[aprssig] Raspberry Pi (was:Where to buy new digipeater?)

[Jason KG4WSV]

Wow, that was almost as good as yelling "powerpole" in here.

I'm running raspbian.  My mistake on ubuntu; they're both derived from
debian, which led me to make an invalid assumption (I thought raspbian
was yet another ubuntu derivation).

I'm using a recommended power supply that's plugged in to a UPS and
not some random wall wart with the right connector, so power should be
good (but I haven't measured it).

The SD card is a sandisk, so that should be of reasonable quality as
well (although it came from scamazon, so I guess there's a slim chance
it's a counterfeit).

SD cards are not design for a large number of write cycles.  A class
experiment involving some disk IO benchmarks on a raspberry pi damaged
the (sandisk IIRC) SD cards.  If I wanted longevity and maximum
reliability, I'd probably configure the thing to be a read-only
filesystem, although that's a pain in the neck to deal with when
software update time rolls around (about every 10 minutes for linux).

I have not swapped out the hardware.

I have a hard time recommending a board that requires me to buy a
power supply board that costs as much as the original board in order
to make it reliable.

The pi's top 3 design priorities are:

1 - make it cheap
2 - make it cheap
3 - make it cheap

Because of this the pi lacks a reliable power supply.  In contrast
I've got a beaglebone black that runs 24x7 without trouble; it only
gets rebooted when it gets a major update.  The odroid XU4 we've been
using seems pretty solid as well, although the nature of the work does
not tell us anything about the uptime.  The XU4 also has an eMMC
module option, which is more expensive than uSD but faster and (so
far) more reliable.

I've handled a few hundred pis in the past few years, although that's
in a educational environment and this is the only unit I've put in a
situation where I expect 24x7x365 reliability.

As far as the millions of pis in use, well, there are many millions of
windows computers in use, and windows fails to meet my reliability
standards too.  Maybe I have a hardware problem, maybe I did something
wrong, but maybe I just expect more than the typical pi user?

Could be a software issue, too.

-Jason
kg4wsv