I spent a few hours getting a Pi 3B running properly for this Grafana project. I actually think it is going to worth the effort. Grafana seems to work well and I have all the code on my own machine.
What I had to do was first set up a usb drive for the machine so I didn't depend on a silly SD card. I went into this with my teeth clamped down because previously it had been a pain to implement <link>. This time, it was a piece of cake.
What the folk did at Raspberry Pi was take the idea of a usb drive seriously. You enable a bit in the configuration, read the SD card you already have running into a file, write it out to the usb drive, plug it in and boot the Pi. OK, it's a little bit more than that, but not much.
I followed the instructions for setting the bit that allows boot from usb drive in the instructions on the Pi site <link> and found out the bit was already set. Then I remembered doing it when I was experimenting before. Then I took out the SD card, stuck it in my laptop and copied an image to a file. Next, I plugged in the usb ssd I already had from last time and copied the image over to it.
I walked across the room and plugged the usb drive into the PI, plugged in the power and went back to the laptop. Putty connected to the Pi on the first try. Notice I didn't say anything about plugging in an SD card?
Nope, the machine is running just fine without an SD card at all. You do realize that this makes the Pi into a full blown computer that you can actually rely on! Yep, this may justify making an enclosure for the combination so it looks pretty on the shelf. Right now it looks a little forlorn over there:
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Looks a little strange hanging by its wires doesn't it? Notice the unopened Echo Dot boxes right by it? That's for another project I hope to get to some day.
I created a special user in the database that can only read data from certain tables to protect against the scary "SQL injection" attacks by hackers so my database is OK. I forwarded a port to the machine from my router so it can be seen from outside when I finally trust it enough to do so; I may be ready to show this thing off in a few days.
Then I spent a little time adding a few new items to the Grafana dashboard so I had more things I could check on just by glancing at the display. It looks like this right now:
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I have the appliance power usage and battery level of the room temperature sensors charted so I can follow them over time. There's other things I can chart for fun and some other indicators that would be nice to see from time to time, but I think I'll use this arrangement for a while to see how it feels.
This entire project has been a success. I gues it was time for my readers to nudge me again about using some of the public tools. Remember this all started when I wrote about Xively a little while ago <link>. Maybe I'll look at Home Assistant next.
Or maybe I'll just make cool charts for a week or two.
What I had to do was first set up a usb drive for the machine so I didn't depend on a silly SD card. I went into this with my teeth clamped down because previously it had been a pain to implement <link>. This time, it was a piece of cake.
What the folk did at Raspberry Pi was take the idea of a usb drive seriously. You enable a bit in the configuration, read the SD card you already have running into a file, write it out to the usb drive, plug it in and boot the Pi. OK, it's a little bit more than that, but not much.
I followed the instructions for setting the bit that allows boot from usb drive in the instructions on the Pi site <link> and found out the bit was already set. Then I remembered doing it when I was experimenting before. Then I took out the SD card, stuck it in my laptop and copied an image to a file. Next, I plugged in the usb ssd I already had from last time and copied the image over to it.
I walked across the room and plugged the usb drive into the PI, plugged in the power and went back to the laptop. Putty connected to the Pi on the first try. Notice I didn't say anything about plugging in an SD card?
Nope, the machine is running just fine without an SD card at all. You do realize that this makes the Pi into a full blown computer that you can actually rely on! Yep, this may justify making an enclosure for the combination so it looks pretty on the shelf. Right now it looks a little forlorn over there:
Looks a little strange hanging by its wires doesn't it? Notice the unopened Echo Dot boxes right by it? That's for another project I hope to get to some day.
I created a special user in the database that can only read data from certain tables to protect against the scary "SQL injection" attacks by hackers so my database is OK. I forwarded a port to the machine from my router so it can be seen from outside when I finally trust it enough to do so; I may be ready to show this thing off in a few days.
Then I spent a little time adding a few new items to the Grafana dashboard so I had more things I could check on just by glancing at the display. It looks like this right now:
I have the appliance power usage and battery level of the room temperature sensors charted so I can follow them over time. There's other things I can chart for fun and some other indicators that would be nice to see from time to time, but I think I'll use this arrangement for a while to see how it feels.
This entire project has been a success. I gues it was time for my readers to nudge me again about using some of the public tools. Remember this all started when I wrote about Xively a little while ago <link>. Maybe I'll look at Home Assistant next.
Or maybe I'll just make cool charts for a week or two.