I have a pi 4 running in the closet that hosts pi hole, Plex, Medusa, transmission, and a few other media acquisition solutions. All running with a simple docker-compose script.
My test for these types of projects is incident rate of my wife complaining about it acting up. So far, I only get an occasional “how come this ad isn’t working on Instagram?” ( :) ) or “where is my show that was on last night” ( :( )
It’s pretty crazy how reliable these little machines are for what you can apply them to. My only issue right now is Medusa seems to stall after a few days and require a restart of the container, and I haven’t been bothered to write a cron job to restart the docket compose nightly or even better, diagnosing and fixing the real problem. So I instead just Remote Desktop in every few days and restart things.
I've been running pi-hole for months. Haven't had a single issue since setting it up. I've never needed to restart it. I forget it even exists until my kid wants to disable it so he can watch ads to get some stuff in games faster, and I can do that from any device on the network.
I think I'm going to add what's needed to make it a print server too. Right now my oldest kids PC is the printer machine so we have to turn that on to print anything, which is a lot these days with 2 kids doing remote schooling.
That's one thing I'm glad I splurged on... I don't print very regularly, and with ink jets, the print heads invariably have dried up on me... for a while now, just been using HP color laser printers with wired networking (they have wireless, but it doesn't work well). Pretty much every device detects it on the network and sets up without issue.
Now if only google could put printing options back into Android.
What do advertising-required websites like business insider look like with pi hole? Do they still allow browsing? With ad block on opera for example I am forbidden from browsing with a "it looks like you're using an ad blocker" page.
I actually don't use the pi-hole on my device because I don't run ad supported apps and I use FireFox with uBlock Origin to browse. It's mostly to keep my 4yo for getting blasted with app ads, he doesn't browse. So it's great for that purpose but note that it doesn't work on YouTube ads, they do something that makes it impossible (without also blocking YouTube).
I know you can add exceptions through the admin page but it's a bit tedious. If I did use it on my own devices, I would never add exceptions. In fact, if a site like that comes up too much in my general browsing, and I find myself accidentally visiting it, I add them to a custom plugin I have that removes links to them from any page. For example, I never see links to facebook, instagram, twitter, linkedin, forbes, wsj. Anything popular with a pay, sign-up, or anti-adblocker wall. I've done it for years now and I don't miss any of the sites I've added.
I was also surprised at their reliability. I had a Model 1 B+ running in a dusty closet with an uptime of almost three years before I finally shut it down.
Some people would process their most critical files on their cell phone if you let them. These devices have non-ECC memory, thermal concerns (that can result in component failure at the worst moment), SD card connector issues and the big one vulnerability to static and dust due to the numerous horsepucky enclosures. That said, they can be great for media, I/O (erm, IoT) controllers, and compute servers (on non mission-critical data, like analyzing pedestrian traffic but not like recalculating the b-tree on a database containing life/business data). Of course, the Sun could always go back into another 10 year period of decreasing CME’s ..not that the technicians promoting anecdotal would realize lol
Your comment is very difficult to understand...are you suggesting people could repurpose cell-phones for projects you would normally run on a raspberry pi?
I think the pi's are great for learning Linux, ARM, and to and extent embedded hardware. I had a cluster of them running in role-based configurations for various services at home (pi-hole for DNS, plex server, bastion host, LibreNMS for monitoring, etc).
I recently migrated everything to a single ESXi host because I wanted to dabble in virtualization (and have a tidy server rack) - but I am forever grateful for how easy and enjoyable they made learning.
The wind speed, wind direction, and rain amount sensors used in the personal weather station are pretty cool. They contain no active electronics.
The wind speed sensor uses a magnet and a reed switch. Once per revolution the magnet passes over the switch, momentarily tripping it.
Pull up a GPIO, hook it to one side of the switch, hook the other to ground, and then just count the pulses you see on the GPIO. Wind speed is proportional to pulse rate.
The rain gauge also uses a magnet and reed switch. It has a collection cup mounted on a pivot. When empty it rests tilted to one side, with half of the cup below the pivot and half above, with the two halves separated by a barrier so that water cannot flow between them. The water falls over the center of the cup, and the geometry is such that it ends up on the high side of the cup.
When enough rain accumulates in the high side, it causes the cup to pivot to that side. The cup is shaped so that water cannot remain in the low side, and so the full former high side drains, leaving the cup empty. The other side is now the high side, and starts filling, leading to an eventual pivot back, and the cycle repeats.
