I've been waiting patiently to shut off my old power-hungry NAS server and move the management of the 8 disk zfs array on to something like a raspberry pi. It looks like I might be a step closer with the RPI5's pcie expansion options.
I'm really not sure that you'll get that much power savings. Given the idle consumption of a drive is ~6W I'm actually surprised my 10 year old server/NAS only consumes about 110W for a system with 10 drives, 10GBase-T, 8 DIMMs, Intel 3930k and fans/some USB peripherals.
Am I crazy, or are we jumping from 4 to 5 whilst ignoring the fact that most of us still can't get hold of 4 due to the supply chain issues?
there hasn't been a shortage for a while now, but you probably didn't hear about it because shortages ending isn't considered newsworthy. it's the same with sriracha, you can pretty easily find it for msrp now, but lots of people still think it is hard to find because the last thing they heard on the topic was a news article about bottles selling on the gray market for $40-$80 back in may.
I check every so often, and checked before I posted that too. First hits I got from the Raspberry Pi website were all sold out, so I presumed it was business as usual. Cycling through a few more shops, I see it is available in some places now.
This is, in almost every respect, the better way. Any non-real-time operating system will eventually get a little bit buggy around timing intensive operations like I2C or (especially) SPI. Better to have your GPIO operations performed by a dedicated micro that only handles your serial traffic and whatever pin-twiddling operations you need to do. Ideally, your serial traffic is in a binary protocol like MODBUS-RTU, so…
Sounds like this would be very annoying compared to a SBC. You have typically several SPI, UART, I2C, gpio interfaces on the pin header on usual ARM SBCs. Ready to use from Linux via standard API, using DMA, etc.
I once had a very simple I2C operation performed on an Orange Pi running project nerves. I had to add a try-again loop to the I2C operation, because the underlying OS kept disrupting the I2C timing. I2C is generally run between 100-400 KHz, so you'd think it wouldn't be an issue, but it definitely was. You can get around this by patching the kernel to carve out timing protection for those operations, but speaking as a firmware programmer, if I'm patching the kernel to avoid writing a simple arduino sketch, I've made some pretty deep mistakes.
Geez for the prices listed in the article (153 EUR and 301 EUR), get a TMM (tiny mini micro - https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... ) computer. These are the SFF/USFF off-lease older enterprise computers like Dell Optiplex. Note that ServeTheHome.com does power consumption for every model it reviews. These ~1L sized computers idle in the 7-13W range. Even with EU electricity prices, it would…
The more I mess with SBCs the more I lean towards this method. The M720q's or M710q's are two of my favorites. As an added bonus the chargers even work with my lenovo laptop(s). I wish someone made a rack to hold them vertically. I'd own 10 if I could mount them in a rack like this: https://images.prismic.io/macstadium/949d85ad-18be-4059-acf6...
With a 3D printer and a little while in basic CAD your dreams could easily come true.
Where do you buy an Orange Pi? When I was researching these devices I found it to be extremely weird/sketchy. These are three different websites all apparently from different companies: - https://orangepi.com/ - https://orangepi.net/ - http://www.orangepi.org (note: https does not work)
Welcome to Chinese fruit clone vendors. They're all copying RPi and now copying each other. Good luck spotting the good ones.
Then when you get the device it won't do anything new after a while because the vendor never maintains their distro and the GPU or device tree are is proprietary so nobody else can either. If you're lucky maybe there's an Armbian build which marries new userspace with the older kernel and its unmaintained drivers.
This is why Raspberry Pi still dominates this market.
I've been waiting patiently to shut off my old power-hungry NAS server and move the management of the 8 disk zfs array on to something like a raspberry pi. It looks like I might be a step closer with the RPI5's pcie expansion options.
If you really care about power consumption here, buy a proper NAS like a Synology.
Do we know how easy it is to remove the microphone from the orange pi's motherboard? A microphone mixed with proprietary firmware is sort of a deal killer for me.
Ignoring that the article is just an ad for his store, the thing that shocked me was the Orange Pi 5 Plus which includes "onboard microphone". I would NEVER want an onboard microphone unless it was a device I had far more than average trust in. What a great way to reward security breaches!
The Pi 5 looks neat and I hear it's finally got a power button built-in, which was always the sorest point of the rpi series for me - the fact that it had no good story for safely idling was always absurd. The default configuration was "if you lose power there's a good chance the filesystem will be corrupt". Still, does the new one do better beyond having an off-button? Like does it wake via USB properly? Does it hav…
> The default configuration was "if you lose power there's a good chance the filesystem will be corrupt". "Good chance"? We used to do kernel module development directly on Pi3/4s at this one client of mine, and I would OOPS the kernel from time-to-time (couple of times a day on average in the beginning stages) and never had a loss that ext4 couldn't recover from (and as the Pis lacked a "reset" button, resets were d…
Having used Raspberry Pi since their very first release, your experience is the exception.
Corrupt filesystems are definitely a lot rarer these days but they still do happen.
I've also had decent sdcards (genuine SanDisk from brick-and-mortar chain store) just completely die on power cycle or reflash.