Category: Pi

Currently I have.

• A Pi-Zero-W running Buster acting as a GPS disciplined stratum 1 time server for my LAN. I need an accurate time source on my LAN for Amateur Radio purposes. It is also my second caching only name server using “dnsmasq”.
• A Pi 4 4 GB media player running Buster. Mostly used to play downloaded TV series and movies with VLC. We use Buster as it seems to be able to make sense of the dodgy data the TV issues. With Bullseye or Bookworm we always have the taskbar and a fair bit of the moving image “off the screen”. This renders the whole thing unusable. And yes. I’ve tried setting the resolution in “cmdline.txt and config.txt, I’ve tried going back to “fkms”, etc. but I’m unable to resolve the issue. I can make things fit OK but at the expense of the frame rate. Lots of dropped frames which make things unwatchable.
• Another Pi 4 but this one is only 1GB. It is my NAS with 10 TB of attached storage. Photos, documents, home movies, etc. This is the family collection – old super and standard 8 movies, old Betamax and VHS family movies, slides, etc. All digitised. It is also where our desktop backups go. Every couple of months or so a backup of all the family stuff is taken and stored off site. It took a LOT of time and effort to get it all digitised and I’d rather not spend that amount of time doing it all again.
• A Pi 3B+ running Bullseye which runs this web server, dnsmask, TVHeadend and is my stratum 2 backup time server synchronised to my Pi-Zero W with a couple of public stratum 1 time servers as fallback. It’s still on Bullseye because try as I might I simply cannot get TVHeadend to work correctly on Bookworm.
• A Pi-4 4GB running Bookworm which I use for downloading, etc. It sits in the corner and does very little.
• A Pi-400 which basically sits on the shelf not even plugged in. I lost patience with its dodgy keyboard so it sits unloved and unused.
• And lastly, I have a Pi-4 4GB with Bullseye which is my daily driver desktop Pi. It has all the usual desktop stuff plus my Amateur Radio stuff on it. It prints, it scans, it’s got LIBRE Office, it’s got a few browsers (just for fun), and it’s where all my “work in progress” stuff lives. Why not Bookworm ? Because with all the daily driver and Amateur Radio stuff it’s just a long winded job and so far I can’t seem to find a few hours to “have at it”.

What I would like to have.

• A Pi-3b+ with the GPS disciplined clock as a stratum 1 time server and dnsmasq as my second DNS.
• A Pi-5 4GB as my media player as it can stream my free streaming services – SBS On Demand, ABC iView, 7+ and 10Play. I’ll also use it to play TV series and movies with VLC.
•  A Pi-4 1GB NAS with all its attached storage.
• A Pi-4 4GB as my download and test system with Bookworm.
• A Pi-4 4GB server. It’ll be the web server and DNS (dnsmasq).
• A Pi-5 8GB as my desktop with LIBRE Office as well as my amateur radio stuff and G.I.M.P.
• The Pi-Zero will go to the shelf to keep the Pi-400 company.

All of the Pi’s will be running Bookworm apart from the server which needs Bullseye for TVHeadend which, so far, doesn’t play well with Bookworm.

And so another reorganisation is in the works.

Using the Pi Imager I flashed a spare USB -3 SATA SSD with the full version of Bookworm. I stopped there and set up the Pi-5 and let it do its thing which only took but a few minutes. After that I configured it with the assigned IP address using “nmtui” and I was ready to start installing the required bits and pieces. Some things were easy and other things not so much. The easiest of all was chromium-browser and thunderbird. I just “rsync” to move the required directories in “~/.config” from the old SSD to the new one. That worked extremely well.

The next thing was to get the Amateur Radio stuff installed and configured. It wasn’t as simple but it was a bit time consuming I got it done OK with rsync making itself very useful again. Moving the “work in progress” stuff was a doddle – “rsync” came in very handy again.

The whole process took only a couple of hours. At this stage I really don’t know what all my angst was about. It was way easier than I feared.

I now have a Pi-5 8GB daily driver desktop. First impression is that it’s really zippy compared to the Pi-4 4GB. Now all I have to do is to copy all the rest of the “stuff” from the Bullseye SSD to the Bookworm one. Should be a doddle.

