The Chronicles of RPi - The Raspberry Pi

So far I have tried really hard not to mention the Raspberry Pi (RPi) in my blogs. I wanted to give a little background about the work I was doing and until recently, all these projects have been running on a PC.

I won't go into much detail about the hardware and software of the RPi,  but it's basically an ARM processor running a linux distro (Raspian in my case). Currently,  there are two versions of the RPi, versions A and B, but I have been using version B in my projects, which has all the whistles and bells.

For further information about the raspberry pi, visit, www.raspberrypi.org

Once you have an appreciation for the RPi, not what it is capable of but more so its size and cost, so you can see why I was so excited about this project. Essentially,  l replaced a PC system, worth a few hundred dollars, with a $50 dollar linux computer. This excitement has spread to others at my work place, as they are asking if they can include units, so they too can experiment,  in the next RPi order.

The work mentioned in the blog thus far (see The Chronicles of RPi - Web Hosting for an update)  is currently running on a RPi and it has been very reliable. I have had some issues with the network at work where it goes down, making the RPi innaccesible over the network but once connection is reestablished,  all the data is present and accounted for. I primarily communicate with the RPi over an SSH connection and sometimes a reset is needed of a network switch and seldomly the RPi itself.

I am constantly making the scripts more robust and efficient as I plan to deploy the unit at another off site location. Another "problem" I have to deal with is its packaging. Its cost alone can exceed the cost of the unit so I am trying to find a cost effective to do this. Many cases are available online but they focus primarily on securing the RPi and not its peripherals. This could take some time so a big box is probably going to have to work for now.

While making adjustsments to the ERC project python script, I deployed a RPi in our second cluster room at work for temperature monitoring and alerting purposes. This will be the topic of my next installment.

Until next time.

Marvin...