Disappointed. When I read "powering an office", I thought they had found a way to run their business-critical applications and storage on Pis. Now that would be an achievement.
Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
151–159 of 159 posts
Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
#152I personally love RPis. My company is balena.io and they too basically run on the little guys!
Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
#153As a controls engineer in a past life, I like seeing projects like this. Johnson Controls, Honeywell, etc. have been eye gouging customers on proprietary hardware. I've toyed with the idea of starting an open source building automation hardware company. There's quite a few open BAS software packages floating around now too.
Can a Pi match the sort of real-time performance of something like a Controllogix PLC?
No, not on its own.
What I've seen done for this sort of application is to stack the RPi on top of, say, an Arduino Mega or SAMD51 in team. The Pi handles database, network (NTP, HTML interface, update work) and the micro is sort of a real-time port expander.
Think of an access control scenario ( doors not ports ) where you have n doors ( potentially 2n readers, either wiegand or directly RS485 ) you then have 2n contact closure sensors ( door position and request-to-exit ) and an output relay to control the lock hardware power. The real-time needs of this type of thing scale to super-wide while the database lookup scales separately.
You keep a fraction of the user table on the micro controller, based on frequent use of the doors attached directly. Hang another micro controller when you've used up your I/O but connect it to RS485 doing the "same thing" with different labels/IDs. But the Pi just keeps the full list, the full log if wanted, and gives a target for your user update work and adding new doors.
I think what people like about the Pi is the modularity and ecosystem. I can get a hat for relays and sensors and things (and a super-duper hat thing for door control if you dig deep enough)
You have to engineer all of the reliability ( RTC, watch-dog timers, power state control, opto-isolation of inputs, debouncing of buttons, on and on...) but if you have more time than money, you can learn a fair deal about a particular field by building something rather than buying it.
Then when you finally have horsepower at your disposal, you may actually appreciate the value of the readily-available devices built to perform such duties reliably.
Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are better solutions other than the Raspberries, often even cheaper, less power hungry and more open, but they struggle to gain visibility because they don't spend in advertising as much as the Raspberry Pi Foundation (Broadcom?) does. Here's a list of over 400 boards. There's also a .csv file to downlaod for offline quick comparison. https://hackerboards.com/
Out of interest, where do you see their adverts?
Advertising doesn't need to be explicit.
I won't comment further as I was roasted here when I wrote what I thought about the RPi Zero scarcity (which lasted years) when it was launched.
Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of interest, where do you see their adverts?
Advertising doesn't need to be explicit. I won't comment further as I was roasted here when I wrote what I thought about the RPi Zero scarcity (which lasted years) when it was launched.
Sure, but that's normally the sort of adverting that goes along with a big advertising spend. I had imagined almost all their advertising exposure is from giving product away for people to review, and of course the charity aspect got headlines originally. I suppose you might say the silly low price of the pi zero was a form of advertising. I don't think they'll do a stunt like that again.
Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just pulled out one this weekend after my ISP decided to refresh my IP and gave me on that was apparently used by Satan himself. All google services were just blackholing my traffic, it was breaking everything. I have never seen it that bad before, I've gotten CAPCHAs before, but never have I seen it just plain never respond to SYNs. I tried to force it to refresh but their router was insistent on me keeping that c…
If you have control over the router that's connecting to your ISP, and assuming it allows such a thing, try changing its MAC address. EdgeRouterX for example allows this. Chances are, you get different IP.
Years ago when I first had the service installed I tried this once, and discovered a $20 "additional device" surcharge on the next bill.
Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can a Pi match the sort of real-time performance of something like a Controllogix PLC?
It'll be infinitely easier to program than ladder logic, that's for sure
Seriously? I've hit "real" programming and bounced off but I spent a few months as a PLC tech and ladder logic was very easy.
Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can a Pi match the sort of real-time performance of something like a Controllogix PLC?
No, not on its own. What I've seen done for this sort of application is to stack the RPi on top of, say, an Arduino Mega or SAMD51 in team. The Pi handles database, network (NTP, HTML interface, update work) and the micro is sort of a real-time port expander. Think of an access control scenario ( doors not ports ) where you have n doors ( potentially 2n readers, either wiegand or directly RS485 ) you then have 2n con…
I'd enjoy a good writeup on how and why simple processors make better real time controllers than vastly more powerful ones.
Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, let’s be real, what could it actually power? I can think of a few applications but it certainly won’t be much. - dhcp / dns / radius for the office - maybe internet router, if they don’t have a too fast connection (>500 mbps) - egress MTA - intranet wiki or ticketing - resource monitoring But yah, I agree with others, the title is a bit click-bait.
Yeah but that said my question is serious, I've seen offices relying on servers and desktops .. when in fact their entire operations could fit on an iphone (circa iphone 10). I have the feeling that a lot of information systems are not exchanging much but require huge payloads to coat things enough to keep cute in the html5/es6 era Quite often what would have been done with a bunch of bytes on a dumb terminal now req…
100% true. Some websites are more than 100 MB to fully load. That’s absolutely insane to me. Tons of JS to process on the client side and very often some Java / .net code on the server side. (I’m not mentioning PHP/Python/Perl because those end up being less resource hungry and could actually run on the Pi ;) )