I’ve tried the Pi-5 as a media player. Much, much better than the Pi-4 that I’m currently using so I can see another Pi-5 in my future. It still has trouble with the screen edges but I have found a way to overcome that with “video=HDMI-A-1:margin_left=50,margin_right=50,margin_top=24,margin_bottom=24” at the end of cmdline.txt. Doing that with a Pi-4 and Bookworm or Bullseye caused unacceptable stuttering and dropped frames whether I’m using X11 or Wayland. With the Pi-5 no such problem exists.

 

Despite all my musings I ended up with a configuration a bit different to what I originally had in mind. Here it is :-

• A Pi5 8GB as a desktop / amateur radio Pi with the full Bookworm.
• A Pi5 4GB as my media player / streaming Pi with full bookworm.
• A Pi4 4GB as my web server running headless with Bookworm lite. The web server is Apache2 with PhP, MariaDB, etc. It also is my primary local DNS with dnsmasq.
• A Pi4 1GB as my NAS with about 10TB of attached storage running Bookworm Lite headless.
• A Pi4 4GB that I use to upload and download “stuff”  and as a local proxy server. Running Bookworm headless. It is also used as a test system as it doesn’t have that much to reinstall when and if it all goes pear shaped.
• A Pi-zero W running Bullseye Lite headless as a GPS disciplined time server. I’m sticking with Bullseye as its easier to deal with the GPS and the NTP server. It’s also the second DNS (dnsmasq).
• A Pi3 B+ running Buster headless so that I can run an older version of TVHeadend which works without a lot of messing around. I believe that TVHeadend started a downhill slide with the release of a new version around the same time that Bullseye hit the streets so I’ve stuck with the older TVHeadend on Buster. The Pi3 works well in this situation.
• My Pi-400 remains on the shelf as a spare should one of the others pack up.

Both of the Pi-5’s have the Argon NEO 5 case with a 2TB Kingston NVME SSD for the media Pi-5 and a 500GB Kingston NVME for the desktop Pi-5.  They both boot from NVME. I decided to go with the NVME SSD’s as they are a lot tidier – no USB-3 SSD’s dangling about. Performance wise the media player Pi-5 is still about the same as it does little intensive I/O stuff. The desktop, on the other hand, does a deal of intensive I/O stuff and is notably snappier. Editing and batch processing large photos (TIFF) and movies as well as transcoding videos using ffmpeg gets through a lot of memory and makes good use of the swapfile. I realise that spinning rust will give me more MB / $ but at the expense of having power supplies and cables all around the place which I would like to avoid as much as I can.

Apart from neatening the cables up and tidying up the storage it’s all done. It was all accomplished without losing anything and freed up a couple of SSD’s for whatever else I can dream up. During the process there were only a few headbanging moments – mostly NTPSEC related – but it all worked out in the end.

Because I’m a “fiddler” the whole shebang will be in a constant state of change which provides me with hours of entertainment and learning.

That’s it, at least until the next latest and greatest “thing” is unleashed by the good folks at Pi Towers whether it be hardware or OS or other software. I’ve only had Pi-s for a few years starting with a Pi-4 1GB and I now have six of them all serving their own purpose(s). Of course I could have easily accomplished the whole lot with a second hand laptop running Debian but where’s the fun in that ?

 

 

The way my Pi’s were all setup was :-

• markpi – Raspberry Pi OS Buster 64 bit kernel and 32 bit userland. On it I had this web server, SAMBA and was our main video player. This is a 4GB Pi 4 with a 1TB Seagate SSD as the boot and storage device.
• raspberrypi – Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye 64 bit. It is a 1GB Pi 4. As well as about 10TB of spinning rust attached via a Simplecom 3 x 2 bay powered SATA boxes with their own power it also had a 1 TB Toshiba SSD. The Simplecom units are daisy chained using their USB ports and the SSD is in the other USB3 port of the Pi. Bandwidth and speed are not important as this is storage for my digital and scanned photos as well as the family digitised slides and Super 8 movies. About 8 or 9 TB of the stuff. All of its storage is shared via SAMBA and / or NFS.
• Desktop – Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye 64 bit.  It is my daily driver desktop machine and runs from a Sandisk 500GB SSD.
• mincepi – Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit Pi 3B+. Acting as my local caching only DNS via “dnsmasq” along with TVHeadend.
• pi-zero – Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye 32bit. SSD card only and is my GPS disciplined time source with NTP. It also has a small display showing date and time only. That’s it….
• Pi 400 – this one is sitting on the shelf and does nothing. Good to have a spare though. If any of the other Pi’s go belly-up a simple change of the boot media and plug it in and we’re away again.

