hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2236.txt

Episode: 2236
Title: HPR2236: Hoarding Raspberry Pis
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2236/hpr2236.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 16:20:15

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This is an HPR episode 2,236 entitled Hording Raspberry Pis.
It is hosted by me and in about 25 minutes long, and carry my clean flag.
The summary is, in this episode, I discuss my growing obsession with building a Raspberry Pi
Data Center.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com, get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code, HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hello hacker public radio fans, this is Be Easy once again.
Coming in just to give a quick update.
So I am a Raspberry Pi person.
I now have four.
I started out with my first one was the Raspberry Pi B Plus, Raspberry Pi 2, then a Raspberry
Pi 3, and then most recently I just got another Raspberry Pi 3.
The cool thing is that they're all about the same shape, and they fit the same types
of boxes and cases.
When I first started I thought I was going to go and try to be a maker, and so just a
little quick update for anyone who's been living in a hole, or it just is not that familiar.
A Raspberry Pi is a single board computer that has, it's our base processor, and they've
obviously got better over time, and they have different form factors.
So there's an A form factor, there's a B form factor, and more recently there's a
zero form factor, and they can be used for, like I said, they're cheap, so the price
is the thing that is really great about them, $35 for the B, and they go down from there
all the way down to $5 for the zero, and they have different functionality depending on
which model, which generation you have, but they basically are an ARM computer that's
connected with internet, whether the internet be through just through Ethernet for some of
the models, or Wi-Fi or Ethernet for some of the other models, and also Bluetooth for
most recent model, and so, and they also have a set of GPIO pins, which are general purpose
input and output interfaces, and so what you can do, and what a lot of people will do,
and what their main goal was of the Raspberry Pi project was to be able to get these into
the hands of kids, and young people, and computer learners all over the world, for in a way
that's inexpensive, to teach them about robotics, electronics, and general computing.
And so I'm like, yeah, you know what, these are great. I'm going to get one, so I got the
Raspberry Pi B plus, and I saw some cool projects that people had posted online, one of the
cool things about Raspberry Pi as opposed to some of the other Singapore computers, which
you might have better specs, like the O-Joy series, or the Orange Pi, Banana Pi devices,
is the community around Raspberry Pi project, and so there's always people posting about
what they did with them, and there's all types of forms that you can go to and look at how
other people have used their Raspberry Pi. So I'm like, you know what, I'm going to do this
too. So I've also one wire thermal meters, and a breadboard, a reusable breadboard, and I'm
like, yeah, I want to be a maker. I'm going to get this going. I'm going to learn about how to
do this stuff. And so I went through the process of, you know, doing my first, because I really
want to do temperature sensing. And so I'm like, all right, I'm going to plug these in, I want
to hook this up to the GPO pins. It's going to be great. And I bought all the stuff, and I
connected, I tried to connect the breadboard and the, the one wire cables, and I'm like, oh, I
don't have resistors, because to make temperature sensing work, I thought there would be resistors
inside the temperature sensing module, but there's not. You need sensors to hook up to the,
I mean, you need resistors to put on the breadboard to make it work. So I'm like, oh, I need
to get resistors. And so then I bought some resistors, and I'm like, oh, and I just never
have gotten back to it. That was three years ago now. And I've never gone back to actually
trying to hook it up with the resistors. I still have all the pieces, and they're still
sitting in a drawer ready to be used. And I, every once in a while, look at it and get these
ambitious thoughts on my head. And they always whistle out, because I'm not a maker. I wish
it was. I wish I get into it. I'm just like, you know what? I have a thermometer. Okay?
I'm like, do I want to learn how to use this stuff? Yes, I do. But I, I, one, I just don't
want to have a Raspberry Pi on my desk. That's how a lot of these people do it. They have the
device on their desk, and they're, and they're fiddling with it. Like, and that's, I just don't,
I, my desk is my work area. I work from home, and I don't have time or space to be messed
around with that in that area. And so what I did instead with that device, my first device
was, I turned it into a little device where I would run, like, just a couple of automated
tasks. The first one being running a speed test. So there is, so one quick thing before I
go too far, the original version of the Raspberry Pi came with an operating system called
Razbian, which is a slightly modified version of Debian for the Raspberry Pi. And although
it has some security issues, or it's just not, you know, it's not meant to be out on the
open internet because it's the way it's set up. It works pretty well. And if you're familiar
with Debian, which I am, I use Ubuntu full-time for all my work and all my home stuff, then
you know, it works for you. So by the way, you know, I don't need this thing. So I don't
need a GUI. I run it headless, and I first just had this command my tool called SpeedTest
CLI. And it is an interface written in Python, I'm pretty sure, that goes out, calls, uses
like SpeedTest.net, runs the, runs like a standard SpeedTest.net thing that you could
do, like if you're running SpeedTest.net from your mobile device or from your computer.
