Graphing Raspberry Pi performance with sar
Posted on August 24, 2017
(Last modified on September 11, 2017)
| 2 minutes
| 353 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
As part of monitoring the general health of my Raspberry Pi boxes, i like keeping a historical image of how the load was at a given time. I have real time monitoring in place, which will alert me via Pushover if something goes haywire1, and my surveillance does it’s own checking and alerts (via the same pushover container) if a sensor fails to report within a given period.
I based my graph generating script on the one described here, though the memory calculation in that script is not what i wanted, and this being a memory restricted platform, i also wanted to monitor swap in/out.
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Running a Docker Swarm on a Raspberry Pi Cluster.
Posted on August 10, 2017
(Last modified on August 29, 2017)
| 5 minutes
| 1026 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
For a long time i’ve wanted to experiment with running a small cluster on my Raspberry Pi’s, but I’ve always had lots of other things to do. Recently i started moving my hosted services from my NAS onto a single Raspberry Pi, and came across a few older Raspberry Pi’s, and thought now is a good a time as any, so here goes.
Hardware used I used the following components:
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New Toys
Posted on December 1, 2016
(Last modified on May 20, 2017)
| 3 minutes
| 570 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Controlling a 3D printer with a Raspberry Pi Preface I finally got around to getting a shiny new toy in the form of a 3D Printer. The specific model is a Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus. While it may not be the best in terms of quality, it’s a nice “little” printer that, after a lot of tinkering, produces some fair prints.
I’ve had my fair share of problems with it, for starters every bolt needed tightening upon unpacking, add to that an uneven printbed, and the general “confusion” following playing around in uncharted territory, and it pretty much sums up my first 4 weeks with it.
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Raspberry Pi Sense Hat
Posted on November 24, 2016
(Last modified on May 20, 2017)
| 2 minutes
| 284 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I recently acquired a Sense Hat, and despite not having much use for it, i decided to have some fun and learning a little along the way.
The hardware The Sense-hat is a little Hat for Raspberry Pi’s that contains a bunch of sensors, along with a small 8x8 RGB LED Matrix. It contains the following sensors:
Gyroscope Accelerometer Magnetometer Temperature Barometric pressure Humidity Along with the hardware, there’s an official Sense-Hat Python library available.
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Playing Around with Go
Posted on February 28, 2016
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 6 minutes
| 1195 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I’ve previously described my temperature monitoring solution, written in Python, and I’ve also described my various attempts at optimizing this solution, using NodeRED and Apache Camel, but all of these attempts have been focused on the server side, while the client has been mostly left to itself.
The client runs on an old Raspberry Pi B+, with a total of 256MB RAM. The RPi also runs a surveillance camera, via the RPi camera module, which requires a memory split of 128 MB.
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Monitoring temperatures with Apache Camel
Posted on December 29, 2015
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 3 minutes
| 546 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Intro I’ve been trying out various technologies for my temperature monitoring project, but all of them have been more or less unstable. The python solution is by far the most robust, but can lose connection to the MQTT broker, and stubbornly refuse to reconnect by itself. The Node-RED solution is, while fast to write, notoriously unstable regarding MQTT connections. Connections sit “idle” showing a connected state, while in fact they are disconnected, and there is no obvious way of reconnecting it - apart from restarting the docker container.
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Scheduling lights with Philips Hue and a Raspberry Pi
Posted on November 13, 2015
(Last modified on December 22, 2015)
| 4 minutes
| 747 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Up until a few weeks ago, i’ve been using IFTTT for controlling various automated light tasks.
The lights i want to control are mostly outdoor lights, turning on at dusk, and off again at sunrise. I also automatically tone the light down and into a slight more red color in the kids rooms around bedtime, and in the living room a wee bit later :)
IFTTT works, but is not very punctual.
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Monitoring temperatures with a Raspberry Pi.
Posted on June 26, 2015
(Last modified on September 3, 2015)
| 4 minutes
| 744 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I recently got into a discussion about dogs, kennels and temeratures. I have a German Shepherd, and he has a nice insulated dog house in his kennel, and the discussion was along the lines, how much heat does it take to warm up the doghouse, if it gets hotter than the outside at all.
Now, a normal person would have solved this by putting a wireless meat thermometer in the doghouse, made a few readings of it with/without the dog, and compare it to the outside temperature.
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Replacing my Raspberry Pi 2 with my Synology NAS and Docker
Posted on April 10, 2015
(Last modified on May 22, 2017)
| 2 minutes
| 418 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I recently moved my server from a 2012 Mac Mini to a Raspberry Pi 2, and while the Pi 2 has been doing a great job, another option recently became available to me.
I’ve been a long time user of Synology NAS products. Their products have great uptime, along with superior performance, mobile apps, file sharing etc.
I’ve been using them since 2001, and have only had a single unit fail on me.
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Replacing my old server with a Raspberry Pi 2
Posted on March 6, 2015
(Last modified on April 15, 2015)
| 3 minutes
| 540 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I’ve been running a server at home for as long as i can remember. Over the years, the tasks performed by the server has varied greatly, from a complete mail/web/file server, to file/streaming/backup, and in it’s most recent incarnation, streaming/backup.
Somewhere along the way (2008 or so), a Synology NAS snuck in, “hijacked” all our data, and streams to AirPlay and Chromecast devices.
For the past 8 years, my server has been a Mac Mini, replaced every 3-5 years with the latest model.
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