Because I always want to automate everything, and I am not that good at gardening yet, I am working on adding smarts to our garden. To start with, the watering system.
I bought an OpenSprinkler PI from Ray’s Hobby and a Raspberry Pi model A (the one with less RAM and since I knew I was going to want to operate it on wifi and wasn’t going to be asking too much of it. I figured I ought to get some hands on experience with the Raspi since everyone is talking about it and it’s convenient not to have to start from scratch for sprinkler automation.
The one downside of no ethernet is how to SSH in to set up wifi? You can’t and I didn’t want to bother hooking a monitor and keyboard up. Fortunately, there is a serial console as documented by Clayton. So I hooked up my handy-dandy sparkfun 3.3V serial module and got wifi setup successfully with a wifi module I had lying around by following these instructions from Rasberry Pi Shake. After that away I went following the instructions from the OSPI wiki to get set up.
Edit:
Setting up syslogd server on OSX
One of the recommended pieces of configuration for the Rasbrerry PI is to use a Syslog server to save wear and tear on the SD card. My main home server runs OSX but thanks to this article, it was possible to set up a syslog server.
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