It gets the upload speed, the download speed, it actually saves a URL to the image of the
graph that gets created when you do it. And so I wrote a small little script that would
put all the information into a line of a CSV file. And then I made a CROG job that every
hour on the hour, runs SpeedTest.net and tell me what my internet speed was. Because
I was having problems with my AT&T broadband. I mean, I have this fiber to my house, and
I have internet issues. It doesn't make sense. So I started to track this stuff. And then
I said, well, I'm doing that. Maybe there's some other things I could track that, like
in a passive capacity. So there's a couple other things that I track as well besides
the SpeedTest. And originally I was just putting the SpeedTest.net stuff into a CSV file.
I rewrote it slightly to put into a SQLite database. So it's a little bit more, a little
bit easier to interface with, because I like to make graphs and stuff out of it sometimes.
So it does that. It also, I use SMTP, Mailer, some Mailer, protocol to like send me everyday,
like to download something from the weather forecast, put it in an email and email myself
the weather for the day. So every morning at 8 o'clock I get an email with the weather.
And I use Cal State to deliver that message. So in AskArt, there'll be a different Cal
or animal every day that says, you know, weather today. And so those are kind of cool.
That's a little simple bash script, maybe three or four lines long. Put that in a cron
job. And then I discovered Incron. And I've already done a post about what I've done with
Incron, which is a file system watcher demon, demon, which will look for changes in a specific
path and do whatever actions or scripts that you want to run on that new file or new path
that comes into that file path system. And I use that because I have some documents that
need the same formatting all the time. And, you know, I could have it on my main computer,
but this way I can use it from any computer in the house. I can just always mount that
as through SS, SFTP, throw off a markdown file into one of the different folders, because
I have different folders for different formats. So drop into the format of my choice folder.
And it'll output into the done folder. And then I pick it up and then I'm done. So that
was my one Raspberry Pi. I'm like, oh, that's great. And then the Raspberry Pi 2 came out.
I'm like, wow, I've got to get the new one. So I got that one. And that one I once again
had those ambitious things about, you know, I wanted to put my one wire thermometer sensors
and want to do it never happened. Instead, I say, well, you know what? I have another job
of this thing. So I was learning Django at the time. And so I made it my dev machine.
So I didn't have to put. So I could have like a stable environment that was, so I wasn't
didn't have one development environment on one computer and a different one. And I could
be seeking the files. I could be, you know, just doing a get repositor or something. But
I'm like, no, I want to be able to serve it up kind of like it was a production server.
So I want to set up engine X. And I did postgres at the beginning, but now I'm back just
using SQLite because it's faster on the Raspberry Pi. And, you know, just wanted to get it
working in a way that would be because I ended up making a real project around that concept.
So I want to be able to do it in real life to say that I could do it. So that if I had
when I go and push that to a production for a client, I know how to do it. So I've done
that at works. So that was on there for a while. And then more recently, I wrote my own workout
app. And it's really simple. Like, I looked at all this workout apps online and they all
want you to sign up and gather all your information. And they want you to have like fitness
devices and everything. And they never, and they didn't do the thing that I really wanted
to do, which was actually log my events. Like, I want to be able to log the things that
I want to log in the way I want to log them. And so I spent the time and I want to learn
bottle at the same time. So bottle like Django or Python web development frameworks, just
for a little introduction to those. And so I made it. I used Bootstrap JS to make it
mobile friendly. And now every day that I go to the gym, I come home and I on my Raspberry
Pi 2 log every event. So I'll say I did this much back, this much biceps, this much legs,
this much running, this much cardio, this much ads. And I can do it myself. No one else
has my information except for me. I can graph it. I can chart it. I can do whatever I want.
And I know it's not that big of a deal that other people have it. But I just really like
every time I go into one of those apps and they're like, where's what's your location?
And like, what's your email address? I just get, like, I just get all weird about it.
