Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

So is this the place I could possibly get some help on this matter? I'm currently trying to get an ownCloud server going on a Pi B+ but I'm running into an issue where I get an "Error Downloading" notice, usually occuring while I am uploading. I believe it is a cron error since it doesn't show it updating on the admin page and putting a crontab update doesn't seem to work (but I somehow got it to work for a bit until I did a reboot). I can provide more info if people are willing but I'm not entirely sure where to start other than trying to troubleshoot why the admin page isn't showing updates from the cron.php file.

That said: It's at the point that it goes through periods of downloading errors followed by long stretches of successful uploads. I'm really digging it as an at-home cloud server, I just want to upload everything without having to get it to re-sync multiple times in order to catch everything it fails to do.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2015 07:25

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# ¿ May 20, 2024 13:52

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

According to this site, you'll have no problems getting it to run if you initiate

code:

sudo apt-get update

and

code:

sudo apt-get upgrade

before switching over. I haven't tried this myself, yet.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2015 00:49

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I think the real question is what you want to build. Instructables and Hackaday.io are good places to search for ideas.

Edit: I personally created my own Dropbox clone for home use (and eventually accessible from the outside world) using a mishmash of two different tutorials. It works pretty well with a 99% effective download rate and ~90% upload rate. It's surprisingly fast once you get it optimized enough, but uploading takes a lot longer than downloading.

Soon I will build a webcam which has X and Y tilt and which can be controlled through the interwebs. If I can make it a rover that can power itself for 3+ days then I will try that, but my main goal is to have remote home security and a rover will allow me to check on various pets and rooms with one setup, plus it'll be cool as poo poo to have a rover for my home security.

durtan fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Feb 25, 2015

# ¿ Feb 25, 2015 04:37

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I'd like to mount a Pi B+ and an Arduino in a homebuilt chassis built out of Erector set parts. Some of the parts looked like chromed steel and the others appear to be powder-coated steel. Anyone have any idea if I'll need to worry about proper grounding like building a computer?

# ¿ Feb 28, 2015 07:33

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I was getting ready to do some debugging on my ownCloud server running on my B+ and noticed my reported free space shrank a gig. I'm aware my apache2 server is not nearly optimized enough yet so I went to open the error log to start knocking down some of the errors I'm getting. Lo and behold, I had two error log files which accumulated in the past week. Each one was 300MB(!) and I'm pretty certain there's more somewhere since my USB drive started with 14gb free space and is now down to 11gb.

600MB of error logs is a scary thing.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2015 10:37

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

So I decided to try Bittorrent Sync instead of ownCloud for my cloud server and, holy poo poo, gently caress ownCloud. Bittorrent only took an install and 10 minutes to get my other computers set up and I now have an upload speed over 1MB/sec. OwnCloud took an hour to setup the server and install the app, loaded my HD with apache server errors, and gave me a 5kb/sec upload speed. The only catch is I'm having some difficulty getting it setup on an ubuntu virtual machine, but I think I have an idea what to do.

Also, anyone have thoughts on Pwnpi? I figure it would be fun to mess around with but I'm new to playing with security stuff like that.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 03:13

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I'm starting to explore c# mono on my B+ and I was wondering if you all have any opinions on whether I should go vi or Emacs. I know poo poo about either but I would prefer one with syntax highlighting and, preferably, the Intellisense-style autocomplete found in Visual Studio. I'm not a super-user by any means but I would prefer to write in C# if given the option since it is more popular than Python.

# ¿ May 25, 2015 22:43

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

evol262 posted:

Don't pick languages based on popularity (within reason), and Python is incredibly popular with bindings for everything, basically.

But omnicomplete and Jedi and other completions are good. None are intellisense. You may be more comfortable with emacs, but vi is incredibly valuable because it'll be on every system you ever touch. Pick one and learn to love it.

Pick .NET if you want .NET for some reason (want static typing, managed memory, and OO but don't want Java, etc). Don't pick it because it's popular. Especially as a first-ish language. It's dramatically different from Python in almost every way without considering popularity, and one of those may be a good reason to pick it.

