… has too many hobbies.

Topic:

Raspberry Pi

23 posts
Jan 2017 – Sep 2024

Cloning Raspberry Pi SD cards

Occasionally I need to set up a new Raspberry Pi that's extremely similar to an existing Pi, typically for a monitoring application like collecting UPS statistics. The hard way to do this is to set up the new Pi from scratch and install and configure your application. The …

Moving fake-hwclock to a separate partition on a read-only Raspberry Pi

My guide to running a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root filesystem has one hacky caveat: it still allows fake-hwclock to write to the filesystem every hour. I don't love this solution, and this post presents a fix.

Raspberry Pi Use Cases

I consider Pis as the tool to use when a moderate amount of Linux compute power needs to be in a specific physical location and/or interface with specific hardware.

Pi Reliability: Reduce writes to your SD card

If you aren't using a read-only filesystem on your Pi, you can still reduce writes to the SD card to increase its lifespan.

Running a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root filesystem

While there are downsides, using a read-only root filesystem will dramatically increase your Pi SD card's lifetime.

Pi Reliability over WiFi: 'Temporary failure in name resolution'

Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. One Pi I run here at home sits in an outbuilding with less-than-ideal WiFi signal strength. It runs PiAware [1] and BirdNET-Pi, and I specifically haven't run Ethernet to it to partially mitigate lightning-strike risks, given that it has two exposed …

Reliable WiFi for the Bambu X1C 3D printer

How to set up a Raspberry Pi WiFi access point that the Bambu X1C can stay connected to.

Considerations for a long-running Raspberry Pi

Keeping a Raspberry Pi online and working with zero intervention for weeks, months, or years is somewhat of an art form. Several classes of things can go wrong, and you need to consider how your Pi will recover from each of them.

Stop using the Raspberry Pi's SD card for swap

Using your Pi's SD card for swap space will, in time, kill the SD card.

Remote logging for easier Raspberry Pi debugging

When something does go wrong, having collected logs somewhere other than your Raspberry Pi's SD card is very helpful.

Raspberry Pi SD cards: fsck them often

If your Raspberry Pi is not using a read-only filesystem, I recommend setting the Pi to run a filesystem check on its root filesystem at every boot.

Mitigating hardware/firmware/driver instability on the Raspberry Pi

Sometimes, through no fault of your own, something deep down will cause your Raspberry Pi to crash. Hard.

Maintaining a solid WiFi connection on Raspberry Pi

The first issue you're likely to hit with a long-running Pi, particularly with a Raspberry Pi Zero, is the Pi dropping off your WiFi network for no apparent reason after days or just hours of operation.

Keep your software up and running on the Raspberry Pi

This post reviews some of the options for keeping a systemd-managed service running persistently on a Raspberry Pi, or really any other Linux system.

Disable or remove unneeded services and software to help keep your Raspberry Pi online

On long-running, single-purpose Raspberry Pis, I like to disable and/or remove some scheduled tasks, services, and other software. This may help with a few different reliability concerns.