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Raspberry Pi

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Peter the file is almost 3GB. I am using a file downloader program just in case the connection breaks and I have to start again. At least it then starts where it stopped. The download time for me is about 2 hours. You may like to try the same if you are not already doing so.

It took me 8 hours to upload

Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk

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3GB, compressed!? Good grief.

I suppose it depends on what you put in there. When I still messed around with my own raspbian based ideas I got it down to 500MB compressed, bare bones, X (the Gui) not installed.

Venus is 65MB compressed, unpacks to about 750MB (which includes a full 275MB of just zeroes, an empty partition for future updates).

So you have some work to do :-)

Downloaded with Uget on Ubuntu in 1hr 57mins on a 4Mb ADSL line which is maximum speed of Telkom exchange in our village. Will be loading it on Rpi2 instead of RPi3 which is currently running. It will be interesting to see if there is much of a difference in performance.

 

I now have the img on my hard disk.  But i cant "burn" the SD card.  Command "Sudo dd" returns "Operation not supported" and the Mac OS Diskutility does not have such an option.  

Just copy all files to the SD card? But it would't be bootable, no?

Sorry i did not mention , the card must be at least 15gb

1 hour ago, PeterGutti said:

Operation not supported

Perhaps the sdcard automounts. That always happens on my system. You have to unmount it first and then attempt to write to it.

That error is fairly generic, it's what happens when a syscall returns ENOTSUP. So it could be anything, but you could try and trace it with strace :-)

You did:

sudo dd if=imagefile bs=1M of=/dev/mmcblk0

right?

8 hours ago, plonkster said:

 

3GB, compressed!? Good grief.

I suppose it depends on what you put in there. When I still messed around with my own raspbian based ideas I got it down to 500MB compressed, bare bones, X (the Gui) not installed.

Venus is 65MB compressed, unpacks to about 750MB (which includes a full 275MB of just zeroes, an empty partition for future updates).

So you have some work to do :-)

 

2017-01-11-raspbian-jessie.zip = 1.42gb. I installed all the requirements and the app is about 8gb. I have installed local emoncms which also require some space for the db if you want it to run for years and not fill up the sd. My smallest size sd that i have is 15gb.

@plonkster if you have a better way, please inform me. I know you can expand the file system. I am no Linux pro. Is there a way to shrink the file system ? Then i can make a smaller image for people to download and they can expand it themself

5 minutes ago, Manie said:

@plonkster if you have a better way, please inform me. I know you can expand the file system. I am no Linux pro. Is there a way to shrink the file system ? Then i can make a smaller image for people to download and they can expand it themself

My criticism was somewhat tongue in cheek... no worries. I know roughly what the basic image size is. You need at least a 4GB card to fit the basic raspbian image, and when a manufacturer cheats (by calling it a 4GB card when it is only 3.9ish) that doesn't work either.

There are two tricks to make it smaller. The first is to fill up all the free space on the image with zeroes before compressing, and there are also two ways to do this. You can either do this on a running image, eg:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M of=spacer
rm spacer

The dd command will fail when it runs out of disk space. You then delete the file and it leaves the underlying blocks all zeroed. This makes all the free space on the image compress to almost nothing.

You can also do that on the image itself. For that you need to do a bit of loopback work, using losetup. First, you need to print the partition table of your image, eg using a venus image:
 

$ fdisk -l venus-image-raspberrypi2.rpi-sdimg
Disk venus-image-raspberrypi2.rpi-sdimg: 748 MiB, 784334848 bytes, 1531904 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc60460e6

Device                              Boot   Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
venus-image-raspberrypi2.rpi-sdimg1 *       8192   90111   81920   40M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
venus-image-raspberrypi2.rpi-sdimg2        90112  655359  565248  276M 83 Linux
venus-image-raspberrypi2.rpi-sdimg3       655360 1220607  565248  276M 83 Linux
venus-image-raspberrypi2.rpi-sdimg4      1220608 1531903  311296  152M 83 Linux

Now the partition I want to zero is the second one, so I need to set up a loopback with an offset at 90112 in this example:
 