I actually started on C but C# drew me in with its lack of pointers and lack of malloc. I currently have some servomotor software I made in Python which allows me to control Arduino through a GUI on the Pi and I thought it'd be fun to try to convert it to C# in order to learn the language and because I was having issues with my Uno behaving properly through Python and the nanpy library I was using.

mod sassinator posted:

Honestly I would go with neither. You'll be much more productive using Visual Studio on a PC and then copying the assembly over to the Pi to run. Coding on the Pi is still kinda painful with its low memory and speed.

For just making quick config file changes, etc. I like nano. It can't hurt to learn a few basics about vi/vim though, like how to get into insert mode and edit a document. Sometimes you might find yourself connected to a crazy old machine that only has vi so it does help to know some basic commands.

I figured I'd write the code in VS2013 and just do copy paste magic since, as you say, the Pi is slow. But Linux is turning out to be quite interesting so I thought I'd build my Linux repertoire and I have no idea what's available out there. Visual Studio is incredibly sexy and it's hard to go to an editor like gedit after experiencing it. I downloaded both Vim and Emacs so I'll see which one sticks first.

# ¿ May 27, 2015 11:02

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Anybody familiar with MotionPie? I set it up for Wifi and it appears to be broadcasting properly, but I can only access the GUI running on the Pi through a computer wired into the home router. I can't seem to access it from a wifi-connected laptop and it is even preventing me from accessing my router's control panel through said laptop. Any ideas? Google isn't helping.

Edit: SSH works fine.

Edit2: It apparently works on IE but not Firefox.

durtan fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Jun 27, 2015

# ¿ Jun 27, 2015 09:15

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Hadlock posted:

Google "owncloud raspberry pi" and setup an annon account

http://www.element14.com/community/...our-own-dropbox

Owncloud ran painfully slow when I tried installing it before, but that was with a php server, not nginx. Can anyone vouch for this tutorial, particularly on a B+? Because I liked ownCloud, it just ran extremely slow and took way more effort than the return I received from it. Otherwise, I'm willing to give it a shot and report back.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2015 08:55

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I'll give Seafile a shot. Would you say transfer speeds are good? I'm currently using Bittorrent Sync for a backup/sync server and it does fairly well. ownCloud was maxing out at 3kb/sec.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2015 09:24

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Hadlock posted:

According to this guy Seafile is about 2-3MB/s on a B+ and just a couple of kb/s with Owncloud

https://www.ionas-server.com/blog/owncloud-vs-seafile-performance/

Seriously, never ever use a product that's built on top of PHP, it's like Duplos for the web when everyone else is at least using Legos, preferably Technics. The language itself might be ok (Facebook runs on it, but they've written their own extended, backwards compatible version of PHP because of it's limitations) but the people who use it for serious projects tend to be complete morons.

Nice! Once I take care of all of the Windows 10 related poo poo I need to do I'll start working on a Seafile install.

Speaking of, any word on Windows 10 for the Pi2?

# ¿ Jul 30, 2015 20:06

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

So I'm struggling on getting past the login stage of my Seafile install. I can access the login screen through its local IP address and my no-ip "cloudname".ddns.net domain, but I get a server error about a "server hiccup" and "engineers being notified". I have done two complete installs and followed this install with the only changes being the internal server name, changing the .no-ip.org references to .ddns.net and the name I used for my .ddns.net domain is obviously not the "mycloud" example. I'm not a network pro and Googling is failing. Any ideas?

Edit: I also use a static ip for wifi using a wpa_supplicant file.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2015 01:13

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

37th Chamber posted:

If you care about speed, a raspberry pi is not the solution to your self-hosted backups.

It has terrible throughput, partly because of shortcuts they've taken to keep the device cheap.

