PPP installer for Sixfab Shield/HAT

Photo by Gilles Rolland-Monnet on Unsplash

Sixfab offers HATs for Raspberry Pi which provides cellular PPP Internet connection anywhere with the availability of mobile network coverage. These HATs are:

1. Raspberry Pi 3G/4G&LTE Base HAT
2. Raspberry Pi Cellular IoT HAT
3. Raspberry Pi Cellular IoT Application Shield

PPP is a data layer communication protocol that is established through the serial port of the modem. These Serial port communications could be either the UART(/dev/ttyS0) or the serial exposed to USB(/dev/ttyUSB3). This serial is also used for both modem commands (AT commands) and responses. This connection is established by dial-up (ATD*99#).

PPP is easy to establish, widely used protocol, and it is flexible with the devices. PPP may show a drop of the connection while using the AT command set for other functionality of modem. The PPP protocol is just used between the computer and the modem to make the connection look like a legacy dial-up modem-based network connection.

Hardware Setup

It is important to properly setup your hardware before you get started. To setup the hardware please follow:

• Raspberry Pi 3G/4G & LTE Base HAT – Getting Started
• Raspberry Pi Cellular IoT HAT – Getting Started
• Raspberry Pi Cellular IoT App Shield – Getting Started

Each of these Shields/HATs can be connected to the Internet via PPP(Point to Point Protocol). For this tutorial, we have developed a script to install and perform the required steps.

Without further ado let us jump into the installation process.

Software Setup

During Standalone installation, all source files are downloaded from the internet. It is enough to download ppp_install_standalone.sh and run it.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sixfab/Sixfab_PPP_Installer/master/ppp_install_standalone.sh
sudo chmod +x ppp_install_standalone.sh
sudo ./ppp_install_standalone.sh

You will be offered to choose among the mentioned shields/HATs. Then it will fetch the required scripts for you. 

Base HAT and Super SIM were used in the tutorial.

During the installation, the user will need to answer several questions, in order to complete the installation process. The questions are:

Please choose your Sixfab Shields/HATs
You will be offered to choose among the mentioned shields/HATs. Then it will fetch the required scripts for you.

What is your carrier APN?
It will then ask for APN. Type in your APN and then press ENTER. For me, it is super.

Does your carrier need username and password?

Enter your communication PORT name
In this step, you will enter your PORT. Please see Table 1.

Do you want to activate auto-connect/reconnect service at Raspberry Pi boot up?
This option allows you to connect to the Internet via your HAT automatically when your Raspberry Pi starts.

If you want to connect to the Internet automatically type y or N. If you have selected N then you will need to run sudo pon to connect to the internet and sudo poff to stop it. Make sure your module is powered up.

​ Enjoy your internet connection

Managing the Connection Manager Service

To check if the service is active you can type.

To stop your reconnect service, type:

sudo systemctl stop ppp_connection_manager.service

To start the reconnect service when it is stopped, type:

sudo systemctl start ppp_connection_manager.service

By default, the reconnect service is configured to start automatically when the server boots. If this is not what you want, you can disable this behavior by typing:

sudo systemctl enable ppp_connection_manager.service

To re-enable the service to start up at boot, you can type:

sudo systemctl enable reconnect.service

Uninstall

If you are using auto-connect/reconnect service, stop the service and disable it.

sudo systemctl stop ppp_connection_manager.service
sudo systemctl disable ppp_connection_manager.service

Then delete the files.

sudo rm -r /opt/sixfab/ppp_connection_manager

Credential

If your carrier asks for username and password;
Remove noauth from /etc/ppp/peers/provider and add the following lines.

user “YOUR USERNAME”

password “YOURPASSWORD”

APN or device port

You can change APN and PORT from /etc/ppp/peers/provider.

Table 1. Selecting Port

To understand PPP further you can check PPP documentation.

If you have the Thales mini PCIe products we recommend using their pppd tutorial.

Troubleshooting

We recommend to go through the section on troubleshooting as it covers the more common issues with establishing and maintaining a network connection. Please check the troubleshooting of your shield/HAT.