Raspberry Pi setup for Android phones

Use your Raspberry Pi 4 to run tests on your Android phones. The images comes with the following pre installed:

• adb
• NodeJS
• Chromedriver and Geckodriver
• Gnirenhet so you can reverse the traffic from your phone back to your Raspberry Pi and throttle your connection
• scrcpy and vnc so you can watch the desktop on you Raspberry Pi from your computer
• sitespeed.io and dependencies to record a video

Install using the pre-made image

1. Download the pre-made image from releases.
2. Burn the image on a SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager.
3. Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi 4.
4. Connect your Raspberry Pi with your router through a Ethernet cable and turn on your Raspberry Pi.
5. Connect your phone to the Raspberry Pi through USB and “Allow USB debugging” on your phone in the popup.

When you checked that everything works you should change the SSH password and update sitespeed.io and NodeJS.

Log into the device

Use the user pi and password tearsofaclown to log into the device using SSH.

Change SSH login password

Login to the device and change the password to your new password using passwd.

Run tests

You can run the test on the phone:

sitespeed.io https://www.sitespeed.io --android

If you want to use the internet connection of your Rapsberry Pi and throttle it (in this example as a 4g network) you run your test like this:

sitespeed.io https://www.sitespeed.io --android --connectivity.engine throttle -c 4g --gnirehtet

Connect using vnc

On your Mac, open “Screen Sharing” and then use raspberrypi.local as the hostname and the password browsertime. You will then be able to see the Raspberry PI screen on your Mac.

On your Raspberry Pi you can start scrcpy (open a terminal and write scrcpy) and you will see the phone screen on the Raspberry Pi desktop.

Update your device

There's probably a newer version of sitespeed.io:

npm install -g sitespeed.io

There's also probably a newer version of NodeJS. Use latest LTS:

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install nodejs

Install from scratch

You can follow the instructions in the sitespeed.io documentation if you want to install the dependencies yourself.