So I missed running ./seafile.sh start and I got it to work successfully, but I'm maxing out at 50kb/sec speeds with an average around 10kb/sec. This includes overclocking to turbo and reducing the camera memory down to 16mb. I think I might go back to bittorrent Sync, but I don't know of a way to access data from outside my local network.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2015 05:13

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Working on my MotionPie IR camera has been fun, but one of the issues I have when trying to make a waterproof casing for it is that I get significant glare from the IR lights and it makes it impossible for the camera to see through the glass. The anti-glare plastic available at Home Depot isn't transparent enough for the camera to get a decent resolution. Anyone have any success with any cheap solutions? Searching for IR-transparent plastic online only yields results for the blacked-out versions used for remote controls. I'm so close to finishing this project but this problem can potentially be a project-killer.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 00:03

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Hadlock posted:

Are you doing underwater ops with this IR camera? I think water has a pretty high absorption rate of IR.

You want to do visible-transparent AND IR transparent?

What about getting a traditional $10 72mm or 40.5mm UV glass lens filter, cutting a hole in your plexiglass box, and then affixing the filter to the box with 3M faucet/bathroom sealant?

This one is $27 but it's "Weather Sealed". I guess for good measure you could smush silicone sealant over the seam for good measure.

I'm doing outdoor surveillance with the camera. I intend to use an outdoor electrical outlet box to contain the Pi and camera assembly and affix the "window" to the case with silicone aquarium sealer. I know there's IR and visible transparent material out there since most off-the-shelf security cameras have it, but damned if I can find something clearly labeled.

Using a camera lens filter might actually work! I'm going to take one off my Nikon lens and see if it's effective.

Edit: The UV lens works! Now, I need to find a UV filter that is large enough to fit the rectangular hole. Do you think the UV protection is enabling the non-reflectiveness of it? I'd love to find a rectangular piece of glass to cover up the opening.

durtan fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Sep 8, 2015

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 01:38

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Paul MaudDib posted:

So basically you're making an IR illuminator? In terms of glare, you probably want the illuminators to be well-shrouded - either behind the sensor with the sensor having a length of tubing in front of it to prevent it from picking up flare, or significantly off-axis. Look at how diving substrobes are set up relative to the lens port.

I think you're going to be hosed though. It's not just a matter of absorption, water actually scatters long wavelengths of light. That's why water looks blue when you're diving - the red light is scattered but the blue is not, so all that's left is the blue light. IR is longer than visible light, so it will be scattered more (think of it like trying to shoot a flash through mud).

On the flip side, have you tried UV imaging? You can still get UV LEDs for illumination. It takes special equipment to do - you really want something made entirely of quartz or fluorite. It gets even more hideously expensive if you're going to attempt to focus this with visible light - you need a lens that focuses everything from UV to visible, if not all the way to IR depending on if your sensor has an IR-cut filter (most sensors do, by default, an IR camera will not).

Really though I think you need to be looking at either an underwater-hotlight or an underwater-substrobe setup depending on what you're trying to do. These problems have been pretty thoroughly explored in underwater photography and you're not going to MacGuyver something better.

So I'm using this module for an all-weather security camera that can see in the dark. I did find out UV filters used for camera lenses apparently prevent glare from the IR illuminators from affecting the camera (see my previous post). So now the hunt is on to find a way to attach it to my assembly body.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 07:50

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I just found out there's a 200GB MicroSD card for $200 but a 128GB card is only $60. I previously had no idea such storage sizes are possible and now the possibilities seem endless.

I'll admit, my jaw dropped when I discovered this fact. Those sizes could make a pretty awesome file server for little cost.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2015 10:26

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

One electrical box, 3 PVC pipe fittings, a smattering of aquarium sealer, 1 extension cord, 1 UV filter, and a Ziploc bag and my waterproof casing is nearly complete! I gave it a test run last night, made a couple adjustments to how the camera module sits in the casing, glued the UV filter to the casing this morning and I think I have a decent security/wildlife camera. Unfortunately, budget constraints and the temptation of a high degree of water protection made me pick a larger casing than I'd prefer, but it allowed me to keep the extension cord plug and 2A power supply safetly nestled from the elements so I think it was worth it. I'm currently field testing it by setting up food traps for the neighborhood cats.

Photo Time!

