Connecting via windows laptop to rpi4 to add utilities to volumio

Help and Support
#1

Success & Failure

I loaded volumio onto a rpi4, installed my music library onto an SSD attached to the RPI4 and using the native volumio hot spot managed to get music out of my speakers all under the perfect control of my android phone. Its perfect for me until this point. In order to modify my library and get it back onto the pi I had to keep removing my SSD and rebooting volumio. I did use the shutdown control but my PC keeps reporting my SSD has a problem and repairs it for me, I do not know how to mount and unmount a drive in volumio because I cannot get a connection from my laptop to my rpi4. I do not have a router or a wired network. I live off my phone and with its hotspot I have wifi throught the house. I have tried every possible way to raise a terminal window on my lap top to tinker with the internal code of volumio but without a connection it is impossible. Volumio recognises my phone hotspot and when I look at the wifi network from my laptop I can see that volumio, my laptop and the hotspot are all working. I have been able to control volumio from my laptop to select & play music. When I tell volumio my wifi and password then I lose connectivity from my spare simless mobile phone which I use as a remote but I retain connectivity from my hot spot mobile phone, then I lose connectivity from my PC. I have reinstalled volumio half a dozen times. Really all I want is to have my laptop connect to my rpi4 then use a terminal window to move files between pi and windows 10 machine. Any help would be appreciated.

#2

WINSCP will help between pc and rpi
But without a router / hub it’s not eazy to talk over a network.
But you say there is wifi in the house you could use that as your network
Both need to be in the same network to be able to talk over the wifi

#3

If I plug in a RJ45 network cable to the pi and my notebook, I can access the Volumio GUI by entering http://volumio.local in a browser using Win10, ensure that the ethernet configuration on your windows machine is set to automatically get an ip-address.
Maybe disable wifi before, once connected you can enable it again.

Enter http://volumio.local/dev to enable ssh-connections, then you can connect via WINSCP (a freely downloadable tool) like dvo mentioned above, using volumio/volumio as user/pass.

This is all possible also using wifi, but on first connect I prefer and advise using a wired connection.

#4

Phil is this a normal network cable or a cross?

#5

Thank you for your advice but nothing works. I think the problem is that I do not have a router or an internet connection. I am experiencing the same problem with OMV. Like many people today I do not need ethernet in my house and I do not need a landline internet connection. My mobile phone does everything including acting as a successful router for my windows laptop (ethernet free) and my rpi4 when running with a gui. My phone hotspot shows that volumio is connected but two ip tracking software pakages installed on my laptop no longer show volumio as being part of my hotspot network following a reboot in headless mode. I installed OMV directly onto my rpi4 after also upgrading the OS over my telephone wifi. After a successful OMV install raspberrypi was no longer displayed by my pc network tracking software. Unless I can use my pi in headless mode via my telephone hotspot it is worthless to me which is a pity because it has so many useful features. At least volumio can be read if it is run with its own access point ebabled.

#6

a normal, never needed a crossover in the past 10 years of networking.

#7

Mike,

maybe I’m missing something, but when you can connect your laptop to your pi via the volumio hotspot, then you can also connect to it using winscp. you do not need to mount anything, your usb-ssd is already mounted to /media/

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Before using winscp you need to enable ssh on volumio.
To do so navigate in a browser to the dev-page and click the enable-button.

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#8

Use ip of the pi to connect instead of volumio.local
Go to network look your ip up here.
And i advice a static ip instead of dhcp (so you know what you will get )
Otherwise you have to change it all the time.

#9

good point!

#10

SUCCESS - have a virtual pint on me.
Thank you. I was going round in circles. Anyway just for the record I was always trying to get a wifi connection via my smartphone hotspot and use WinSCP. Maybe I should have got there sooner. Trying the ethernet direct cable connection between 2 machines did not seem to work. Solving 2 problems at the same time is confusing. but my process changed as follows:
0. Forget wifi, use the default volumio WAP unless I get a router with wifi and ethernet and make a rpi4 NAS.

  1. Use Chomium not firefox as a browser
  2. Use IP address not volumio.local etc
  3. In volumio set failover reboot to volumio WAP if wifi not found
  4. After burning SD add an empty file called SSH to it (maybe not needed)
  5. I struggled in WinSCP a bit but eventually found how to mount my SSD from within the commands above the right panel to drag and drop files from laptop to pi.
  6. In /dev I found SSH enable/disable buttons but I expected one to highlight and the other to grey out but that did not happen - but the log lower down the page showed the result of my key presses
  7. reboot rpi to ensure that changes took place
  8. helpful software to diagnose the wifi problem was “wireless network watcher”, helpful software to sort out ripping CDs to Flac was “exact audio copy”, “mp3tag” and “easytag”
#11

Great things worked out well : )
Volumio is really cool, and worth some efforts.

#12

You can’t mount a ssd in winscp, all external drives like an usb-stick or a ssd-harddrive are mounted at boot time on the pi, You’ll find them in the media-folder, located in the root directory.

In Winscp hit the tree button, to split the right window in a directory tree section at the top, and a file section down below. This helps to get used to the directory structure of Volumio.

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