And I just say no. So, so I'm glad I have my little Raspberry Pi 2's later on. I've
now put, made a get server out of that one. So I have a couple repositories on there
that I don't want to share on GitHub or on Bitbucket, which is where I set sort of my
other things. Like, I think I'll put in the show notes here. My Bitbucket repository
is for, for these web apps that I've created. So that's the Raspberry Pi 2. It only has
two jobs. And the cool thing about these is that they're $35. And if you want to do a
whole bunch of other things with them, the money starts to add up so you can end up spending
$100 per one of these activities. But these, especially all the ones up to the Raspberry
Pi 3, if you just have, you know, old phone chargers at home, because every time you get
a new phone, you get a new charger, but you still have your old charger. So you end up
getting a big pile of these. Well, all these micro USB chargers work on the Raspberry Pi.
The new ones, the Raspberry Pi 3, they use a little bit more energy. So I have been getting
the, like, the ones released by Element 14 or by Cana Kit to say that these are four of the
Raspberry Pi 3, because I know that they use up more amperage, I think. So like I said, I'm
not an electrical engineer or anything, so that's all mumble jumbo for the most part to me.
Like, I get it conceptually, but don't ask me any specifics. So I'm like, all right, well,
for a while, I just had those two, and I just had these little simple black plastic cases
that I got off of Amazon for like $45, and that was good. But then the Raspberry Pi 3 came
out. And so when that came out, I'm like, all right, I want to get one of those. And when
I got one of those, I'm like, well, I need a better way to store these, because now they're
just starting, these little cases are kind of big. They're making these little tiny Raspberry
Pi's a lot bulkier. So I saw also an Amazon, and I'll put this in the show notes too. I found
a little rack for Raspberry Pi's, and they do make some of these racks that hold up to 10
devices, a little, they're made out of acrylic or plastic, and they're just like stacked
up on top of each other, all facing the same direction. And so I bought one that has a
four rack rack, and you don't have to put all four of the pieces together. You can put
the pieces together as you need them. So for a while, there's just a three rack set,
and now it's a four rack set. But on this one, I'm like, well, I need to get this device
because I need to, because I'm getting a Raspberry Pi person now. And so I bought it and then
figured out a use for it. And the use I found for this one has changed over time. And
I've done several different things with it. One, it was for a while, just my computer that's
just always on my LAN, that's always on, so that I could do stuff like IRSSI, which is a IRC
client. So I can just have something that's always on. It's always there. So if I'm not at home,
I can always SSH into my home network and be on the network and have a computer that has
all the stuff that's already on that I need. And so it sometimes had like NFS mounts to other
things on my network that I got on my network attached storage so that I could have all my files,
even if I wasn't around them. And that was cool for a while. But then I found a better project
for it because I had been using back in the day, I used Google Reader, and then I had to
switch the feedly. And I heard people talking about tiny, tiny RSS. And so I finally decided to try
that. So I made a tiny, tiny RSS server out of this one. And I have the tiny, tiny RSS app on my
phone. And with the web, the web interface for my regular computer, which is some, it's close
enough to feedly where I don't need feedly anymore. I can do everything that I used to feedly for
with this without any compromises. So that's great. One more thing that is in my control. And as I'm
doing these things, I know a lot of people are like, why are you going through all this work? It's
more because I want to learn these things. I want to learn how I had never really
set up like tiny, tiny RSS is a, it's a lamp stack. And I've set up a lamp stack before,
but it's been a while. I want to do it again. And I wanted to, well, it's a little different. I'm
using light D instead of Apache. And I was going to use, I tried to use SQLite, but it was,
it was, they're preferred methods for you to use Postgres. And so I tried to mess around with
it for a while. I was like, you know, fine, I'll just use Postgres. So I'll learn how to integrate
light D into Postgres and all these things. So these are things that, you know, I'm not a
sass admin, but I do develop. And I, and it's come in handy on more than one occasion,
when an application that I'm working on doesn't work. And the vendor is there trying to fix it.
And I'm like, well, did you check the firewall to see if that port is open? And just knowing that
from messing with this stuff, like, solves problems in my job. And like, it's not my job to figure that
out, but, you know, I made a little contribute. So that's that Raspberry Pi. And then I'm like, well,
I have a part of my businesses doing customer interaction. So getting new clients, managing my
current clients. And I started looking for a CRM and a customer relation management system.
