I'm curious about how you did this:
"All I need to do to get River5 installed was to download the files from github and upload them to the pi with scp. I then unzipped them went into the folder and ran these two commands:
npm install
node river5.js ..."

I can’t figure out how to transfer folders from the river5-master to the raspi with scp. IMHO scp is just for files and not for folders. Have you copied files ‚flatly‘ (without the folders) to the raspi? Thx for suggestions on email.