16 ms·

Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

276 points by heywire 5y ago

theHIDninja 5y ago
That is surprising. I guess it's still economical for them to use these horrible computers despite the fact the mean time between failures is at best three weeks.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Do you have any references for MTBF or the Pi's failure modes in general? SD cards going out are pretty much the only thing people talk about, and that problem is easy to solve. Another thing is bad power supplies, again easily solved (and not the Pi's fault).
  - theHIDninja 5y ago
    My experiences with raspberry pis has been exclusively and extremely negative. The first one I owned had some kind of electrical fault that bricked and destroyed my TV. The second one I owned had a fault where a few of the capacitors on the back fell off upon me plugging it in for the first time. The third one I tried had a fault where it would spontaneously shut down if I had any USB devices plugged into it for any reason at all (in this case it was a mouse and a flash drive). The fourth one I owned had the same problem, and the way I fixed it was desoldering its onboard wifi receiver running it at an absurd underclock and overvolting the USB2 input with my bench power supply. With that said, let me talk about their hardware. The USB-C implementation on the raspberry pi 4 violates the USB spec. When this was brought up to the engineers over there, they completely memory holed the problem, saying it works on USB2 chargers through an adapter. I call bullshit because during normal use it will draw more than 12.5 watts (which exceeds power limits on USB2 cables). I have never seen the micro HDMI port on anything made before 2013 so the adapters required to make it work with modern TVs may as well be proprietary ones sold by RPi. The camera input connector is encrypted for some reason, so if you wanted to use a camera through there it has to be one of raspberry pi's. Despite them claiming it's opensource, it really isn't. The only thing that they have made opensource is the schematics which are largely useless for integrating into your own designs. The main processor onboard (and a handful of other ICs) isn't even commercially available. They claim it is, but that's only if you order it in minimum quantities of a few hundred thousand or something. So in order to use the RPi4's most basic features, you need a proprietary charger, a proprietary camera, and a proprietary video output dongle. These things are more locked down than most laptops. And that's just the problems with the RPi4. That has absolutely nothing to do with the litany of problems the past versions have had, which I don't feel like listing here. One of the issues that comes to mind is that the RPi 3 had a problem where it would spontaneously shut down if the lights in the room flickered wrong. Worst of all, because these clowns have mindshare it means that other more well-behaved SBCs will never get any form of community tech support or large enough marketshare to make any notable change.
    - smarx007 5y ago
      > The third one I tried had a fault where it would spontaneously shut down if I had any USB devices plugged into it for any reason at all (in this case it was a mouse and a flash drive). I have a power supply that is so weak that Pi would reboot when I plug a USB keyboard in it. Solution: never use weak power supplies on Pi's. > I have never seen the micro HDMI port on anything made before 2013 so the adapters required to make it work with modern TVs may as well be proprietary ones sold by RPi. Pi Zero uses mini HDMI due to size constraints. Pi 4 has 2 HDMI outputs! Instead of adapters, I always prefer "right" cables. More expensive but convenient. E.g. https://www.amazon.de/Snowkids-zukunftssicheres-TV-Kabel-unterst%C3%BCtzt-ARC-f%C3%A4hig-Grau/dp/B07Z838XB3 https://www.amazon.de/Snowkids-zukunftssicheres-TV-Kabel-unt.... Also, ironically, my 2012/2013 ASUS Zenbook has a microHDMI port. > The fourth one I owned had the same problem, and the way I fixed it was desoldering its onboard wifi receiver running it at an absurd underclock and overvolting the USB2 input with my bench power supply. Have you tried 2-3A power supplies? E.g. https://www.amazon.de/Anker-PowerPort-Wandladeger%C3%A4t-kompaktes-USB-Ladeger%C3%A4t-White/dp/B07X1X5ZFV https://www.amazon.de/Anker-PowerPort-Wandladeger%C3%A4t-kom.... Though I found the "official" supply cheaper and went with it. > One of the issues that comes to mind is that the RPi 3 had a problem where it would spontaneously shut down if the lights in the room flickered wrong. Most likely your power adaptor would not be able to maintain stable voltage when your lights flickered. Anyway, have been running 3B+, a few Pi0s for a few years and this is the first time I read about so many problems with Pi's falling on one head. To keep my SD cards alive longer, I use DietPi and had only one SD card die on me over ca. 10 pi-years of uptime. > more well-behaved SBCs I am all ears!
      - theHIDninja 5y ago
        I tried multiple power supplies. I even tried bench power supplies and overvolting them. Nothing worked. It fails for the same reason power strips fail if you plug too much into them. The Pi needs ~110% of what the input can even supply (that's ignoring the spec that says it should be 2.5 amps) and anything plugged in down-stream will need to take pieces out of that. >Pi 4 has 2 HDMI outputs! Two full-sized HDMI ports could fit on the board. At least, I could fit them. I question the competency of all the engineers working there. >Most likely your power adaptor would not be able to maintain stable voltage when your lights flickered. No. It was due to the wifi/bluetooth tranceiver not being potted and it would hard-reset if disturbed too much by the photoelectric effect. >Anyway, have been running ... Anecdotal evidence. They are built like absolute trash and it's a miracle anybody says they work for any reason. > more well-behaved SBCs Wake me up when someone makes one with ECC ram. I will not entertain using one unless it does.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    I have always used a few since the days of the original version. On my experience they last until I drop them, crush them with some tool, or step over them. The power supply tends to be much shorter lived. I severely oversize those and even then they like to stop working after just a few years. The SD card is the shortest lived component by far, but it lasts longer and has a better failure mode if you disable swap. (Why do pi distros enable swap at all?) Oh, and of course, since version 3 the power cable is the hardest component to get right. You need a very good cable, and you probably don't even know the specs on most of the ones you have...
    - ajford 5y ago
      I've had a lot of luck using the Samsung Evo Select micro sd cards, and use them almost exclusively with my RPis. I've recently been trying PNY Elite-X as well with good results, though I think I've only got one Pi running those (and two Wyze cams).
- heywire 5y ago
