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Malcolm XML
Aug 8, 2009

I always knew it would end like this.

fishmech posted:

Well what the Pi is, is a cheap smartphone design from the mid-2000s. And in fact, it's not uncommon for smartphone and featurephone designs to still work this way, to actually boot in the GPU and then start up a conventional ARM CPU.

Nope the pi is a broadcom set top box that has an arm core stapled on and eben Upton still works for brcm and he lead development on vc4

He took the easy way out and it's only now that Linux is getting upstream drivers


Although it is why the pi has a decent HDMI out and video processing for such a lovely processor

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Police Automaton
Mar 17, 2009
"You are standing in a thread. Someone has made an insightful post."
LOOK AT insightful post
"It's a pretty good post."
HATE post
"I don't understand"
SHIT ON post
"You shit on the post. Why."

General_Failure posted:

How did you measure the wattage savings, or was it calculated based off known consumption values.

Measured it, around here you can borrow such devices for free from your utility company, but you can also buy them, they don't cost that much (around 20 eurobucks) and they're pretty accurate and will be at least in the general ballpark of what the device uses. Watching a computer triple it's power consumption when loading up a game really makes you think about consumption. (careful though, lots of these cheap meters get inaccurate at very high or low wattage because of how they're built) I found it very hard to get reliable numbers of what specific hardware components use because it varies and the manufacturers are not especially forthcoming with that information for some parts besides some marketing low idle numbers and TDP which also doesn't tell you the whole story.

Power consumption in general is also why old computers who still do fine often sadly aren't really worth it anymore. Of course you can also factor cost of the computer and general energy used to produce it/get it to you(those trucks and planes and even the computers at the logistics company need energy too)/dispose of it in (if you care about the Environment) and actually still get ahead but even justifying them that way gets harder and harder with advancements. Lots of people are still very attached to their PowerPCs and if they are because they just enjoy working with what they got more power to them but you shouldn't fool yourself that you're saving money.

quote:

I see what you mean. I agree totally. I was thinking more in terms of usability rather than functionality. I can't really comment on memory protection beyond accidentally causing a lot of segfaults when I was working on gaining direct access to GPIO. I goofed a few pointers and misunderstood how to pass data to registers for calling SWIs. I guess it doesn't have much. Another thing that's bad for a modern OS but good for tinkerers.

Well it's a big no-no for everything that's facing the internet. That being said I don't think the russians and chinese are looking into RiscOS 0day exploits that much, but hey, if that system ever got any market share I'm sure they would.

quote:

Might I suggest an older Pi with built in ethernet and USB ports? The Zero would be fine if you don't mind having a hub and either not having a network connection or getting an adaptor that works with it.

I'm not really thinking about networking it if I do. Mostly that's the price I can justify for playing around and it's just so tiny to put somewhere. The earlier Pis at least around here haven't budged in price one bit. They sometimes do around the time a new Pi is released, but then go back to their usual price fairly quickly. Quite crazy actually.

quote:

Energy efficiency is always a sticky topic.
...
By the way I'm typing this on the Pi.

I'm typing this on the small Kabini which is really impressive for the 45 bucks I paid for it. (Well, I ended up paying more, further stuff below)

Small trip report here: I wanted to give FreeBSD a go after not having been exposed to a *BSD in I'd say decades, (and the short stint on the Pi) sadly the GPU isn't supported at all and for desktop usage that was a dealbreaker. I went with Gentoo (yeah, yeah I know. Force of habit really, I've been using a gentoo desktop for about a decade now) and helped the APU (which can quite hold itself on this front really) via distcc with the 5820k so that all the compiling at the beginning would go a bit quicker. Firefox, which is also such a habit-thing since the Netscape days, has become more and more unusuable (they do not care about Linux) and bloaty and was not fun to use on this Kabini at all. Very slow javascript-execution and further general nonsensical slowdowns which I can only guess my much stronger i7 just bruteforced, even though the experience wasn't always exactly snappy there either. You could sort of watch how firefox managed to choke one CPU at 100% while the others just sat there and watched, at the most inappropriate of times sometimes even. (browser just sitting there with me doing nothing) I then installed Chromium which is a difference of night and day, really. Browsing feels snappy and not much slower than on my 5820k and the load average with Chromium running is much lower. My lightweight daily programs I use work just as well here too. It's even enough for some games and emulation if you like to play the classics. If you don't mind Windows you'll also get excellent performance with Win10.

