Developing a DIY networking toolkit

for location-based collective awareness

The MAZI toolkit

Everything you need to build your own MAZI Zone

Use the MAZI toolkit to make your own MAZI Zone. This section of the website provides a list of hardware and items to buy, links for downloading the toolkit image software and the application software, and instructions to put it all together. There are ideas for what to do with your own MAZI Zone. Once your zone is built, you need to let people know about it, so you will also find templates for posters and publicity materials.

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1 - What you need

Hardware:

Raspberry Pi model 2 B, zero, 3 B, 3 B+  More information about Raspberry Pi products
MicroSD card (16GB or higher, over class 10 speed)
USB wireless adapter with external antenna (only for Raspberry Pi 2)

Optional for set up:

Portable USB battery for portable use
USB wireless adapter with external antenna (for dual mode)
Keyboard/display (for installation with raspbian image) 
Link to detailed notes on suggested products.

 

Additional optional elements for specific applications (under construction)

Containers for the Raspberry Pi kit
Input devices (cameras, microphones, hybridletter box)
Sensors – tested range of usb sensor or sensehat tools

2 - Installing the image on the Raspberry Pi

Option A.

Use the ready-made MAZI toolkit image 

This is the recommended option for most people interested in deploying a MAZI zone. It should not take more than a few minutes to complete.

 

First download the latest MAZI toolkit Raspberry Pi image (1GB zipped, 8GB uncompressed)
Check the MAZI toolkit’s version history https://github.com/mazi-project/guides/wiki/Version-History )
Unzip the downloaded file and note the folder where the uncompressed mazizone-vXXX.img file is stored (you will need it in the next step)

 

Copy the image to your microSD card 

Instructions follow for: 1. OS X   2. Linux  3.Windows 

1. For OS X

  1. Download and Install Etcher from https://etcher.io
  1. Open etcher and click Select Image to choose the mazi img file.
  2. Choose SD Card as Drive.

_images/etcher.jpg

  1. Click Flash!

As soon as the process is finished mount the SD card on the Raspberry Pi and turn it on.

2. For Linux

Please note that the use of the dd tool can overwrite any partition of your machine. If you specify the wrong device in the instructions below, you could delete your primary Linux partition. Please be careful.

1.  Run:

df -h

To see what devices are currently mounted.

2.  Insert the SD card and run df -h again. The new device that has appeared is your SD card. The left column gives the device name of your SD card. It will be listed as something like /dev/mmcblk0p1 or /dev/sdd1. The last part (p1 or 1 respectively) is the partition number but you want to write to the whole SD card, not just one partition. You therefore need to remove that part from the name, getting, for example, /dev/mmcblk0 or /dev/sdd as the device name for the whole SD card.

3.  Now that you’ve noted what the device name is, you need to unmount it so that files can’t be read or written to the SD card while you are copying over the SD image

4.  Run:

umount /dev/sdd1

Replacing sdd1 with whatever your SD card’s device name is (including the partition number).

5.  In the terminal, write the image to the card with the command below, making sure you replace the input file if= argument with the path to your .img file, and the /dev/sdd in the output file of= argument with the right device name. This is very important, as you will lose all data on the hard drive if you provide the wrong device name. Make sure the device name is the name of the whole SD card as described above, not just a partition of it. For example, sdd, not sdds1 or sddp1, and mmcblk0, not mmcblk0p1

sudo dd bs=4M if=2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

6.  The dd command does not give any information of its progress and so may appear to have frozen.To see the progress of the copy operation you can run in another terminal

sudo pkill -USR1 -n -x dd

 

3. For Windows

Download Win32 application for flashing the SD card

  1. Select your device (SD card)

_images/photo1.png

  1. Locate the downloaded disk image

_images/photo2.png

  1. Click Write and wait for the write to be completed

_images/photo3.png

 

Option B:  

Installation with Raspbian image

Raspbian is the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s official supported operating system. Find out more at the Raspberry Pi website.

 

This option is recommended only for developers, or technically advanced MAZI toolkit owners who want to learn about the MAZI technical approach, and possibly contribute to the toolkit development.

 

Extra equipment required: keyboard and display

 

Detailed guidelines on the MAZI Guides site.
(Scripts to facilitate the manual installation will be made available soon.)

