Installation

Prerequisites

Linux, FreeBSD and OSX

Before you install pilight, make sure you have gcc, cmake and dialog installed. On some distributions you can also install all compilation tools at once by installing build-essential. The installation of these programs differ from distribution to distribution. Please refer to their instructions on how to do this.

Windows

The prerequisites for compiling for Windows are included in the git package. You have to provide a framework like Visual Studio and have to install CMake and grep. For grep you might pick “Complete package, except sources” from here. It's recommended to install this grep as an adminstrator and then by hand look for grep's bin-path and add this to the systemwide PATH environment variable (this grep installer does not do this for you). For CMake look here.

If you have all the tools together, clone a pilight git repository to your local disk, open a windows command line prompt and change directory to where your local pilight repository remains. Then run

CMake .

which will create all your framework specific “makefiles” needed to compile and build pilight.

Connecting the Hardware

Make sure you have a supported receiver. Currently only one type has been proven successful. This one is called 433MHz Superheterodyne 3400 RF Transmitter and Receiver link kit and can be bought from Ebay.

In order to fully use pilight you need to have one of the supported hardware senders and receiver connected, and preferably also a low-pass filter. The low-pass filter is meant to filter all noise inevitably received by these receivers. Currently pilight can run in three hardware modes. Please refer to the config.json description on how to use one of these modes.

Module

In this mode, pilight will use a lirc kernel module to send a receive codes. This hardware mode is advised when you are not using a low-pass filter.

• First connect the receiver to GPIO 18 (wiringPi 1) and the sender to GPIO 17 (wirinPi 0).
• Then load the lirc_rpi kernel module.

modprobe lirc_rpi gpio_in_pin=18 gpio_out_pin=17

GPIO

In this mode, pilight will directly use the gpio pins. This hardware mode is advised when you are using a low-pass filter.

• Just connect the receiver to BCM pin 18 (wiringX 1) and the sender to BCM pin 17.
• If using a filter, connect the receiver to the data-input on the filter instead, and connect the data-output pin to pin 18

None This is a blank mode, where pilight does not use the GPIO at all, so it has no sending or receiving capabilities. Use this mode when running pilight on a computer that does not have GPIO, such as a NAS.

Compilation and Installation

To use the precompiled deb package, follow the instructions here. This is the recommended way if you want to install the latest stable version.

If you want to use the latest development version you need to either compile and install pilight manually, or use the nightlies that are prepared for installation every night (see here for more information). Use these commands to compile and install pilight manually

cd ~
git clone --depth 5 -b development https://github.com/pilight/pilight.git
cd pilight
chmod +x setup.sh
./setup.sh

pilight is now installed and can be used by running service pilight start. This will run pilight with a default configuration. This allows basic sending and receiving.

Configuring

To change any of the default settings of pilight modifications can be made in the settings section of the config.json file. It is possible to predefine specific locations and their respective devices in the config.json. Please refer to the wiki page for further explanations.