I made the experience that the Kabini cares a lot about memory bandwitdh and will be affected noticeably by it, so if considering such a build it's worth it to get the fastest DDR3 memory supported possible. It's also DDR3L compatible. I ended up buying 8 GB (more than plenty) DDR3L-1600 memory. I could bump the voltage down to 1.25V and still tighten the memory timings a bit, memtest-approved and all. You can drive multiple screens but at least on this ASRock QC5000-ITX board using the Displayport and the HDMI-port at the same time isn't supported, which leaves one DVI Port and one VGA port. I have hooked it up to my 1440p Dell via DisplayPort. It's shared memory and I gave the GPU 512 MB, which according to radeontop never gets more than 75% full with my average usage. Contrary to what you can read online, it supports 1080p Vids @60 FPS in hardware decoding very well and probably can even do more on that front but I didn't look into it because it's all I need.

My board is passively cooled but you want to connect a fan somewhere in the vicinity for those hot summer months, just to move the warm air away a bit. My advice is getting the biggest fan possible and just let it rotate very slowly, that way it won't make any noticeable noise at all. The fan settings in the firmware are a bit anemic, maybe there's a way to reach the IO chip from linux with the lm-sensors package (worked with my 5820k board) to turn the fan(s) off depending on temperature but I didn't look into it at all. The APU supports AES-NI which means hardware accelerated encryption.

Power consumption with one fan and one SSD hovers between 19W and 24W, depending on how much the APU is doing and that number also makes sense with the available data of the components (lets ignore the power efficiency because I'm lazy), which puts it in the ballpark of a HD6450 graphics card and also undercuts pretty much every old machine you might get from eBay in that price range with comparable performance efficency-wise.

I'm writing all this because people in this thread tend to go for the Pi to get a low-power computer, while there are alternatives that aren't expensive and do better. This Kabini will still race circles around every Pi while generally having much better software support and lots of perks the Pi can only dream of. (SATA, PCIe, USB 3.0 etc.) Even completely with case and anything, if you'd really go shopping I bet you could put one together for maybe ~130 eurobucks, maybe even lower if you get some parts for a bargain on eBay for example. (or still have lying around like I did) Or you get one of those crazy cheap deals you get with Newegg, I don't know, I don't have access to such things over here. Of course you have to pick your usage scenario around the available performance and pick your software carefully, but such is life with the Pi too.

It's a cool, very silent and an incredibly cheap (I stayed below 90 Euros, I'm not sure what the Pi2 ended up running for me but it can't be much less) machine that I'll turn into my daily driver (and turn my 5820k into a on-demand VM/gaming/etc. server-thing and also move it somewhere else where I can't hear it) and I'm glad I bought it. You hear such things about the Pi too, while you read a lot of frustration when googling the Kabini. The reason for that is that the people are aware what they get themselves into when they buy a Pi, while many people venting about the Kabini online are frustrated because it can't do what a $2000 gaming rig does. Of course there are other computers, some better, some also more expensive. It's generally just a thing to consider that they exist.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE
Kabini is pretty awesome for what it is. It's not a powerhouse in the x86 world but it smokes ARM boards. My only complaints are that very few boards expose its ECC RAM capability (only the ASUS AM1M-A) and that it only has 2 onboard SATA channels so for fileserver use you'll need SATA expansion cards. You can put together a complete system for like $150 total, absurd value for the money. My system pulls like 25W total and I think I could get that down further with a PicoPSU unit.

