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Comment by wingerlang | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear exactly how this helps him work compared to just using hosted versions of the services.

It looks like there could potentially be a lot of maintenance to keep multiple individual servers up and running, and this is probably multiple side project in and of itself.

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I was well on my way to having a forest of RPis. The boxes are cheap, and "they only use 5W"... until you have 10 of them.

I replaced each and every one of them with an Intel NUC (6. gen Celeron) running FreeBSD, and created a jail for each of the services the individual RPIs maintained.

It uses 5-9W (Idle), which is like 80% of the time. It has real Gigabit Ethernet, as well as a SATA SSD, and that alone is enough to provide much higher performance (for me)

The only RPis i have left running are the individual nodes in my video/climate surveillance.

Could you maybe post some more specs / setup ?

Proxmox runs beautifully on a Gen 8 Intel Nuc. A lot more than 5-6 raspberry pis but much more powerful.

Chick-Fil-A use a small cabinet of NUCs and deploy an arbitrary number of services via Kubernetes to all there restaurants. It's a pretty neat setup.

https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at...

I'm sure i've seen this as a talk too, it was pretty humble iirc they seemed surprised how practical it turned out to be.

Yeah my story of using one to write my startup's MVP after my thinkpad finally bought the ghost is maybe more compelling because I actually used it for everything until we got our first customer and I scored a mac for a more standard professional desktop environment. In a pinch it has enough functionality to build and launch a web application. Obviously not ideal but it actually worked in emergency for me.

Now that's something I'd love to read about! My only comparable experience was during my most recent co-op where I used an Asus C300 Chromebook running Gallium OS 2.1, and it served me quite well for the work I was doing.

Although using modern websites when you only have 2 GB of RAM and a mobile Celeron chip is absolutely painful...

Same.

Hosting websites at your house? Slower load times for your users.

Hosting git at your house? If your house burns, you might lose all copies of the code.

Hosting a manual WordPress installation? That's making work for yourself IMO.

The downside of decentralisation is that it's often just centralisation in your hands.

Could also be a upside :)

> If your house burns, you might lose all copies of the code.

This is what off-site backups are for. You have them, for your hosted services as well as your home ones, right?! OK so with a hosted service you have the advantage of them managing uptime and recovery matters to an extent, but I still prefer to have my own backups on another host, so I have the data in my hands if the whole service goes offline for a time.

I'd agree with your other points but I don't think the "what about a site-down situation?" matter differs between self and remote hosted options (unless, perhaps, you are paying a pile for nice renumeration-backed SLA promises).

Backups would be great and solve the issue I mentioned. I assumed that of all the people tinkering on the Pi, only a minority would set up automated backups

    Hosting websites at your house? Slower load times for your users.
    Hosting git at your house? If your house burns, you might lose all copies of the code.

I'm guilty of both, although my home connection is a 300/300 mbit fiber connection with a static IP. I make versioned backups locally and remote daily, just as i would from any VPS host.

The only reason i'm considering moving all the internet facing stuff to a VPS is to allow me to "relax" a bit, by minimizing the amount of public services/ports that can have potential exploits on my home network. I've tried to minimize the damage an attacker can make by using FreeBSD jails.

I already segregate the network traffic in LAN, DMZ, SERVERS, KIDS, IOT and GUESTS, with the only route being through the firewall for access to other VLANS, as well as not allowing traffic from certain VLANS onto others. I monitor logs religiously.

I'm guessing a VPS would probably allow me to sleep a bit easier at night, though i'd still have the same amount of maintenance work.

It does seem to be "for the sake of it". Why would you want a web based IDE when you could have a desktop app for way less effort?

hehe , yeah. i mean it's cool but this was basically, "Pi is a server and you can run software on servers". I was hoping for something that used some extra electrical components and circuitry to accomplish something more then just running software.

I'd actually argue it's easy to get set up on the cloud hosted versions of this stuff! sure it helps to roll your own everything (git, jira, IDE...) and i appreciate the work and write up. Plus those rpi's do look pretty fuckin sweet, it makes my nerd senses tingle

Having exposed GPIO pins is nice. I'm running a log display on a RPi 1, but there's also a 7-segment status display for the team, showing build+prod data. Not sure how I'd do that on a PC...serial port, probably.

