Tour through PiCockpit 2020
This post provides a tour of PiCockpit in 2020.
Want to find out what PiCockpit is all about?
Check out the video below, with the latest PiCockpit features in 2020:
Here’s a transcript of the guided tour:
Welcome to PiCockpit. PiCockpit is a web interface to monitor and control your Raspberry Pis.
You can use it for free for up to 5 Pis!
This video is a tour through PiCockpit. Let’s get started.
Adding a new Raspberry Pi to PiCockpit is easy. We have a help video that shows you how to do it.
Once you’ve added some Pis to your account, it will look like this.
You can see at a glance which of your Pis is online and which is offline, and their IP addresses. Your
Raspberry Pis can be anywhere in the world – as long as they have an Internet connection, you will be able to control them with PiCockpit.
Click on the heartbeat icons to see vital statistics in real-time.
Click on a Raspberry Pi to get to the app overview screen.
PiCockpit currently has four apps – GPIO, PiControl, PiDoctor and PiStats.
The GPIO app is a special highlight in my opinion, so we’ll save it for last.
Let’s look at PiStats first:
This shows even more real-time statistics, including the SoC temperature – important for overclocking and making sure you have the right case for your Raspberry Pi 4.
If you’re interested in the SoC temperature in particular, type it into the search to filter the list.
Let’s have a look at PiControl next.
You see three buttons which allow you to power off your Pi, reboot it, and upgrade the picockpit-client.
You can easily add commands of your own, our help will give you step-by-step instructions for this.
PiDoctor is currently the most powerful app in PiCockpit. PiDoctor allows you to run a wide range of tests on your Raspberry Pi to check it’s health status.
Click on Run All Tests to get started.
The WLAN module will show you WiFi networks near your Raspberry Pi.
The Network module shows your Pis IP addresses and network interfaces – it’s a good start for network diagnostics.
The System module has a wealth of information about your Pi.
It’s especially useful to check for under voltage problems and temperature issues, here in the throttling & under-voltage area. Here you can also check how much free storage space you have on your Pi, where it was manufactured, and which revision you have.
The Video module and USB module show you the attached HDMI monitors and USB devices.
Finally, the software module allows you to see the currently running processes on your system, and their resource usage.
Let’s have a look at the GPIO app now.
GPIO makes it really easy to read your GPIO pins and to control the GPIO pins.
You simply add a pin you want to read using the drop down menu, and you’ll see its state immediately.
The configure button allows to customize your setup. Here you can edit the pin’s name and change state names.
GPIO Output has a toggle to set the pin high and low. If you don’t need a pin anymore, simply click on Remove. With PiCockpit, the pins will remember their set up in between sessions.
Finally, SoftwarePWM gives you a slider with which you can dim LEDs for example.
Now that we’ve concluded the tour, it’s time to power off the Raspberry Pi:
As you can see, there’s a warning which protects any accidental clicks. It’s little things like this which make PiCockpit fun and safe to use.
I hope you enjoyed this tour through PiCockpit – your web-based Raspberry Pi control and monitor interface.
If you have any problems, questions or would like to add more than 5 Raspberry Pis, please get in touch and let us know.
We’re here for you.
Conclusion
Once you’ve got PiCockpit set up on your Raspberry Pis, you can begin to experiment with some of the projects that we’ve featured in our Paragon Projects series!