June 2016

IOT Projects

Saving a Slice of Raspberry Pi

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

Raspberry_Pi_LogoSo of all the things on the network, the DNS and DHCP server are pretty important.  Especially because my experience has been the router the ISP provided is kind of mediocre at doing the DHCP job.  So when the Raspberry Pi I’ve tasked with doing the work started flaking out I was a little worried.

After some investigation, it seems the SD card had lost a sector, or whatever the equivalent thing is to a sector on flash memory.  These things do have a bit of a limited life and this particular one was a small 4GB card that was a little older.  Four gigabytes isn’t even above the recommended size for the Pi, but I knew I wasn’t planning on putting a lot on it.  Problems arose when it started dying though.  There actually isn’t much using the PiHole, some of the things my wife does with coupons and such I suspect might get blocked and I don’t want the headache of dealing with trying to manually whitelist things and complaints that this and that isn’t working.  The DHCP is another issue.  When the DHCP server disappears, it seems anything using it simply can’t connect to the internet.  I have a lot of static assignments but there’s quite a few assigned by the server.

I may have to look into setting up a secondary backup server, maybe on one of the CHIPs even.

I started out simply re-imaged Raspbian onto a fresh card and setting things up again following the tutorial I had posted.  Everything went pretty smoothly except that I was now out my old config file and would have to go through the hassle of recreating all of the changes I’d made adding and removing devices.

So I went with a new strategy, why not just clone the old card to a new one.  Unfortunately, Win32 Disk Imager, the recommended tool for imaging these SD cards, couldn’t read the whole card, it got hung up and failed partway in.  So I turned to my laptop and Linux hoping for something more robust, which I found in ‘dd’.  It probably stands for “Disk Duplicator”, but don’t quote me on that.

I started running dd to make an image of the old card to put onto a new card, unfortunately, it also failed, like Win32DiskImager.

Back to Square One…

After some searching, I found this post suggesting something called ddrescue.  Most of it wasn’t anything I needed aside from the following.

sudo apt-get install gddrescue
sudo ddrescue -v /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

A few things of note.  My laptop, like many, has a build in SD slot, I added a second using my USB card reader.  I opened the disk manager to get the path to each card, /dev/sdb and/dev/sdc.

This command also hit an error at the same point as both Win32DiskImager and the “dd” command, but it pushed on through, recovering everything else.  At this point it’s a matter of hoping that one bad spot wasn’t int he middle of an important file.

IOT Projects

Internet of Things, Internet of Stuff

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I wanted to take some time to touch on my every changing collection of Internet of Things style devices.  Honestly, it’s kind of iffy what constitutes an “IOT” device, but for the most part I’m sticking with “cheap” and “non traditional computing devices”.

The chief player among these are of course…

The Raspberry Pi

I’m up to 5 Raspberry Pis, a B+, two B2s, one B3, and one Pi Zero.  I have already discuss these quite a bit so they don’t need a ton of additional discussion.  The B+ still operates my DNS/DHCP server, one B2 still runs my IRC stuff, one B2 still runs a Minecraft server.  I actually have not yet come up with a good use for the B3 and Zero yet.  I’ve started messing with Windows 10 IOT on the B3 a bit and there is a Retro Gaming GameBoy project using the Pi Zero floating around on Reddit I may have a go at.

Arduino

If Raspberry Pi is the king of IOT, then Arduino is definitely the Queen. I’ve kind of dropped out of doing Arduino projects a bit and dismantled most of the ones I had built.  Other than adding a WiFi enabled board to my set (by mistake, I thought I was ordering a Shield not a board), not much has changed on my Arduino library.

i did try to build a little digital hourglass project I found online but it’s not going super great.  Stay Tuned for More

Next Thing’s CHIP

CHIP is still one of the most annoying and impossible to search for terms online.  I’m up to three CHIPs now, I’ve received my second Kickstarter CHIP and my VGA DIP.  I’ve still been having some bad luck getting my CHIPs to do much of anything.  I tried to build an Amazon Alexa with no luck in the end after a ton of troubleshooting.  I’ve been trying to get Synergy combined and running on one to let it work with my multi monitor set up.

Now that the Kickstarter campaign is more or less finished and the CHIP is reaching a wider audience I’m hoping it starts to get more support online.

Remix Mini

Another kickstarter product, the Remix Mini is a small computer that runs Android as a desktop.  It works pretty well, I mostly used it last year while traveling for work in the Hotel Room.  I have not touched it since, for one simple, stupid reason.  The HDMI output doesn’t support any of my HDMI to DVI cables.  I can’t plug it into a regular monitor, so I just have… not used it.  I could plug it into a TV but it’s effectively a simple desktop machine and doesn’t work as well for a “lean back” experience.  Maybe if I had a wireless KB and Mouse it would work better.

It’s a shame to because I was really looking forward to this one and it runs a lot of my apps surprisingly well.

ChromeCast

I picked up a Chromecast last year on Black Friday. I used it a bit but in the end, it’s ended up in a drawer.  It’s just too much of a hassle and it caused too many problems.  First off, the hassle.  My crappy old Nexus 7 is partially to blame here but in general the lack of any built in interface is just a flat out pain.  Having to dig out my tablet to use it is a pain.

Worse yet, it was causing problems with the Wireless in the house.  I disabled guest mode which eliminated the problem (eliminating the interference) but it’s still kind of lame that it was an issue to start with.

Kindle Fire Stick

A more recent addition to the network, I added a Kindle Fire Stick.  This is effectively the same as the Chromecast, without the hassle and bull shit of needing a separate device to use it.  It’s not completely without it’s issues but it works pretty well.  The main problem I’ve had is that it loses signal, a lot.  It doesn’t work as all directly hooked to my HDMI switch and at this point it’s cabled out and laying out on the floor behind everything to get it away from any interference.

It runs Amazon videos, which I don’t really use, it runs Netflix, which is used a lot.  It also works well with the fact that I buy my MP3s primarily through Amazon.  Another nice bonus, I use Amazon Cloud to backup all of my Photos, so they are all available through the Fire Stick now to view on the TV.

SteamBox

 Another newer addition is the SteamBox.  Specifically, the cheap streaming box.  It works pretty nicely.  I haven’t had a chance to really put it through the loops yet but my first tests worked well.  I’ll probably do a more in depth write up at some point on it.