On a PC, Arduino flashed with Firmata. It lets you write behavior in whatever language you want. It also keeps the serial connection open at all times so you can send commands as you go (e.g. with a Python REPL)

USB-to-serial still exists but the support for it is kind of crimped now due to security concerns (in Windows at least) and you can also damage the PC if the external circuit is not thought out correctly.

Not really sure if the USB adapter manages to isolate enough of the risk though, I have only used Firmata...

USB-to-serial has, first and foremost, horrible jitter issues.

I was confused about it, too. It made more sense when I thought of his blog as a series of tutorials for people who want to learn how to use RPI.

My thoughts exactly. I was hoping to find something more useful than the same benefits t I'd get from a free azure subscription.

Something about the RPi seems to motivate new hobbyists in ways that hosted VMs just don't.

It's quite difficult to put a sticker on a VM.

Closer to the truth than one might think. The Pi can be tinkered with in the same way one could tinker with an Amiga or an Atari back in the days. You can, of course, tinker around in a Docker container or a VM as well, but they're not physical products and therefore not "real" in the same sense.

current gen skilled hobbyists grew up with fancying "physical" objects. a RPi is a physical object manipulating your data. a hosted VM(even if hosted on your own personal machine) doesn't have the same "tactility"

I've Rasp Pi + alpha card + 50K mah powerbank as my router, which creates 3 APs, one with Tor other with work VPN and last with my home connection.

All use cloudflare dns+ pi hole to block ads.

I use another PI as a media server and for remote torrent downloading.

Is a powerbank an efficient and safe UPS for a RPi? I was at some point told powerbanks are not a good solution for Pi's, but I cannot remember the reasoning.

It's not - it's a hack. Powerbanks aren't design for random surge in power output which is what Raspberry Pi requires.

Usually used for charging other batteries.

Can you clarify why? Surely they are just normal batteries with a charging circuit? I'd have thought it was more a problem with "pass through charging" where the battery needs to discharge (RPi) and charge at the same time.

Powerbanks are designed for continous load for a trickle charge.

An RPi can suck down a continously changing power input.

That depends on the powerbank. Many powerbanks with Quick Charge 3.0 support will supply over 4A at 5V without power delivery negotiation. It's a hack, but so is the Raspberry Pi - I wouldn't trust a powerbank for anything critical, but I wouldn't trust a Raspberry Pi either.

> Powerbanks aren't design for

What particularly makes them unsuitable for this?

Many things 'aren't designed' for something but work just fine in that capacity..

I have been using Mi powerbank 2i for my Rpis for last 9 months or so. I have had zero issues with it. The advantage of using 2i are,

1. It's dirt cheap than any other solution I found($15, I use 10k mah version)

2. I can plug RPi to it and I can plugin a charger in 2i. When the main power cuts off, It'll instantly switch over to battery with 0 downtime. I think this is called passthrough charging)

3. It can provide 2.5 or 3.5 amps(not sure about exact value) output

4. It has two ports

How many hours it lasts?

I have never measured it. At worst the main power has gone down for a 2-3 hours and it lasted at least as much. I don't have a USB power meter to measure the power taken by the Rpi so I can not give you an exact number but I would guess it to be at least around 5-10 hours if not more.

Edit: Someone linked pijuice project. I went to their website and according to them, Their 10k mah version lasts 24+ hours

> Onboard 1820 mAh off the shelf Lipo / LiIon battery for ~4 to 6 hours in constant use! (with support for larger Lipo Battery of 5000 or 10,000 mAH+ to last up to 24 hrs +)

https://uk.pi-supply.com/products/pijuice-standard

So, I would say 2i would probably last about the same?

> 2. I can plug RPi to it and I can plugin a charger in 2i. When the main power cuts off, It'll instantly switch over to battery with 0 downtime. I think this is called passthrough charging)

This alone is a killer feature that’s far less common than I expected before I started searching for it. Most power banks cut off output while they’re charging, and many require physically re-plugging the device to start powering it again.

I ended up acquiring a PiJuice for this functionality alone.

https://github.com/PiSupply/PiJuice

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