View table: ToDo

M: I have quite a few things that I've designed and printed but haven't bothered to put on Internal:Thingiverse yet, and I'm behind in my Internal:Github and blog work. There's a fair bit of that which would fit in quite well here and I would like to post it under the SqL banner if that works for you. Is there a Squirrelslair Internal:Thingiverse page or Internal:Githubrepository?

There are those pages now, and also Internal:Instructables. By "under the SqL banner", do you mean Squirrelslair and this wiki? Ttenbergen (talk) 19:42, 14 November 2021 (PST)

• The main thing I was thinking about was moving the video from the USB stick to the SD card. I don't think there have been any requests to change the video since the electronics were handed over, and if that

comes up at some point it could be either a trip or a quick hand off of SD cards. Making the root filesystem on the SD card read-only used to be a lot of work and unreliable but it's since become a selectable option in raspi-config. One less part to troubleshoot, no fstab file entries to worry about, and all of the files are on the same device. The one thing we'd need to test is speed; I don't expect there to be a big difference on a Pi 1A+ but I don't have any numbers for you.

• • I still think there is a simplicity to the USB setup that I like. If I had to go in without documentation right now and change the video on the gruffalo display (or walk someone else through it over the phone or through a remote control zoom meeting) I could do it with the USB setup, but much less likely if we move it to sd card. Also, having them separated seems to provide a little bit of the separation between data and code that is considered good practice in web site building, but without reviewing the reasons, that would be a smaller argument. In any case, there are trade-offs. I don't have my heart set on this either way, we should discuss further. Ttenbergen (talk) 09:30, 2022 April 9 (PDT)
    • Completely agree with the simplicity factor. But it's been there for over a year and there's been no discussion of changing the video yet.Hal (talk) 13:29, 2022 April 10 (CDT)
    • Nor has there been a sign of the USB key failing. I think I may need to qualify this all a bit. For you to whip up a new PI sd card from scratch right now is a well understood process. I'd look it up and start installing even the tools to put an image on an SD card, almost as if I had never done it. I think I have set up a total of 2-3 ever. Maybe that's part of why I like the separation. Although I am obviously kidding myself here, since I might still have to set up a new one of these one day. So maybe the real trick is for me to get a better idea of the process you follow for this. After that I might even agree with you! ;-) Ttenbergen (talk) 17:06, 2022 April 10 (PDT)
    • I'm not concerned about the USB stick failing. But considering the way the enclosure is built and how little space there is on that side of the board, I doubt it would be a simple thing to walk someone through over the phone if it ever came up that they wanted to change the video. That being said, the setup process for a standalone machine is very simple and takes less time than downloading the image file.
      • I agree, the USB position in the case is unfortunate. And yet, the number of museum-type people who would be willing to remove the screen to fiddle with it physically would likely be higher than the number of them who would also be able to figure out how to do anything with that sd card, likely on a windows desktop. For example: David. He was happy to set up the display. We cloud test how he would feel about the sd card. Ttenbergen (talk) 11:02, 2022 April 11 (PDT)
        • You know what - don't worry about it. I was just thinking out loud and things got away on me. The Pi and storage weren't what failed, after all. And they paid for a USB stick and an extra SD card. Hal (talk) 18:57, 2022 April 11 (PDT)
    • As an aside, there has got to be an easier way for me to do these edits than squinting through a wall of text and writing in the date and time.Hal (talk) 99:99, 2999 Aprilaugustember 999 (CDT)
      • Yes, the wall of text is a pain. I use ctrl-f a lot when editing wiki, but the fact that I have to probably shows a weakness in the tool. I guess one part is to refactor discussions early, as things become clear. Re. signature, try 4 tildes and then save, it expands into the signature and datestamp. Ttenbergen (talk) 11:02, 2022 April 11 (PDT)
        • Arrite, thanks for the tilde trick. That saves some time! Hal (talk) 18:57, 2022 April 11 (PDT)
  • As a separate thought: sd cards fail, possibly more frequently than USB sticks. Which would then be something we need to compensate for anyway. But it would also be something easy to compensate for by including an sd with a copy in all projects. SD fails and the fix would be a standard "make copy of spare, run". A possible cheaper alternative would be to keep an image of the SD on a google drive and link from the wiki page. Ttenbergen (talk) 09:36, 2022 April 9 (PDT)
    • Now that it's a lot easier to make the root filesystem RO and there's no reason not to, I don't think that card wear should be much of a problem. But including the spare SD is a very good idea anyway. Keeping an image in the cloud would be good too, except then we're looking at 2+GB files.Hal (talk) 13:29, 2022 April 10 (CDT)
      • Would it make sense to keep a setup script of some sort rather than the card contents? Is there such a tool for Raspberry Pi? Something like composer? Ttenbergen (talk) 17:06, 2022 April 10 (PDT)
      • Yes... and no. The Pi OS distribution is at the mercy of the upstream Debian distribution. Every once in a while there's a fundamental change in how things run - switching from initd to systemd a few years ago was huge (and still controversial), moving networking config from /etc/network/interfaces to /etc/dhcpcd.conf, and more recently the change to the new video system. Running a script that downloads the most recent image and does the setup would work great in probably 80% of cases. This display is, unfortunately, not one of them - the new video system means omxplayer (which was designed for the Pi) no longer works. Or at least it didn't last time I checked. There are other video players that will do the same job but the syntax may be a little different, etc.Hal (talk) 19:46, 2022 April 10 (CDT)

