Hi! I’ve just finished assembling my Keybow, which was a delightful experience, and it’s up and running. I’m eager to play with customization, but it seems awkward to power it down and swap out the SD card every time I want to tweak something. How would I configure the Keybow to (1) get on my WiFi network and (2) accept SSH connections? Do I just need to plug it into a keyboard and HDMI display and get things set up the usual way or can I just unplug the SD card one more time, edit some files, and be SSH-able? Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!
hello and welcome to Pimoroni, i dont own one ,but It runs on a Pi so it would just hookup to a hdmi monitor and a keyboard and set up to boot to the ssh .good luck
Cool – after posting the question it occurred to me that this isn’t really a Keybow question so much as a Pi Zero question. I should be able to get the thing set up in “headless” mode to connect to my WiFi the usual way.
One followup question, though. The docs said something about files being copied from the SD card to a ramdrive and used from there during operation. If I SSH into the Pi and modify config files on the SD card, what command should I use to refresh what will actually be used on the LEDs and keys?
sorry i don’t have an answer for that question ,a bit over me head ,I’m just a basic Pi user,if it dont work for me format and i start over ,lol
Thanks anyway, @Caperjack1953! I tried the config that has worked on other Pis but I don’t see the Keybow on my network. Will try plugging it into a monitor if I can find a suitable cable, but I’d be happy to hear from others who might have tackled something like this.
The operating system they’ve put together for Keybow is very very minimal. It doesn’t support networking in its standard configuration.
You can mix things around and provide network to it over USB but this is not a particularly trivial step.
The OS is robust enough to withstand repeated power cycling, so you pretty much can just yank the power out each time you need to change something (unlike other pi OS’s).
There are people out there who have got the keybow working over wifi etc on the forum- search keybow and you should find some examples. As said above- they’re not trivial modifications!
Thanks, @monglet! I found 27 Keybow-related threads but none of them seemed to have any info regarding networking setup, nor did a broader Google search turn anything up. I think I’ll just experiment with doing things the way everybody else is for a while and maybe come back to the remote stuff later.
@jgarbers did you ever manage to fix it? I have a similar project in mind now – standalone keybow that can either talk MQTT or make home-assistant API calls directly, but it doesn’t seem like a lot of folks share that desire. So far the only option seems to be potentially https://mrusme.github.io/kiwi/