  Last year I decommissioned a Pi 2 that had been running nonstop pretty much since it came out, with the same SD card. I used it as a camera/motion detector for my garage, so it isn’t like it had the perfect environment. I also have a pi 3 that runs nonstop collecting data from a couple usb peripherals. I have a pi zero W running as a print server for the last 2-3 years, and a pi 4 with multiple services and docker containers for the last 1.5-2 years. I have never experienced an SD or pi failure. I only buy the power supplies recommended by the pi foundation. I also gracefully shut down vs. yanking power (but I do not have these on UPS, so they do occasionally experience power outages)
  - theHIDninja 5y ago
    That is all anecdotal evidence. All four that I have tried using have failed catastrophically for different reasons. See my reply to a different comment on the same thread.
    - heywire 5y ago
      As is yours. I was only sharing my own anecdotes to show that both extremes exist.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  There are better solutions other than the Raspberries, often even cheaper, less power hungry and more open, but they struggle to gain visibility because they don't spend in advertising as much as the Raspberry Pi Foundation (Broadcom?) does. Here's a list of over 400 boards. There's also a .csv file to downlaod for offline quick comparison. https://hackerboards.com/ https://hackerboards.com/
  - kingosticks 5y ago
    Out of interest, where do you see their adverts?
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      Advertising doesn't need to be explicit. I won't comment further as I was roasted here when I wrote what I thought about the RPi Zero scarcity (which lasted years) when it was launched.
      - kingosticks 5y ago
        Sure, but that's normally the sort of adverting that goes along with a big advertising spend. I had imagined almost all their advertising exposure is from giving product away for people to review, and of course the charity aspect got headlines originally. I suppose you might say the silly low price of the pi zero was a form of advertising. I don't think they'll do a stunt like that again.
- ajford 5y ago
  I've got multiple RasPis from 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gen that all have lasted years. I know of a Rpi 2b still running in a shed in the New Mexico desert that holds at about 90*F that's still going after 5 years. I had a 3B running as a car infotainment system with hard shutdowns at least daily for three years. Sold that car and it's now in a drawer, but slated for use in an arcade perhaps. I've got another 3b running as a Unifi controller that's been running for 2+ years. I've got two 3b and one 4 running OctoPi (3d printer server) without issues for 3+ years. Given the mass adoption and heavy usage of RPis, I would venture to day most people don't find them to be "horrible computers". I think in 5+ years the only time I've had an RPi fail at the hardware level and die was due to powering it via the 5V headers and accidentally reversing polarity. Might have also shorted one out when an enclosure was flooded due to bad weather seals. All anecdotal, but I find most of the time when Pi's fail it's often either voltage sag, poor quality sd cards, or excessive writes to the SD. The SD cards are definitely a weak link in the RPi ecosystem. Whenever possible, ensure your Pi isn't reporting undervoltage and look for ways to minimize writing to disk (or attach a USB drive for any heavy writing necessary).
albertzeyer 5y ago
We use a small drink kiosk touch pad powered by Rasperry Pi, using this simple software project: https://github.com/rwth-i6/drink-kiosk https://github.com/rwth-i6/drink-kiosk Works great. Except the SD card seems to be dying now after 3 years of constant usage (well, less usage during the enforced home-office times).
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  Check out the high endurance SD cards they typically support 10 to 100 times the writes other SD cards do and aren't that much more expensive. They are most often used in dashcams and the like.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Or for a kiosk you could probably run exclusively from RAM and never touch the SD card after the initial boot.
    - sgt 5y ago
      We found that booting from USB and using a 2.5" SSD drive is durable.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Fwiw Alpine Linux is very easy to set up in diskless mode. That's what I used for my first Pi 4 install. It does boot up and load packages from the sd card, but after that everything runs from RAM.
- forinti 5y ago
  Try disabling syslog and swap.
- benttoothpaste 5y ago
  3 years for SD card is very long. Mine requires SD card replacement after 3-4 months. I hate that storage medium.
Damogran6 5y ago
My RPi's are like lottery tickets. I buy them with the thought of all they could be used for...then collect duct in the junk drawer. I also tell myself I'm supporting the manufacturer, though it would appear they don't need my help.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Same here. I buy them, set them up for some interesting thing, and then I decided to just convert the fleet into a single NUC with ESX. Faster, easier to manage.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewzah 5y ago
  Indeed. One actually useful case I found was using an rpi with shairport-sync + owntone to allow airplay streaming. I got a quality DAC from hifiberry [0]. Another use was running HomeAssistant, but I migrated that to my real server. Another use is having an external InfluxDB + Grafana monitoring setup so I can view stats even if the server goes down. Lastly, you can take X amount of raspberry pis and run a kubernetes cluster with k3s. [1] Since I don't play with my cluster much, most of my pis just sit around gathering dust... 0: https://www.hifiberry.com/ https://www.hifiberry.com/ 1: https://k3s.io/ https://k3s.io/
  - bombcar 5y ago
    That's a big one, unless you're doing actual IO on the Pi itself, if you have a server you can likely virtualize or docker whatever you were going to do with the Pi.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    I have a few Pis around the house, but likewise, the primary use-case that has stuck has been as an Airplay target (using shairport-sync). I'm not using a RPi specific DAC, but rather a cheap USB DAC. I have two of these around the house and haven't had to touch them for years. The second use-case I have is as an Octopi server to run my 3D printer. I have found this interface to be significantly more user friendly than uploading new designs to an SD card.
bush-bby 5y ago
I don’t know why, but there are few things I enjoy more than living vicariously through people who document raspberry pi projects and use cases.
- moduspol 5y ago
  I think it scratches the same itch for me as it does for my wife looking at Instagram recipes. The end result clearly looks amazing. I'd really like to get into doing that, but every time I try, it ends up being way tougher than it looks and the net result is nowhere near as clean as it is in the pictures.
  - jgust 5y ago
    This comment isn't aimed at you specifically, but I hope it helps: You're looking at the 10th, 20th, 30th+ attempt being documented/curated on the internet. You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet, so don't let that not-so-perfect first try slow you down if you derive value from tinkering.
    - northwest65 5y ago
      If you hadn't have posted it, I would have! Much like writing code, you collect knowledge along the way and the next one is hopefully better.
agumonkey 5y ago
