7 ms·

In the article it says the system was programmed by a highschool student 30 years ago. Now the replacement cost is 1.5-2 million.

rvense 8y ago
They should just get the same guy to redo it with a Pi or a second-hand laptop.
- okket 8y ago
  Right. I wonder what this Amgia can do what a Raspberry Pi or even ESP8266 can't? Bit banging a simple maintenance radio / 1200 baud protocol should not be that hard?
- pcdoodle 8y ago
  This would shit the bed in less than a year. Pi will corrupt the sd card after a few ungraceful shut downs.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    Run an Amiga emulator on it, never shut down! And because it's cheap, run that three times, and have an emulated gameboy sound the alarm if one of the three stops responding, or delivers a different answer than the other two. Getting it all into a software state that can easily be transferred to "something that runs Linux and this emulator that requires next to nothing" certainly seems sensible at any rate.
  - blhack 8y ago
    I have a PI in an interactive art installation that gets power cycled pretty freaking often, and so far the card has held up. It is something I worry about though.
    - lostlogin 8y ago
      Can you just duplicate the card and use that image as a backup? I’ve stashed a few away like this but pcdoodle’s suggested solution sounds a lot more elegant.
      - giobox 8y ago
        This is actually more difficult than you’d expect in some ways. The vast majority of card cloning guides will advise you to use the ‘dd’ command line utility, which makes an exact replica of the card, including the free space. Unfortunately not all SD cards, even if advertised as the same capacity, are exactly the same size. If your replacement card is just 1 byte smaller your dd clone won’t restore - the “free” space has to fit into the target card as well. Long story short - most popular methods of cloning microSD cards for the Pi only ensure the ability to restore to a larger SD card, not necessarily one of the same advertized size. For sure there are workarounds, but it’s not as straightforward as you might assume. Personally I’m much more a fan of other tools such as rsync or version control etc for cloning data to and from Pi projects. The better answer is just to USB boot the Pi anyway - they’ve supported this for a while now, no card corruption issues to mitigate.
        lostlogin 8y ago
        Thanks for this. I need to change what I’m doing.
        nijave 8y ago
        Clonezilla?
        blhack 8y ago
        rsyncing the entire root file tree should be good enough.
    - pcdoodle 8y ago
      Read only file system guides are out there. This makes it 90% more reliable.
  - rvense 8y ago
    Yeah, probably.
  - giobox 8y ago
    This is a good reason to USB boot a Pi (yes, they’ve supported this for ages now) - no one should SD card boot a Pi in a production style environment, given the well documented card corruption issues. Read only file systems on the SD boot volume are another solution, but this can cause other headaches (obviously) or may not be appropriate for the software you intend to run.
  - asix66 8y ago
    I have a RPi connected to my sprinkler solenoid valves via an OpenSprinklerPi board. It’s running the SIP [1] controller and a custom garage door plugin [2] I wrote. It’s been running 24/7 in my garage since 2014. YMMV I guess? [1] https://github.com/Dan-in-CA/SIP https://github.com/Dan-in-CA/SIP [2] https://github.com/andersix/sip_garage_plugin https://github.com/andersix/sip_garage_plugin
  - FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
