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So, I put my Pi on a custom quadcopter. I have a program that will track an object with a cam and send out pulse widths to control my motors. Anyway, right now I have to ssh into my Pi to run my executable. I am using a WiFi dongle to connect with ssh, but that thing is sucking a lot of current, so I need to get rid of it. I would like it to run my makefile executable on power up, instead of having to ssh in and run it each time I want to fly. I already have the Pi auto-logging in. The makefile is compiled and ready to go with sudo ./MyProg. Any thoughts?

elixenide
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nreich
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3 Answers3

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Put your command into the /etc/rc.local file. You don't have to use sudo because this file is run by init at boot time.

If you encounter problems doing this, see:

If the program is persistent (i.e., keeps on ticking) be certain to background it. If it does not have such a feature built in, use & at the end of the line. If you do not do this, likely your boot will snag for a bit then init will kill the process.

Community
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gurcanozturk
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You can just run sudo crontab -e and add the @reboot prefix to the command. For example if you wanted to run bash /home/pi/script.sh on boot, simply add @reboot bash /home/pi/script.sh to the end of your crontab file. Remember that crontab is user specific and may require sudo and a full path of execution.

Patrick Cook
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jeffresc
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For starting programs at boot time, another solution is to use systemd. This has the advantage of starting and stopping the program as well as just start on boot. A sample video tutorial illustrating how to use systemd is available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEuViHanjKI

There are also many other resources available by searching on "systemd".

Kolban
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