What about powering the information system ?
- amelius 5y ago
  Indeed, before I clicked the link I thought this was about replacing the entire IT infrastructure (servers, laptops and PCs) by RPis. Disappointed to see that this was about controlling some LEDs and billboard screens instead.
- 404mm 5y ago
  I mean, let’s be real, what could it actually power? I can think of a few applications but it certainly won’t be much. - dhcp / dns / radius for the office - maybe internet router, if they don’t have a too fast connection (>500 mbps) - egress MTA - intranet wiki or ticketing - resource monitoring But yah, I agree with others, the title is a bit click-bait.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Yeah but that said my question is serious, I've seen offices relying on servers and desktops .. when in fact their entire operations could fit on an iphone (circa iphone 10). I have the feeling that a lot of information systems are not exchanging much but require huge payloads to coat things enough to keep cute in the html5/es6 era Quite often what would have been done with a bunch of bytes on a dumb terminal now requires full blown windows + browser, network shares of useless files, mail servers holding massively redundant content
    - 404mm 5y ago
      100% true. Some websites are more than 100 MB to fully load. That’s absolutely insane to me. Tons of JS to process on the client side and very often some Java / .net code on the server side. (I’m not mentioning PHP/Python/Perl because those end up being less resource hungry and could actually run on the Pi ;) )
newshorts 5y ago
When I see companies build bespoke solutions like this I can’t help but wonder which client paid for that. Don’t get me wrong I would love to spend the time to build a system like that, as an engineer it sound fun! No doubt this project came at the cost of someone paying the company for value that was not transferred Sorry for being Daniel Downer here…
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Yes, it's called "profit". You can distribute it to shareholders, and you can also use some of it to improve the live of employees. As a rule, every client contributes with something. Probably not at the same rate.
- eli 5y ago
  Engineers who get dedicated time to work on fun projects are better, happier engineers. Everyone wins. We implement “15% time” for this and other reasons (and we certainly didn’t invent the idea). Some great ideas came out of it that grew into products and features. But mostly it’s stuff that was fun or interesting but didn’t directly lead to any revenue. That’s not just ok- it’s an important part of getting better as an engineer.
- yardie 5y ago
  All their clients paid for it, does it really matter? Clients aren't concerned with what the consultants does with the money once the invoice is paid. Could you imagine your employer/client involved with your own life like that? "I don't think spending our money on a trip to Maldives is an effective use of our money. Maybe we are paying you too much." Like that would fly, literally, anywhere?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- detaro 5y ago
  Curious, if you visit a company you contract with do you apply this to everything? "So, did we pay for this coffee machine? How about this TV?"
yardie 5y ago
This is a really cool project and as a hacker of the Raspberry Pi since v1b I love to see it. Clicking on the Monterail about page I really do appreciate when companies list their teams. It's that small bit of credit that I feel goes a long way. It appears more common in European companies. American companies will typically list the board and executives; ICs are treated as interchangeable cogs with no credit given except internally.
- ahyattdev 5y ago
  I believe part of the reason for American companies to not list teams publicly is to guard against easily poaching talent using that data.
  - yardie 5y ago
    LOL. Like that information isn't readily available on LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, Github, etc. There are ways ($$$) to retain talent.
zwieback 5y ago
That's a nice looking panel, would like to hear a little more detail on the wiring and switching of AC loads. At work we're only allowed to go up to 50V, for everything else we have to call in an electrician and that costs $$$. edit: found some more detail in the direct link - very interesting. I wonder if you have to get something like that inspected wherever it was installed.
treesknees 5y ago
The technical detail blog post has a bit more information. At first I was wondering why they decided to go with an RPi instead of a few enterprise servers, and it looks like they're utilizing the GPIO interfaces to interact with relays to power some of it. https://www.monterail.com/blog/2016/smart-office-raspberry-pi https://www.monterail.com/blog/2016/smart-office-raspberry-p...
- dang 5y ago
  Ok, we've changed to that from https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/nine-raspberry-pis-power-this-entire-office/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/nine-raspberry-pis-power-th... above. Thanks!
_joel 5y ago
That's pretty cool. I mean I've worked in offices with tons on Pi's but they've been mainly just driving monitoring and visualisation displays. Seeing some other automation and streaming stuff in neat.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Could someone explain it to me what burger memes are about? I'm not sure if displaying meat on screen is a good idea unless you run a fast food shop.
- amelius 5y ago
  Is showing anything on a billboard screen a good idea, given the power consumption when nobody is looking?
byteface 5y ago
nice. i've done simliar projects with unipis in hotels as its cheaper than crestron. Seeing that din rail brought back some memories. you can attach an infrared reciever to the pins and use lirc to then basically do whatever from a universal remote aswell which is a cool upgrade. put infra on a pizero on the network so it can go in ceiling or discretely somewhere. you might also find the AC has an http interface . they often modbus but samsung have http ones too. so u may be able to control that. one thing you can do is read the serial signals coming out of an AC controller and record the bytes. then just store them as instrucitons and send the same bytes over the same wire to hack it. takes a lot of fiddling.
isoprophlex 5y ago
Nine raspi's... and the mother of all gpio expansion boards. Holy shit that control board is glorious. I want this for my living room :)
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Pretty cool! I wonder if there is a rpi alternative with more gpu power and multiple hdmi outputs just for this use case. You could probably run all the logic on a single rpi. The rpis driving the screens are probably under-utilised and complicates the setup. On the other hand, by having multiple rpis, you reduce the risk of everything going down and ethernet cables (or wifi) could be simpler to setup than having super long cables from a central board up to every screen.
ur-whale 5y ago
