Where's my Pi?

[simplesi]

The simple ideas are always the best

Just a quick cut and paste from twitter
run
http://pastebin.com/uKBmeAyU

on your desktop computer

and then save this
http://pastebin.com/03piWyvy

as client.py

then run client.py

Code: Select all

 python client.py uniquename

on your RPi
and up will pop your RPi's id address

This should allow us to run headless RPi on networks using DHCP and be able to find out how to connect to it using SSH or VNC or whatever you want.

Code not down to me - I've got a friend at the Preston RaspberryJam who has some game at times

Simon

[mbateman]

Would it be useful to have a GUI/TUI that displays a unique list of names rather than printing out the IP and name every 2 seconds? I can imagine if you have a lot of RPis your screen would fill up quickly and it might be a bit hard to find the entry you want.

[simplesi]

The programmer arrives

The things that we could now do could end up quite long

A GUI would be nice (but not top of my list)
"Server" -I'd prefer some other name BTW - like "discoverer" (but better than that) program should run on any main stream OS Windoz/MAC/Linux without installing other progs - so might need specfic versions as can't assume python loaded onto someones Win8 laptop

I think the client should default to sending the RPi hostname if no uniquename is specified as parameter

Maybe 2min should be configurable

Eventually we are going to need an installer to insert client.py into the right point of the RPi startup sequence

And then we have to get it as part of the Raspbian distro so we can find our RPi straight out the box

Simon

[mbateman]

Using the hostname if there isn't a name supplied should be simple.

I'll have a look at pyinstaller I believe it will produce executables for various platforms. Windows is probably the one to start with.

Instead of configuring the 1 minute thing it is probably better to make it broadcast messages until the Bob (the machine formerly known as discoverer and server) acknowledges that it has received the IP and name.

[trouch]

use Fing, a free network scanner available on desktop, android, and iOS !
Official site : http://www.overlooksoft.com/features
Android app : https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... droid.fing
iOS app : https://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/fing-ne ... d430921107

[simplesi]

Instead of configuring the 1 minute thing it is probably better to make it broadcast messages until the Bob (the machine formerly known as discoverer and server) acknowledges that it has received the IP and name.

I like "Bob"

Not sure about that approach - we don't want to be blamed for swamping a LAN with broadcast traffic - even its only once every 2 secs

And using precious CPU cycles when trying to do some real processing

But we' need to trial and error the process

use Fing, a free network scanner available on desktop, android, and iOS !

I use Fling on my 'droid myself to do this at the moment but I think its a bit of a geeky tool

(I hadn't realised they did a desktop version though - I'll have to give that a whirl )

I'm hoping this other approach can be used by say teachers in a class or just "users" being told to stick in the number it gives into a VNC type prog and then start running stuff remotely on their RPi .

Simon