    Netboot is now a thing on RPi. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/network-boot-raspberry-pi-without-microsd/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/network-boot-raspberry-pi-with...
  - kup0 8y ago
    Have been running a Pi 24/7 for quite some time now with zero corruption. Samsung EVO SD card, have multiple times rebooted by pulling the power (which is not ideal) because of unrelated issues that were due to some OS problems (SSH doesn't respond, etc) without a problem, but haven't had to do that in a long while after changing the OS and getting NIC stuff set up properly. I have seen that the majority of SD corruption that happens tends to be in situations where Pis are being run under-powered off of a USB hub or something similar instead of a wall-plug. I believe with a decent-quality SD card, and properly powering the Pi, the chances of SD corruption are relatively low. That said, I would prefer a USB3, SATA, NVME, or even eMMC interface, but the Pi has worked remarkably well for me. USB2 booting the Pi is always a backup option if my luck takes a turn for the worse
- agumonkey 8y ago
  in the decades of accumulated parts lying in the building they could probably make a rendering farm
pp19dd 8y ago
So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would never happen. But overall, I get the feeling that people today are afraid of things they can't vendor out, things they can't replace cookie-cutter style. Sometimes that concern is justified, when you think in terms of support spanning decades, but overall I see it as a vertical integration of bureaucracy all around us. It's not just this control system, it's everything. Was it Caltrans that hit a modernization roadblock because the agency hand-built railway sensors and circuits around that same time and now can't find replacement parts because people don't build things in-shop anymore?
- appleiigs 8y ago
  They should get their students to build the replacement.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - drdeadringer 8y ago
    And not pay them 1.5-2 million [minus hardware], I wager.
    - dsamarin 8y ago
      How about 20 raspberry pis connected to the Internet and pay them 2 thousand?
      - Groxx 8y ago
        And then explain why their heater hacked the entire network, or helped DDoS the governor's site during an election? Probably not the best idea to hook things like this up to the internet.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
madengr 8y ago
I built the burglar alarm system for my school, 28 years ago while in 12th grade. All TTL circuitry. That portion of the building was remodeled, so it was torn out after a few years, but I’m guessing the replacement cost for a commercial system was over $10k.
topkai22 8y ago
My guess is that the cost is mostly at the edge (needing to update the thermostats, control systems, communications systems and other HVAC equipment at the 19 campuses) not the software.
endorphone 8y ago
As is always the case, the replacement isn't simply a system doing an identical job on modern hardware. Instead they spec'd out a whole new system with new onsite controllers, bidirectional communications, integration with new systems, etc.
analog31 8y ago
There might be some survivorship bias at work here. Lots of things were programmed on early microcomputers. It seemed easy but control systems can harbor unexpected bugs that are hard to diagnose. The ones that failed were taken out of service and forgotten about.
dospunk 8y ago
As other people have said, the money isn't just going towards replacing the Amiga. The school system wants to upgrade to more modern HVAC systems, which is good in the long run as they'll be more energy efficient and probably more effective.