The biggest shortcoming was that the web server and our media player is on the same Pi. For me that wasn’t acceptable as there were conflicting demands. When playing streamed media the network traffic was intense which compromised the web server so I thought something needed to change.

The Pi 3B+ was basically wasted as all it did was dnsmasq and TVHeadend.

The Pi-zero was, and remains just a GPS disciplined ntp server.

The NAS Pi remains so although I wanted to change it to booting from spinning rust. Stuff had to moved around a bit too – there are drives that are nearly full and others that are nearly empty. For example the drive that has the old Super 8 movies on it is only about half full and the storage requirements here are not going to increase. Moving it to a smaller drive that’s only just big enough makes sense. I’ve thought about RAID but I feel that’s not the best solution here – too many things can go wrong. Better to organise the current storage so that there is free space where needed and bugger all free space where it isn’t.

At the end I want a Pi serving up this web site and TVHeadend so we can watch free to air TV in places where terrestrial TV is unavailable but mobile phone services is. I wanted a robust desktop Pi with enough storage available. I wanted my GPS disciplined clock available via NTP and I wanted a NAS with its storage organised sensibly. Lastly I wanted a Pi to play our movies and stuff without interfering with anything else. This Pi stays with Buster as Bullseye, 32 and 64bit, plays really, really badly with our TV which is connected to the Pi (I strongly the Bullseye “kms” driver) which is what we watch “stuff” on.

Surely that’s not too much to ask. Is it ?

 

The Pi 4 4GB media player has the media drive from the NAS Pi mounted in a suitable spot so basically all it’ll need is a SD card with VLC, etc. on it. It also is running Buster as previously noted. As they say in the Meerkat ad’s, Simples.

The NAS Pi, with a lot of messing around, has had the storage moved around and generally reorganised. The irreplaceable stuff is now on a single 8 TB hard drive and is backed up twice with one copy kept here and the other with a friend for safe keeping. This is essentially static storage and only added to when the family discovers new stuff – family and school photos, holiday movies, etc. The replaceable stuff, as well as our digital and scanned photos, is spread over two more 8 TB hard drives and the boot device is now a 3 TB hard drive which also holds the NFS exports for “/home” on my desktop Pi and the media player Pi. All of the re-organising left me with two 8TB hard drives spare.

The desktop Pi has the “/home” directory moved to a NFS drive from the NAS Pi and has the “/boot” and “/root” on a smaller SD card.

The Pi 3B+ is now the web, DNS (via dnsmasq) and TVHeadend server running Bullseye 64 bit with a SD card boot device.

The Pi-zero remains as my time server just for fun. It also has dnsmasq as a backup caching only name server.

All except the Pi-zero and the desktop Pi are powered with Raspberry POE+ hats which work really well and declutter the cupboard they are in considerably.

Well, so far it’s all worked out pretty well. I’ve even managed to migrate my wife to a Pi. Because of my new structure it was really easy – just clone my desktop SD card and make a couple of changes – dhcpcd.conf and fstab and then plug it in and boot it. My wife didn’t need a lot of convincing either – the annual M$ licence fee impost and changes to the pricing structure which would make MS Office a LOT more expensive did that. Job done and a home found for the “spare” Pi-400.

 

We had a NBN (National Broadband Network) outage here caused by a broken cable in the copper between the neighbourhood node and our place. NBN Co got onto it pretty quickly and it was repaired within the day.