I have RPi's with wireguard all over my house hooked to various devices (cameras, boiler, lawn watering system, pool filtration, temp/hygro sensors, centralized home automation hub, home assistant, etc...). Can connect to them from anywhere in the world to check what's going on with my house and in some cases act on it. They also gather every possible piece of data they can get their hands on and log that to a centralized, off-site InfluxDB instance so I can ramp up a grafana instance and check what's been happening in the last <time period>. Convergence of a few things that happened relatively recently to make this possible / easy: 1. Wireguard: all my computers and it thins are on the same virtual LAN 2. Pi 4 has a *way* better Wifi antenna and can sit quite far from the Wifi router and still be very useful. 3. Grafana 4. InfluxDB
moonbug 5y ago
A manager needs firing.
johnklos 5y ago
I had an office with close to a thousand ports spread over a dozen VLANs waiting on a Juniper "expert" to configure routing / NAT / firewalling. Between hardware that was delivered non-functional, other hardware which wasn't properly licensed, and the lack of experience of this "expert", nothing was working for the first several days. In a fit of frustration, I asked for all VLANs to be sent to one port, then I set up a Raspberry Pi to do DNS and DHCP using a NetBSD host-based router to actually forward and do NAT. I told them it would stay that way until the Juniper gear was set up 100% and tested. They're excellent little machines, inexpensive, and wonderful to keep around "in case of emergency". Learn how to root off of a USB drive or to limit writes to the SD card, and they're wonderfully reliable, too.
beezischillin 5y ago
The Pi4 is an amazing piece of hardware. While relying on sd cards is a sure way to get a disappointing surprise, they now support booting off a USB drive, which is amazing. Couple it with even a sata ssd and a USB adapter and you’ll be amazed how fired up it becomes. A Linux without a GUI boots in mere seconds. My biggest complaint really is the availability, especially now. I had to buy one of those mini Intel Atom PCs because I just couldn’t find a Pi4 anymore at a reasonable price. I run an invoicing tool off mine, PiHole, NextCloud, UPS monitoring and HomeAssistant to control lights and heating in my home. I have one serving as a controller and monitoring server for my 3D printer that I turned into a chunky little tablet with a 7” touchscreen and OctoPrint. And another one for backups at the office.
- handrous 5y ago
  > A Linux without a GUI boots in mere seconds. IIRC Lakka (a Linux that boots straight into Retroarch, based on the same micro-distro Kodi uses, I think) is booted and interactive, with a GUI, in like 2-3 seconds. I think it's using direct rendering to achieve that, though, not X or Wayland. [EDIT] And that's off an SDCard.
  - beezischillin 5y ago
    I should’ve been more specific! I meant Raspbian Lite :) That one certainly doesn’t boot in seconds off an SD card.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Right, I wasn't trying to one-up you, and a "full" Linux distro of any kind will take longer than that, just pointing out that the bottleneck is not the hardware. The thing can boot really fast.
      - beezischillin 5y ago
        Oh, don't worry, I assumed that you weren't, I just realised that I wasn't too specific so I just specified it. Sorry if I accidentally implied that you were, I wasn't trying to. Still, I learned about micro-distros which was quite an interesting thing to discover :) I might try and mess around with some on the Pi Zero I have to see if I can figure out a cool use for something like that.
BlackLotus89 5y ago
I only count 7 Pis where are the missing 2?
louwrentius 5y ago
I've been using the Raspberry Pi3/4 for: 1. Pihole + p1 power meter 2. Internet quality monitoring 3. Grafana + Graphite for my home computers 4. Always on Ubuntu Repository Mirror with external 8TB drive 5. A 3b hosting my website powered by solar I should add 'router' but my internet is faster than my Pi4 can handle. Maybe the compute module or pi400 can handle gigabit internet. However, almost everything I listed here could be hosted on a single low-power x86 box and that would even be more power-efficient too.
c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
As a controls engineer in a past life, I like seeing projects like this. Johnson Controls, Honeywell, etc. have been eye gouging customers on proprietary hardware. I've toyed with the idea of starting an open source building automation hardware company. There's quite a few open BAS software packages floating around now too.
- Causality1 5y ago
  Can a Pi match the sort of real-time performance of something like a Controllogix PLC?
  - glouwbug 5y ago
    It'll be infinitely easier to program than ladder logic, that's for sure
    - Causality1 5y ago
      Seriously? I've hit "real" programming and bounced off but I spent a few months as a PLC tech and ladder logic was very easy.
  - cameron_b 5y ago
    No, not on its own. What I've seen done for this sort of application is to stack the RPi on top of, say, an Arduino Mega or SAMD51 in team. The Pi handles database, network (NTP, HTML interface, update work) and the micro is sort of a real-time port expander. Think of an access control scenario ( doors not ports ) where you have n doors ( potentially 2n readers, either wiegand or directly RS485 ) you then have 2n contact closure sensors ( door position and request-to-exit ) and an output relay to control the lock hardware power. The real-time needs of this type of thing scale to super-wide while the database lookup scales separately. You keep a fraction of the user table on the micro controller, based on frequent use of the doors attached directly. Hang another micro controller when you've used up your I/O but connect it to RS485 doing the "same thing" with different labels/IDs. But the Pi just keeps the full list, the full log if wanted, and gives a target for your user update work and adding new doors. I think what people like about the Pi is the modularity and ecosystem. I can get a hat for relays and sensors and things (and a super-duper hat thing for door control if you dig deep enough) You have to engineer all of the reliability ( RTC, watch-dog timers, power state control, opto-isolation of inputs, debouncing of buttons, on and on...) but if you have more time than money, you can learn a fair deal about a particular field by building something rather than buying it. Then when you finally have horsepower at your disposal, you may actually appreciate the value of the readily-available devices built to perform such duties reliably.
iudqnolq 5y ago
How are you emulating an IR remote on a raspi? I dropped down to Rust and gave the thread max priority in Linux but still couldn't toggle the port fast enough (the remote outputs square waves where the signal for the same button varies by low hundred of microseconds. The frequency changed rapidly enough that I can't use the rpi's built-in pwm). It seemed I'd need a dedicated board running something more embedded-y the rpi communicates with. Instead, I'm going to try to solder transistors to the capacitive buttons on the existing remote and re-use it's board. Unfortunately I can't get replacement remotes and I'm just learning how to solder, so I'm not confident in success.
jfklsdfjsdf 5y ago
Disappointed. When I read "powering an office", I thought they had found a way to run their business-critical applications and storage on Pis. Now that would be an achievement.
ticktockman 5y ago
I personally love RPis. My company is balena.io and they too basically run on the little guys!

