Raspberry Pi mini computer £21

[TgT]

My Raspi should be here by the end of June. I'm hoping to develop some kind of version of Cumulus to run on it, for some of the supported weather stations at least.

Any progress?

[steve]

Any progress?

I'm working on something...

[mcrossley]

And I'm trying to get my Pi to receive the FO radio transmissions directly - making progress but not there yet, unlike Kens, mine is 868MHz and has a DCF clock.

[SJG1976]

Any progress?

I'm working on something...

So excited......


I've not had much luck with getting my Pi to do much lately, just not had the time!!

[TgT]

I have plans to run weather station connected to R.Pi on solar energy AND i like Cumulus

[TNETWeather]

I setup a webserver on one of my RPi's this past week. The other day I setup a simple page to display some of the raw data that is processed by another workstation.... Nothing fancy, just playing around to see how fast (or slow) the RPi would be as a web server.

This unit is headless, with only a USB WiFi dongle and power... has no keyboard etc.. attached.

It is simply processing the simple realtime.txt file that is sent by Cumulus to one of my other webservers. Nothing fancy no real graphics to keep it lean.

Current webserver is Apache2, but I plan on moving over to lighttpd which should be a lot leaner and use less resources.

Website Removed

Well this lasted for about 12 hours when someone at the Ip 213.125.49.189 decided to play some hacking attempts to the point that the webserver crashed. Not sure if I will bring it back online since I don't have "normal" security on the box to mitigate this type of event.

[mcrossley]

Seems to run OK Kevin. I've still not got my FO direct radio link working yet, I think the interference from the Pi's WiFi adapter may be too great...

[nking]

I setup a webserver on one of my RPi's this past week. The other day I setup a simple page to display some of the raw data that is processed by another workstation.... Nothing fancy, just playing around to see how fast (or slow) the RPi would be as a web server.http://webrpi.tnet.com/weather

Very nice Kevin. It'll be interesting to see how robust this Pi is....

[TNETWeather]

Very nice Kevin. It'll be interesting to see how robust this Pi is....

I've found it to be extremely reliable.. but you have to start out with good components... The power supply is one of the most important. Not enough power or poor power and you can have a lot of weird results. All of my RPi are now powered with what would be power supplies from/for tablets so they are typically 1.8amp or higher. A lot of cheap off eBay or other locations are not really what they say they are and you can end up tracking down problems that end up directly related to power.

While I do have one connected to my big screen HDTV via an HDMI connector, all of the others are headless. This takes a little planning but is not very complicated.

I even have one that is "portable" in that it is in a case, with a WiFi dondle, HDMI cable (with DVI adapter if needed). I can take it to an office, connect it to my Nexus 7 tablet to set the local WiFi account info and then restart it on the network at the office, plug it into a monitor in the conference room and do presentations. Works well even when I don't know if they will have a WiFi source since I can leach off of my smart phone using LTE and have fast Internet access without it.

I also use MicroSDHC cards for memory instead of just plain full sized SDcards. I use an SDCard adapter... this has the benefit of being able to be used in a mini-USB thumb drive which has a lot more support than the SDcard format in things like notebooks etc...

I also have set them up so that I can backup the filesystems on a regular basis so if one gets corrupted you don't have to start all over. Also means I can use a basic build as a starting point for a new unit.

As long as you are not thinking of it as being a high powered computer and want to make a desktop out of it, it is quite a nice unit with many possible uses.

[steve]

As long as you are not thinking of it as being a high powered computer and want to make a desktop out of it, it is quite a nice unit with many possible uses.

I built a new kernel on mine (I needed hidraw and it's not enabled in the supplied images). I know a sensible person would have cross-compiled, but the Pi was just sitting there anyway. Only took about 10 hours...

[TNETWeather]

As long as you are not thinking of it as being a high powered computer and want to make a desktop out of it, it is quite a nice unit with many possible uses.

I built a new kernel on mine (I needed hidraw and it's not enabled in the supplied images). I know a sensible person would have cross-compiled, but the Pi was just sitting there anyway. Only took about 10 hours...

Only 10 hours?... one of the reasons why I have more than one is because I was setting something up and I wanted to do something else while it was running. At $35... and already having some spare PSU's and WiFi dongles... it is a cheap computer.

The newer 512mb units are slightly faster. I have one already and have a couple more on order.

[nking]

Very nice Kevin. It'll be interesting to see how robust this Pi is....

I've found it to be extremely reliable.. .

Hi Kevin,

Many thanks for your comprehensive reply/advice.

[TNETWeather]

Had to take the RPi website offline this morning have a barrage of hack attempts hit it basically causing it to freeze as it couldn't handle the connections.

Plan on rebuilding it using lightttp in a few days and sticking it behind a stateful inspection firewall to protect it better.

This would not normally be an issue as few would use this as a public web server, but more likely as a private web server to get to their data.

[steve]

That IP address is in the Netherlands. I can confirm that no-one has ever posted to the forum from that address.

[henkg]

Interesting topic. I just ordered one (the type B version 2.0 512 MB version).
Before that, I did a lot of reading. Information that was useful for me:
- This topic.
- The Raspberry quick start guide: http://www.raspberrypi.org/quick-start-guide
- So you got one, now what?: http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/04/rasp ... de-how-to/
- Dragontail Mapping Tutorial to setup a Pi for pywws: http://www.weather.dragontail.co.uk/ind ... tion_setup
- Installing a USB Weather Station on a Raspberry PI Part 1: http://blog.retep.org/2012/07/30/instal ... pi-part-1/
- Installing a USB Weather Station on a Raspberry PI part 2: http://blog.retep.org/2012/09/01/instal ... pi-part-2/
And of course the PYWWS documentation: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgr ... orum/pywws

My object is to get the Raspberry running with PYWWS, including FTP to my website.This might take awhile (many weeks I guess). Eventually I might be able to create a Debian image with everything incorporated, and make it available for download.
For now: wishfull thinking. The Raspberry isnt even delivered yet ....
PS. AFAIK, PYWWS only works with Fine Offset weatherstations.