Monitor your Network Quality with a Raspberry Pi ORB Sensor

Hi everyone. It's Emmet’s from Pi My Life Up. In this video, we'll be showing you how to set your Raspberry Pi up as an Orb sensor. Orb is a network monitoring tool that tracks various aspects of your network's performance. In particular, it tracks three different elements. The first is the speed of your network. This is the download and upload speed that the device is currently capable of. Second is the responsiveness of your network between both your router and your ISP. Showing both the latency to your router and your ISP allows you to better analyze what is going wrong with your network. The third metric that Orb tracks is the reliability of your network. This simply checks whether your network is available or not. All three of these metrics are combined to create what they call the Orb score. This score gives you an idea of roughly how your network is performing. The Raspberry Pi is a fantastic device to operate as an Orb sensor as it is very low powered, which means you can keep it running without having to stress about power bills. Additionally, if you want to track something such as Wi-Fi performance, they're much easier to place around in various rooms compared to other devices. For example, you could set up a Raspberry Pi in a multi-level home on each floor. You can then use this to investigate whether the different floors are causing an issue with your Wi-Fi performance. Please note to install the Orb sensor, you will need to be running a 64 bit operating system on your Raspberry Pi. This also means you'll need to be running Raspberry Pi three or newer. The one downside to orb is that you do require their app to be able to get the data. At the time of publishing this app, supports Windows, Mac OS, Android, and iOS. Before we set up the orb sensor, you will need to create an orb account and set up the app on one of these devices. We will leave a link in the description where you can find the download for your chosen operating system. In our case, we already have Orb installed onto our Mac device. Here you have three different options. The first is to sign in using an existing orb account. The second is to create an account, and the third is to skip the account process entirely. The advantage of using an orb account is that you can easily monitor your network even when you aren't around it. For this example, we will be clicking the Create Account button and following the prompts. Depending on the operating system that you're installing Orb to, you may be asked to give it location and network access. Follow the prompts to give it these permissions. Orb needs this information to be able to monitor your network and also find other Orb sensors, that are on the same network. Once done, click the choose Preferences button. On this next screen, you'll be able to give this orb a name. We'll be sticking with the default value. You can also add this orb as a favorite if you wanted. Once you're happy with what you have selected, click the next button. This final screen will give you an overview of how Orb works and how it calculates its score. Once you're ready to proceed, click the Let's Go button. Now that you have the Orb Desktop app installed, we can finally move on to setting up the Orb sensor on our Raspberry Pi. With the terminal open on our Raspberry Pi, the first thing we will want to do is update the package list cache by typing sudo apt update and pressing enter. Once that is completed, upgrade any out of date packages by typing sudo apt upgrade space hyphen y and then press enter. Once the update is process completed, we'll need to ensure that the curl package is installed by typing sudo apt install curl space, hyphen y, and then enter. With curl now installed, we can finally move on to adding the official Orb sensor repository to our Raspberry Pi. This helps ensure that we will always have access to the latest available version. Let us start by adding the GPG key for this repository by typing curl space. Hyphen f s capital L space https colon forward slash pkgs dot orb dot net slash orb forge dot noarmor dot gpg. Space pipe symbol space sudo space tee space slash usr slash share slash keyrings slash orbforge

hyphen keyring dot gpg space greater than symbol slash dev slash. null. And then finally press enter. Now add the orb repository itself by typing curl space hyphen f s capital L space https colon forward slash pkgs dot net slash stable slash Debian dot orbforge hyphen. Keyring dot list space pipe symbol space sudo space tee space slash etc slash apt slash. Sources. Dot list dot d slash orb dot list With the repository now added, we need to update the package list case again. This will ensure that our Raspberry Pi will know that it can install the Orb sensor. You can perform this update by typing sudo apt update. All we need to do now to install the orb sensor is to simply type in sudo space apt space, install space orb space hyphen y and then press enter. Once the orb is installed, it will automatically begin monitoring your network from your Raspberry Pi. You should now be able to start seeing this data through the orb app. However, before we do that, there is one more thing we need to do. To get the orb sensor to automatically update itself every day type in sudo space systemctl space enable space hyphen now space orb hyphen update dot timer and then press enter. With that all now done, you can now open up the orb app and link your Raspberry Pi Orb sensor to your account. Here you can see that orb has automatically detected the Raspberry Pi that is on our home network. To link it, all we need to do is simply click the link to my account link. After linking your Raspberry Pi Orb sensor, it should now appear under the “Your Orbs” header. You can see the score that is automatically being generated for your device. To get more detailed information that your sensor is collecting, simply click it On this page you can see the score being generated for the responsiveness, reliability, and speed of your internet connection. Scores are generated individually for each of these and then you are given an overall value, which is your orb score. The higher the value, the better your network connection is. Your orb sensor will continue to gather data and send it to your orb account. If you liked this guide on setting up orb on your Raspberry Pi, be sure to give us a thumbs up and subscribe! Until next time, have a good one!