When the tech. arrived the first thing he told me was that our modem/router was no longer supported and that we needed to use the newer one that I had. The reason that we were using the old the old modem/router is that the newer model couldn’t do port forwarding or dynamic DNS. It transpired that the new model had had a firmware update and both dynamic DNS and port forwarding were now supported. This was proven to be the case and the configuration was entered into the new modem/router.

Enter the SSH problem. My two Pi4’s were connected via a hub and ethernet cable, my Pi-Zero was connected via 2.4GHz wifi and my Pi-400 is connected via 5GHz wi-fi. With the new modem I can’t SSH across connection modes. For example, I can’t SSH into any other system on 5GHz from a system on 2.4GHz or ethernet. I can, however, connect to any other system on 5GHz wi-fi. I spent days playing with this until I found a technical document which described the problem as I was seeing it. It only applies to SSH so I just use telnet now. Strangely, I can SSH into any system via jandmf.com:xxxx where xxxx is the port that’s forwarded to the desired systems port 22.

An advantage of the new modem/router is that if the NBN decides not to play nice is uses the 4G network as a backup. In the backup mode there is a huge disadvantage though. Dynamic DNS doesn’t work and neither does port forwarding.  Oh well, I can live with that as the NBN goes down very rarely.

Up behind the TV I had a rats nest of cables and power strips. The design of the Raspberry Pi power supply with its “wings” means that I need a few power strips rather than just one. As well as three Pi’s we have the TV and phone and laptop chargers so if I could get rid of the Pi power supplies I’d only need one power strip. I was already using an eight port PoE (Power over Ethernet) hub so all I needed was a few PoE hats which were duly ordered as were a few plastic / acrylic PoE compatible cases.

In my usual style I went for it, putting the Pi’s and the PoE hats in the new cases. Looks OK too. here’s a link to the PoE HAT and here’s the link for the PoE HAT compatible case.Straight off the bat it all worked perfectly apart from the fan going at full speed and being annoyingly loud. Clearly something needed to be done about that. Anyway I installed the PoE HATs’ and cases on the other two Pi’s  – a Pi3B+ and the other Pi4B 1GB so I now have to Pi4’s (1GB and 4GB) and a Pi3B+ with PoE working perfectly.

Next came the taming of the fans. I very nearly found the end of the internet finding what I needed. It transpired that a few lines in /boot/config.txt would do the trick.

dtoverlay=rpi-poe-plus
dtparam=poe_fan_temp0=10000,poe_fan_temp0_hyst=1000
dtparam=poe_fan_temp1=55000,poe_fan_temp1_hyst=5000
dtparam=poe_fan_temp2=60000,poe_fan_temp2_hyst=5000
dtparam=poe_fan_temp3=65000,poe_fan_temp3_hyst=5000

I assume that there are four fan speeds zero, quarter, half and full speed. I gleaned this by watching the output from “cat /sys/devices/platform/rpi-poe-fan@0/hwmon/hwmon1/pwm1”. This is the PWM value which seems to be either 0, 64, 128 or 255. I don’t know if there is any more granularity than that though.

In /boot/overlays/README there is a concise explanation of what dtparam=poe_fan_tempn lines do.

OK so that’s three Pi’s powered by PoE hats. The fans are under control and quiet and seem to run at the PWM of 64 or 128 levels with a temp of 55 to 65 degrees C which is OK as the CPU doesn’t get throttled back until it reaches 85 degrees C. Having the three Pi’s powered by PoE enabled me to put two of them in the cabinet under the TV out of sight. Bonus.

 

While the PoE stuff coupled with the SSH stuff was going on I thought that I’d reorganise what was where.

The Pi-400 remains as my desktop system although that’s in the process of being upgraded from Buster (Debian 10) to Bullseye (Debian 11) and so far the 64bit Beta is working quite well apart from a couple of known issues concerning Bluetooth and wi-fi.

My 1GB Pi4 is now purely a NAS server with about 10GB of attached storage on spinning rust. It is running Bullseye 64bit headless with no desktop installed. Apart from PiOS Lite I have only installed telnetd, telnet, ftpd, ftp, Samba and NFS server.