And I saw all these and there's some good open source ones, but they're so big and they're so
huge. And I'm like, can I do something different? Can I make my own CRM? And I'm like, so I really
want to go through the effort. And then I remember how easy it is to set up something in Django. So
I mean, another really simple Django app that does the CRM the way I want to do it. And it's
probably not the right way to do a CRM, but it does what I want to do, which is be able to track
my clients track conversations that have with them. And, you know, and be able to say like,
well, it was last time I met with them. I have like a scale on how engaged I am with a client.
And so, you know, building up a way to say, okay, my really good clients, I'm going to start to
build a procedure where how I, how often I contact them. The ones that, you know, there's a
whole bunch of people that are leads that, you know, I'm tracking now to say, oh, yeah, I've contacted
them. They told me to go piss off. I contacted them. They seem slightly interested, but it weren't
the person in charge, you know, all the kind of information that you need to know
is important. So I said, okay, let's do it. I built that. So now I have another web server. So now
out of my four Raspberry Pi's, three of them are a little web apps and the $35 for life web apps.
I was thinking about putting these on digital ocean because I used digital ocean for certain things.
But I thought about it. I'm like, I could do five or $10 a month for each of these indefinitely.
Or I can pay $35 once plus for like I already had SD cards around the house, so I didn't have to buy
those. I had to buy one or two new charger. So for like, you know, anywhere between $35 and $50
or $55, I could have it for the year or for forever. And I said, and I don't really need these things
to be off the land. So I said, well, I'll just do myself. And now I have like a little stack
of them. And now that I have a stack of basically servers on my network, I started messing with things
like Ansible and Fabric to kind of orchestrate things, not because the things that are on there
are so complicated that I need that, but because it interests me. So like I have simple Fab
Fabric automation things where I just sent a command and it'll run because the first two,
the B plus and the two are running Raspbian still, but the two Raspberry Pi threes are running a
Ubuntu 1604 minimal server. And so, but since they're both Debbie and bass, I can run the same
command. So I'll just say, for all four of these devices, run pseudo-update and pseudo-update
this upgrade dash Y. And it goes and updates all of them at the same time. And then I'll do
send this pseudo reboot to all them at the same time. And they all reboot at the same time.
I mean, do I need to know how to do that? Am I ever going to be SS admin doing this for
my job? No. But it interests me. And the thing I was searching for when I bought the Raspberry Pi is
I'm being fulfilled in, which is to scratch that itch, that curiosity of computing. And I thought
it was going to come in that maker space. And it really never did. Even though it would make my wife
happier because all these things that I've done with these are pretty much just for me. But the
exception of maybe the, um, maybe the speed tests, if the internet's acting up, I can go tell her,
oh yeah, every day at five o'clock this week, it's had this problem or something like that.
Everything else is for me. These other projects, like I was supposed to hook one up to our garage
system and make it so they can push a button on your phone to open it. That didn't happen.
That would have helped her. So, you know, she's kind of gotten over it. But it makes me happy.
It, um, it does what I want to do, which is get some, get some training on these things,
learn some things that I'm interested in. And, you know, just have fun. And that's what hacking
is about, right? It's learning things and taking them apart and understanding how they work.
And I know way more about how, even though I've been running Ubuntu or Fedore full time,
since 2000, 11, I think I was at 1110 was my first thing. Yeah. So, since then, I've in the last
couple of years since I've been managing these devices, I've learned so much more. And I really
recommend if anyone hasn't bothered getting one of these devices because they didn't know what
they were going to use them for because they're not a tinker or they're not a maker. They're not
going to build a robot out of them. That's, um, that's one use case for them. And that's maybe that
was the use case that they were intended for. But since they do have general purpose computing,
software installed on them, you can do whatever you want with them. So, that's my episode. I encourage
all of you out there to submit an episode. I know it's kind of a scary thought at first,
but once you do it, I just watched this movie with my kids recently called Sing. It's about
the singing competition with these little dancing and singing animals and animation. You get the point.
But the, um, Matthew McConaughey's character says about being shy.
If you just start to do the thing that you're shy about, you stop being shy about it because
you're falling doing it. And I think that's kind of true. So, um, please, when he shows, I love hearing
about everything from, you know, what someone's cat's doing to what you're doing with your soldering
iron or your electrical volt meters. All that stuff is I get something out of it. And I know a lot
of other people do too. So, keep up the good work and happy hacking.
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