System services#

Cinemate uses three system services for its operation.

cinemate-autostart.service#

Responsible for autostart of Cinemate on boot. By default, it is turned off on the downloadable image file.

Starting in v3.2 the service now waits for the camera sensor to come online before launching the UI. The helper script /usr/local/bin/camera-ready.sh polls cinepi-raw --list-cameras for up to 30 seconds and logs progress to the systemd journal so Cinemate does not start with a black screen if the IMX sensor is still initialising.

Starting, stopping, enabling and disabling the service#

Go to the Cinemate folder:

cd cinemate

make install   # copy service file
make enable    # start on boot
make start     # launch now
make stop      # stop it
make status    # check status
make disable   # disable autostart
make clean     # remove the service

The make install step also copies camera-ready.sh into /usr/local/bin/ with execute permissions so that the systemd unit can call it from ExecStartPre.

To start Cinemate manually, anywhere in the cli, type cinemate.

storage-automount.service#

Storage-automount is a systemd service that watches for removable drives and mounts them automatically. The accompanying Python script reacts to udev events and the CFE-HAT eject button so drives can be attached or detached safely.

It understands ext4, ntfs and exfat filesystems. Partitions labelled RAW are mounted at /media/RAW; any other label is mounted under /media/<LABEL> after sanitising the name. This applies to USB SSDs, NVMe drives and the CFE-HAT slot.

To manually install and enable the service:

cd cinemate/services/storage-automount

sudo make install
sudo make enable

You can stop or disable it later with:

sudo make stop
sudo make disable

wifi-hotspot.service#

Wifi-hotspot keeps a small access point running with the help of NetworkManager so you can always reach the web interface. The SSID and password are read from /home/pi/cinemate/src/settings.json under system.wifi_hotspot.

Install and enable it with:

cd cinemate/services/wifi-hotspot

sudo make install
sudo make enable

As with storage-automount, you can stop or disable the hotspot with

` make stop make disable