Category: Raspberry PI

Installing a USB Weather Station on a Raspberry PI Part 1

One of the reasons for having multiple PI’s was to have one take over duties from an aging ITX based Linux box of reading from a USB Weather station and uploading the data to both it’s website and WeatherUnderground.

Unfortunately this project got pushed forward when, last Thursday morning, the ITX box decided to die on me. I think it’s power supply finally gave out after 9 years of service.

So this is the first part of a series on setting up a USB weather station onto a Raspberry PI.
Continue reading “Installing a USB Weather Station on a Raspberry PI Part 1”

Compiling a Kernel on the Raspberry PI

The reason I had to do this was because I needed video4linux to get a webcam working for a forcoming series of posts connecting a telescope to the pi. Although the connection to the telescope wasn’t a problem, the customized webcam I have needed it.

Here I compile the kernel on a more powerful linux box to save time then transfer the kernel over to the PI.

Also this article is mainly my personal notes on compiling a new kernel rather than a tutorial on how to do it. Writing it here makes sense to keep things together & maybe it’s useful for anyone else.

These instructions are based on the RPI Kernel Compilation available at elinux.org.
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Using NFS to provide extra disk to a Raspberry PI

As the Raspberry PI uses an SD Card for it’s boot device there are times when you need either more space than is available on that device or a device that’s faster – writing to flash is slow and flash cards do have a limited number of writes that can be made to them.

Now there’s several ways to accomplish this:

  • Use an external USB drive (the common route)
  • Use a network shared drive

Using a USB drive is simple and is the faster option but it means it’s dedicated to the PI whilst it’s in use, hence this article on using a network drive – in this instance a directory on another Linux box in the network.

Also having it shared on the network means that multiple machines could use it at the same time. Imagine if you are a teacher with a collection of PI’s being used by your students. You could setup a central read-only directory with your class work which they can all access as if it’s installed locally.
Continue reading “Using NFS to provide extra disk to a Raspberry PI”