My Pi4 4GB is now a media centre and database server. The database is for this web server and is MariaDB. It’s used to play music, TV shows, etc with VLC. The media files are all on the NAS server Pi. It’s still running on Buster with 64bit Kernel and 32bit userland though. I’m waiting for Bullseye 64bit to come out of Beta before I upgrade it.

The Pi3B+ is now the web server as well as a TVHeadend server. It’s also headless with only ftp, ftpd,telnet, telnetd and TVHeadend installed over PiOS Bullseye Lite. I can access TVHeadend remotely so that we can watch TV when we’re travelling in places where we have a 4G connection available on our phones and tablets but where there is no terrestrial TV reception. Our portable TV plays nicely with my iPad Mini 5 and it works very well indeed. Sometimes, when we have full coverage we can even watch HD TV although standard definition is plenty good enough.

The Pi-Zero is now my GPS disciplined time server with a Real Time Clock and that’s its only function. It runs on 32bit Bullseye headless.

I think the next step is to try to move my wife to a Pi. She’s seen how well the Pi-400 works as a desktop so now all I have to do is to wean her off Windows. I had in mind upgrading my Pi-400 to a Pi 4 8GB as I do a fair bit of memory hungry photo and video processing. The Pi-400 will suit my wife perfectly as she does proof reading and word processing and gets most of her work via e-mail. The only issue I can see is not having Outlook but I’ve found that Evolution is a workable substitute for Outlook. She also does a load of web based work using Firefox so PiOS with Firefox installed will work perfectly for her. The Libre Office Suite works perfectly with Microsoft format documents so there’ll be no compatibility issue there either.

As far as the rest goes I’m still not entirely happy with where I’ve got everything so I’ll need to think about that. I also need to streamline my storage. I have a lot of spinning rust hard drives so re-organising them is also a priority – some partitions are short on free space while others have heaps. Loads are very uneven so evening things out would be good.

For the server(s) and desktops I really, really want to get rid of wi-fi and for wired systems move to ethernet over power line. I don’t like wi-fi, never have. Wi-fi is useful for portable devices like tablets, iPads, phones, etc. but in my view has no place with non portable devices.

So they’re my plans, anyway. Will it all happen ? Dunno…. We’ll see.

 

 

Clearly the answer was a resounding “Yes”. I had a Pi 4 4GB, a Pi 4 1GB and a Pi Zero. The people at Pi HQ decided that I should spend a bit money and get a Pi 400.. I only ordered the Pi 400, the mouse and the power supply as I already have a load of SD cards and many HDMI cables and adapters. The release of the Pi 400 worked in nicely with what I want to do – ditch Windows and go entirely with Linux so I ordered one from Core Elctronics. A few days later and I had it my hot little (well big, actually) hands.

Well the first thing to do was to put the RaspiOS image onto a spare Sandisk 500GB SSD. While that was happening I connected the Pi 400 to a monitor and stuck my “Basic” SD card in it to check if I could just lurch into USB booting. No problems.

I removed the SD card and plugged the SSD in and turned it on. As expected it all just worked. The next thing to do was to get it updated so that was done – time consuming process so I had a coffee while it was happening.

Next on the list was to get my “home pages” opening automatically when Chromium starts which was accomplished in a trice. Looks good too, but I need to twiddle the font sizes a bit.

Now that I had it up and running with the internet connected and the browser working I started working on my “required” software. Libre Office, an email client, working sound,etc.

Libre Office was a straight install via “apt install” and of course went perfectly. Next came an e-mail client. I played around with Claws for a while until I realised that it doesn’t play nicely with the way I like to do things – I have six email accounts and that seems to complicate things too much with Claws.

More research was done and I figured that Thunderbird, going by the reviews, ticks all of the required boxes. Again, a quick “apt install” and I had thunderbird installed. I configured the email accounts which was a quite easy process. Then came the hard part.

What a clunky, slow, bloated piece of software Thunderbird actually is. Sure it can do what I want but it can only do it in its own (long) time. Even Outlook on a slow old Windows box is faster and slicker. The search continues for a better email client that can deal properly with POP3/SMTP and IMAP without having a major hernia.