Stream from my live test last night. I think the IR illuminators were not aligned properly and was being blocked by the PVC. I made a couple adjustments and I'll see how they work tonight.

Bonus photo of my ferret, Picard, which I happened to find on the SD card.

durtan fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Sep 26, 2015

# ¿ Sep 26, 2015 22:19

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I made it from a 2" conduit body cover, this one, specifically, the lens assembly is made out of a 2.5'' electric PVC fitting and an 82mm UV filter. It's all held together with aquarium sealer adhesive and the inside I have he Pi in a cheap plastic casing to provide added protection to the board. It measures about 3.2in W X 4.8in H x 9.3in D in the body and the lens assembly extends out approximately 3 in". (I didn't measure it but am guesstimating). I found the lens on Amazon for $6.99 so the whole setup was around $20-22. The aquarium sealer was about $5.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2015 02:35

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

the nicker posted:

Anyone run a pi outdoors for an extended period of time? I wanna put one in my gate opener but I'm not sure how long it would survive. It'd be out of the rain but I'm texas so it gets really hot under there in the summer. Probably 120F+

So I'm currently doing an outdoor test on mine, temps here are averaging around 80F so the heat isn't much of an issue. See my post above if you want an idea for a camera setup, but my research suggests that you'd want to weatherproof your pi without it being airtight so condensation won't form. I'd also put it in a plastic case which will prevent spiders from shorting out the board.

What do you want to use it for? Just curious.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2015 18:19

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I'm sad to report the MotionPie software doesn't seem to be up to the task as a long-term security camera. I'm still optimistic finding the right settings will alleviate my problems, but I think I may be asking too much of it.

The software is too unstable. It can occasionally glitch out and ignore motion or forget to stop recording. I can't seem to find a way to get it to record 24/7, so I have it set taking a photo every five seconds and relying on motion-activated video to catch important events. This can (understandably) lead to 15,000+ photos a day, which was giving me around 1.5GB a day at full resolution including videos. This was a significant problem since large amounts of videos confused the web UI, causing timeouts and forcing me to delete archives through SSH to clear up enough space for it to allow photo preview again. It has also crashed several times for unknown issues and I've had to reboot it through SSH several times, long-term mounting could make this situation very complicated if the plug is in an inconvenient spot. Also, motion-detection seems to be very processor-heavy and I get maybe 3 frames/sec with motion-detection enabled regardless of any still-images being taken.

Finally, the biggest issue I'm struggling dealing with is that the software doesn't have an easy way to backup photos to another computer that I'm aware of. I'm currently looking into a workaround to this, but a security camera is useless if the videos can be stolen along with the camera. There are several positive things I like about this software: Time-lapse photos and wildlife observation can benefit very highly from a camera like this. I may be asking too much from his software and I know a one-man project that doesn't make financial gains is going to suffer from bugs, and the UI is pretty awesome to work with. I'm hoping to get some more time with the camera and try to find settings that work, but as of now it's currently recording the rain to make time-lapse videos during the day and it's pretty fun to watch, so I consider that a win.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 07:28

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

MotionPie update: It appears changing the settings to reduce the amount of timelapse photos taken a day from every 5 seconds to 30 seconds has improved stability a lot. I guess it's a no-brainer that creating 10k+ photos daily might be too much to handle. I'm now generating around 500MB a day of video and photos and I can still access everything without the GUI crapping out. I'm still stress-testing the software by not deleting anything and it seems to do fairly well. I may permanently mount this camera after all.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 20:04

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

mod sassinator posted:

As a learning device for electronics, etc. the Pi is perfect though. Set your expectations to something that the board was designed to do and you'll be much happier.

On this note, what are some good suggestions for Pi projects? I currently have a Bittorrent Sync cloud running on a B+ which I think is awesome, and my Motionpie camera which...isn't so awesome. I've been debating flashing the SD and reloading Raspbian or Jessie in order to have it stream to an old work computer running VLC, but I'm open to new ideas.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2015 09:50

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Does anyone know if it's possible to run Excel off a Pi 2? I know people say it can run Windows 10 apps, but I've also heard that's marketing crap and it can run a single Metro-style app at a time. I am one of three people in the world that own a Windows phone, and I know there's a stripped down version of Excel available on it. I just want to know if I'm wasting my time since I have a week before I return to class and I want to make my time worthwhile.

