Running the ZigBee Site Survey on a Raspberry Pi

This is a tutorial how to install and run my freeware tool ZigBee Site Survey on a Raspberry Pi. This was tested with a Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspbian “Jessie” but it should run also on other devices (other distributions) without significant changes.

Prerequisites

Keep your system up-to date:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install libudev-dev

Install node.js

Raspbian Jessie was built in March 2016 and still ships node.js 0.10.29, a very outdated version. The ZigBee Survey Tool needs at least version 4.x, so we have to update node first. n is my choice for having always the current node version (or any older one for tests). With the following steps we install n and node.js 4.4.1 (the current release at time of writing). First we have to remove the obsolete version.

sudo apt-get remove nodejs
git clone https://github.com/tj/n.git
cd n
sudo make install
sudo n 4.4.1
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node /usr/bin/node
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/npm /usr/bin/npm

Check the version of node with node -v, this should result in v4.4.1

Install ZigBee Site Survey

Clone the code of the site survey (the master branch has always a running version) to your system and install the libraries:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/ancasicolica/ZigBeeSiteSurvey.git
cd ZigBeeSiteSurvey
npm i

Getting the dependencies and building some of them takes some time and should finish without errors. You don’t need to install a driver for the USB stick from MMB, it’s just plug & play.

Running the Survey

Connect the RapidConnect USB Stick to the Raspberry Pi (you don’t need any additional drivers, they’re already part of the distribution), enter the directory and start the survey:

node server.js

The service is reachable using the address http://localhost:2998 but unfortunately the Raspberry Pi standard browser Epiphany does not support all CSS and JavaScript features required. You can watch the results of the survey on the Raspberry Pi locally using a modern browser, e.g. the Iceweasel:

sudo apt-get install iceweasel

Most likely you want to access the survey tool from remote, then Chrome is the browser I recommend (this is the browser I use for most of the tests). See with ifconfig which IP address was assigned to your device and connect from any computer inside your network.

Starting the ZigBee Site Survey together with the System

See this article how you can start the ZigBee Site Survey tool together with your Raspberry Pi.

 

Thanks @ Mustafa Isleyen for reviewing this article and giving feedback!