I have two Raspberry Pi boards now, and both seem to be finding a long term role. The first I’ve been using for some time as a PC at Splat Space meetings. Connected to the meeting room’s LAN, a mouse, keyboard, and USB-based hard drive, this RP makes a usable stand-alone Linux system for keeping up with email and the like. A fellow Splat Spacer is making a case for this RP with his 3D printer (thanks, Geoff!). Instead of hauling all the pieces and parts and plugging them together for every meeting, I intend to strap the RP, hard drive, USB hub, etc to the back of the monitor. A wireless bridge is needed, too. I still have several left over from when our broadband was via Starband and I was my next door neighbor’s ISP. This RP is named kludge-pc.
The other RP is destined to live on my home LAN. The original charter I had in mind for it when I ordered it in February was as a low power, battery-backed “overseer” to monitor the various bits and bobs in the house and make available clues as to what’s right or wrong with things. I especially want it to be able to diagnose common failure modes, such as when the wireless repeater gets unplugged for the sake of the vacuum cleaner and then we all wonder what happened to the Internet connection. But since deciding on this job for it, I’ve since realized we badly need a local caching DNS server to make today’s URL-heavy web content less painful to access. Before we could get broadband at this house in the boondocks, I ran an autodial modem-based LAN, and a DNS server was key to making it tolerable. The problem with that (bind-based) setup was that it had to be highly available, and apart from it becoming painful to reboot while others were using computers in the house, I begrudged the watts of electricity. I can’t use my main Linux system because I can’t guarantee it being up all the time (of all things the Arduino development IDE is capable of killing it: more on that in another post.) But a 3.5 watt board like the Raspberry Pi will be perfect. Finally, the GPIO on this board in combination with the Adafruit Linux distro will naturally tie into various monitoring functions, such as how many hours a day the water pumps are actually running. The obvious name for this RP will be eye.