It pivots after 0.011 inches of rain. During the pivoting the magnet passes the reed switch. Hook it to a GPIO just like with the wind speed sensor, count the pulses, multiply by 0.011, and you've got inches of rain.
The wind direction sensor also uses a magnet and reed switches. It has 8 reed switches arranged around a circle, evenly spaced. The magnet is on the arm that points in the wind direction, arranged so that as the arm rotates it passes over the reed switches.
The magnet is powerful enough and/or the reed switches are sensitive enough that the magnet does not have to be right over the switch to trip it. It can be a little the side. This distance is great enough that you can actually have two switches tripped at once. As the arm rotates, the pattern you see is a single switch is tripped, then that switch and one of its nearest neighbors are both tripped, then the first switch opens but the neighbor remains closed. As it continues to rotate, that neighbor and the next one past it will both be closed for a bit, then the first neighbor opens.
By looking at which of the eight switches are closed, you can tell which of 16 directions is closes to the one the the wind is coming from one.
The reed switches are all wired in parallel, each in series with a different value resistor. You can tell which switch or switches are closed by measuring the resistance. For example, supply a constant voltage to one side of the sensor, hook the other to a known resistance, and use an ADC to measure the voltage across that known resistance. You can then calculate the resistance from the closed switches and their resisters, and see what combination of switches must be closed to produce that resistance.
The link given in the article on building the weather station that points to Argent Data Systems to buy the sensors gives a product not found message. You can get very similar sensors at Sparkfun [1].
I was going to say you could get the same sensors at Sparkfun, because that is where I got mine, but the ones I bought were these [2], which is listed as retired, with an updated version available which is the one I linked to above.
The difference? The older version appears to actually be from Argent. The datasheet says Argent Data Systems. I'm not sure Argent actually made them, because the Argent data sheet says "Imported by Argent Data Systems".
The newer version's datasheet says "Shenzhen Fine Offset Electronics Co., Ltd", and is in metric (rain gauge tips at 0.2794mm), and has both English and Chinese text.
I wonder of Shenzhen Fine Offset Electronics is the original maker that Argent imported from, and Sparkfun just switched to importing them itself?
Comparing the Chinese text to the translated English text in the Shenzhen datasheet is interesting. For the rain guage, the Chinese text says 0.3mm, which would be 0.0118". This suggests it might even be that Shenzhen made this originally for Argent, designed for US measurements, so it is 0.011", that got converted to metric (0.2794mm) in Shenzhen's English documentation, then rounded to 0.3mm in Shenzhen's Chinese documentation. Or, it was designed to be 0.3mm, that got converted to 0.011" (although it should have been 0.012" as the correct result is a tad over 0.0118") in the Argent documentation, and Shenzhen for some reason decided to go with that but convert to metric in their English documentation, instead of using the correct 0.3mm?
Another interesting difference in the Chinese and the English: the wind speed sensor Chinese documentation contains 0.33m/s. The English documentation says 2.4km/h, which it says is the wind speed that will cause the switch to close once per second. The Argent document says "1.492 MPH (2.4 km/h)". The things is, 2.4km/h is 0.667m/s, not 0.33m/s.
Do they measure frequencies per half-second rather than per second in China for this kind of thing? I can't think of any reasonable way to explain that factor of 2.
Another good project is to run a liveatc.net feed. Check the site to see if your local airport has a feed, they're all run by volunteers. You can use an RTL-SDR dongle (with https://github.com/szpajder/RTLSDR-Airband) or an audio input source such as a USB audio input dongle or https://fe-pi.com/products/fe-pi-audio-z-v2 (when they're back in stock). To find the frequencies to program in, you can use https://www.airnav.com/airports/. Older Raspberry Pi's will handle the compression + streaming just fine and streamer clients never connect directly to your pi.
My test for these types of projects is incident rate of my wife complaining about it acting up. So far, I only get an occasional “how come this ad isn’t working on Instagram?” ( :) ) or “where is my show that was on last night” ( :( )
It’s pretty crazy how reliable these little machines are for what you can apply them to. My only issue right now is Medusa seems to stall after a few days and require a restart of the container, and I haven’t been bothered to write a cron job to restart the docket compose nightly or even better, diagnosing and fixing the real problem. So I instead just Remote Desktop in every few days and restart things.