Getting Angular running on Raspberry Pi
I’ve been running my Lego Finder on a Raspberry Pi 3 I dubbed “Minitron”. It’s alright, keeps me notified when Lego adds sets to the store. But since I was getting into Angular and Typescript, I figured it would be nice to be able to run Angular projects on it as well.
So many failures
The Raspberry Pi runs on an ARM chip. Angular ain’t built like that. It’s typically run on x84 hardware. There are cases where people have gotten Angular 7, 8, and others running on a Raspberry Pi using embedded Angular. But Angular is up to version 15 and support only goes back to 13. And I did not possess the patience or wherewithal to work out all of the difference and kinks.
$100 to freedom
But you know what’s cheap these days? Silicon. I was able to get a decent mini x86 PC for about $100. It’s probably 3 times larger than the Raspberry Pi, but I’m ok with that. It came with Ubuntu, but because I love making things difficult for myself, I installed Slackware over it. Now I had a cheap, headless server ready to do my bidding.
Toolchains and services
Once that was done, I realized I could just throw everything on this. So I started with the thing I came here to do. I got Angular installed and set up. Created a test application just to make sure it would work.
Then I put Django on it as well, because that’s being used elsewhere and might as well to have somewhere I can check deployments.
Then I built a Dreamcast toolchain, figuring I could use it as a build/test machine.
All of this went pretty smoothly.
Finally, I wanted to transfer over the Lego Finder to the new machine.
MySql to PostgreSQL
As a final obstacle to myself, I also decided to run PostgreSQL on the mini PC as opposed to the MySQL instance running on the Raspberry PI. This involved changing the SQL of Lego Finder. Not a major issue as they both follow Python’s database interface API.
Final
Now I have a mini build/test PC that I can use to test out various projects and to build Dreamcast projects. It’s roughly three times the size of the Raspberry Pi, but not large enough to be an issue.