rvense 8y ago

They should just get the same guy to redo it with a Pi or a second-hand laptop.

okket 8y ago
Right. I wonder what this Amgia can do what a Raspberry Pi or even ESP8266 can't? Bit banging a simple maintenance radio / 1200 baud protocol should not be that hard?
pcdoodle 8y ago
This would shit the bed in less than a year. Pi will corrupt the sd card after a few ungraceful shut downs.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  Run an Amiga emulator on it, never shut down! And because it's cheap, run that three times, and have an emulated gameboy sound the alarm if one of the three stops responding, or delivers a different answer than the other two. Getting it all into a software state that can easily be transferred to "something that runs Linux and this emulator that requires next to nothing" certainly seems sensible at any rate.
- blhack 8y ago
  I have a PI in an interactive art installation that gets power cycled pretty freaking often, and so far the card has held up. It is something I worry about though.
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    Can you just duplicate the card and use that image as a backup? I’ve stashed a few away like this but pcdoodle’s suggested solution sounds a lot more elegant.
    - giobox 8y ago
      This is actually more difficult than you’d expect in some ways. The vast majority of card cloning guides will advise you to use the ‘dd’ command line utility, which makes an exact replica of the card, including the free space. Unfortunately not all SD cards, even if advertised as the same capacity, are exactly the same size. If your replacement card is just 1 byte smaller your dd clone won’t restore - the “free” space has to fit into the target card as well. Long story short - most popular methods of cloning microSD cards for the Pi only ensure the ability to restore to a larger SD card, not necessarily one of the same advertized size. For sure there are workarounds, but it’s not as straightforward as you might assume. Personally I’m much more a fan of other tools such as rsync or version control etc for cloning data to and from Pi projects. The better answer is just to USB boot the Pi anyway - they’ve supported this for a while now, no card corruption issues to mitigate.
      - lostlogin 8y ago
        Thanks for this. I need to change what I’m doing.
      - nijave 8y ago
        Clonezilla?
      - blhack 8y ago
        rsyncing the entire root file tree should be good enough.
  - pcdoodle 8y ago
    Read only file system guides are out there. This makes it 90% more reliable.
- rvense 8y ago
  Yeah, probably.
- giobox 8y ago
  This is a good reason to USB boot a Pi (yes, they’ve supported this for ages now) - no one should SD card boot a Pi in a production style environment, given the well documented card corruption issues. Read only file systems on the SD boot volume are another solution, but this can cause other headaches (obviously) or may not be appropriate for the software you intend to run.
- asix66 8y ago
  I have a RPi connected to my sprinkler solenoid valves via an OpenSprinklerPi board. It’s running the SIP [1] controller and a custom garage door plugin [2] I wrote. It’s been running 24/7 in my garage since 2014. YMMV I guess? [1] https://github.com/Dan-in-CA/SIP https://github.com/Dan-in-CA/SIP [2] https://github.com/andersix/sip_garage_plugin https://github.com/andersix/sip_garage_plugin
- FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
  Netboot is now a thing on RPi. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/network-boot-raspberry-pi-without-microsd/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/network-boot-raspberry-pi-with...
- kup0 8y ago
  Have been running a Pi 24/7 for quite some time now with zero corruption. Samsung EVO SD card, have multiple times rebooted by pulling the power (which is not ideal) because of unrelated issues that were due to some OS problems (SSH doesn't respond, etc) without a problem, but haven't had to do that in a long while after changing the OS and getting NIC stuff set up properly. I have seen that the majority of SD corruption that happens tends to be in situations where Pis are being run under-powered off of a USB hub or something similar instead of a wall-plug. I believe with a decent-quality SD card, and properly powering the Pi, the chances of SD corruption are relatively low. That said, I would prefer a USB3, SATA, NVME, or even eMMC interface, but the Pi has worked remarkably well for me. USB2 booting the Pi is always a backup option if my luck takes a turn for the worse
agumonkey 8y ago
in the decades of accumulated parts lying in the building they could probably make a rendering farm

pp19dd 8y ago

So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would never happen. But overall, I get the feeling that people today are afraid of things they can't vendor out, things they can't replace cookie-cutter style. Sometimes that concern is justified, when you think in terms of support spanning decades, but overall I see it as a vertical integration of bureaucracy all around us. It's not just this control system, it's everything. Was it Caltrans that hit a modernization roadblock because the agency hand-built railway sensors and circuits around that same time and now can't find replacement parts because people don't build things in-shop anymore?

appleiigs 8y ago
They should get their students to build the replacement.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  And not pay them 1.5-2 million [minus hardware], I wager.
  - dsamarin 8y ago
    How about 20 raspberry pis connected to the Internet and pay them 2 thousand?
    - Groxx 8y ago
      And then explain why their heater hacked the entire network, or helped DDoS the governor's site during an election? Probably not the best idea to hook things like this up to the internet.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

madengr 8y ago

I built the burglar alarm system for my school, 28 years ago while in 12th grade. All TTL circuitry. That portion of the building was remodeled, so it was torn out after a few years, but I’m guessing the replacement cost for a commercial system was over $10k.

topkai22 8y ago

My guess is that the cost is mostly at the edge (needing to update the thermostats, control systems, communications systems and other HVAC equipment at the 19 campuses) not the software.

endorphone 8y ago

As is always the case, the replacement isn't simply a system doing an identical job on modern hardware. Instead they spec'd out a whole new system with new onsite controllers, bidirectional communications, integration with new systems, etc.

analog31 8y ago

There might be some survivorship bias at work here. Lots of things were programmed on early microcomputers. It seemed easy but control systems can harbor unexpected bugs that are hard to diagnose. The ones that failed were taken out of service and forgotten about.

dospunk 8y ago

As other people have said, the money isn't just going towards replacing the Amiga. The school system wants to upgrade to more modern HVAC systems, which is good in the long run as they'll be more energy efficient and probably more effective.