about using a terminal printing "hello world" as your test basis. That's actually the opposite of what you want to do (probably). Opening "GUI things" (terminals) with background processes, like daemons being started by systemd, is harder than what it is you're actually trying to achieve, and thus counterproductive as a test case.

Instead, just see if you can get the thing to log a line to a file, which in bash would be:

echo "hello world" > /home/foo/testoutput

or even just create a file:

touch /home/foo/testfile

That way you can tell something is happening. Or if raspbian has email setup (I have no idea if it does):

mail -s 'it worked' foo@bar.com </dev/null