Setting C.H.I.P. up

Author

Enrico Spinielli

Published

August 7, 2016

Few weeks ago I finally received my C.H.I.P. and PocketC.H.I.P.

C.H.I.P. is the famous $9 computer crowdfunded in May 2015 via Kickstarter and PowerC.H.I.P. combines a 4.3-inch screen and a button-style QWERTY keypad with it.

Here they are in all their beauty:

C.H.I.P. Pocket C.H.I.P.
chip pocketchip

Setting C.H.I.P. up

I am interested to play with both toys remotely, so I did follow Setting up CHIP as a headless server with minimal tools in order to install and configure ssh.

Here is what I did for C.H.I.P.:

  1. connect via USB to my laptop (a Mac) via screen and logon usr: chip, pwd: chip as per default settings (to be changed later ;-).

    $ screen /dev/tty.usbmodem1411

  2. follow the WiFi Connection instructions in the docs, i.e. execute the command

    $ sudo nmcli device wifi connect 'homeSSID' password 'mypass' ifname wlan0

  3. update packages and install ssh

    $ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ssh

  4. optional, upgrade packages and cleanup:

    $ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get autoremove

  5. fix locale (I use American setup, so in the GUI I did select the item en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8):

    $ sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

I also renamed the hosts biochip (the bare one) and chippie (the Pocket one). Although I found various posts on how to do it I tried w/ nmtui and selected the Set system hostname item then rebooted: all worked smoothly.

ToDo’s

  • disable root account (ssh and non) login.
  • change chip account password
  • change root account password