Baytrail motherboards and single-board computers are pretty great too. Although Atom does not support ECC nor AES-NI crypto acceleration.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

The thing about the Pi is that the OS, the GPIO etc are very very well documented, and everything just loving works the first time around. I have a CHIP and an Orange Pi PC and two or three beagle bone blacks, but all my projects run on on a Pi unless it absolutely requires more power. Integrating gpio, i2c on a Pi is a snap and all the robotics frameworks work out of the box on it.

If I need a cheap PC there's always an Intel compute stick.

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

Twerk from Home posted:

Isn't the primary driver of this open source reasons? They really don't want a GPU that needs a binary proprietary firmware blob.

If it were, or if it becomes so, they'd be going with an Adreno because those have been reverse engineered and there actually is an open source driver for them.

General_Failure
Apr 17, 2005
I don't want to do a megapost.

There are always malcontents that want a lot for very little. I enjoy using the Pi so it meets my expectations. I have uCs that do IO better than it, and a PC that computes better than it can. But it's great at being a tiny little desktop that I can connect stuff to. Plus I like ARM based things so there's that.

Can I have a link to these Kabini things? I want to see. All I can find are some sort of holiday resort.

I wish I could borrow a wattage measuring thing. There's a few things I'd really like to check the actual usage of.

It doesn't bother me that my RISC OS Pi is connected to the internet via LAN. If anyone could gain access there's nothing they could really do besides maybe look at some broken C source I'm writing. Oh! It actually compiled as a library and linked properly for the first time just now. It's about bloody time.

Yesterday I rearranged stuff and stole cables from the PC. The Pi 3 now has the good monitor and the Pi Zero running RISC OS has the ex POS monitor. The PC isn't really connected to anything. I'll reconnect it when I need it again. I've only needed light web / email / document reading duties recently so it's really overkill.

The Orange Pi is conditionally holding up to being a NAS. It desperately needs heatsinks. I can absolutely bring the poor thing to it's metaphorical knees in seconds especially with heavy NFS usage. For now it'll just keep bouncing off it's thermal throttling until the pack of 30 heatsinks arrives. they were cheap! what can I say.

I connected the old 60GB USB HDD to the Pi 3 and temporarily mounted the swap partition on it. Probably an act of cruelty but it's better better than running out of memory. Even though I've been using linux since the early mid 90's I guess, a couple of days ago was the first time I'd heard of the swapon and swapoff commands. So goddamn useful when you really need extra swap space RIGHT loving NOW.

apropos man
Sep 5, 2016

You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!

General_Failure posted:

I connected the old 60GB USB HDD to the Pi 3 and temporarily mounted the swap partition on it. Probably an act of cruelty but it's better better than running out of memory. Even though I've been using linux since the early mid 90's I guess, a couple of days ago was the first time I'd heard of the swapon and swapoff commands. So goddamn useful when you really need extra swap space RIGHT loving NOW.

You can also dd your / partition from the SD card onto a USB drive, then edit /boot/cmdline.txt to point it to your new / partition during boot.

Then the SD card is only used for the boot files and the rest of the OS is running from hard disk. I have a media sever running this way on a Pi 1.

General_Failure
Apr 17, 2005

apropos man posted:

You can also dd your / partition from the SD card onto a USB drive, then edit /boot/cmdline.txt to point it to your new / partition during boot.

Then the SD card is only used for the boot files and the rest of the OS is running from hard disk. I have a media sever running this way on a Pi 1.

I could. Or with a tiny bit more work I could put the boot stuff on there too. It's for a Pi 3 so it can boot from USB. I've activated that but haven't tried it yet.

ante
Apr 9, 2005

SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS
For power readings on a Pi, just get a USB Doctor (or similar) off AliExpress. It'll run you about $3, and give you voltage and current readings. Power is voltage X current.

apropos man
Sep 5, 2016

You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!
I have a cheap watt meter from Amazon. Something like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0...we-L&ref=plSrch

It's OK, but I wouldn't trust it implicitly for such low power situations as a Raspberry Pi.