276 points by heywire 5y ago

That is surprising. I guess it's still economical for them to use these horrible computers despite the fact the mean time between failures is at best three weeks.

foxfluff 5y ago
Do you have any references for MTBF or the Pi's failure modes in general? SD cards going out are pretty much the only thing people talk about, and that problem is easy to solve. Another thing is bad power supplies, again easily solved (and not the Pi's fault).
- theHIDninja 5y ago
  My experiences with raspberry pis has been exclusively and extremely negative. The first one I owned had some kind of electrical fault that bricked and destroyed my TV. The second one I owned had a fault where a few of the capacitors on the back fell off upon me plugging it in for the first time. The third one I tried had a fault where it would spontaneously shut down if I had any USB devices plugged into it for any reason at all (in this case it was a mouse and a flash drive). The fourth one I owned had the same problem, and the way I fixed it was desoldering its onboard wifi receiver running it at an absurd underclock and overvolting the USB2 input with my bench power supply. With that said, let me talk about their hardware. The USB-C implementation on the raspberry pi 4 violates the USB spec. When this was brought up to the engineers over there, they completely memory holed the problem, saying it works on USB2 chargers through an adapter. I call bullshit because during normal use it will draw more than 12.5 watts (which exceeds power limits on USB2 cables). I have never seen the micro HDMI port on anything made before 2013 so the adapters required to make it work with modern TVs may as well be proprietary ones sold by RPi. The camera input connector is encrypted for some reason, so if you wanted to use a camera through there it has to be one of raspberry pi's. Despite them claiming it's opensource, it really isn't. The only thing that they have made opensource is the schematics which are largely useless for integrating into your own designs. The main processor onboard (and a handful of other ICs) isn't even commercially available. They claim it is, but that's only if you order it in minimum quantities of a few hundred thousand or something. So in order to use the RPi4's most basic features, you need a proprietary charger, a proprietary camera, and a proprietary video output dongle. These things are more locked down than most laptops. And that's just the problems with the RPi4. That has absolutely nothing to do with the litany of problems the past versions have had, which I don't feel like listing here. One of the issues that comes to mind is that the RPi 3 had a problem where it would spontaneously shut down if the lights in the room flickered wrong. Worst of all, because these clowns have mindshare it means that other more well-behaved SBCs will never get any form of community tech support or large enough marketshare to make any notable change.
  - smarx007 5y ago
    > The third one I tried had a fault where it would spontaneously shut down if I had any USB devices plugged into it for any reason at all (in this case it was a mouse and a flash drive). I have a power supply that is so weak that Pi would reboot when I plug a USB keyboard in it. Solution: never use weak power supplies on Pi's. > I have never seen the micro HDMI port on anything made before 2013 so the adapters required to make it work with modern TVs may as well be proprietary ones sold by RPi. Pi Zero uses mini HDMI due to size constraints. Pi 4 has 2 HDMI outputs! Instead of adapters, I always prefer "right" cables. More expensive but convenient. E.g. https://www.amazon.de/Snowkids-zukunftssicheres-TV-Kabel-unterst%C3%BCtzt-ARC-f%C3%A4hig-Grau/dp/B07Z838XB3 https://www.amazon.de/Snowkids-zukunftssicheres-TV-Kabel-unt.... Also, ironically, my 2012/2013 ASUS Zenbook has a microHDMI port. > The fourth one I owned had the same problem, and the way I fixed it was desoldering its onboard wifi receiver running it at an absurd underclock and overvolting the USB2 input with my bench power supply. Have you tried 2-3A power supplies? E.g. https://www.amazon.de/Anker-PowerPort-Wandladeger%C3%A4t-kompaktes-USB-Ladeger%C3%A4t-White/dp/B07X1X5ZFV https://www.amazon.de/Anker-PowerPort-Wandladeger%C3%A4t-kom.... Though I found the "official" supply cheaper and went with it. > One of the issues that comes to mind is that the RPi 3 had a problem where it would spontaneously shut down if the lights in the room flickered wrong. Most likely your power adaptor would not be able to maintain stable voltage when your lights flickered. Anyway, have been running 3B+, a few Pi0s for a few years and this is the first time I read about so many problems with Pi's falling on one head. To keep my SD cards alive longer, I use DietPi and had only one SD card die on me over ca. 10 pi-years of uptime. > more well-behaved SBCs I am all ears!
    - theHIDninja 5y ago
      I tried multiple power supplies. I even tried bench power supplies and overvolting them. Nothing worked. It fails for the same reason power strips fail if you plug too much into them. The Pi needs ~110% of what the input can even supply (that's ignoring the spec that says it should be 2.5 amps) and anything plugged in down-stream will need to take pieces out of that. >Pi 4 has 2 HDMI outputs! Two full-sized HDMI ports could fit on the board. At least, I could fit them. I question the competency of all the engineers working there. >Most likely your power adaptor would not be able to maintain stable voltage when your lights flickered. No. It was due to the wifi/bluetooth tranceiver not being potted and it would hard-reset if disturbed too much by the photoelectric effect. >Anyway, have been running ... Anecdotal evidence. They are built like absolute trash and it's a miracle anybody says they work for any reason. > more well-behaved SBCs Wake me up when someone makes one with ECC ram. I will not entertain using one unless it does.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  I have always used a few since the days of the original version. On my experience they last until I drop them, crush them with some tool, or step over them. The power supply tends to be much shorter lived. I severely oversize those and even then they like to stop working after just a few years. The SD card is the shortest lived component by far, but it lasts longer and has a better failure mode if you disable swap. (Why do pi distros enable swap at all?) Oh, and of course, since version 3 the power cable is the hardest component to get right. You need a very good cable, and you probably don't even know the specs on most of the ones you have...
  - ajford 5y ago
    I've had a lot of luck using the Samsung Evo Select micro sd cards, and use them almost exclusively with my RPis. I've recently been trying PNY Elite-X as well with good results, though I think I've only got one Pi running those (and two Wyze cams).
heywire 5y ago
Last year I decommissioned a Pi 2 that had been running nonstop pretty much since it came out, with the same SD card. I used it as a camera/motion detector for my garage, so it isn’t like it had the perfect environment. I also have a pi 3 that runs nonstop collecting data from a couple usb peripherals. I have a pi zero W running as a print server for the last 2-3 years, and a pi 4 with multiple services and docker containers for the last 1.5-2 years. I have never experienced an SD or pi failure. I only buy the power supplies recommended by the pi foundation. I also gracefully shut down vs. yanking power (but I do not have these on UPS, so they do occasionally experience power outages)
- theHIDninja 5y ago
  That is all anecdotal evidence. All four that I have tried using have failed catastrophically for different reasons. See my reply to a different comment on the same thread.
  - heywire 5y ago
    As is yours. I was only sharing my own anecdotes to show that both extremes exist.
squarefoot 5y ago
There are better solutions other than the Raspberries, often even cheaper, less power hungry and more open, but they struggle to gain visibility because they don't spend in advertising as much as the Raspberry Pi Foundation (Broadcom?) does. Here's a list of over 400 boards. There's also a .csv file to downlaod for offline quick comparison. https://hackerboards.com/ https://hackerboards.com/
- kingosticks 5y ago
  Out of interest, where do you see their adverts?
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Advertising doesn't need to be explicit. I won't comment further as I was roasted here when I wrote what I thought about the RPi Zero scarcity (which lasted years) when it was launched.
    - kingosticks 5y ago
      Sure, but that's normally the sort of adverting that goes along with a big advertising spend. I had imagined almost all their advertising exposure is from giving product away for people to review, and of course the charity aspect got headlines originally. I suppose you might say the silly low price of the pi zero was a form of advertising. I don't think they'll do a stunt like that again.
ajford 5y ago
I've got multiple RasPis from 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gen that all have lasted years. I know of a Rpi 2b still running in a shed in the New Mexico desert that holds at about 90*F that's still going after 5 years. I had a 3B running as a car infotainment system with hard shutdowns at least daily for three years. Sold that car and it's now in a drawer, but slated for use in an arcade perhaps. I've got another 3b running as a Unifi controller that's been running for 2+ years. I've got two 3b and one 4 running OctoPi (3d printer server) without issues for 3+ years. Given the mass adoption and heavy usage of RPis, I would venture to day most people don't find them to be "horrible computers". I think in 5+ years the only time I've had an RPi fail at the hardware level and die was due to powering it via the 5V headers and accidentally reversing polarity. Might have also shorted one out when an enclosure was flooded due to bad weather seals. All anecdotal, but I find most of the time when Pi's fail it's often either voltage sag, poor quality sd cards, or excessive writes to the SD. The SD cards are definitely a weak link in the RPi ecosystem. Whenever possible, ensure your Pi isn't reporting undervoltage and look for ways to minimize writing to disk (or attach a USB drive for any heavy writing necessary).