Because I tend to have a lot of browser tabs open all the time and the email client open as well as a large spreadsheet I decided to use a real swap file – a simple edit of  /etc/dphys-swapfile and that was done.

Well the first impression is that it is a whole lot quicker than my, admittedly, old Windows 10 box. I have all of my Samba shares from my other Pi’s and my Windows box mounted without much trouble.

Sound via Bluetooth was a bit of a bear to get working but I stumbled on a post in the Raspberry Pi forums that suggested that trying Pulseaudio was worth a try. It worked OK on a quick test of my JBL GO 2. There are reports of distorted audio which I’ll investigate later.

Well that’s simple really. I’ll have to go through my Windows 10 box and have a look at which programmes I really want and get them, or their equivalent, installed and configured.

I need to get a decent email client to replace Thunderbird. If any readers have suggestions please send them my way.

So far I’m impressed. The performance has exceeded my expectations greatly. The Pi 400 seems to be more than capable of performing the tasks that I want it to.

And last, but by no means least, it is a cheap solution to my aging Windows box problem.

So now I have :-

• A Pi 4 4GB hosting this web site as well as being a media player and MySQL database server.
• A Pi 4 1GB which is a NAS system with Samba and about 6TB of attached storage. It runs the RaspiOS 64 bit OS.
• A Pi Zero which is my “messing about” system. It gets used for all sorts of stuff while I try and learn about python3.
• A Pi 400 which will become my desktop solution when I finish it.

And, of course, here’s the mandatory photo of the Pi 400 in action

 

 

So I already have a Pi 4 4GB and 1GB. The 4GB Pi is where this web site is hosted along with our stash of TV shows and movies and as well as serving up the web site we use it to play our shows via VLC and a 4K HD TV. That all works very well and it just sits there and does its stuff. It’s visible to the internet on ports 443 for the web server and 22 for maintenance when I’m not at home. It has 1TB or storage attached.

The 1GB Pi is our file store – backups of our Windows systems, our digital photos, iTunes music, our movie and show collection, etc. It is also a MySQL server for various databases that I keep for community group stuff. This Pi isn’t visible to the internet at all and has about 5TB or storage attached all SSD.

Both the 1GB and the 4GB Pi’s are running 64 bit kernels although the 4GB Pi is 32bit userland. The 1GB Pi is fully 64 bit. They both boot from USB SSD devices.

Both of those Pi’s have Samba running and they share various directories. The whole setup works very, very well.

When I first got the 1GB Pi it was supposed to be a sort of development and test system for other stuff I’m working on. That scenario lasted only a short time, however.

So what to do about a test system ? A Pi Zero of course. It doesn’t matter what I wreck – I can just make another SD card if I mess up too badly. So I ordered one along with a power supply, a HDMI adapter and a plastic case.

After a small hiccup within about an hour or so I had it in its case with the 128 x 32 OLED Display  from Core Electronics attached and working.

The hiccup was born of not paying attention. I imaged the 64bit PoOS to the brand new SD card and spent a bit of time trying to work out why it wouldn’t boot. I should’ve read what the Pi Imager was telling me and used the correct version of PiOS. You can take it from me that a 32bit PiZero can’t use the 64bit OS. Idiot….

The longest parts were making the SD card from the latest correct download and updating it once I had it booted.

First impressions ? Geeze it’s small and for such a small package it’s surprisingly capable – much more so than my 80’s IBM Thinkpad running OS/2 Warp.

Now that I’ve got my bascic configuration up and running I’ve taken a copy of the SD card using the handy built in utility so I’ve got a basic fallback position should I mess things up irretrievably.

Next step is to make a start on a python3 script to control the fans on the other two Pi’s then there’s a couple of other MySQL things that I want to do with the community group database and that’ll be followed by some HAM radio stuff that I’ve been looking at for a while now.

 

 

So after a bit of success with the previous two Adafruit displays I figured that I’d try their 240×240 display so I ordered one and given the current COVID-19 induced postal delays it eventually arrived.

I wasted no time in disabling the script that runs the 128×64 display and plugging in the new one.

