From a noob - Suggested modifications to Raspberry PI Gateway instructions

Yupo Wert

Hi,
Just fresh off the boat, enjoying the learning curve of getting CCTV feeds between my Hikvision NVR and Echo Show 5!

So far, your web pages are very well laid out, but I hit a few small speed bumps when slavishly following the HowTo steps on getting the Gateway onto a Raspberry Pi. Outside of following printed instructions, my Pi/Linux skills are next to ZERO.

So I thought, as a noob, who better to highlight a few (super small, yet time consuming) issues I came across.

Broken link to Raspberry Pi instructions from the download page
If you go to the download page: https://monoclecam.com/monocle-gateway/download and scroll down to the Raspberry Pi sections, it has a link to the Pi instructions (https://monoclecam.com/monocle-gateway/install/raspberrypi) however, clicking on that link, gets a 404 error. (“oh no! maybe the Pi isn’t supported anymore! - I should give up now!”)
The Correct link IS avail from the menu list on the left hand side (but you have to scroll back up to see it) https://monoclecam.com/monocle-gateway/install/linux-raspi
The Pi Gateway instructions do have a couple of issues (at least with my stock Pi3, using PUTTY SSH from Win10)

a) STEP 1 - The CURL command failed as it needed SUDO in front of it - this isn’t immediately obvious, as the clipboard copy/paste from your page auto launches the command, which appears to do ‘something’

b) STEP 3 - “move or copy it to the Monocle system configuration directory” - OK. NO IDEA.

I think you should continue on the “noobs gotta have precise instructions or they spin” vibe with something like…
i) SUDO NANO /etc/monocle/monocle.token
ii) Copy to clipboard the text from the web page popup token, and paste it into NANO (using right click or CTRL-whatever)
iii) CTRL-X, confirm to Save/Exit

c) STEP 5 - Please mention CTRL-C as how to drop back to prompt. To a non-linux-er, it is not intuitive. I eventually scrolled down the next few steps before finally reading about it at the end of step 7.

So far, that’s as far as I’ve got ! The gateway is INITIALIZED, so I’m off to explore the jungle of how to get a Hikvision NVR to hook up. I’ll let you know
Many thanks
Yupo

FineSir

@Yupo-Wert
The fact there is some steps in there which are left semi vague is good. It makes people think for themselves and try to learn a little bit of the fundamentals. I do agree it could be easier, however does it need to be?
My Linux skills are pretty lacklustre, I can edit text, create text files move files and other basic commands. I breezed thru the install of monocle cam.

Maybe they should link a guide on basic operation which would make some of they key points there meaningful before people dive in.