• The other thing I was thinking about was whether it would be a good idea to swap the 1A+ out for any of the B+ series. They're larger, more expensive, pull more power, and generate more heat, but are much more common and versatile. They have the same hole spacing as the A+ so attaching one to the enclosure shouldn't be a problem as long as there's space to fit (which shouldn't be a problem if there's no USB stick). The rest of our Pi-based projects use B+ boards, so it would be easier to have spares on hand if there's a failure.
  • So really the only improvement is replacability, since versatility is not really applicable when the 1A+ fills the requirements. So, really, there would be little benefit in changing it out now, only to make it easier to change it out later. There would be benefit if it never breaks, and if it does break in the future, the effort to change it then would be the same as the effort to change it now. What am I missing? Ttenbergen (talk) 09:22, 2022 April 9 (PDT)
    • Yep, being able to replace it easily and quickly from existing stock would be the main improvement. I can't think of any other reason to carry an A+ version of the boards anymore - between the B+ and Zero boards (both of which are more common now) I don't think we'll need to use a 1A+ or 3A+ again. So don't worry, you're not missing anything.Hal (talk) 13:22, 2022 April 10 (CDT)

• I'm installing it on a Pi 4 right now (3.11.0a7). Should be interesting to see if any of the regular stuff runs faster, like the simple calculations for the range lights or even something fancier like blitting Hal (talk) 13:09, 2022 April 14 (PDT)
  • Okay, so on a Pi 4 2GB running at default clock. Main Python install is 3.9.2, altinstall is Python 3.11.0a7. Running a program that assigns three floats and then does a sin of the 1st one, cos of the 2nd one, and tan of the results of the sin and cos. Over 100 runs of 1M iterations, 3.9.2 took an average of 1617.198ms, 3.11.0a7 took an average of 1553.976, or 96% of the time. Running a program that creates an array (using the array library) and appends 1M random integers (range 0-999999), then copies the appended array to another array. Over 100 runs of 1M iterations, 3.9.2 took an average of 2628.873ms, 3.11.0a7 took an average of 2027.642ms, or 77% of the time. Running the same program but using Python lists instead of the array library gave numbers of 2555.437ms, 2038.417ms, or 80% of the time. So after a very quick test of an alpha version, it looks like 3.11 could make a difference for programs that do some memory-intensive work. Hal (talk) 14:57, 2022 April 14 (PDT)
    • Is this ready for use then for any next project? Or is it still alpha? Ttenbergen (talk) 19:52, 2022 July 29 (PDT)