INSTALLATION.md

Raspberry Pi Software for the SuperTech-IT 8x8x8 RGB LED Cube

Manual Installation

Install Vanilla Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi

Download Raspbian and install it on your SD card. The minimal image is sufficient.

(Optionally) update the distribution to the latest version

pi@picube:~ $ sudo apt-get update
pi@picube:~ $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
pi@picube:~ $ sudo apt-get clean
pi@picube:~ $ sudo shutdown -r now

Install the real-time linux kernel

This is optional but without this kernel the cube performance will suffer if the CPU becomes heavily loaded.

A pre-compiled version of the Linux kernel with the RT Preempt patch applied is available for all Raspberry Pi models at picube.uk and can be installed as follows. NB: This version includes the fix for the Dirty COW vulnerability.

pi@picube:~ $ wget http://picube.uk/files/raspberrypi-kernel-20161021.deb
pi@picube:~ $ sudo dpkg -i raspberrypi-kernel-20161021.deb
pi@picube:~ $ rm raspberrypi-kernel-20161021.deb

(Alternatively you can build it yourself. There is a good write-up at http://www.frank-durr.de/?p=203 )

Disable SD card low-latency-mode (llm)

Add the following text to the end of the line in /boot/cmdline.txt

sdhci_bcm2708.enable_llm=0

Allow the pi user to elevate scheduling priority and lock memory.

Add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf

pi	-	memlock		51200
pi	-	rtprio		99

Reboot the Pi

pi@picube:~ $ sudo shutdown -r now

Install additional software

pi@picube:~ $ sudo apt-get install git

Clone this repository and build the software

pi@picube:~ $ git clone https://github.com/hummypkg/picube.git
pi@picube:~ $ cd picube
pi@picube:~/picube $ make install