I'm also extremely curious about opening my Pi 2 to the internet and attempting to get the Bittorrent Sync GUI accessible outside of my network. The previous posts were really informative but I'm still relatively new to Linux servers and might attempt another attempt at a server if I can get the security issues figured out. Is there any other reading someone would recommend? I'd prefer in English, not Linux acronym speak, if possible.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2016 23:57

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

So I just got a powered USB hub, and I'm struggling to find the folder paths for the files contained on my flash drives . Gparted shows the file paths to be /dev/sda , /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc but I can't seem to get to the folder. What am I missing?

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 20:05

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Mount the device or mount each individual drive?

Will I need to do this every time I want to access it? Is there a way to do this automatically?

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 20:28

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Moey posted:

Device being each individual drive you have connected to the hub.

What OS is this on? You should be able to automount.

I'm on Raspbian Jessie.
It seems to be automounting but the dev/media folder, which usually shows these files, doesn't have anything that is obviously my usb drives. Gparted has the "Mount" option greyed out so I'm assuming it's mounted through that.

TVarmy posted:

Try reading this: http://ss64.com/bash/mount.html

In Unix-style systems, hardware devices are represented as directories, but that's a different abstraction than the filesystem on a drive.

So you need to tell the system, "Hey, I'd like you to load the file system on this partition on this drive" with the mount command. So if you want the first partition on the first drive your system listed, you'd mount /dev/sda1.

I don't have my pi with me, but here's a pi-specific guide for doing that, complete with editing fstab (which tells the system what to mount on boot, if you plan on keeping those drives always plugged in): http://elinux.org/RPi_Adding_USB_Drives#Mounting_Drive_Partitions

I'll be giving this a read, thanks.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 21:00

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Moey posted:

Is it a powered USB hub?

Yup. Specifically one of the Inisignia 2.0 hubs that's powered with a wall-wart.

Here's the df output.

code:

Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        7315616 3599752   3362712  52% /
devtmpfs          494108       0    494108   0% /dev
tmpfs             498412       0    498412   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs             498412    6808    491604   2% /run
tmpfs               5120       4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs             498412       0    498412   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1     61384   20312     41072  34% /boot
tmpfs              99684       0     99684   0% /run/user/109
tmpfs              99684       4     99680   1% /run/user/1000

Edit: A thought, would it matter if the usb hub is running three storage USBs and a wifi dongle?

Edit 2: I'm running the PI2 on a 1A power supply until my replacement 2.5A comes in tomorrow. Could the USB port be receiving too little power?

durtan fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Feb 8, 2016

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 23:10

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

Saukkis posted:

I would first try command 'blkid /dev/sd*', it may give you the names of the different drives.

This did nothing. What does that mean?

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 00:10

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

So I just started up the GUI through TightVNC, tried to do a file search to find the file location, and saw the USB drive on the list of partitions to select from. Clicking it asks me to mount the drive, which it does. I can now see the drive in /media/pi. Can someone explain to me what is going on here? I'd really like to learn about what I am missing in this regard.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 00:14

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

So i discovered I had to make fstab entries for the devices and now everything works as expected. I kept getting errors saying there was no fstab entries for the devices, so I made a few.

Entry level Linux stuff, apparently.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 04:01

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

ElCondemn posted:

Yup, that would work fine, though he had trouble using blkid... personally I prefer to use labels in fstab and udev rules to keep things consistent.

So blkid worked fine for me when I used it without the /sd*. If I remember correctly, I just typed in blkid and it gave me the info.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 03:19

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# ¿ May 20, 2024 13:52

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

My new C.H.I.P.s came in today and I tested them out a little bit. There's some beastly power processing power involve, so now I need to think of some good things to make Bluetooth-capable.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 17:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again