A Pi is obviously overkill, even a Pi Z w which we ended up using, but they are efficient enough for us, and more importantly, I know the system, and I could relatively quickly get it working using just bash on the Pi.

I was not really interested in learning how to program on a different system just for this.

We did some power analytics on the Pi and disabled a few things, sorry I don’t remember it right now.

The unit is placed in a semi public place where teenagers sometimes congregate and we don’t want to draw any attention to the device, so solar power is out.

A LoRa unit though could be interesting to implement, sadly my parents house is up a steap hill and there is no line of sight.

I have been thinking of experimenting with Meshtastic and LoRa for off grid coms due to the geopolitical situation here in Europe, might be worth it getting a few units to test out.

You are quite welcome, I stole it from WTYP pod

One thing that always struck me as weird is that when the wreck of the Titanic was found, the swimming pool was still full.

What part of “first car” confuses you?

Sorry, I thought it was clear that it was an unfamiliar situation as a new driver, the lights was in a slightly unusual configuration so I didn’t see the light as I pulled up and thus never realized that I needed to shift my head to see it.

The reason to film the fireworks is to possibly get content to send to Failarmy

I forgot about three more technical aspects of the device…

The bash script it set up to run as a service in systemd, this is to make it run on startup and have some control over it, this is important for the next part.

The one min delay after submitting the data and shutting down the pi, this gives me time to find the command to stop the script before the script shuts down the pi, this is important so you can access the system and service it.

Why shut it down at all, the power will be cut shortly after?

This is to preserve the filesystem and reduce the risk of corruption, consider that the pi will turn on and off 24 times every day, any error caused by improper shutdowns will quickly amplify.

Some more details, the temperature probe is a DS18B20, it connects to the GPIO pins, and communicates over the 1-w protocol which is built into the pi, you get the data digitally in celsius, if it is a negative temperature it is a hassle to deal with so I just made it report 0 as default when it is too close.

The probe can error out, it then reports the temp as 85, since the water never actually gets that high in reality, I solved it by checking if the value returned from the probe is 85 before submitting it, if it is, it will take another measurement, check that for 85, if that is still 85, it will check one final time and then just submit the result, so far this has solved the issue.

Once the data is formated and ready, the pi makes an HTTP request, posting the data using curl, to a simple PHP/MySQL site I hacked together, where a page displays the current temp, a timestamp of when the temp was taken and a small graph showing changes to the temp over the last 24h

Planned improvements:

Use the status field that the pi reports to include wifi signal strength, as trees grows around the device it will reduce the signal strength meaning that measurements are lost, with the signal strength data we can check how bad it is and clear leaves ahead of the problem.

Considered improvements:

Security, as it stands right now, there is zero security to submit data to the database, anyone can just access the submit.php page and it will add an empty entry to the database, or if they figure out the syntax they can just post whatever data they want into the database. I would like to add a simple validation of a static random string that the pi sends along with the rest of the data. I am no real webdev, just an IT guy who hacked this together.

Power monitoring, it would be good to have an idea of of how well charged the battery is, it would require a separate module which would also require power, reducing the battery life as it is. Currently the battery lasts a few months and we have a manual schedule to replace it, it is not a huge problem, but it would be nice to have the data.

It run off of a 12v motorcycle battery, the whole thing is on a timer, every halfhour, the timer gives the pi power for two minutes, during those two minutes the pi boots up, and runs a bash script to collect and send the data, wait for one min and shutdown the pi.

The pi communicates over wifi with a friendly neighbouring house.

I missed the change of the first traffic light I stopped at when I had just bought my first car, I had stopped so the light was hidden behind my rearview mirror, got a deserved honk

No, do not under any circumstances use the hot water tank as a water source!

This can be deadly!

Legionnaires’ disease is bad shit.

You absolutely can judge your own behavior when you are impaired, I have done that plenty of times and decided that I needed a break when driving plenty of times.

The issue is that you are a worse judge of your own behavior when impaired, so you need to take that into account

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

This happened in the past, and will happen in the future.

I doubt DVD or Blurays are going away that soon, I could even see it making a comeback as people figure out that it is an objectively better product

Cyan released a remake of Myst back in 2021, it works on iOS and still looks stunning.

They also released a remake of Riven last year, though not for mobile.

What do you mean by “not pron”?

Fair point.

A few years back me and my dad set up a raspberry pi with a temperature probe to monitor the water temp in a local swimming hole, it reports the temperature every half hour and submits it to a private webpage.

Works really well

I suddenly got very tired today when driving, and noticed my car drifting out of lane as I was unfocused, I was far from home, didn’t have any snacks or anything.

Luckily I found a place to park soon after, pulled over, and rested for 20 min or so.

Tiredness can come sudden, it doesn’t mean you should loose your license as long as you can deal with it in a safe manner.

I have never ridden a Tesla, and I plan on requesting a non Tesla car from now on when I have to take a taxi.

Cars in general, Teslas in particular, should have a standardized blackbox data recorder that third parties can open and access the logs, we have had this kind of tech on aircrafts for many decades.

It is terrifying that Tesla can just say that there was no relevant data and the investigative agency will just accept that.

I remember watching an episode of Air Crash Investigations, where a plane crashed, and they could not find an immediate cause, but the flight data recorder was able to be analysed far back, way before the accident flight, and they noticed that a mount for the APU turbine had broken many flights earlier, and the APU had broken free during the flight, causing the crash.

It is not Tesla’s job to tell the investigators what is relevant and not, it is Teslas job to unlock all data they have and send it to the investigators, if they can’t or won’t, then Tesla should lose the right sell cars in Europe

Sweet!

Glad to hear that this is no new idea!