3 - Testing and initializing your MAZI Zone

1. Insert the microSD card into the slot of the Raspberry Pi.

 

2. Optional: Insert the USB wireless adapter with external antenna (if you have a Raspberry Pi 2 or wish to operate in dual mode without ethernet cable).

 

3. Power up your Raspberry Pi and wait about 1 min to let your MAZI Zone start.

 

4. Search for the WiFi name (or SSID) “mazizone” and connect to it. 

 

5. A window pops up automatically for you to set initial admin info. If you don’t see the window, use a web browser to visit http://portal.mazizone.eu

 

6. Follow carefully the administrator set-up steps, filling in all requested information:

 — Set the administrator password. The default user name is: mazi_admin and the current default password is “1234”. Make sure to save the new password for later use!

 — Set the correct date/time. This is important for your MAZI Zone to work correctly, especially in offline mode.

 — Set the network WiFi name (SSID) of your MAZI zone, if you want to customise it. This is optional.

 

7. Click “Submit” and you will be directed to the admin login page inside the MAZI portal. Note that the admin username is “mazi_admin” and the password the one you just set in the previous step. Don’t forget it!

 

8. Start using your MAZI Zone!

—- If you want to start using your MAZI Zone as a normal user, go to http://portal.mazizone.eu

—- If you want to customize your MAZI Zone as an administrator go to http://portal.mazizone.eu/admin

 

If any of the above steps didn’t work as expected, please email us at info@mazizone.eu

4 - Configuring your MAZI Zone

As an administrator of your MAZI Zone you have access to a wide range of configuration options that will help you personalise your MAZI Zone.

To do this you should visit:  http://portal.mazizone.eu/admin/  This is only available if you are connected to your MAZI Zone.

 

Perhaps your first customization tasks will be related to Applications (decide which applications appear in the front page and customize the corresponding texts describing their role) and Networking (change WiFi name and the portal URL, e.g., http://here.now, and connect your MAZI Zone to the Internet.

 

The following section offers more details on how to customise the applications on your MAZI Zone. More detailed documentation for the various configuration options is available at: 

 

In addition, it is also highly recommended to connect remotely to your Raspberry Pi through a terminal (ssh pi@10.0.0.1) for the following important operations:
 — Change the root password (your system will be highly insecure if you don’t do this action)
 — Expand the memory of the filesystem to reach the total capacity of the SD card you used. Otherwise you will have access only to ~2GB left in the 8GB MAZI Zone raspberry Pi image (click the button “Expand storage” in the admin “Dashboard”)
 — Update the maximum file upload size from the default 2M (go to the menu Admin->Settings)
 — Initialize the wordpress installation (note that the admin panel of wordpress is at http://portal.mazizone.eu/wordpress/wp-admin)

 

More information about this step is available in the “Documentation” menu on the admin panel of your MAZI Zone (see above).

5 - Software applications

Every MAZI zone has a set of pre-installed FLOSS applications, like Etherpad and NextCloud, that will be accessible by those (and only those) connecting to your MAZI Zone. MAZI is developing also a specialized MAZI Zone application called mazi-board or “Guestbook“.
You can either let the users of the MAZI Zone choose which applications they prefer using, or narrow down their choices to help create a critical mass of people using the same applications, in this page, when connected to your MAZI Zone: http://demo.mazizone.eu:4567/admin_application (the corresponding URL leads to the demo page in which admin actions are not recorded).
You can also try the currently installed applications on the public demo server: http://demo.mazizone.eu:4567/index (for Nextcloud the test account  is user: test pass: mazizone.
Detailed description and tips for each application are available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/mazi-project/guides/wiki 

 

Please contact us at contact@mazizone.eu if you wish us to pre-install your favourite FLOSS application in future versions of the MAZI toolkit.

6 - Deploying your MAZI Zone

Promote your MAZI Zone.

Let people know that your MAZI Zone exists, and consider ways to demonstrate how to use and participate in interactive local services of this type. The MAZI toolkit includes three types of additional documentation to this end, which is currently under construction in the following documents (feel free to add comments/suggestions).

https://github.com/mazi-project/guides/wiki/Deployment-tips

https://github.com/mazi-project/guides/wiki/Framings

https://github.com/mazi-project/guides/wiki/Stories

 

Bug reports and feature requests are more than welcome at:

https://github.com/mazi-project/portal/issues

 

You can also download a set of posters [pdf] that can help you introduce your MAZI Zone

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