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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 includes in the git package.

Connecting the Hardware

Make sure you have a supported receiver. Currently only one type has been successfully tested. 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 preferable build a low-pass filter. The low-pass filter is meant to filter all noise inevitable received by these receivers. Currently pilight can run in two hardware modes. Please refer to the settings.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 (wiringPi 1) and the sender to BCM pin 17.

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 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 en receiving.

Configuring

To change any of the default settings of pilight alterations can be made in the settings.json file. To predefine specific locations and their respective devices a config.json file can be created. Please refer to both wiki pages for further explanations.