Getting it working with a sample Adafruit script took no time at all so I now had to write another Python3 script to run the bigger display. I worked out roughly what I wanted to put on it and in which orientation. With a decent font size and by tweaking the height and width parameters in the script I found that I had eleven lines to play with.

As ever my Python3 skills are a bit Neanderthal so it took a while and was really, really messy to start with. But at least it worked.

Once I set to work putting a bit of doco in the script and cleaning it up a bit I only needed an hour or so to make it look a bit respectable, to me at least, and to have it still work. It’s here for your perusal if you so desire.

It even looks fairly neat apart from the fan wires that are not connected any more due to the display taking the 5V pins. I’ll have to work out a way of sourcing the 5V from somewhere else although the fans aren’t really needed – the Pi 4 4GB usually runs at less than 60 deg C even when playing HD videos with VLC.

After a bit of messing around I have it displaying the date, the time, CPU temp, CPU and memory usage, disk usage, swap usage, uptime, boot time and three lines for button presses, etc. I’ll probably mess around with these lines and the button callbacks some time in the future.

Anyway another success with an Adafruit display. If you have a look at the script that drives it you’ll no doubt see that my Python3 skills are lacking and that I’ve probably gone about everything in the most inefficient way possible.

There are a few bits of the script that I found as code snippets and messed about with to get the results that I wanted, other bits are directly from Adafruit.

For my next trick I want to have a slideshow running and have the buttons set up in such a way that I can switch what I’ve got now to a slideshow and back again. I was think to have both buttons present a sort of menu so that I can Poweroff, Reboot or go with a slideshow. I have absolutely how I’m going to do it yet though.

Stand by for future developments. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for the script(s) that I’ve already written please let me know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So after getting the little display I decided to have a go with the Adafruit 128×64 OLED Bonnet for Raspberry Pi. After a bit of messing about this is what it looks like in operation

I’ve put eight lines of text on it and enabled a few of the buttons / joystick. The test is date, time, cpu temp, CPU and memory used percentages, root partition usage, swap usage, uptime and the boot time. The buttons thus far assigned are button 5 for reboot, button 6 for power off, joystick down is Samba restart and joystick up is Apache2 restart. It required a fair bit of messing around as well as learning a bit about GPIO pins and acting on the buttons.

Anyway here’s the Python3 script. It isn’t particularly well commented – the comments were more for my use while I was writing it. And nor is there any error checking. Python3 seems to do a pretty good job of that.

For my next trick I want to have a play with a Adafruit Mini PiTFT – 135×240 Color TFT Add-on for Raspberry Pi. I don’t know what I’ll display on it yet but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

I’m also tossing around the idea of having a play with the PiTFT Plus 320×240 2.8 TFT + Resistive Touchscreen

Because of all this messing around during the COVID-19 restrictions that we are living under here in Victoria, Australia I reckon I may have to get another Pi. Probably a 2GB Pi 4 this time – I already have a 4GB and a 1GB and I cant see a reason for forking out the extra cash for the 8GB iteration.

Of course another Pi means another SSD to boot from, another case and probably a fan shim. Hmmm. I can see the price of all this creeping well toward unaffordable already.

 

 

Why USB boot ? Well for a start I’m a tinkerer who just can’t leave things alone. Secondly I’ve had an SD card fail and didn’t want to go down that path again – maybe I should’ve got better cards ? And thirdly I’ve always, rightly or wrongly, regarded the SD card boot scenario a bit clumsy.

I got rid of some of the clumsiness by moving the root partition to a 1TB Toshiba X1 portable SSD. This was easily done and was a great success. I still had a bit of SD clumsiness though which I wanted to get rid of.

Then along came the announcement of USB booting and for once in my life I didn’t leap into the deep end with the first BETA. I waited until the BETA was elevated to STABLE and then leapt into the deep end.

What follows is what I did to get it working.

I have a perfectly working Raspberry Pi 4 1GB which is acting as a Samba server with a few TB of storage attached which we use to store our nightly backups, scanned and digital photos and a bunch of other stuff which is important to us. It was working well and didn’t need fixing or otherwise messing with at all.

