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Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Hardware Guide

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B

Hardware Requirements

The current setup assumes you'll be using a Raspberry Pi Model 4b with an mt76 based wireless adapter. The built-in ethernet port of the Raspberry Pi is connected to upstream/WAN/internet.

Running SPR

WiFi dongles

The WiFi 5 dongles have been tested to perform well with a 500-550Mbps top speed in a low noise environment and the WiFi 6 dongles can reach closer to 700Mpbs in a low noise environment.

  • A USB SSD works best. A 16GB SD card can also be used but is not recommended

  • Ethernet cable for setup (and if you run uplink over the wire)

  • Optional For running multiple WiFi adapters, a powered USB 3.0 capable hub is recommended

  • Optional An Ethernet USB Dongle for additional LAN devices since the built-in ethernet card (eth0) will be used for the WAN. The UE 300 has been tested to run near line speed on the Pi (950Mbps). The U3 330 also works and provides additional USB 3.0 ports.

tip

Grab the Complete Starter Kit for everything you need to get started here

Building from source

  • 8 GB of RAM are recommended for building SPR on the Pi. Any amount of RAM can work for building but ramdisks have to be disabled in the docker build. The prebuilt GHCR has prebuilt SPR images available also.

Using a different wireless card

For using a different wireless adapter, the default hostapd configuration may need to be modified in the UI or in configs/wifi/. Note that the built-in Raspberry Pi Wireless card can not be used as an AP by default as it does not support AP/VLAN, which is a feature that SPR relies on.

Install the SPR Pi 4 Image

For running SPR on a Raspberry Pi 4, a pre-built image is available on the releases page.

You can download spr.img.xz and flash it with a tool such as Balena Etcher, or if you prefer to write the image using the command line:

# On a mac, write the image to the external disk (rdiskX).
# Be careful to make sure you identify your removable drive correctly.
$ xzcat spr.img.xz | dd of=/dev/rdiskX bs=$[1024*1024]
tip

If you use Balena Etcher be sure to download the image first and choose Flash from file.

Running

  1. Plug in SPR to your local network using a ethernet cable
  2. Boot the drive on the Pi - setup will complete on device and reboot
  3. Visit http://spr.local to setup your device

Default credentials for ssh are: ubuntu:ubuntu

Upstream services

Under /home/spr/super/config/base/config.sh, consider disabling UPSTREAM_SERVICES_ENABLE=1 if you do not want the API and SSH exposed to the WAN ethernet interface. This can also be toggled under the Firewall Services tab in the UI.

Follow the SPR Setup Guide

If you prefer to run on an existing image, or run from a fresh Ubuntu server install, you can Follow the SPR setup guide