Re: Grounded grid VHF front-end

Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Nov 2024 01:34:45 -0000 (UTC)) it happened
antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) wrote in
<vhbh7j$26abk$1@paganini.bofh.team>:
 

Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

 
What bothers me today (thought maybe use an extra Raspberry Pi) is that prices
are going up to insane lavels for a Raspi5 8 Gb + supply + housing + sdcard to above 120 USD:
 https://www.sossolutions.nl/raspberry-pi-5-8gb-starter-kit-compleet
 
For just a bit more you have a decent mini computer:
 https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-mini-pc-x86.html
 
Inflation?
Time to end raspi stuff and look for other solutions.

>
I bought Raspberry Pi 1B when they appeared, but after that used
Chinese alternatives.

 
Same here, have some old Pi2 versions...
one Pi2 is on 24/7 running a server, measuring air pressure, radiation,
this Pi4 8 GB I use for web browsing and Usenet
a Pi4 4 GB records security cams and plays audio, records airplane traffic (with dump1090)
and lots more stuff...
 

Orange Pi used to be cheap, most is more
expensive now.  But Orange Pi Zero 3 is reasonably priced and
powerful enough for my purpose.  You apparently want PC class machine,
for this I want real PC.

 
I have several 'real' PCs.. but those are big and use a lot of power, have DVD burner, huge harddisks,
Almost never on these days, stopped burning optical disks, almost all USB harddisks for data storage now.

I mostly depend on storing data on multiple HDD-s (my PC have mirrored
pair of discs and I have extra discs for backup).  In last several years
I did not burn any DVD-s, but maybe I will do some with importand data
for extra safety (DVD are too small for bulk data).

I depend on data stored on HDD, most is fetched from Internert but
things vanish randomly from the net and I have my own indices of
interesting data, so I normally use local copy from my disk.  Also,
have some compute intensive stuff.

 >For light use mini-PCs may be enough and

are quite cheap.  I got one for equvalent of $70, 6GB RAM, dual core
Celeron N3350, 64 GB solid state disc, 2 USB 3.0 slots (+ 2 USB 2.0),
LAN, Wifi, of course in case and with included power supply.  For
me important advantage is that there is no fan (passive cooling only).
Less powerful used mini-PCs can be as cheap as equivalent of $5.

 
Sound good, x86 based is nice too, have written lotd of stuff for that
 

Supposedly some "TV boxes" are cheap, resonably powerful and can
be programmed with Linux.  But I did not try one.

 
Indeed, I have several satellite reception boxes, HD recording and playback no problem with those
some have internet connection too, record to USB SD stick.
When full with stuff I like to keep I copy it to a 4 TB Toshiba USB harddisk connected to my Pi4 8 GB.
 
I do have a satellite reception PCI card in an old x86 PC too, but that is not HD.
But wrote a lot of software for it.
 
 

Pi-s are better for electronics/automation thanks to available
interfaces, but that needs much less compute power (camera is the
only high bandwidth interface that I use).

 
Yes, GPIO is nice, on the PCs I uses the parport for I/O,
even specifically bought a parport PCI card for that on ebay..
 
Much goes via ethernet these days and that works fine on Rspberry too.
Building / designing things with ethernet interface is not that hard.
severl projects on my site:
 https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/newsflex/download.html
USB is also fast enough for many things.

USB can do milliseconds, ethernet hundreds of microseconds, small
micros can do much better.  Theoretically with a micro connected via USB
one can synchronize clocks of the micro and PC with microsecond
accuracy, I plan to try this but do not know how this will work.

When you are satified
with lower compute power there are some cheap ones.  I am trying
now Milkv Duo.  Radxa ROCK also seem to be reasonably priced.
But once you want faster CPU, more RAM, EMMC, etc they are getting
more expensive.  I am not sure why, memory modules for PC seem
to be cheaper than price of adding memory to SBC-s (possibly this
is just pure marketing).

 
Yes, a lot of marketing is involved
You get sort of addicted to GPIO with Raspberries...
Anyways how much processing power do I really need?
 
I program a lot of stuff in asm for Microchip PICs:
 https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/pic/index.html

Nice.  I have avoided PICs, using now mostly STM32 and coding in C.
One can create quite small and efficient programs in C.  I use
assembler when I feel it is better but currently that is mainly
for delay loop.  Doing all in efficient assembler would be large
effort for moderate gain (maybe 20% efficiency/size improvement),
and IME "easy assembler" tend to be less efficient than C.
 

This world creates bloat sftware so it can sell new hardware, Microsoft has shares in hardware companies,
so new bloat needs new hardware.. more money

I dislike bloat but OTOH thanks to bloat powerful PC-s are available
at affordable price.  Otherwise they would be an expensive industry/
corporate items.

--
                              Waldek Hebisch