albertzeyer 5y ago

We use a small drink kiosk touch pad powered by Rasperry Pi, using this simple software project: https://github.com/rwth-i6/drink-kiosk https://github.com/rwth-i6/drink-kiosk Works great. Except the SD card seems to be dying now after 3 years of constant usage (well, less usage during the enforced home-office times).

JaimeThompson 5y ago
Check out the high endurance SD cards they typically support 10 to 100 times the writes other SD cards do and aren't that much more expensive. They are most often used in dashcams and the like.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Or for a kiosk you could probably run exclusively from RAM and never touch the SD card after the initial boot.
  - sgt 5y ago
    We found that booting from USB and using a 2.5" SSD drive is durable.
foxfluff 5y ago
Fwiw Alpine Linux is very easy to set up in diskless mode. That's what I used for my first Pi 4 install. It does boot up and load packages from the sd card, but after that everything runs from RAM.
forinti 5y ago
Try disabling syslog and swap.
benttoothpaste 5y ago
3 years for SD card is very long. Mine requires SD card replacement after 3-4 months. I hate that storage medium.

Damogran6 5y ago

My RPi's are like lottery tickets. I buy them with the thought of all they could be used for...then collect duct in the junk drawer. I also tell myself I'm supporting the manufacturer, though it would appear they don't need my help.

rootusrootus 5y ago
Same here. I buy them, set them up for some interesting thing, and then I decided to just convert the fleet into a single NUC with ESX. Faster, easier to manage.
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andrewzah 5y ago
Indeed. One actually useful case I found was using an rpi with shairport-sync + owntone to allow airplay streaming. I got a quality DAC from hifiberry [0]. Another use was running HomeAssistant, but I migrated that to my real server. Another use is having an external InfluxDB + Grafana monitoring setup so I can view stats even if the server goes down. Lastly, you can take X amount of raspberry pis and run a kubernetes cluster with k3s. [1] Since I don't play with my cluster much, most of my pis just sit around gathering dust... 0: https://www.hifiberry.com/ https://www.hifiberry.com/ 1: https://k3s.io/ https://k3s.io/
- bombcar 5y ago
  That's a big one, unless you're doing actual IO on the Pi itself, if you have a server you can likely virtualize or docker whatever you were going to do with the Pi.
- mbreese 5y ago
  I have a few Pis around the house, but likewise, the primary use-case that has stuck has been as an Airplay target (using shairport-sync). I'm not using a RPi specific DAC, but rather a cheap USB DAC. I have two of these around the house and haven't had to touch them for years. The second use-case I have is as an Octopi server to run my 3D printer. I have found this interface to be significantly more user friendly than uploading new designs to an SD card.

bush-bby 5y ago

I don’t know why, but there are few things I enjoy more than living vicariously through people who document raspberry pi projects and use cases.

moduspol 5y ago
I think it scratches the same itch for me as it does for my wife looking at Instagram recipes. The end result clearly looks amazing. I'd really like to get into doing that, but every time I try, it ends up being way tougher than it looks and the net result is nowhere near as clean as it is in the pictures.
- jgust 5y ago
  This comment isn't aimed at you specifically, but I hope it helps: You're looking at the 10th, 20th, 30th+ attempt being documented/curated on the internet. You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet, so don't let that not-so-perfect first try slow you down if you derive value from tinkering.
  - northwest65 5y ago
    If you hadn't have posted it, I would have! Much like writing code, you collect knowledge along the way and the next one is hopefully better.

