Pimoroni Flotilla Offline - instructions

After last week's Wimbledon Raspberry Jam, a few people asked me for instructions for getting Pimoroni Flotilla working in a completely offline environment. Obviously you need an Internet connection to do all the installing, but following these instructions should enable you to use Flotilla and all the great Cookbook stuff when you don't have Net access.

Here is a brief description of the steps I performed. This will almost certainly not work exactly the same way with future releases of the software and may not even be necessary!

1. Start with a fresh install of Raspbian and PIXEL. Do the usual update and upgrade:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade -y

2. Install the Flotilla software as normal.

curl -sS get.pimoroni.com/flotilla | bash

Start it up and update the Flotilla Dock firmware if required.

3. Clone the flotilla-cookbook and flotilla-rockpool repositories

git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/flotilla-cookbook.git

git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/flotilla-rockpool.git

4. Change into the flotilla-rockpool directory and switch to the Edge branch.

cd floilla-rockpool

git checkout edge

git fetch

5. Now for the tedious bit. All the hyperlinks in the examples in the Cookbook are pointing at online resources. We need to change them so that they point at our local cloned copy of Rockpool. Basically you need to go through each of the Cookbook recipe directories (in /home/pi/flotilla-cookbook) and edit the index.html file:  change wherever it says 'http://flotil.la/rockpool/' to 'file:///home/pi/flotilla-rockpool/' (note the three /s after file). You could use a bash script to trawl through the whole directory or just open each one manually (Geany on the Pi is a good editor) and do a find/replace.

6. Finally, to make sure all the examples (especially Synth) work correctly with local files, you need to launch Chromium with some extra flags. I created a separate Desktop shortcut to make this simple. Create a file called flotilla-offline.desktop in /home/pi/Desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Exec= chromium-browser --allow-file-access-from-files
Icon=rockpool
Terminal=false
Name=Flotilla Offline
Comment=Flotilla Offline

7. An icon should appear on the Desktop. Run it! I recommend adding Chromium bookmarks to each of the modified index.html files in each of the Cookbook recipe subdirectories. I also added a bookmark for the local version of Rockpool (file:///home/pi/flotilla-rockpool/index.html)