$ sudo losetup /dev/loop0 venus-image-raspberrypi2.rpi-sdimg  -o $((90112*512))
$ sudo file -s /dev/loop0
/dev/loop0: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=92e8a174-99af-405c-9944-23cf2e0d30b9 (extents) (huge files)

Now you can mount loop0, and write files to it, eg:

$ sudo mount /dev/loop0 /mnt
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M of=/mnt/spacer
$ sudo rm /mnt/spacer
$ sudo umount /mnt

At this point I prefer to give the file system a forced fsck so that it leaves the factory with a mount count of zero:

$ sudo fsck -f /dev/loop0

Then you need only delete the loop device when done:

$ sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

The second way to make it smaller involves actually making the partitions smaller. That involves first using resize2fs (to make the file system smaller) and then fdisk (to make the partition smaller too), taking care not to make the partition smaller than the filesystem living on it. I'd rather leave that out unless there is someone who really really needs this to be smaller :-)

thanks Plonster, i will try and give it a go ;)

You can also (on the running image) remove some software that is not required. You'd first run dpkg -l to get such a list, eg:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ dpkg -l
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                                  Version                                   Architecture Description
+++-=====================================-=========================================-============-===============================================================================
ii  acl                                   2.2.52-2                                  armhf        Access control list utilities
ii  adduser                               3.113+nmu3                                all          add and remove users and groups
ii  aggregate                             1.6-7                                     armhf        ipv4 cidr prefix aggregator
rc  alsa-base                             1.0.27+1                                  all          dummy package to ease purging of obsolete conffiles
ii  apt                                   1.0.9.8.3                                 armhf        commandline package manager
.
.
.
etc

And then you can uninstall the things that are not really needed, eg if you're not doing any python development you can drop python2.7-dev:

apt-get --purge remove python2.7-dev

And so on and so forth. I recall that the default raspbian image is rather fully featured :-)

Combining such a cleanup with zeroed blocks should bring it down somewhat.

Very true , especially the games ect

I have added the pip4048 , as it is slightly different form the Axperts .A guy in Belgium is testing it and will report back. 

 

9 hours ago, plonkster said:

Perhaps the sdcard automounts. That always happens on my system. You have to unmount it first and then attempt to write to it.

That error is fairly generic, it's what happens when a syscall returns ENOTSUP. So it could be anything, but you could try and trace it with strace :-)

You did:


sudo dd if=imagefile bs=1M of=/dev/mmcblk0

right?

yes (more or less)

Pedro-MacBook:~ Pgutti$ sudo dd if=/Users/Pgutti/Desktop/ICC-PI.img of=/dev/disk4 bs=1024k

dd: /dev/disk4: Resource busy

Pedro-MacBook:~ Pgutti$ sudo dd if=/Users/Pgutti/Desktop/ICC-PI.img of=/dev/disk4s1 bs=1024k

dd: /dev/disk4s1: Resource busy

 

I was wable to format the SD with SD Formatter tool and i can copy files on it.  But "dd" cannot write the img.  

Captura de pantalla 2017-01-10 22.19.55.png

Edited by PeterGutti
attached screen shot

9 hours ago, plonkster said:

Perhaps the sdcard automounts. That always happens on my system. You have to unmount it first and then attempt to write to it.

That error is fairly generic, it's what happens when a syscall returns ENOTSUP. So it could be anything, but you could try and trace it with strace :-)

You did:


sudo dd if=imagefile bs=1M of=/dev/mmcblk0

right?

what is "strace"?

10 minutes ago, PeterGutti said:

what is "strace"?

It's a debugging tool that tracks all system calls and prints it out on the screen. You just prefix whatever command you're running with strace, eg "sudo strace dd....". The idea is that you can then see whatever system call is returning the ENOTSUP error. Not that that would help much to the average guy... but the result could be of use to a developer.

I don't know if and how that works on the mac though.

plonkster, in mac os strace does not exist.  

But there is a consol tool:

10/1/17 22:49:51,719 sudo[5901]:   Pgutti : TTY=ttys000 ; PWD=/Users/Pgutti ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/dd if=/Users/Pgutti/Desktop/ICC-PI.img of=/dev/disk4 bs=1024k
 

but there it shows only the command.. no reason for failing.

