SSH Access to Pocket Piano 201?

Is it possible to plug a wifi or ethernet dongle into the USB port on the 201 Pocket Piano and gain ssh access to Linux?

Iā€™m very interested in this as well!

Yes this is possible. The 201 is running a Yocto Linux distribution and SSH is enabled by default. To login use ā€˜rootā€™ for the user and ā€˜organelleā€™ for the password.

The harder part is getting it on the networkā€¦ If you plug in an RT5370 WiFi adapter (this is the same one we use with Organelle), it will try to connect to a network named ā€˜musicā€™. This isnā€™t so helpful since you would have to have a network of that name. To change the network name you have to edit ā€˜/etc/wpa_supplicant.confā€™

It also works with a USB ethernet adapter, Iā€™ve been using this one:

Once you get in with Ethernet, you an edit wpa_supplicant.conf with your WiFi network credentials.

vim is installed for editing and the gcc toolchain is also installed. There is some other stuff like Python installed but mostly the system is very stripped down.

Other thoughts: you could put something in the Pd patch that used the [shell] object to change WiFi credentialsā€¦ also looking into getting a serial console available via the USB-C

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Thank you! Works great.

I thought it will be easy to establish the ā€œmusicā€ network as I have an Organelle but unfortunately it didnā€™t want to connect to it - Organelle OS 4.2.

If it is of help for anyone:
Being on a Mac Iā€™ve downloaded Paragonā€™s extFS for Mac - Write/read access to Linux files under macOS High Sierra - extFS by paragon software for Mac - it has a 10 days free demo. With that I was able to mount the SD card via card reader and change the network settings in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

You just have to find out the IP address of your 201PP with a local WiFi scanner.

Just did a quick scp file transfer and it worked flawless:
scp -v -r ./X-201-Pacifica root@my.201.ip.address:/home/root/app/pd/synths/

Not sure if I prefer this over disk mode but itā€™s still nice to have this option.

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Forgot to mention thisā€¦ The LanScan app is free and works very quickly listing the IP address on your local network.

Very nice. Is this true of the 5 Moons as well? I assume itā€™s true of the Organelle since the default password is ā€˜organelleā€™.

Just a few quick notes, in case anyone else has been struggling with SSH-ing to the 201 over wifi, as I was.

First I tried connecting with a USB-ethernet adaptor. That worked without any hassle, once I had obtained the 201ā€™s IP address from my routerā€™s web interface. I then connected to the 201 via SSH using

ssh root@my.201's.IP.address

and entering ā€œorganelleā€ as the password when prompted.

But I really wanted to get this working via wifi. I bought an RT5370 wifi dongle.

My initial downfall was that in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf on the 201, I didnā€™t realise that the psk property needed to contain the hex-encoded key of my wifi password, rather than the password itself. The hex key can be generated using this command, which can be run on the 201 once SSHd into it via ethernet, replacing myssid and mywifipassword appropriately.

wpa_passphrase myssid mywifipassword > /etc/wpa.conf

That will then create a wpa.conf file with a network object like this:

network={                                                                    
    ssid="myssid"                                                       
    #psk="mywifipassword"                                                 
    psk="mywifihexkey"                                                    
} 

You can then copy and paste the psk value from that into the actual /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file.

After doing that and rebooting my 201, the 201 did not show up in the list of devices on my network (as shown by my routerā€™s web interface). But when I shut down my 201, rebooted my router, then turned the 201 back on with only the wifi dongle connected to the 201ā€™s USB port, it did appear on the network, with a different IP address than the one that it had consistently used via ethernet. Iā€™m now able to SSH into the 201 from my laptop with only this Tic Tac-sized wifi dongle plugged into the 201ā€™s USB port.

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