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Looking for Raspberry Pi stock

Matt Strydom
Matt Strydom
in The Internet of Things

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1 minute ago, WannabeSolarSparky said:

It is a Raspberry PI 4B 4gig just in a different form factor i.e keyboard builtin :)

Thanks for this information Sparky.

 

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    Have a look for Intel NUCs.  Can often find 2nd hand Celeron NUCs cheaply at Cash Converters or refurbishers.  Far better quality and performance than a Pi.

    With the price of PIs these days, they only really make sense if you need access to the GPIO bus or hats.  Once you factor in PSU, case and a decent SD card that isn't going to die in 3 months, PIs are not actually that cheap.

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    28 minutes ago, JustinSchoeman said:

    PIs are not actually that cheap

    I was lucky and got mine before they ran out of stock worldwide pushing the prices up.
    I paid R700 each for 2
    Those sd cards are a waste of time especially for data monitoring, if you val;ue your data then update the firmware to run ssd or external hdd.
    I updated my firmware and now boot directly off ssd's and it has been running almost non-stop for 3 year now.
    PSU also been running 24/7 for 3 years without issues.

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    56 minutes ago, JustinSchoeman said:

    Have a look for Intel NUCs.  Can often find 2nd hand Celeron NUCs cheaply at Cash Converters or refurbishers.  Far better quality and performance than a Pi.

    With the price of PIs these days, they only really make sense if you need access to the GPIO bus or hats.  Once you factor in PSU, case and a decent SD card that isn't going to die in 3 months, PIs are not actually that cheap.

    A NUC won't work for Solar Assistant, it needs to be on a Pi. 

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    8 minutes ago, mzezman said:

    A NUC won't work for Solar Assistant, it needs to be on a Pi. 

    Ah. Looks like they do hardware lock-in just for license enforcement. A bit silly, but I suppose that is what you get when you go with commercial software.

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    3 minutes ago, JustinSchoeman said:

    Ah. Looks like they do hardware lock-in just for license enforcement. A bit silly, but I suppose that is what you get when you go with commercial software.

    Yeah that's the deal breaker for me. I need full control over my "stuff" 😁
    Open source works just fine for me. And more often than not the opensource solutions are better supported due to the sheer number of people that collaborate and work on the code :)

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    16 hours ago, Superfly said:

    SD's are a waste of time and money

    You get SD cards that do wear levelling, just like SSDs (Samsung is not one of them). For it to work properly, you have to make sure there are enough free blocks - the easiest is to format it so that 20% of the drive is unused.

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    1 hour ago, BritishRacingGreen said:

    How do you cope with USB ports, hub? 

    It's the W. I wasn't able to get ahold. Of the W 2 which is faster. The original zero has no W - which I believe stands for wifi. 

    It has 2 micro USB ports. 

    One I use for power other for the comms. 

     

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    On 2023/03/20 at 6:18 PM, Superfly said:

    SD's are a waste of time and money (unless for camera etc)  SSD's are always the way to go... (HDD's? what's that? LOL)   

    For Solar-Assistant specifically, SD card is fine as SA is configured to do minimal writing to the SD card - chances of failure are significantly reduced.

    On other projects, I've used Sandisk SD cards in RPI3 and RPI4 with lots of I/O over lengthy periods (years) and not had issues... yet.
    If you use quality SD cards, I suspect the SD failure issue is a bit exaggerated.

    SD much cheaper than SSD.

    The big benefit of SSD over SD is the speed.

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    2 hours ago, system32 said:

    For Solar-Assistant specifically, SD card is fine as SA is configured to do minimal writing to the SD card - chances of failure are significantly reduced.

    On other projects, I've used Sandisk SD cards in RPI3 and RPI4 with lots of I/O over lengthy periods (years) and not had issues... yet.
    If you use quality SD cards, I suspect the SD failure issue is a bit exaggerated.

    SD much cheaper than SSD.

    The big benefit of SSD over SD is the speed.

    Yes, I agree. 

    For the last 15yrs or so i have used SD cards on embedded Linux SBCs (eg PI), I only lost SD because of abrupt power loss. And in all cases the loss was no damage, a reformat was required though. 

    The reason for it is the SSD has relatively large rail capacitors  which allow the SSD controller enough time to flush its cache. SD does not have lthat kind of luxury, and atomic boot sector transactions can and will be left hanging. 

    Of course SSD has speed and wear levelling advantages as well. 

    Edited by BritishRacingGreen

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