Iot Control Center

A local area network kubernetes cluster for managing and controlling IoT devices.

Installation

1. Flash an SD card with Ubuntu Server OS Arm64 Architecture

• Raspberry Pi Imager
• Connect the Pi to your network
  • Can be configured from Raspberry Pi Imager in options
  • Alternatively this can be done manually by editing the /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml found in Ubuntu
    • Remember to netplan apply

2. Boot up the Raspberry Pi and SSH into it

3. Docker and docker-compose Installation

• Docker Installation on Ubuntu Docs

4. Login to a dockerhub account

• If you do not already have a dockerhub account, create one since it is needed
• Log in with the sudo docker login command
• In the dockerhub portal, create a project called iot-control-center

5. Install Kubernetes

• Rancher Docs
  • Default installation can be done with the following command:
    • curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -
• Enable cgroups
• Install linux-modules-extra-raspi with:
  • sudo apt install linux-modules-extra-raspi
• Configure DNS
  • Use a text editor to add the following to /etc/resolv.conf:

     namespace 8.8.8.8
     namespace 8.8.4.4

  • Then, restart daemon and docker systemctl services

     sudo systemctl daemon-reload
     sudo systemctl restart docker

  • Purge the DNS pod in the kube-system namespace
    • Get the DNS pod name with kubectl get pods --all-namespaces, e.g. coredns-b96499967-ggsj5
    • Delete it
      • kubectl delete pods coredns-b96499967-ggsj5 --namespace="kube-system"

6. Set up your environment variables

• There are 4 environment variables needed for the build script to work:

  1. MONGO_DB_USERNAME
     • Your chosen database username
  2. MONGO_DB_PASSWORD
     • Your chosen database password
  3. MONGO_DB_IP
     • The IP address of the raspberry pi (which hosts the database)
     • This IP address can be found by running ifconfig
  4. DOCKERHUB_USERNAME
     • The username of the dockerhub account logged into in step 4

• These environment variables can be set by appending the following to your /etc/environment file:

  MONGO_DB_USERNAME="<your chosen database username>"
  MONGO_DB_PASSWORD="<your chosen database password>"
  MONGO_DB_IP="<the IP of the pi>"
  DOCKERHUB_USERNAME="<your dockerhub username>"

7. Clone this Repository

8. Build and push the local docker containers to dockerhub

• cd into the /Kubernetes folder of this repo
• Execute the update_cluster.sh script to build and push all containers with sudo permissions
  • This may take quite some time on the first go. Depending on your RPi specs, could take anywhere from 5-20 minutes

9. Configure your cluster secrets

• Copy the secrets.yaml found under /Kubernetes/Secrets. Rename it to secrets.yaml or another name of your choosing
• Edit the file with a text editor to add the secrets. You'll need to add:
  • A Mongo Database Username and Password
  • The address of the Mongo Database (i.e. the address of the current Raspberry Pi. This can be found using ifconfig)
• Apply the secrets to your cluster using kubernetes apply -f secrets.yaml

10. Deploy the Mongo Database

• Build and bring up the docker container for the database
  • cd into /MongoDb
  • Run sudo docker compose up --build -d
• To validate, visit the IP address at port 8081 to validate the mongo express UI appears
  • e.g. http://10.0.0.4:8081

11. Deploy the cluster

• cd into /Kubernetes
• Run deploy_cluster.sh to deploy the cluster
• Check your device IP from anywhere on your LAN, you should see the IoT Control Center Home page!

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