A quick tip from a network engineer. Document every single connection in visio or an equivalent software. Print that out and laminate it. Document all your IP addresses you use and be sure everything is statically assigned. Make sure you have redundancy factored in. Don't just build 1 SD card build 2 so you have a backup in case the primary fails. label both ends of every cable so you know where it is going to / where it is coming from. These small things will save you immense headaches in the future.
This is a really cool project! Excited to see where you take it. As someone else pointed out, the SD card on your pi is the single most likely thing to fail. I would strongly recommend you use an SSD instead of an SD card if you can help it. If you must use an SD card, invest in a "high endurance" card. Several brands make them - most will be branded as "high endurance", "industrial", or "edge". Still, an SSD is definitely the way to go IMO. Edit: I believe the pi 5 has a dedicated PCIE interface, that you can use to directly attach a PCIE (NVME) SSD. If this were my project, I would do exactly this.
One little tip on the newer Pi's from my experience using them as embedded monitoring systems, load your OS onto a really good usb3.x stick (or even better a proper nvme/pci drive) as opposed to an sd. I have had an almost 100% failure on PI's using sd cards (from all different manufactures and quality levels) when putting them into a real production environment. most if not all SD cards just are not designed for the constant read and write cycles that a main hard drive on a pc experiences. I know you had mentioned you were likely going to be using a different PC on the final system but might help a little with some of the headaches.
I've been binge watching the series and that was the first thing that caught my eye. I'd go as far as to say skip usb/nvme and go with sata ssd. You'll hit a bottleneck with nvme drives. But any of those options will be better than sticking with the sd card
I appreciate these comments. I'm obviously in an ideal environment (house, with AC, etc). This will be in a pilothouse 50-60 ft boat. While it won't get wet, the rest of the environment will be hard on the electronics. So how does a SATA SSD connect to the Pi?
With a Pi 5, I would go for an nvme sad simply to reduce the requirement of a USB port. They make some super sleek nvme drives that attach to the bottom of the pi and avoiding much added thickness
Tip: Sdcard have a slow read write performance that could be the cause of it crashing. You might want to consider using a ssd drive instead. You can get a 512gb ssd cheaply these days. Also Sdcard tends to go bad easily.
Running VNC probably also consumes alot of resources from the PI, better connect directly to a monitor and if this is going run over the network in production run it headless(no ui/displayserver installed) and if possible a webui on another PC (prob need to configure alot over SSH if you can do that).
A quick tip from a network engineer. Document every single connection in visio or an equivalent software. Print that out and laminate it. Document all your IP addresses you use and be sure everything is statically assigned.
Make sure you have redundancy factored in. Don't just build 1 SD card build 2 so you have a backup in case the primary fails. label both ends of every cable so you know where it is going to / where it is coming from.
These small things will save you immense headaches in the future.
Great idea! Thank you!
This is a really cool project! Excited to see where you take it.
As someone else pointed out, the SD card on your pi is the single most likely thing to fail. I would strongly recommend you use an SSD instead of an SD card if you can help it. If you must use an SD card, invest in a "high endurance" card. Several brands make them - most will be branded as "high endurance", "industrial", or "edge". Still, an SSD is definitely the way to go IMO.
Edit: I believe the pi 5 has a dedicated PCIE interface, that you can use to directly attach a PCIE (NVME) SSD. If this were my project, I would do exactly this.
One little tip on the newer Pi's from my experience using them as embedded monitoring systems, load your OS onto a really good usb3.x stick (or even better a proper nvme/pci drive) as opposed to an sd. I have had an almost 100% failure on PI's using sd cards (from all different manufactures and quality levels) when putting them into a real production environment. most if not all SD cards just are not designed for the constant read and write cycles that a main hard drive on a pc experiences. I know you had mentioned you were likely going to be using a different PC on the final system but might help a little with some of the headaches.
I've been binge watching the series and that was the first thing that caught my eye. I'd go as far as to say skip usb/nvme and go with sata ssd. You'll hit a bottleneck with nvme drives. But any of those options will be better than sticking with the sd card
I appreciate these comments. I'm obviously in an ideal environment (house, with AC, etc). This will be in a pilothouse 50-60 ft boat. While it won't get wet, the rest of the environment will be hard on the electronics. So how does a SATA SSD connect to the Pi?
With a Pi 5, I would go for an nvme sad simply to reduce the requirement of a USB port. They make some super sleek nvme drives that attach to the bottom of the pi and avoiding much added thickness
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
Oh, man, that's such a joy to see that you can do such things yourself and on a limited budget nowadays :)
It sure is! Thanks for the comment.
Tip: Sdcard have a slow read write performance that could be the cause of it crashing. You might want to consider using a ssd drive instead. You can get a 512gb ssd cheaply these days. Also Sdcard tends to go bad easily.
Thanks for the advice
Do you have 4.7k pullup resistors on the ds18b20 temp sensors? If not you will see junk data.
I did not. I’ll check this out.
Running VNC probably also consumes alot of resources from the PI, better connect directly to a monitor and if this is going run over the network in production run it headless(no ui/displayserver installed) and if possible a webui on another PC (prob need to configure alot over SSH if you can do that).
Good idea!
Cool!
Thanks!
Are you doing fuzz testing?
As in testing for police nearby? ;). Tell me more!