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I'd be cautious about using an expensive SD card in the pi, they can be damaged by powering off while being written to. I've had a few fail completely.
So I'd go for having a couple of smaller/cheaper cards, rather than one big expensive one.
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I would avoid booting from SD cards. They are prone to failure (and usually at the worst possible time). Boot from a quality 16GB thumb drive (I use Samsung Fit+ drives), and if you need the extra storage, simply connect a SSD to one of the other USB ports.
Am I correct in assuming that you got a Pi4 with > 2GB RAM?
I would consider running POE because the USB-C power connection is not at all reliable if you start moving the pi around. You want to avoid uncontrolled power-down events - ESPECIALLY if you're booting from a SD card.
I've found that the Pi4 runs very hot. Get a good cooling solution. The best one available is the Ice Tower. I use that one exclusively. Ice Tower case with Low-profile cooler[^]. You can also get just the cooler if you have other needs like I do.
If you're decide to do POE, I recommend the UCTronics POE hat. I had to order mine direct from UCTronics because I couldn't find it on Amazon.UCTRONICS PoE HAT 5V 3A for Raspberry Pi 4B, 3B+ and 802.3af/at PoE Network, with Cooling Fan[^]
I also got their HDMI extender: UCTRONICS Micro HDMI to HDMI Adapter Board for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B[^]
As well as their rack mounting plate (because it provides a mount point for the HDMI extender board): UCTRONICS Mounting Plates for Raspberry Pi 4 B Models, Compatible with 19 inch 3U Rack Mount, 4-Pack[^] - this comes in a pack of four, but I have seven Pi's and got two of these four-packs.
POE Consideration - the UCTronics POE hat precludes the use of any viable cooling solution if you mount it as intended (directly on the GPIO pins). Because I insist on running the Ice Tower cooler (cited above), I had to cobble together a solution that did the following:
0) an adapter for the GPIO pins on the pi that essentially made a "T" that allowed me to connect the POE hat with a ribbon cable, and still allowed me access to the GPIO pins to connect the fan on the ice tower - GPIO 1 to 2 Expansion Board 2 x 20-pin Strip Dual Male Header Double Row Straight GPIO Connector Pin Header[^]
1) I got some 200mm male-female jumper cables to connect the POE header on the pi to the POE hat - Jumper cables[^]
2) I got a 200mm 40-pin ribbon cable to connect the pi GPIO pins to the POE hat - Adafruit ruibbon cable[^]
3) I got a 90-degree GPIO male-to-female adapter to connect the ribbon cable to the POE hat. The reason for this is that a standard male ribbon cable connector will interfere with the 4-pin connector on the POE had - uxcell 9Pcs 2x20 Pin Box Header Connector IDC Male Sockets Right Angle 2.54mm [^]
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I know this all sounds kinda convoluted, but POE is necessary in my use case, and the Ice Tower cooler is a highly valued cooling solution. I'm currently designing a case to hold it all. When I get done, and if you have access to a 3D printer, I can share the design with you.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Thanks for all that information. I got a starter kit that includes a case and a couple of fans.
I have a powered USB hub. I'd bet you good money your USB power problems were from trying drive your pi off of the PC's USB power directly. I'll give that a go for a little while and see how it goes.
I'd have loved to know about your issues with SSD before I went and bought half a terabyte of it.
I'll be hooking it into my main monitor and using a full size keyboard with it since it is being used as a development machine for reasons - that's why I bought it. It has 8GB.
I'll back my SD up after every session. And in any case I use source control. Since this machine is purely to speed up my development of drivers for i2c and spi devices all I'm doing with it is coding.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: I'd bet you good money your USB power problems were from trying drive your pi off of the PC's USB power directly.
I was actually talking about the physical connector, but before I switched over to POE, all of my Pi's were powered from a wall-wart.
honey the codewitch wrote: I'd have loved to know about your issues with SSD before I went and bought half a terabyte of it.
The SD card unreliability is kinda widely known, especially among Pi owners.
BTW, ALWAYS do a controlled shutdown/power-off. Never just shut it off, especially if you're using a SD card to boot from.
One more thing - if you do change to booting from a thumb drive, it's a good idea to keep an unformatted 1gb (or smaller) SD card in the SD slot. It speeds booting from the thmb drive, and keeps the Pi from periodically polling the SD slot to see if a card is in it.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Thanks. The SD i ordered was sold out anyway, So i didn't end up getting it. I'm glad. I'll end up ordering a thumb drive.
Real programmers use butterflies
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As JSOP said they do run hot, on mine I put heat sinks and put it in a case with a fan.