10 hours ago, PeterGutti said:

plonkster, in mac os strace does not exist.  

Indeed, I found that out this morning. There is something called dtruss that looks like it does the same thing, but it needs elevated privileges (on Linux it doesn't). Anyway... probably a wild goose chase anyway.

20 hours ago, Manie said:

I have added the pip4048 , as it is slightly different form the Axperts .A guy in Belgium is testing it and will report back. 

 

hi guys (girls), iam the guy from Belgium :P

here in europe its almost all PIP4048 (ms / msd) versions, so the Axpert 5kv parallel was working , but not that good, 

Manie did here a very good job on the coding yesterday!! i would give you a kiss  :P:P:P:ph34r:

 

What is not working :

inverter_frequency = not updating in emon (that you already know ;) ) (not even with the last version you send to me)

 

i connected my solarpanels today (i have dual MPPT), and i see only PV1 in the program and the "total" in emoncms

i did send you an email today with the return code, i hope it helps.

 

what would be great to see in the program and in emoncms, PV1 Amps, PV1 Volts, PV2 Amps , PV2 Volts, and PV1 + PV2 together (volts and amps)

 

 

i have one (or some more B))  word for ya Manie, keep it up and thanks for helping !!!

talk to you later african brother ;)

grtz kristof

 

Thanks for the feedback

yea , the PIP 4048  is still in testing face, I did the coding yesterday. I will still see how we can achieve this as i don't have a protocol doc specifically for yours, nor do i have the inverter. 

 

 

 

 

Just now, Manie said:

Thanks for the feedback

yea , the PIP 4048  is still in testing face, I did the coding yesterday. I will still see how we can achieve this as i don't have a protocol doc specifically for yours, nor do i have the inverter. 

 

thats why iam here to test-run it ;)

 

 

 

Please indicate to me in the return string what values should be the pv1 and pv2 etc. It all depends what the inverter return. If you have more than one Axpert in serial the temperature does not return from the inverter.  If you can't see it in the return string then I can't help as the inverter return the info. There is lot that some Inverters does not return, that we would love to have. Like the inverter temp per inverter , not only one inverter.

15 minutes ago, Manie said:

Please indicate to me in the return string what values should be the pv1 and pv2 etc. It all depends what the inverter return. If you have more than one Axpert in serial the temperature does not return from the inverter.  If you can't see it in the return string then I can't help as the inverter return the info. There is lot that some Inverters does not return, that we would love to have. Like the inverter temp per inverter , not only one inverter.

the temp is working fine now ;) so you dont need to worry about that anymore 

 

that was the return string i emailed you

(227.4 49.9 229.8 49.9 0712 0506 014 397 49.70 000 055 0044 0001 104.5 49.70 00009 01010110 00 00 00054 010N{

 

 

 

 on my inverter it was (when i was looking after i toke the screenshot)

pv1 =54w and 107v

 

so the value close to it in the return is = 

055 0044 0001 104.5 49.70

could this be (at that time )

string 2 :

49.70 = 49.70v

0001 = 1watts

string 1 :

104.5 = 104.5

0044 = 44w

EDIT:

pv1 is reading  good, so you could know the code for that.. only pv2 is not reading out...

5 minutes ago, kg666 said:

on my inverter it was 

pv1 =54w and 107v

 

so the value close to it in the return is = 

055 0044 0001 104.5 49.70

could this be

string 2 :

055 = 55w

0044 = 44watts

nope it is battery capacity. Look the protocol doc and compare the values. Yours does not display the pv 1 and 2 separated 

1

4 minutes ago, Manie said:

nope it is battery capacity. Look the protocol doc and compare the values. Yours does not display the pv 1 and 2 separated 

euhm not sure about that...my inverter can show pv1 and pv2 separated and total on the display 

when i looked in your program..that was the exact value of my PV1 on the inverter... not the combined voltage and watts

the protocal doc you have is for the MS version, and that is indeed a single MPPT solar input, i have dual remember ;)

 

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