Installing on an Embedded Device¶

Edge Insights can run headless on an embedded Linux device, for example an arm64 industrial PC. The services run continuously in the background, and the portal is accessed from a browser on another machine on the same network.

Embedded devices install from a release tarball. This is also the only way to install on arm64. If you're installing on a laptop or desktop PC instead, see Installing on a Linux desktop.

Requirements¶

An arm64 or x86_64 device. Tarballs are published for both architectures
Ubuntu 22.04+ or Debian 12+. Other systemd-based distributions may work but are untested.
systemd with user services (systemctl --user)
The can kernel module, i.e. SocketCAN, also vcan if you want a virtual bus for testing without hardware
sudo / root access to run the installer
About 1 GB of free space for the install location, /opt by default

Install¶

Download the tarball for your architecture, edge-insights-<version>-linux-arm64.tar.gz or edge-insights-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz, from the Software Download page of your canedudev.com account. If you do not have an account yet, see Getting Edge Insights.

The page needs a login in a browser. Download the tarball on a PC, then copy it to the device, e.g. with scp:
```
scp edge-insights-<version>-linux-arm64.tar.gz <user>@<device-hostname-or-ip>:
```
On the device, extract the tarball and enter the extracted directory. It contains install.sh, uninstall.sh, dist/, and systemd/:
```
tar -xzf edge-insights-*-linux-*.tar.gz
cd edge-insights-*-linux-*
```
Run the installer with --start --access network --boot-autostart. It installs the stack into /opt/edge-insights, registers the systemd --user services, starts them immediately, makes the portal reachable over the network, and brings the stack back up after every reboot:
```
sudo ./install.sh --start --access network --boot-autostart
```
- --access network makes the portal reachable from other machines on the network. See Network access.
- --boot-autostart brings the stack up when the device boots, with nobody logged in, so it keeps recording on its own. See Starting at boot.
- Omit --start to install without starting. Start later with systemctl --user start analytics.target.
- Add --with-vcan to load the vcan kernel module during install. Useful for a virtual test bus when no CAN hardware is attached.
- Add --prefix <dir> to install somewhere other than /opt/edge-insights. Use it when the device's root filesystem is small and your storage is on another disk. Pass the same directory to uninstall.sh later.
Edge Insights is installed once and shared by every user on the device. What it records is stored per user, in ~/.local/share/edge-insights.
Open the portal from a browser on another machine on the same network:

http://<device-hostname-or-ip>:36300

On the device itself it is also available at http://localhost:36300. From there, select the CAN interface to capture and upload a DBC file to start decoding signals.

Reaching the device through a custom DNS name, a reverse proxy, or a tunnel instead of its hostname or IP needs an extra step: see The portal loads, but every save or upload fails.

Upgrade¶

Download the new tarball from Software Download and copy it to the device. Extract it and run the installer again. The installer remembers the --access and --boot-autostart choices from the previous install, so a plain re-run keeps the device configured the way it was:

sudo ./install.sh --start

An upgrade does not touch your data. If you installed with --prefix, pass it again.

Managing the stack¶

Start or stop everything:

systemctl --user start analytics.target
systemctl --user stop  analytics.target

Follow the logs:

journalctl --user -u 'analytics-*' -f --no-hostname -o short-iso

Network access¶

--access network binds the portal and the Grafana dashboards to all network interfaces, so you can reach them from another machine. Without it the portal is reachable only on the device itself, at localhost.

Use network access only on a trusted network. The portal has no login.

The installer remembers the choice, so you do not need to repeat the flag when you install again. To make the portal local to the device again:

sudo ./install.sh --access local

Starting at boot¶

Use the installer's --boot-autostart flag to start the stack at boot. Do not enable the services by hand:

sudo ./install.sh --boot-autostart

The installer remembers this choice, and --no-boot-autostart turns it off again. With it on, the CAN Settings page gains a Boot Autostart option that controls whether capture also starts, or only the portal. See CAN Settings.

Uninstall¶

sudo ./uninstall.sh

This stops the services and removes the installed program. It prompts before deleting your data, e.g. analytics database, uploaded DBC files, imported logs. To remove everything without prompting:

sudo ./uninstall.sh --purge

If you installed with --prefix, pass the same directory. Only the data of the user running the uninstaller is removed. Other users' data is kept.