Then the USB boot and 64 bit beta’s became available so I just had to try them out, didn’t I ?

Suffice to say that it all worked perfectly and now my Samba server has booted from a USB device and is running the new 64 bit beta OS.

Here’s how I did it.

All I did was to follow the instructions here. Please have a read of this most excellent doco before you do anything else.

Another thing that must be done before you start is to make sure that the proposed USB boot device works properly with your Pi. I have a couple here that work perfectly with Windows and iPad but just will not be recognised by Raspbian Buster.

Make a new SD card. I downloaded the image from the Raspberry Pi download page and put it on a new SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager – Your mileage may vary if you use Balena Etcher or something else.

The next step is to put your image burner to use again and burn the image to the USB boot device that you will wish to boot from and put it to one side.

Boot from the new SD card that you just created and go through the setup process. Then do a “sudo apt update” followed by a “sudo apt full upgrade”. I rebooted the Pi at this stage. Next comes the first of the fun parts.

As root, edit /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update and select BETA releases. I found that you need to have “beta” in lower case. Then do “sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta/pieeprom-2020-05-15.bin”

Do “rpi-update” and copy *.elf and *.dat from /boot to the boot partition on the USB device that you’ve put to one side. Do a “sudo poweroff” and remove the SD card. Reconnect the power and it should boot from the USB device if you’ve done it right.

I followed the instructions here and they proved to be invaluable. The whole operation worked properly the first time I tried it so follow the instructions in the doco and you’ll probably not go wrong. If it all goes wrong just go back to the beginning and start over.

I can still boot from my original SD card if I need to so I have a fallback if I need it.

While I was making my Pi boot from a USB device, Raspberry announced a 64 bit beta of Raspbian Buster. Of course, I just had to try it out in conjunction with USB booting.

I downloaded the 64 bit Buster image and using the Raspberry Pi Imager I prepared a USB SSD with it.

I did a “sudo poweroff” and swapped the USB devices over and plugged it back in. Imagine my surprise when it booted without any issues. I did the setup and I had a Pi with 64bit Raspbian Buster booted from a USB device. Not an SD card in sight..

Next was to get it updated and Samba installed. Again it went without a hitch. To make life a bit easier I copied fstab, /etc/dhcpcd.conf and smb.conf from my original SD card. “fstab” was not a direct replacement. I just edited the fstab (on the new 64 bit device) and put the mounts for my storage in it. The other two files were direct replacements though. Rebooted and it looks exactly the same as it did with the original SD card.

Well, at the end of the processes it all works perfectly. I’m sure that there will be more issues to overcome as the USB boot and 64 bit Raspbian move out of “beta” and into “production”

In the grand scheme of things it gained me exactly nothing apart from a bit more knowledge about the workings of the Pi and Raspbian.

I’m not touching the Pi that this web site is on – it’s a web server, a media player and store, a database server, etc. This Pi I regard as being critical and all precautions are taken to keep it up and running. I take nightly incremental backups and weekly full backups of the whole system including MariaDB database backups.

Sooner or later though, I’m going to have to bite the bullet and fully upgrade this Pi – a prospect that I’m most certainly not looking forward to.

Seeing as I managed to get USB boot and 64 bit Raspbian working so easily I figured that I may as well go for broke and get a duplicate of this web site happening.

First up I installed Apache, MariaDB, php and php-mysql. That was all very easy as it usually is.

Next up was to make a database for WordPress and create the relevant user. No problems here either. Then I installed the latest copy of WordPress and configured it. Again, no problems.

The bit that I expected the most trouble from was getting a copy of the WordPress installation and data across from this site to the new Pi configuration. All I did was to install the duplicator plugin on both sites and export it from this site and install it on the test Pi.

So now as well as Samba, I have LAMP+WordPress working. It’s hardly the definitive test, I know, but it’s an encouraging preview for when 64 bit Raspbian comes out of beta and into the real word.

Another good thing to come out of this exercise is that I may have discovered a path towards upgrading when USB boot and the 64 bit OS comes into prime time.