I recently had a gentleman, Richie M6XRM, contact me on how to do this. It proved to be quite the challenge.
Instructions & Script
The information and how to has been posted on my GitHub page along with the script (you will need to supply your own URL to the stripped.csv file). Below I’ll explain the issues we encountered while trying to configure this automatic update. I can’t say that this is the best or only way to do this, however this is how I did it and I can confirm it works.
Issues & Fixes
Issue 1
One of the biggest issues was writing the script on Windows and converting/keeping the line endings of that script as unix line endings so they’re compatible with linux. I used Notepad++ to write and edit the script before uploading it to GitHub. Apparently it is not enough to save the file as a UNIX bash/sh file type. At the bottom of Notepad++ it says what the line endings are and I never noticed it. The DOS line endings created a lot of issues when the script was run on the Pi.
Fix 1
The fix for this in Notepad++ is to click Edit > EOL Conversion > Unix and then save the file as a UNIX bash/sh file with the extension “.sh”. The fix in the nano text editor is to press CTRL + x, then y, then ALT + d, then enter.
Issue 2
The other major issue was that system cron on the Pi does not understand rpi-rw even when it is run inside the script which is being run as root.
The cause of this is that rpi-rw is actually an alias set in the bash profile for the logged in user. Since cron runs as it’s own thing/shell separate from the logged in user (pi-star), it doesn’t understand rpi-rw or at least it didn’t understand it for me or Richie.
Fix 2
The fix for this is to put the actual command that rpi-rw points to in the script instead of using rpi-rw. That command is as follows:
sudo mount -o remount,rw / ; sudo mount -o remount,rw /boot
I came across this page on Medium which explained how to convert Raspbian to a read-only filesystem which is what Pi-Star uses. At the end of the page it talks about creating an ro and rw alias to quickly switch the filesystem between read-only and read-write. That’s when it dawned on me that this is the way the Pi-Star developers handled the read only operating system and that rpi-rw/rpi-ro are aliases.
A huge thank you to Richie M6XRM for his patience with me in figuring this out and for being so understanding while I was recovering from surgery.
We just hope this helps someone else and explains a bit of the mystery behind the rpi-rw and rpi-ro aliases.
73,
Tyler N3TDM