Adventures with the PiStation Safe Shutdown feature

pistation-shutdown.txt

# The PiStation Case (for the Raspberry Pi 4)
# is a well built fun case, especially for those
# with a passion for retro-gaming consoles.
# Personally, I love it.
#
# - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pistation-case
#
# But installing the 'safe shutdown' feature may get you frustrated.
# The hardware's brilliant, but the shutdown script installation
# needs a little work. There are a number of
# issues the current installation script does not resolve: -
#
# - Needs Python and the RPi GPIO module (I use Python 3)
# - Coping with the lack of /etc/rc.local script
# - Broken shutdown behaviour
#
# I'm using an 8GiB RPi 4 Running a 64-bit Ubuntu (21.04).
# The SafeShutdown feature works, but this is what I had to do
# to get it to _actually_ work...

# 1. Get the shutdown script yourself

SourcePath=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroFlag/retroflag-picase/master
script=/opt/RetroFlag/SafeShutdown.py
wget -O $script "$SourcePath/SafeShutdown.py"

# 2. Install pip3 and the RPi.gpio module
#    (I already had python 3)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install python3-pip python3-rpi.gpio

# 3. Create your own rc.local
#    My ubuntu had no /etc/rc.local
#    This caused the script installation to fail anyway (it expects the file to exist)
#    So I just created it by hand with the following content
#
#    sudo python3 /opt/RetroFlag/SafeShutdown.py &

sudo vi /etc/rc.local
[...]
sudo chmod +x /etc/rc.local


# 4. Fix the shutdown script
#    The shutdown button reboots the Pi, it doesn't shut it down!
#
#    See https://github.com/RetroFlag/retroflag-picase/issues/125
#
#    Also, consider removing the calls to 'sudo sleep 5s'
#    in the reset and shutdown handlers in the script.
#    It just adds 5 seconds to the process - do you need that?

# 5. Reboot (to install the shutdown script for the next boot)

sudo shutdown -r now