LoxBerry: extension to your Loxone
Posted on January 21, 2018 • 3 min read • 525 words
Loxone can already do an incredible amount. For things that Loxone can’t do or know, you can use LoxBerry.
LoxBerry is an open source project that expands the Loxone Miniserver. Examples include a free weather service with Wunderground data, voice recognition, switching WiFi sockets, owning a mail server, Google/CalDav support, and so on. LoxBerry was originally developed for Raspberry Pi (hence the name), but now also works on several other platforms. LoxBerry was originally German but has been mostly translated into English.
VMware image
Besides having a ready-made image for Raspberry Pi, there is also an image for VMware. This allows you to start quite easily in VMware Workstation/Fusion/Player/vSphere. The image itself can be found at http://www.loxwiki.eu
If you don’t know how to deploy an OVA image, check out the (English) page of VMware Workstation
Given the image primarily has German settings, such as a QWERTZ keyboard instead of QWERTY, it’s best, for your convenience, to change these settings.
Changing keyboard settings
As mentioned, the LoxBerry VM’s keyboard settings are set to German/QWERTZ by default. Follow the next steps to set it to (for example) US.
- Login to the VM’s console
- username/password is loxberry/loxberry
- Since the keyboard is configured as QWERTZ, the Y is in the place of the Z. Keep this in mind when typing the password
- type:
- su root
(password is: loxberry) - dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
(the ‘–’ is in the place of the ‘/’ on my laptop) - then choose your keyboard. I chose the generic 104 key PC
- su root
Installing VMware Tools
As a dedicated VMware enthusiast, I believe VMware Tools should be in the VM, hence the installation of the Open VM tools. The whole process is described in https://partnerweb.vmware.com/GOSIG/Debian_8.html
The short steps:
- Add to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib - and execute the following commands
apt-get install open-vm-tools```
When you now restart or shut down the VM, at least the stop and start actions will be executed.
Changing passwords
Before further configuring Loxberry, it’s very wise to change the passwords.
Login as loxberry, then type ‘su root’ and the password.
Then change the passwords for root and loxberry:
- passwd
Enter a new password for root - passwd loxberry
Enter a new password for the loxberry user
Configuration
The configuration of LoxBerry itself is done in a browser window, http://<IP>
My German isn’t that good (anymore), so I do the configuration in English. Don’t forget to press the button next to the language selection, otherwise, nothing much happens. Create a user. Note that not all characters are accepted in the password, like ‘#’
Then, in the next screen, fill in the details for the Miniserver. It’s wise to create a separate user in your Miniserver, as LoxBerry also can’t handle all the characters in passwords.
Go through all the steps. The only downside I find is that at the end of the journey the passwords stand in plain text. Other than that, a handy installation.
Next steps
Now that you have installed LoxBerry, you can install plugins and make the connection on the Loxone side. As soon as I get to this, I’ll also make a description of it.
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