Sorry for the untidy link: I'm on my phone.

Edit: those USB doctors look neat. I might get one.

General_Failure
Apr 17, 2005

ante posted:

For power readings on a Pi, just get a USB Doctor (or similar) off AliExpress. It'll run you about $3, and give you voltage and current readings. Power is voltage X current.

You know what. That never occurred to me. The drat things always come up in the things I'd like section, or whatever the hell it's called.

So, that library I said I finally got compiled. It compiled fine. Couldn't link to it without also linking to the libraries which it linked to. Yeah gently caress that. Spent a few hours working out how to write the few bits I needed from scratch so it didn't need them, and found (but not yet solved) a heinous bug.

In all I'm pretty happy. It's kind of cool having two Pi's Side by side and an Orange Pi playing server for them. I'll be glad when I can get this drat library usable though.It's using a mixture of SWIs and bare metal twiddling to give a vaguely Arduino-ish API in RISC OS. I mean it already works but some functions are a bit troublesome to make friendly and versatile at the same time.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

General_Failure posted:

Can I have a link to these Kabini things? I want to see. All I can find are some sort of holiday resort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit

Twerk from Home
Jan 17, 2009

This avatar brought to you by the 'save our dead gay forums' foundation.

General_Failure posted:

Can I have a link to these Kabini things? I want to see. All I can find are some sort of holiday resort.

Here's the one that matters:

http://www.microcenter.com/product/430774/Athlon_5350_Jaguar_2GHz_Socket_AM1_Boxed_Processor

$40 for a quad core CPU bundled with a mini-ITX motherboard, and it's not even that much slower than a Q6600 when it gets down to it.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

ante posted:

For power readings on a Pi, just get a USB Doctor (or similar) off AliExpress. It'll run you about $3, and give you voltage and current readings. Power is voltage X current.

Hmmm, this thing looks pretty neat.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Dig...2616678486.html

General_Failure
Apr 17, 2005
Security tester lol. The ones I normally see are the simpler versions of them.

I'll have a look at the kabini link when I'm not using the phone.

My Pi 3 started to get under volt flashes again last night even though it had the cap on the 5v rail. Odd thing was it showed the rainbow square, not the lightning bolt. What the hell?

Chromium seems to have a memory leak too. Lucky I left the USB hard drive with the swap partition plugged in. It would have completely poo poo itself otherwise.

JayKay
Sep 11, 2001

And you thought they were cute and cuddly.

Twerk from Home posted:

Here's the one that matters:

http://www.microcenter.com/product/430774/Athlon_5350_Jaguar_2GHz_Socket_AM1_Boxed_Processor

$40 for a quad core CPU bundled with a mini-ITX motherboard, and it's not even that much slower than a Q6600 when it gets down to it.

Ugh, they have them in stock at my local Microcenter. I really don't need it, but at $40 that's really hard to pass up even if it's probably going join my Pi3 on the shelf.

Police Automaton
Mar 17, 2009
"You are standing in a thread. Someone has made an insightful post."
LOOK AT insightful post
"It's a pretty good post."
HATE post
"I don't understand"
SHIT ON post
"You shit on the post. Why."
I had one of those USB-Measuring things once, turns out the way it was designed it also acted as current limiter unintentionally. I'd be careful with the Pi/HD setups. They might not get enough power with one of those in-between and then you go chasing problems that aren't there.

I have the A4-5000, it's slower even though for my usage scenario that doesn't really matter. the A4-5000 comes soldered onto the board (and with a heatsink) so in my case, the entire package was around that price. The board has a SATA controller integrated, so you get 2 SATA ports more. Also a mPCIe and a PCIe slot, an external USB 3.0 chip to what the SoC supports itself etc. etc.. Love it!

