[aprssig] Raspberry Pi (was:Where to buy new digipeater?)
Ken Koster
n7ipb at wetnet.net
Wed Sep 19 14:33:38 EDT 2018
On Wednesday, September 19, 2018 9:35:10 AM PDT Jason KG4WSV wrote:
> Wow, that was almost as good as yelling "powerpole" in here.
Fun stuff :-)
> 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 think there is an Ubuntu distro for the pi but I've never tried it or anything other than
raspian.
> 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).
Same here, from same source. So far no problems.
> 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 generally make a few of the filesystems into ram disks and I don't worry about the logs
getting wiped on a reboot. One of my friends, Curt WE7U, made up a pi for APRS use and
went to the extreme of finding everything that did a write and either eliminated them or
pointed them at a ram disk. To extreme for me.
> 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.
I can understand that but that extra hardware (seem my last post about the UPS) gives me a
ton of features I make use of.
> 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.
They're all good too, I have at least one of each.
> 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.
Lets not even go there, I never voluntarily used it, never will.
> Maybe I have a hardware problem, maybe I did something
> wrong, but maybe I just expect more than the typical pi user?
>
The biggest thing I see is users not properly shutting down the pi or expecting cheap small
SD cards to work well. I don't think you're one of those.
> Could be a software issue, too.
That's always a concern.
> -Jason
> kg4wsv
--
Ken - N7IPB
Email: n7ipb at wetnet.net
JID: n7ipb at jabber.wetnet.net
SvxLink Repeaters: http://pnw220.wetnet.net
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