agumonkey 5y ago

What about powering the information system ?

amelius 5y ago
Indeed, before I clicked the link I thought this was about replacing the entire IT infrastructure (servers, laptops and PCs) by RPis. Disappointed to see that this was about controlling some LEDs and billboard screens instead.
404mm 5y ago
I mean, let’s be real, what could it actually power? I can think of a few applications but it certainly won’t be much. - dhcp / dns / radius for the office - maybe internet router, if they don’t have a too fast connection (>500 mbps) - egress MTA - intranet wiki or ticketing - resource monitoring But yah, I agree with others, the title is a bit click-bait.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Yeah but that said my question is serious, I've seen offices relying on servers and desktops .. when in fact their entire operations could fit on an iphone (circa iphone 10). I have the feeling that a lot of information systems are not exchanging much but require huge payloads to coat things enough to keep cute in the html5/es6 era Quite often what would have been done with a bunch of bytes on a dumb terminal now requires full blown windows + browser, network shares of useless files, mail servers holding massively redundant content
  - 404mm 5y ago
    100% true. Some websites are more than 100 MB to fully load. That’s absolutely insane to me. Tons of JS to process on the client side and very often some Java / .net code on the server side. (I’m not mentioning PHP/Python/Perl because those end up being less resource hungry and could actually run on the Pi ;) )

newshorts 5y ago

When I see companies build bespoke solutions like this I can’t help but wonder which client paid for that. Don’t get me wrong I would love to spend the time to build a system like that, as an engineer it sound fun! No doubt this project came at the cost of someone paying the company for value that was not transferred Sorry for being Daniel Downer here…

marcosdumay 5y ago
Yes, it's called "profit". You can distribute it to shareholders, and you can also use some of it to improve the live of employees. As a rule, every client contributes with something. Probably not at the same rate.
eli 5y ago
Engineers who get dedicated time to work on fun projects are better, happier engineers. Everyone wins. We implement “15% time” for this and other reasons (and we certainly didn’t invent the idea). Some great ideas came out of it that grew into products and features. But mostly it’s stuff that was fun or interesting but didn’t directly lead to any revenue. That’s not just ok- it’s an important part of getting better as an engineer.
yardie 5y ago
All their clients paid for it, does it really matter? Clients aren't concerned with what the consultants does with the money once the invoice is paid. Could you imagine your employer/client involved with your own life like that? "I don't think spending our money on a trip to Maldives is an effective use of our money. Maybe we are paying you too much." Like that would fly, literally, anywhere?
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detaro 5y ago
Curious, if you visit a company you contract with do you apply this to everything? "So, did we pay for this coffee machine? How about this TV?"

yardie 5y ago

This is a really cool project and as a hacker of the Raspberry Pi since v1b I love to see it. Clicking on the Monterail about page I really do appreciate when companies list their teams. It's that small bit of credit that I feel goes a long way. It appears more common in European companies. American companies will typically list the board and executives; ICs are treated as interchangeable cogs with no credit given except internally.

ahyattdev 5y ago
I believe part of the reason for American companies to not list teams publicly is to guard against easily poaching talent using that data.
- yardie 5y ago
  LOL. Like that information isn't readily available on LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, Github, etc. There are ways ($$$) to retain talent.

zwieback 5y ago

That's a nice looking panel, would like to hear a little more detail on the wiring and switching of AC loads. At work we're only allowed to go up to 50V, for everything else we have to call in an electrician and that costs $$$. edit: found some more detail in the direct link - very interesting. I wonder if you have to get something like that inspected wherever it was installed.

treesknees 5y ago

The technical detail blog post has a bit more information. At first I was wondering why they decided to go with an RPi instead of a few enterprise servers, and it looks like they're utilizing the GPIO interfaces to interact with relays to power some of it. https://www.monterail.com/blog/2016/smart-office-raspberry-pi https://www.monterail.com/blog/2016/smart-office-raspberry-p...

dang 5y ago
Ok, we've changed to that from https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/nine-raspberry-pis-power-this-entire-office/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/nine-raspberry-pis-power-th... above. Thanks!

_joel 5y ago

That's pretty cool. I mean I've worked in offices with tons on Pi's but they've been mainly just driving monitoring and visualisation displays. Seeing some other automation and streaming stuff in neat.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Could someone explain it to me what burger memes are about? I'm not sure if displaying meat on screen is a good idea unless you run a fast food shop.

amelius 5y ago
Is showing anything on a billboard screen a good idea, given the power consumption when nobody is looking?

byteface 5y ago

nice. i've done simliar projects with unipis in hotels as its cheaper than crestron. Seeing that din rail brought back some memories. you can attach an infrared reciever to the pins and use lirc to then basically do whatever from a universal remote aswell which is a cool upgrade. put infra on a pizero on the network so it can go in ceiling or discretely somewhere. you might also find the AC has an http interface . they often modbus but samsung have http ones too. so u may be able to control that. one thing you can do is read the serial signals coming out of an AC controller and record the bytes. then just store them as instrucitons and send the same bytes over the same wire to hack it. takes a lot of fiddling.

isoprophlex 5y ago

Nine raspi's... and the mother of all gpio expansion boards. Holy shit that control board is glorious. I want this for my living room :)

jokethrowaway 5y ago

Pretty cool! I wonder if there is a rpi alternative with more gpu power and multiple hdmi outputs just for this use case. You could probably run all the logic on a single rpi. The rpis driving the screens are probably under-utilised and complicates the setup. On the other hand, by having multiple rpis, you reduce the risk of everything going down and ethernet cables (or wifi) could be simpler to setup than having super long cables from a central board up to every screen.

ur-whale 5y ago

I have RPi's with wireguard all over my house hooked to various devices (cameras, boiler, lawn watering system, pool filtration, temp/hygro sensors, centralized home automation hub, home assistant, etc...). Can connect to them from anywhere in the world to check what's going on with my house and in some cases act on it. They also gather every possible piece of data they can get their hands on and log that to a centralized, off-site InfluxDB instance so I can ramp up a grafana instance and check what's been happening in the last <time period>. Convergence of a few things that happened relatively recently to make this possible / easy: 1. Wireguard: all my computers and it thins are on the same virtual LAN 2. Pi 4 has a *way* better Wifi antenna and can sit quite far from the Wifi router and still be very useful. 3. Grafana 4. InfluxDB

moonbug 5y ago

A manager needs firing.