Today I tried around with game streaming from the 5820k Windows VM. (with VGA passthrough) There is not a single really efficient program to do this on linux, especially for games. There's the likes of xfreerdp which supports RemoteFX of Win10 but it's completely CPU bound and doesn't even thread well so the performance is just awful. I then found out that steam can do this too (just have to run it on both machines) and it even uses hardware encoding and decoding for the stream. Although I had to screw around with the steam client a bit to make this work properly in my non-ubuntu linux, this works a lot better with the A4-5000 and an 1080p game stream is no problem, tried it with GTA5, was just like the real thing. If you do things like change resolution etc. steam will silently fall back to software decoding which is very annoying. 1440p is sadly out of the picture, even with hardware decoding the Kabini GPU just can't do it. Interestingly enough, you can just add every executable you want to steam and stream it that way and take advantage of the hardware en/decoding. Tried it with notepad.exe, works perfectly. I've never looked into using something like that but just assumed there'd be tons of software to do such things with, especially also with the Pi, but it just isn't so and what little software there is doesn't even work that well. I think my dream of moving away my 5820k where it can make noise is sadly over and I'll probably get an usb switch, it seems the simplest solution that will also work the best.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

So some notes, the official Pi case is barely big enough for a pi, does not fit the Adafruit pwm/servo hat, or most other hats, at least without significant modifications/grinding. Doesn't fit the A+ at all. I'm going to have to modify the hat on the "back end" (SD card side) to get the lid closed, and then modify the case to get the PWM pins to clear the top of the case.

Think a rare few hat boards fit the official case, but most probably need some modification (grinding) near the hinge.

Also random, I have a couple of I2C breakout boards, is there a complimentary case I can toss them in? I'm thinking about just gluing a half size breadboard in another official case with a couple of wires between the two.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

There, I fixed it:

On close inspection, the hat didn't have any mission-critical bits where the clips went, managed to not grind away 100% of the SDA pin for more I2C goodness. If you look closely, below the 5v barrel adapter is what's left of the adafruit star and magic hat logos, to give you an idea of how much I ground away.

The top still closes/snaps together, if the PWM pins on the left didn't protrude beyond the top of the lip quite a bit. I'm kind of tempted to make room for the pins in the lid/top so I can seal it up fully when I'm done (if ever)

Baconroll
Feb 6, 2009
I want to get an Amazon Echo to tell me the value for various temperature sensors running off a Raspberry Pi - but I don't want to poke an incoming hole in my firewall.

I'm thinking of having a cron job on the Pi to periodically push the current temperatures onto some external webspace, and then write an Alexa skill using a Lambda function which would get a temperature value from the external webspace.

It doesn't cost much for a small amount of webspace, but I was wondering if I'm missing a trick here ? Is there an 'easier/free' external place I could write/read some numbers to ? The amount of data is probably going to just be a few bytes, so getting a gig of webspace feels like overkill.

apropos man
Sep 5, 2016

You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!
What about spinning up a free tier Amazon VPS and upload the data to there? Not sure how long the free tier lasts, though.

RebelStarfox
Aug 14, 2016
A little help needed, My father has after getting interested in the Pi. I bought him one for his birthday and he loves it. Christmas is coming so I was hoping to get him more pi related stuff. Could anyone recommend anything for him. Good books. Better models .. anything really. Think he has the pi 2 already but I'll double check that.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

You could get him a 3? If you knew what he actually likes to do with it that'd help

fordan
Mar 9, 2009

Clue: Zero

Baconroll posted:

I want to get an Amazon Echo to tell me the value for various temperature sensors running off a Raspberry Pi - but I don't want to poke an incoming hole in my firewall.

I'm thinking of having a cron job on the Pi to periodically push the current temperatures onto some external webspace, and then write an Alexa skill using a Lambda function which would get a temperature value from the external webspace.

It doesn't cost much for a small amount of webspace, but I was wondering if I'm missing a trick here ? Is there an 'easier/free' external place I could write/read some numbers to ? The amount of data is probably going to just be a few bytes, so getting a gig of webspace feels like overkill.

Might you be better off using Echo's built-in home automation tools and some code to make the Pi look like a Wemo or similar device? I don't have an Echo and I haven't looked deeply into it, but there's lots of software out there for Pi/linux to emulate home automation controllers and to be able to act as a bridge into standard protocols (or less standard ones like Apple's HomeKit). That may let you keep everything local.

