4 ms·

Pis are horrendously unreliable. Even if you pull out all the stops to make them work reliably (like disabling SD card writes), they don't. The broadcom chips

by wyager 5y ago

Pis are horrendously unreliable. Even if you pull out all the stops to make them work reliably (like disabling SD card writes), they don't. The broadcom chips they use are complete garbage. I was hopeful I could use the watchdog timer to make a pi more reliable (by restarting it when it inevitably crashed). Guess what? The internal watchdog timer doesn't f*cking work! You'll notice that every project using pi hardware that needs a WDT uses an external one. Total junk! I don't use them for anything anymore, and I used to have like 6 automating various things.

aulin 5y ago
I've used the internal watchdog without any issue. I mean the one you enable from systemd with RuntimeWatchdogSec=10 (where 10 iirc is a number less than 14 which is the number of seconds where the timer overflows). Not really much to configure or customize but it works reliably.
- wyager 5y ago
  Interesting. Perhaps they fixed the driver/hardware since I last looked at this a couple years ago. At the time, no one had got it working successfully (the special device was there; it just didn't seem to do anything).
paulmd 5y ago
I played around with Pis a lot in the OG Pi 1B era and yeah, I got tired of fixing it every couple months (I attribute this to power quality and SD card failures) and just moved to using various x86 based systems. I used surplus SFF optiplexes from surplus sales (paid as little as $5 for some), AM1-based mITX (mobo+CPU for $50!), or Atom-based NUCs (used to get "surplus" J5005 NUCs with the plastic still on for $125). I'm looking to get back into it with some Pi4s for a few things - but I'm planning to PXE boot this time around to try and sidestep the SD card/power problems. Basically just stuff like LibreElec to free up some of my J5005 NUCs for actual stuff.
rcarmo 5y ago
Modern Pis have effectively zero (pun intended) relationship to the original ones. The kernel issues were fixed, and as long as you keep them cool, you can go a long way even on SD cards.

by wyager 5y ago

aulin 5y ago

I've used the internal watchdog without any issue. I mean the one you enable from systemd with RuntimeWatchdogSec=10 (where 10 iirc is a number less than 14 which is the number of seconds where the timer overflows). Not really much to configure or customize but it works reliably.

wyager 5y ago
Interesting. Perhaps they fixed the driver/hardware since I last looked at this a couple years ago. At the time, no one had got it working successfully (the special device was there; it just didn't seem to do anything).

paulmd 5y ago

I played around with Pis a lot in the OG Pi 1B era and yeah, I got tired of fixing it every couple months (I attribute this to power quality and SD card failures) and just moved to using various x86 based systems. I used surplus SFF optiplexes from surplus sales (paid as little as $5 for some), AM1-based mITX (mobo+CPU for $50!), or Atom-based NUCs (used to get "surplus" J5005 NUCs with the plastic still on for $125). I'm looking to get back into it with some Pi4s for a few things - but I'm planning to PXE boot this time around to try and sidestep the SD card/power problems. Basically just stuff like LibreElec to free up some of my J5005 NUCs for actual stuff.

rcarmo 5y ago

Modern Pis have effectively zero (pun intended) relationship to the original ones. The kernel issues were fixed, and as long as you keep them cool, you can go a long way even on SD cards.