johnklos 5y ago

I had an office with close to a thousand ports spread over a dozen VLANs waiting on a Juniper "expert" to configure routing / NAT / firewalling. Between hardware that was delivered non-functional, other hardware which wasn't properly licensed, and the lack of experience of this "expert", nothing was working for the first several days. In a fit of frustration, I asked for all VLANs to be sent to one port, then I set up a Raspberry Pi to do DNS and DHCP using a NetBSD host-based router to actually forward and do NAT. I told them it would stay that way until the Juniper gear was set up 100% and tested. They're excellent little machines, inexpensive, and wonderful to keep around "in case of emergency". Learn how to root off of a USB drive or to limit writes to the SD card, and they're wonderfully reliable, too.

beezischillin 5y ago

The Pi4 is an amazing piece of hardware. While relying on sd cards is a sure way to get a disappointing surprise, they now support booting off a USB drive, which is amazing. Couple it with even a sata ssd and a USB adapter and you’ll be amazed how fired up it becomes. A Linux without a GUI boots in mere seconds. My biggest complaint really is the availability, especially now. I had to buy one of those mini Intel Atom PCs because I just couldn’t find a Pi4 anymore at a reasonable price. I run an invoicing tool off mine, PiHole, NextCloud, UPS monitoring and HomeAssistant to control lights and heating in my home. I have one serving as a controller and monitoring server for my 3D printer that I turned into a chunky little tablet with a 7” touchscreen and OctoPrint. And another one for backups at the office.

handrous 5y ago
> A Linux without a GUI boots in mere seconds. IIRC Lakka (a Linux that boots straight into Retroarch, based on the same micro-distro Kodi uses, I think) is booted and interactive, with a GUI, in like 2-3 seconds. I think it's using direct rendering to achieve that, though, not X or Wayland. [EDIT] And that's off an SDCard.
- beezischillin 5y ago
  I should’ve been more specific! I meant Raspbian Lite :) That one certainly doesn’t boot in seconds off an SD card.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Right, I wasn't trying to one-up you, and a "full" Linux distro of any kind will take longer than that, just pointing out that the bottleneck is not the hardware. The thing can boot really fast.
    - beezischillin 5y ago
      Oh, don't worry, I assumed that you weren't, I just realised that I wasn't too specific so I just specified it. Sorry if I accidentally implied that you were, I wasn't trying to. Still, I learned about micro-distros which was quite an interesting thing to discover :) I might try and mess around with some on the Pi Zero I have to see if I can figure out a cool use for something like that.

BlackLotus89 5y ago

I only count 7 Pis where are the missing 2?

louwrentius 5y ago

I've been using the Raspberry Pi3/4 for: 1. Pihole + p1 power meter 2. Internet quality monitoring 3. Grafana + Graphite for my home computers 4. Always on Ubuntu Repository Mirror with external 8TB drive 5. A 3b hosting my website powered by solar I should add 'router' but my internet is faster than my Pi4 can handle. Maybe the compute module or pi400 can handle gigabit internet. However, almost everything I listed here could be hosted on a single low-power x86 box and that would even be more power-efficient too.

c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago

As a controls engineer in a past life, I like seeing projects like this. Johnson Controls, Honeywell, etc. have been eye gouging customers on proprietary hardware. I've toyed with the idea of starting an open source building automation hardware company. There's quite a few open BAS software packages floating around now too.

Causality1 5y ago
Can a Pi match the sort of real-time performance of something like a Controllogix PLC?
- glouwbug 5y ago
  It'll be infinitely easier to program than ladder logic, that's for sure
  - Causality1 5y ago
    Seriously? I've hit "real" programming and bounced off but I spent a few months as a PLC tech and ladder logic was very easy.
- cameron_b 5y ago
  No, not on its own. What I've seen done for this sort of application is to stack the RPi on top of, say, an Arduino Mega or SAMD51 in team. The Pi handles database, network (NTP, HTML interface, update work) and the micro is sort of a real-time port expander. Think of an access control scenario ( doors not ports ) where you have n doors ( potentially 2n readers, either wiegand or directly RS485 ) you then have 2n contact closure sensors ( door position and request-to-exit ) and an output relay to control the lock hardware power. The real-time needs of this type of thing scale to super-wide while the database lookup scales separately. You keep a fraction of the user table on the micro controller, based on frequent use of the doors attached directly. Hang another micro controller when you've used up your I/O but connect it to RS485 doing the "same thing" with different labels/IDs. But the Pi just keeps the full list, the full log if wanted, and gives a target for your user update work and adding new doors. I think what people like about the Pi is the modularity and ecosystem. I can get a hat for relays and sensors and things (and a super-duper hat thing for door control if you dig deep enough) You have to engineer all of the reliability ( RTC, watch-dog timers, power state control, opto-isolation of inputs, debouncing of buttons, on and on...) but if you have more time than money, you can learn a fair deal about a particular field by building something rather than buying it. Then when you finally have horsepower at your disposal, you may actually appreciate the value of the readily-available devices built to perform such duties reliably.

iudqnolq 5y ago

How are you emulating an IR remote on a raspi? I dropped down to Rust and gave the thread max priority in Linux but still couldn't toggle the port fast enough (the remote outputs square waves where the signal for the same button varies by low hundred of microseconds. The frequency changed rapidly enough that I can't use the rpi's built-in pwm). It seemed I'd need a dedicated board running something more embedded-y the rpi communicates with. Instead, I'm going to try to solder transistors to the capacitive buttons on the existing remote and re-use it's board. Unfortunately I can't get replacement remotes and I'm just learning how to solder, so I'm not confident in success.

jfklsdfjsdf 5y ago

Disappointed. When I read "powering an office", I thought they had found a way to run their business-critical applications and storage on Pis. Now that would be an achievement.

ticktockman 5y ago

I personally love RPis. My company is balena.io and they too basically run on the little guys!