TheresaJayne
Jul 1, 2011

fordan posted:

Might you be better off using Echo's built-in home automation tools and some code to make the Pi look like a Wemo or similar device? I don't have an Echo and I haven't looked deeply into it, but there's lots of software out there for Pi/linux to emulate home automation controllers and to be able to act as a bridge into standard protocols (or less standard ones like Apple's HomeKit). That may let you keep everything local.

I would wait for the dot to come out, same functionality less cost

G-Prime
Apr 30, 2003

Baby, when it's love,
if it's not rough it isn't fun.

Baconroll posted:

I want to get an Amazon Echo to tell me the value for various temperature sensors running off a Raspberry Pi - but I don't want to poke an incoming hole in my firewall.

I'm thinking of having a cron job on the Pi to periodically push the current temperatures onto some external webspace, and then write an Alexa skill using a Lambda function which would get a temperature value from the external webspace.

It doesn't cost much for a small amount of webspace, but I was wondering if I'm missing a trick here ? Is there an 'easier/free' external place I could write/read some numbers to ? The amount of data is probably going to just be a few bytes, so getting a gig of webspace feels like overkill.

If you're going to write a lambda anyway, why not have it just consume the data from an s3 bucket, and have the Pi write it there? No point in running full on hosting for a basic datastore, and the cost should be almost zero.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Baconroll posted:

I want to get an Amazon Echo to tell me the value for various temperature sensors running off a Raspberry Pi - but I don't want to poke an incoming hole in my firewall.

I'm thinking of having a cron job on the Pi to periodically push the current temperatures onto some external webspace, and then write an Alexa skill using a Lambda function which would get a temperature value from the external webspace.

It doesn't cost much for a small amount of webspace, but I was wondering if I'm missing a trick here ? Is there an 'easier/free' external place I could write/read some numbers to ? The amount of data is probably going to just be a few bytes, so getting a gig of webspace feels like overkill.
You want an MQTT broker. Adafruit.io will cost you no money.

Baconroll
Feb 6, 2009
Thanks - the adafruit.io looks to be just what I want, and with all the different client libraries and support for http it should cover all the bases nicely.

psydude
Apr 1, 2008

Anyone used their Pi as a home automation hub to link together smart LEDs and outlets, like a Wink would normally do?

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


psydude posted:

Anyone used their Pi as a home automation hub to link together smart LEDs and outlets, like a Wink would normally do?

I've got an openhab install running on a Pi. Unfortunately I couldn't get zigbee communication working with my zigbee hardware so I'm still using smartthings until I've got the cash to replace the handful of zigbee devices I've got.

If you're all zwave already aeotec makes a great USB stick that works wonderfully. I didn't get too far into the openhab config before I shelved it, so I couldn't tell you how reliable it is or if there are roadblocks past controlling a zwave dimmer. But my initial testing seems to show that it'll work just fine and other people seem to have no issues either.

Baconroll
Feb 6, 2009

psydude posted:

Anyone used their Pi as a home automation hub to link together smart LEDs and outlets, like a Wink would normally do?

I run Domoticz on a Pi and control,

Z-wave Lightbulbs/dimmer modules/PIR sensors/door sensors
Philips Hue Lights
A bunch of random ebay 433 Mhz devices like power sockets, temperature sensors, door sensors, doorbell
Basic Sonos output (e.g. loud barking dog or siren)
Pi 1-wire temperature sensors

In terms of hardware the Pi has a z-wave usb stick and an 'RF Link' to control 433 Mhz devices.

I've been doing some integration with the Amazon Echo - the Echo natively supports the Philips Hue bulbs, but for everything else I'm running some software on the Pi called 'HA Bridge' which can make any http controllable on/off smart device present itself as a Hue device to the Amazon Echo. As Domoticz allows any of its devices to be http controllable I just have HA bridge point to the http address for the devices in Domoticz.

