johanvdw

I communicate to the device using modbus, not direct rs232. The main reason I'd prefer a non-arduino solution is that I have the code working and tested on linux. Checking out arduino nevertheless, as it would probably be a better solution on the longer term.

Thanks for you answer so far. Some math: Based on https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/raspberry-pi-zero-power : with some tweaking the power consumption of a raspberry pi A+ is 0.4W or 80mA at 5V. That would equal to 40mA at 12V allowing some losses in the power conversion. A car battery has a rating of approximately 50 Ah. So it would allow running for 50000/40/24/7 = 7 weeks . While that's could work in theory, I'm mostly wondering if there is another board I could use. My processing needs are quite nimble. In fact dumping all data to sd and turning off/on the sensor at regular intervals would do. Perhaps I will look to more arduino like solutions in the end.

Hi all, I'm looking for an sbc with low power consumption, but still able to run linux (arduino like solutions are somewhat unflexible, and take longer to configure). Basically it should be able to do rs232 and be able to store data to an sd card. It should be able to run approximately two weeks on batteries. Wifi/ethernet/hdmi are not required if there is a way to use a serial console (apart from the extra rs232 which is connected to our measuring device). I already own a banana pi (original) and raspberry pi zero (apart from other boards which draw much more power). Are there any boards I could check out that have significantly lower power usage?

A final note in case someone else bumps on something similar: stability problems persisted, so we returned the computer and the shop switched both CPU and motherboard. We have been running without issues since that.

I'm using debian buster with kernel 5.9 (backports). I could try using ubuntu. Anyway, everything works quite well, but after approx one day at least one kernel trace ends up in the logs. The PSU is not the one I wanted (hard to find ones with a lot of capacity currently), but 850W should still be sufficient I guess (there is only an nvme in the machine (samsung 970 evo). Also I would suspect that power problems would lead to reboots instead of just single programs failing.

That's exactly what we have KSM32ED8/32ME https://azerty.nl/product/kingston/4310306/server-premier-ddr4-module It is actually quite interesting we came up with more or less the same build.

Thanks for your reply. We experienced problems with both the 1.10 bios and 1.12 (from asrockrack ftp, a bit vague, I wouldn't use it if you have no issues). I see random crashes and kernel traces in dmesg. I think it may be bad memory, but I failed to get memtest86 or memtest86+ working. As I remembered you had more or less a similar setup I was curious if you had any similar issues. Luckily you don't :-)

Going a bit offtopic, but can you (or one of the server admins) post some info on the bios+kernel used? We have the same motherboard (with the 32 core threadripper) and we see a lot of stability issues which I can not explain yet. Have you seen anything similar?

Okay, perhaps I should limit the scope: is there an sbc (or set top box) which can take hdmi in and encode it? I have seen orangepi rk3399 has an input port, but is it supported?

Hi, I wonder if anyone has experience using an sbc (or tv box) for remote controlling a server. I think the necessary pieces are there on many boards (many have camera inputs which could perhaps be used for video, it looks like some even have an hdmi in). I found this [1] project, but it uses some extra hardware I'd like to avoid. https://github.com/Fmstrat/diy-ipmi Has anyone done anything similar? Note I'm mostly looking into this to gain knowledge, not to put this in production in a real world situation.

Too late now, but I save all of my configuration using etckeeper . You will not regret doing the same.

You don't need to specify hwaddress if you use kernel 5.0 or later, as the changing mac address was addressed.

HDMI audio for H6 is not yet supported in the mainline linux kernel, and nobody is currently working on it --> see https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort

I don't think you need the whole config, the commit which fixes reboot is just this one: https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong/OrangePiH6_external/commit/4c2440c02e29f84aef7a296f90e170f38e12c248

If you have a connection from linux to linux, you could also consider wireguard. It performs much faster than openvpn. https://www.wireguard.com/performance/