Cumulus Support

I recently bought a Raspberry Pi and have started tinkering with it in a headless setup, remoting in via ssh or VNC with my Mac. I'll be trying my hand at getting MX up and running on it next, at first with a spare Envoy, but my goal would be to transition to the Pi as my main system.

If those of you with long term experience using a Raspberry Pi could chime in on your experience with the reliability of the system I'd appreciate it. I'm particularly concerned about the stability and reliability of the SD card. Any tips or thoughts welcomed.

Thank you,
-Dave

Hi Dave,

I'm not sure if my setup fits in definition "long term", but my Pi (2 version B,) has been up and running in attic (-25C°-+40C° in weatherproof case) w/o major issues couple of years now - with the same memory card. With Cumulus MX from beginning of this year. I would say Pi is a good choice after all. Some may have different opinions, my friend´s card bailed out few weeks ago and he is quite angry about it. Pick up a good quality card and make sure you have backups and you are good to go.

https://www.raspberrypistarterkits.com/ ... nux-macos/

Hi Dave,

I have had a Pi Model B+ running my setup for about 3 years now with no real issues.
A good quality SD card is a must and also consider the size of it as well. If you wish to log the FTP activity, then this file can get very large very quickly and will fill the card up. I have an 8GB card in use and with CumulusMX installed plus a few other things and there is about 1.4GB free.

For remote access I use TeamViewer - this now supports RPi and since I use it to access other machines it made sense to use this for the weather station. It works well and offers some useful features.

The only problem I get is that the Pi sometimes drops the wifi, so if it is available I would always go for an ETH connection.

Hope this helps,

Paul

I wood go for a ssd I've got 60gb and all my files on there to take the load off a sd card and if u got a Sql database like me I wood dump that to the ssd or if u got a Nas drive ues that

I ditched the SD card and added a cheap 128GB USB attached SSD drive. The capacity is overkill, but like an SD card, the bigger the better for reliability as the internal wear leveling has more locations to spread the writes over.

I have also redirected all the temporary files to an in memory disk - that includes the tag files etc that Cumulus writes to.

I run two websites and a SQL database on my pi 3 since April 2017, that replaced a pi model B that had been running on an SD card since May 2015.

I don't know. The whole point of the pi is space and low power consumption. I've had a Pi 3 now for about 18 months using an SD card and it's worked fine for me. However, I also have a backup plan in place for my Cumulus files that I run daily to my cloud (Google Drive). I think connecting the pi to an external drive for this purpose would be overkill, but, buy a name brand and well reviewed SD card for the pi for reliability.

My opinion. Take it for what it's worth.

Thank you all for sharing your experiences with the Pi. I'll keep you all updated as I proceed with my own experience using one. I'm eager to ditch the old laptop I'm using for MX duties now.

Regards,
-Dave

While I understand what BigOkie is saying I personally would agree with what Mark said, but the drive doesn't necessarily have to be a SSD it can also be a standard external USB 2.5" drive which can be very cheap nowadays.

I use them for 2 Pi's one for streaming and the other some experimental programming and they have improved the reliability markedly especially when power cuts or reboots are concerned.

I have a set up similar to Mark and would recommend it. I have had no reliability issues with RPis for over three years now - the only one that broke did so physically when i sat on my original Pi Zero! Small SSD disks can be obtained relatively cheaply nowadays.

I have an Odroid XU4 that I'm seriously looking at putting CMX on. That might be overkill, but it's a good bit of hardware (2x USB3.0 + 1x USB2.0, 1 HDMI1.4, builtin bluetooth, builtin wifi, 8 core processor). Right now I'm using it to serve up 2 external 4TB hard drives using NFS to my Media Server but can move that to my Synology NAS in a while. It's the fan cooled version.