Super Slash
Feb 20, 2006

You rang ?

evil_bunnY posted:

You could get him a 3? If you knew what he actually likes to do with it that'd help

Or even a fistful of Pi Zeroes?

RebelStarfox
Aug 14, 2016

evil_bunnY posted:

You could get him a 3? If you knew what he actually likes to do with it that'd help

Heya sorry just found out it was a rpi3. At the moment he's messing around with it, he mentioned something about getting pi arcade working and something about a RC car and the pi. He loves messing around with code and just finding out what he can do with it. As you can tell I'm not geared into pi's at all I'm more of the building and upgrading my PC and well ... Games. All help greatly received

General_Failure
Apr 17, 2005

Super Slash posted:

Or even a fistful of Pi Zeroes?

And while you are at it perhaps the arc of the covenant?

Jamsta
Dec 16, 2006

Oh you want some too? Fuck you!

How do Domoticz and OpenHab compare to a Fibaro?

I use the latter at work, and it's a very polished solution (albiet buggy in places).

stevewm
May 10, 2005
There is also Home Assistant... It can run on a pi. In fact they now have a image for the pi available.

Can control Zwave devices, 433Mhz devices, and much more. Also emulates a Philips Hue bridge specifically for Echo integration, allowing Alexa/Echo to control devices in Home Assistant.

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


Jamsta posted:

How do Domoticz and OpenHab compare to a Fibaro?

I use the latter at work, and it's a very polished solution (albiet buggy in places).

OpenHab, Domoticz and Home Assistant are all open source and free, Fibaro looks like a product kind of like smartthings, looks pretty nice but I don't think it's relevant to the rpi discussion.

Personally I like OpenHab because it's so flexible, Home Assistant and Domoticz look much simpler than OpenHab but I'm sure you can do everything that OpenHab does. OpenHab seems to have the most development and hardware support, but that's really only a concern if you have existing equipment you want to integrate with.

Subjunctive
Sep 12, 2006

✨sparkle and shine✨

Baconroll posted:

I want to get an Amazon Echo to tell me the value for various temperature sensors running off a Raspberry Pi - but I don't want to poke an incoming hole in my firewall.

I'm thinking of having a cron job on the Pi to periodically push the current temperatures onto some external webspace, and then write an Alexa skill using a Lambda function which would get a temperature value from the external webspace.

It doesn't cost much for a small amount of webspace, but I was wondering if I'm missing a trick here ? Is there an 'easier/free' external place I could write/read some numbers to ? The amount of data is probably going to just be a few bytes, so getting a gig of webspace feels like overkill.

Take a look at Amazon's SimpleDB, you can likely just stash the values in there and get them from Lambda.

Baconroll
Feb 6, 2009

Subjunctive posted:

Take a look at Amazon's SimpleDB, you can likely just stash the values in there and get them from Lambda.

I've got this all working with io.adafruit.com which was suggested here. A cron'd python script on the Pi uses the urllib2 and json libraries to get a list of all the temperature devices and temperatures from Domoticz and then sends them to adafruit with a https call.

In Lambda I've got an python script which gets a room name passed to it from the Alexa service and then uses that to get the correct temperature from adafruit and then builds a spoken text reply which it passes back to the Alexa service.

Seems to work well enough - Alexa is replying in less than 2 seconds with the temperatures and I didn't have to poke any holes in my firewall.

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evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Baconroll posted:

I've got this all working with io.adafruit.com which was suggested here. A cron'd python script on the Pi uses the urllib2 and json libraries to get a list of all the temperature devices and temperatures from Domoticz and then sends them to adafruit with a https call.

In Lambda I've got an python script which gets a room name passed to it from the Alexa service and then uses that to get the correct temperature from adafruit and then builds a spoken text reply which it passes back to the Alexa service.

Seems to work well enough - Alexa is replying in less than 2 seconds with the temperatures and I didn't have to poke any holes in my firewall.
Nice job

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