Hi Mike,
On (2), (although obviously I can't say for sure on the Pi 3 yet) you
should have reasonable confidence that these things will run long-term. The
chip they use are designed to be used in set top boxes and other consumer
electronics applications that are plugged in at the wall and never switched
off.
My main concern with the Pi would be flash wear. Basically SD cards aren't
designed to take read/write cycles in the same way as hard drives, and
server software (apache, wordpress, mysql etc.) are written assuming that
they can read and write blocks to disk forever. This requires a bit of
careful thinking about how things are configured in Linux land,
particularly with regards to logfiles, database storage and so on. So
basically - fine for experimental purposes and things that aren't mission
critical, but more careful handling required if you're going to be doing
something that's writing to disk lots. All things considered, though,
you're probably talking about over a year before a failure occurs. Some
good advice here:
http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/9220/maximum-demonstrated-sd-card-durability
On the autoboot/shutdown situation what David says is spot on. A wall timer
is ideal for this sort of thing. Unfortunately more clever solutions with
WOL etc. don't seem to be supported due to the Ethernet-over-USB
architecture of the Pi:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=39714
Best regards,
Nick
On 9 March 2016 at 09:42, Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> We're building some prototype signage tools for the Raspberry Pi - it’s a
> relatively simple thing that runs a local web server / web page but then
> calls out to the web for bits of content. Ultimately it’ll be hitting up a
> WordPress install via the WP REST API then caching content locally so we
> can do stuff like retrieve the days’ events from the museum website and
> show them on-gallery - that sort of thing.
>
> I know some people are doing groovy things with Pi’s in a production
> environment - particularly Watershed, Bristol Museums - but I’m interested
> in hearing:
>
> 1) about any other examples
>
> and
>
> 2) what experiences there are in how resilient Pi’s are longer term -
> running day after day. The one I’ve built boots automatically into a
> fullscreen browser and fetches the relevant page. Then it updates itself
> every 10 minutes via ajax. I’ve been running it all day for a week now
> without any issues, and no sign of anything getting hot / tired (this is a
> RPi 3 - super fast!) - but if anyone has experience of whether there are
> any issues after months of uptime, that’d be good to hear…
>
> Oh - related to 2) - what are good solutions for auto booting / shutdown
> each day?
>
> Thanks muchly
>
> Mike
>
>
> _____________________________
>
> Mike Ellis
>
> Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency:
> http://thirty8.co.uk
>
> * My book: http://heritageweb.co.uk *
>
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