Tile Management

Repository

• Main automation repo: https://github.com/techtile-by-dramco/ansible

What It Does

The Tile Management Ansible stack manages day-to-day operations for Techtile Raspberry Pi nodes and related services:

• Host reachability checks (ping playbooks).
• Batch command execution on tile groups (run_cmd pattern).
• OS/package updates across selected tiles (apt-upgrade.yaml).
• Controlled reboot and shutdown of tiles (shutdown.yaml with action_to_take).
• UHD/USRP software setup (main-uhd.yaml).
• FPGA image deployment on attached USRP devices (load-fpga-image.yaml).
• PoE power control logic tied to midspan + PoE port mappings (power-ctrl.py with SNMP-based control helpers).

Inventory Model

The inventory defines host/group organization and is designed for selective rollouts:

• Role-style groups: server, tests, fail, multiON.
• Spatial groups: wallEast, wallWest, floor, ceiling.
• Segment groups: segmentA through segmentG.
• Aggregate groups: rpis and walls.

Operationally, each tile host entry is associated with:

• Tile DNS/hostname (for example rpi-a01.local).
• Midspan identifier (for example midspan-009).
• Midspan PoE port number.

This mapping is what enables targeted power operations and physical troubleshooting by tile name.

Typical Operations

Operation	Playbook/Entry Point	Example
Check connectivity	general/ping.yaml	ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yaml general/ping.yaml --extra-vars "tiles=segmentA"
Run command on tiles	general/run_cmd.yaml	ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yaml -l rpis general/run_cmd.yaml -e "cmd='uname -a'"
Upgrade packages	tiles/apt-upgrade.yaml	ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yaml tiles/apt-upgrade.yaml -e "tiles=ceiling"
Shutdown or reboot	tiles/shutdown.yaml	ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yaml tiles/shutdown.yaml -e "tiles=G01 action_to_take=reboot timeout_seconds=0"
Install/update UHD stack	tiles/main-uhd.yaml	ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yaml tiles/main-uhd.yaml -e "tiles=floor"
Load USRP FPGA image	tiles/load-fpga-image.yaml	ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yaml tiles/load-fpga-image.yaml -e "tiles=segmentB"

Operational Notes

• Group-targeted execution is the default pattern; avoid broad all runs unless intentionally planned.
• ansible.cfg is tuned for high fan-out (forks=200, SSH pipelining enabled) to handle many tile nodes in parallel.
• Some helper scripts use ansible_runner for scripted operations from the server side.
• Keep SNMP and login secrets outside docs and out of committed plaintext.