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Are you sure this purchase is not a result of circular reasoning?
Ravings en masse^ |
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Pi shaped reasoning, so yes I suppose =)
Real programmers use butterflies
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Given your hardware constraints, would a limited set of named colors be useful [^]
Off-topic: It might interest you to explore Pantone (subtractive) colors: [^], [^]
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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The way C++ works none of the colors are instantiated unless you use them. Strings ... that's not *as* true, so I'm wary of strings. Basically, until I can find a use case for having an actual string in the code for a color name, I'm going to avoid it.
All of the X11 colors I declared are good because like I said, they are only instantiated in the final binary if they are used, and even then they are represented by a single machine word.
The subtractive color models like CYMk? I can support those, I just have nothing that uses them yet so I haven't created a pixel with those channels.
This library will support pretty much any color model, with the possible exception of color models that are dependent on spatial positioning.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Is that a shaven or an unshaven..
I meant, what is the airspeed of an unshaven European beaver, versus an African unshaven beaver?
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Thats easy - European beavers are pink (close to red) and red always goes faster.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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[...]
Mycroft Holmes wrote: and red always goes faster. The more blood is pumped through it..
So I shut up here. This no Soapbox
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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That's the colour of rock-climbing helmet I asked for
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It was probably done by a modern beaver that wanted internet in his home.
Could happen over here (Netherlands) too as the beaver is returning after a period of absence.
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Codewitch
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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<rant>
Why do vendors insist on launching elephanting web pages at the end of their supposedly enterprise-grade installers when you're installing them under the System account and you used the damn /quiet switch !?!?!?!?!?!?
THERE'S NOBODY LOGGED INTO THE ELEPHANTING MACHINE TO SEE THE ELEPHANTING WEB PAGE!
</rant>
<grumble>
Now I have to get out InstallShield and go hunting for a custom action and rip it out... elephanting vendors...
</grumble>
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: and you used the damn /quiet switch !?!?!?!?!?!?
THERE'S NOBODY LOGGED INTO THE ELEPHANTING MACHINE TO SEE THE ELEPHANTING WEB PAGE! Because marketing demanded it.
It's not about being reasonable. If we were, marketing had no reason to exist.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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My favorite belongs to the hardware security key we use. Their installer can be run with a UI or "silently". Running it "silently" displays more windows (message boxes mostly) and requires more clicks than the full UI version.
Dumbasses.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Yeah, I got another app that's "enterprise", from a major vendor that shall stay nameless. That thing assumes the users are admins on their own machines, like that's still a thing. When the install completes, it launches Word and a giant "readme.doc", and you can't turn it off! It's an .EXE installer so I can't modify it to remove that function! GRRRRRR!!
The vendors response? "Put in a feature request to remove it and maybe we'll get around to it."
Well, since this was supposed to go on some 3,000 machines, and I can't install it silently as System without it still launching Word, that's a large chunk of money this vendor is now missing out on while we go look for another product.
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Have you considered getting it "repackage" professionally....?
Even if it is (on the surface) an exe it may still contain MSI's... these are (fairly) easily customized using Transforms... if you have to bite the bullet a complete repackaging (capture installation and repackage as an MSI) is an option but be sure that whoever does it is a "Professional" and consider possible updates in the future...
Who the f*** is General Failure, and why is he reading my harddisk?
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More than anything else, I don't think that the customer should have to pay to fix broken software for the vendor.
Not that it doesn't happen all the time but I still, strangely, think the vendor is responsible for this sort of thing.
Ravings en masse^ |
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Oh, don't get me started on broken installers.
Keep in mind that vendor get paid to write software and they spend a ton of time doing that. Installers tend to be afterthoughts that they're not so hot at understanding. You'd be surprise at how many installers I come across that do really stupid things or are just broken and need to be fixed. Sure, they'll install/uninstall the software, but they also end up doing subtle crap that screw things up.
For example, I had a vendor include a custom action in their .MSI installer that indiscriminately killed off all of the WMI provider host processes during uninstall. Those would be the WmiPrvSe.exe processes you see at the bottom of Details in Task Manager. Well, doing that craps out all of WMI on the machine. SCCM (Microsoft's endpoint management and deployment suite) is heavily dependent on WMI. You can guess what chaos ensued when I uninstalled that piece of crap. If you we're running something that was dependent on WMI, you'd never know that happened. Restart the machine and all evidence of it happening is gone.
I cracked open the installer and found the offending (offsensive) custom action. Called the vendor. "Oh, really? It did that? Could you tell us where that is and what to do to fix it. The guy who builds our .MSI's doesn't work here any more..."
I see sh*t like this once or twice a week.
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