Guides
Product introductions, setup notes, and troubleshooting guides for ZPi Controller.
8posts
GuidesZPi ControllerZPi Controller pairs a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with a 4-input/4-relay board and runs .NET 9 plus Blazor on top. Part 1 walks through Modbus TCP/RTU, the browser rule editor, hosted user programs and the AI-generated operator HMI.
GuidesZPi ControllerBuild a full-screen industrial HMI for a Raspberry Pi PLC just by talking to Claude. The workflow lives inside the MCP tool description, and SSE auto-reload plus version rollback stay on the server side.
GuidesZPi ControllerConnecting a Raspberry Pi PLC to Claude Desktop should take one double-click. Getting there meant fighting encoding traps, cmd parser quirks, PowerShell escaping and three ways of launching Claude that did not work.
GuidesZPi ControllerA mistyped Modbus port that killed the web UI in an infinite restart loop, an avahi reload that keeps advertising the old hostname, and a C# regex replacement where $1 silently becomes $15 - with the broken and fixed code side by side.
GuidesZPi ControllerWiFi credentials that vanish after a reboot and a boot sequence that stalls for a full minute are both first-impression problems on a Raspberry Pi PLC. This is how we backed up credentials ourselves and dropped boot time to 33 s.
GuidesZPi ControllerMQTT as the top priority, WebSocket for a real live monitor, alarms and notifications, and ZViews the AI generates from a user program manifest. The v2 roadmap for this Raspberry Pi PLC and the closing post of the series.
GuidesZPi ControllerA single-page ZView, 10 KB of HTML, showing an upstream Modbus master driving four outputs and reading four inputs back. The bit matrix on screen catches byte swaps and wrong bit positions instantly.
GuidesZPi ControllerSeven posts on building an industrial controller out of a Raspberry Pi, collected on one page - from the hardware and the AI HMI through the debugging traps, boot time, and what comes next.
