Joe,
I transitioned from Pis to ESP32. I was all-in on Pis, trust me. I love
linux. The issues:
It's not just the power supply. SDCards in this environment will corrupt
eventually, absolutely. There is nothing that can protect the operating
system from eventual corruption. Yes, I too, have been lucky and had
them run for years. You simply cannot count on this with consumer-grade
sd cards. You can buy industrial quality flash or eMMC, but at this
point you are spending more for your memory than you are on the board,
and often much, much more. If you do enough research, you will find that
this is simply something you cannot practically avoid, unless you go to
these expensive cards, or do work to make a frozen, read-only operating
system image that offloads all data that need to be permanently stored
onto something like a flash drive, where you do not care if it becomes
partially corrupted. It's sad, but true. I have talked to dozens of
people who use these. Every single one has had these issues, regardless
of how good their power supply is. If your application cannot tolerate a
reformat periodically (remote devices come to mind), this situation is
simply a non-option.
The operating system is constantly being updated, and if you want things
like, I dunno, support for Python 3.5+, you have to deal with the fact
that it is often times a bleeding edge operating system, and things
simply break. LSB was non-functional for a period ... it has at many
times simply been a mess.
For me, I do not need a local database. I push it to a cloud service (my
own servers, in this case), and handle it there, and serve it to
anywhere on the net. For this reason, the complexity of a Pi solution
simply does not outweigh the above issues.
Now, you can get an ESP32, which has WiFi, 4MB flash, bluetooth, in a
tiny package, for $10. You can get one with a nice little oled display
for $19. You can get one with an sdcard and wired ethernet for $30. You
can get another version with 4MB more of program space via PSRAM for a
little more. You can get em with relays, IR transceivers, CAN, RS485 ..
lots of things. It's not quite as diverse as the arduino ecosystem, but
it is getting there for sure. Best, you can run micropython on it and
avoid having to write any C whatsoever. I ported a ton of code over from
my Pi projects. Best of all, it is rock solid. Mine reboots once an
hour, stores data in a little json file to pick up after it reboots, and
loads config from a set of json files. It posts to a web API, hosts its
own web page for web-based config ... it's just ... wonderful.
Should probably contact me off-list if you want, as this is not germane
to OWFS, but happy to give you any info you like.
Cheers,
C
On 2/20/2019 7:38 PM, joep wrote:
Hi All,
To some extent this follows from thread: *Reliability and
Robustness of the DS2482-100 or DS2482-800*
I've been using a couple of Raspberry Pi's (RPi 1 Model A+) to
manage the temperature, humidity and lighting in a terrarium since
2014/2015. One Pi is in active use while the other is used as a
development platform to try things out on. Overall I'm impressed by how
much one can do without spending a fortune and I'm quite keen to explore
further.
One thing which always bothered me with the Pi's is the SD card.
I've had a few corruptions (all power supply related). Even with a clean
and stable supply I am still doubtful if one can achieve "industrial
grade" reliability if using SD cards. So I'm now looking for other
microcontroller options to control my 1-wire based system as I'm
intending to extend management to my greenhouses where reliability is
more important.
Options I have looked at so far include the Arduino (Uno, Zero or
DUE) and the ESP32. Haven't fully explored the latter but it seems to
have an incredible number of interfaces. I'm quite impressed by the
Arduino - it's simple, there's a big choice of units and it's easily
extensible (with a lot of pre-built modules available). My design will
involve power switching and (ideally) more than one 1-wire bus (so a
DS2482-100 is likely to be involved). The system will also interface to
my network for monitoring and management.
What are your opinions re. suitable microcontrollers where
reliability and ease of extensibility are requirements.
--
Regards
Joe P.
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