Installation of Tinkerforge Brick Viewer
The Tinkerforge Brick Viewer (also referred to as brickv) provides a graphical interface for testing Bricks and Bricklets. Each device has its own view that shows the main features and allows to control them. Additionally brickv can be used to calibrate the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) of the Bricks to improve measurement quality and to flash Brick firmwares and Bricklet plugins.
Installation of Brick Viewer
An Brick Viewer installer is available for Windows, macOS and Linux systems.
The Brick Viewer can be installed from a setup .exe file. First, download the Brick Viewer installer .exe form the Tinkerforge website here. Click on the downloaded file, this should open the installer.
You can choose the actions of the installer:
- Install Brick Viewer will copy the program files.
- Install/Update ESP32 Bootloader Driver will install/update the USB bootloader driver for ESP32 (Ethernet) Bricks. This driver is necessary to do ESP32 (Ethernet) Brick firmware updates using Brick Viewer.
Typically you want the installer to perform all tasks. Simly click on Next to start the installation process.
Next the installation path can be configured. Change it if necessary, but ensure that the path contains ASCII characters only, especially avoid umlauts. Brick Viewer cannot be started if non-ASCII characters are in the installation path, due to a bug in the Python pywintypes module.
Finally click Install to start the installation process.
First, download the Brick Viewer .dmg form the Tinkerforge website here. Click on the downloaded file, this should open the image.
To install the Brick Viewer drag and drop the .app file to your applications folder. After this you have finished the installation process. You might need to restart your machine after this, otherwise the icons do not show up for some unknown reason.
The Brick Viewer can be installed on Debian based distribution (Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) from a .deb file. For Arch Linux the package brickv is available in the AUR. On other distributions the Brick Viewer can be installed from source.
First, set up our APT repository on your system according to this guide. Then install the Brick Viewer package:
sudo apt install brickvYou can start the Brick Viewer in the application menu under electronic or in a terminal with:
brickvConnect to your Raspberry Pi
Once you have successfully installed the Brick Viewer, you can establish a connection to your Raspberry Pi via the previously configured Brick Daemon. To do so, enter the Raspberry Pi’s IPv4 address in the appropriate field within the Brick Viewer interface and click Connect.
Upon successful connection, the HAT Brick should appear as installed and active, indicating that the system is functioning correctly and ready for further configuration or operation. This visual confirmation in the Brick Viewer serves as a crucial step in verifying the communication between the Raspberry Pi and the HAT Brick. Furthermore, accessing each brick to gather data is possible as shown below.
