It’s me again. Your favourite pi man! My boss’s design got approved and the packhorse ordered lots of these bad boys. With a master degree, I’m a assembly line worker now 🙄

Oh my God that's a lotta Pi.

Can almost feel the diabetes over here 😂

@Stuxnet not so sweet. The B+ has a newer pcb design, it doesn’t fit our 3D printed bracket.

Each sd card requires setup up address manually. The nightmare begins 😫

Wow! Lots of Pi boys here! I’m impressed 😉

Recently got my pi as well. I don't know what to with it, but i love it!

@faptain we use it as a button station to print labels. So each one replaced a PC, huge saving. My boss has one as a thermostat for his pool at home. 🤦‍♂️for me, I don’t know what to do with it either

@sunfishcc

"setup up address manually"

Flash identical image to all of them. Connect them one by one (through switch or wifi predefined in the image), collect MAC addresses from ARP table, set up static DHCP binding.

Then you know which Pi has which IP and can do any mass changes programatically over SSH - be it Ansible or custom scripts.

Did something similar, although we have only ~25 Pi's, so we collected the MAC addresses manually.

@qwwerty yep. That’s exactly what we gonna do. But copy image to as card one by one takes lots of time...

@sunfishcc couldn't you do a net boot if you put them into a DHCP net and then install an OS that way? I believe I read that the 3B can do that...

@ilPinguino how can you get the os image into sd card in the the 1st place?

@sunfishcc cool!
These bad boys are really powerful and cheap, I will be using mine for learning to code as These don't have any fans and my ultrabook fan is making a insane noise.

@sunfishcc https://raspberrypi.org/documentati... explains it - you put the image onto a TFTP server, connect the Pis to the same network and they boot...
Still, I'm not sure you can install an OS that way.

@ilPinguino they boot via FTP?

@sunfishcc TFTP. I never tried that because I don't run setups this large, but it should work.

@ilPinguino I will take a look. TY

Well assembly line worker might be fitting, on the hand, knowing average handling skills of humans..your abilities are direly needed cause muggles just dont understand how bare circuits works these days

@BurnoutDV I actually had background in mechanical engineering before started programming. All these pcb design, machining skills finally can see the light of day 🛠⚒(who designed these icon!)

@sunfishcc ohai fellow mechanical engineer *waves*

I have three Pis running libreelec/kodi, one as a docker server for work stuff & experiments, one to control my aquaponics setup, one to fill & reheat my bathtub remotely, one to display recipes & order groceries from the kitchen with a barcode scanner, one interfaces with my washing machine, dryer and water heater for some custom tweaks (dryer pauses when I watch TV, water heater should not hibernate if I'm up late programming), one near the roof with a weather station, and one under my house with long probes along the foundation to measure groundwater levels seismic activity & give early flood warnings.

And I'm working on a super low power one with 8TB ssd storage and an eink display in a waterproof Faraday shielded encasing, with a large wiki backup and various other resources called "Hitchhikers guide to the Apocalypse", for obvious reasons.

@bittersweet i thought about going for an SSD based storage aswell but i havent done any research. From a logic standpoint the energy consumption of an mostly unused SSD should be low..but is that really so? And where do you get 8 TB SSDs without going bankrupt?

@BurnoutDV €900 for the 8TB, a friend of mine made the custom SSD board. Speed was not a requirement, so it's made from components optimized for power saving, using 60-70mw total during stress testing (a standard m2 drive will use 25-35mw, but that's for 500gb). I desoldered the hungry Ethernet chip and rebridged USB directly to the underclocked SoC to save power as well, everything together consumes between 0.7-1.4w. I have included a large lithium battery which can power it for a week of continuous usage.

The only issue is the size — I wanted to fit an offline low power Wikipedia inside a handheld, but it's the size of a fat laptop and weighs way too much because of the rugged casing.

@ilPinguino go through the tutorial on network boot your raspberry pi. Sadly, not exactly what I need.

@bittersweet so you use pi as a nas?

@sunfishcc Well... no. I use that specific 8TB pi project as a survival storage concept. It has no active network connection, just tens of thousands of ebooks and copies of various wikis, and a bunch of other archival stuff, in a massive ruggedized box. I'm not much of a prepper, but that project started as a joke when a friend said "There should be a Hitchhikers guide to the Apocalypse, something to store all knowledge for survivors".

I do have an actual 48TB NAS, built on a debian server with 8x6TB HDDs... mostly because my girlfriend stores a lot of 4K recordings.

@bittersweet nice idea. If you're still looking for contributions, I have a few interesting things in my library...

@bittersweet where did you download so many stuff?! Just tell me how many tb in your porn collection 🤤. I’m thinking to get a nas at home, but 2 slots seems not big enough, and anything bigger than that just too expensive

update: we create clone remotely with a USB card reader connected to pi, soon we run out of socket board, ethernet port, and card reader 👍

Putting the last bits together

@justin-tamblyn the pi is used to send http request to server, and print labels based on fetched value from server (completely separated tasks). The alternative solution is to use PLC and computers, which almost cost 10 times more🙄

Have half of the pies installed, waiting for the delivery for the server