Show HN: PiUi – add a mobile phone UI to your RaspberryPi project (opens in new tab)

I had the same problem so I went through the nginx.conf file supplied with PiUi and compared it to the default one in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. In the default one there's an _include_ line on line 71. This pulls in what ever .conf files from /etc/nginx/conf.d/ I then copied the lines 40-59 from piui/nginx/nginx.conf to its own file /etc/nginx/conf.d/piui.conf and restarted nginx. Now when I type in the IP of my Pi in my mobile webbrowser I get in to the PiUi site. However this way does not provide the small graphics components in the UI components. Any ideas on that?

I ran into the missing CherryPy module issue.... How did you sort it out? Thanks for all of the great info.

No configuration needed in order to talk to it. You just tell your users to connect to the access point it provides, and everything happens automagically from there.

FWIW, this is how the GoPro works with its iPhone app and Android app. It's so easy to set up that I decided to adopt it here. It is of course possible to connect the Pi and the phone to the same (existing) wifi network, but then you need to help the user figure out the right IP address to connect to. I messed around with zeroconf/bonjour for this before I settled on this simpler mechanism -> it works but is pretty temperamental. The other thing I have tried on Android is to have the phone create a wifi hotspot with the same SSID and password as my home network. When at home, the devices are all connected nicely, when away, the Pi connects to the phone and (modulo zeroconf being picky) the whole thing works well; couldn't get this to work with the iPhone.

Right now, the Android app shows the current uptime and system load on the Raspberry Pi in the title bar. It does this by polling a URL which is handled by the PiUi Supervisor (separate python app from your main app). As you can see on github, the supervisor can also list and stop/start apps - I have feature enhancements to use all this planned for Android and yes, I'm keen to expose on iOS in future too.

Yep, that's neat! Intention was to allow richer, graphical UI. Esp, the timelapse project was a motivating use case for me and seeing the preview images on the phone display is really useful.

Other than the wifi access point set up, it should just work on the BeagleBoard. Follow the detailed instructions on the blog post (not the "easy way" using SD card images) and follow a BeagleBoard wifi AP tutorial.

@dkp0h, Thanks I know how install a python module, actually pip does the job. My point is that it should be indicated on the requirementents of the piui installation. Just to help beginners.