EEVblog #871 - Find Aliens With Your Raspberry Pi!

[Towger]

For a major city you are being ripped off. You will always have crap speeds and/or high costs if you live in the sticks.

I Dublin, a high cost city in a high cost country.  I am on the slowest my provider currently offers.  240Mb Down and 24Mb Up, unlimited (unless you take the piss).  All this costs €50 a month including a VOIP phone number with 400 free minutes to 22 countries.  It is more expensive if you don't take the phone line.  At 3PM on a Saturday these are the current speeds:

Last Result:
Download Speed: 228013 kbps (28501.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 24750 kbps (3093.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 10 ms
Jitter: 2 ms
4/23/2016, 3:02:33 PM

[EEVblog]

At least we know why the EEVBLOG live cam switches off on a hardware timer.

Literally a motor, cogs, and a microswitch

Even 50KB/sec is 3MB per minute, 180MB per hour, 4.3GB per day, 130GB per month. That's a huge chunk of a 500GB plan.

[NiHaoMike]

$400 a month for a 20Mbit connection with a data transfer limit??

Ouch!   

And I thought $45/month for 20M unlimited here in the US (in the city) was a ripoff since it was only $40/month a year ago. Sad to see that TWC, despite their poor customer support, is considered "very good" compared to many other ISPs. Really time to build a long range P2P wireless mesh network if only to keep the ISPs honest.

[Carl_Smith]

A minor correction -- when SETI@Home first started they didn't use the BOINC system.  They had a custom piece of software you installed that did nothing but crunch SETI@Home.  There was the background task, and if you wanted there was a screen saver that would show the graphical view of the units being processed.  I used it for years.  Eventually they started BOINC up but let everyone on the old system remain for a while.  I never got around to changing to BOINC, so when they discontinued the old system I just didn't do it anymore.

I sort of got discouraged when computers were getting faster and faster and making all my past progress look like nothing.  Not that it was a competition.   For a couple years I worked at a computer manufacturer and one time we set up about 30 new systems in the test lab.  Usually we had specially designed test routines we ran, but we finished setting them up on a Friday, and we didn't have time to put the real test software on all of them and get the official testing going.  So I signed up all 30 computers -- all with faster processors and memory than the general public even knew about yet -- on crunching SETI units on my personal account.   By Monday they had processed more units than I had done on my obsolete home PC in the previous year.     I don't think I ran it at home much after that.

But I do have a RasPi sitting around running but doing mostly nothing.  Maybe I should let it look for aliens.  I no longer know my old account info, so I'd have to start over on the stats...

[LapTop006]

Under voltage warning?
That rainbow square is a 2 by 2 pixel square with a blend effect done by the gpu. That's the bootloader signifying It's running.

When it's showing like that after the system is in Linux it means the pi is undervoltage, actually just that a comparator is below its threshold, not that it's actually low enough to be a problem.

I had a demo unit for some hardware that shipped with a power supply that worked, but was just barely enough for the comparator to trip.

[TJM]

IMO the power/W calculations are way too optimistic. Benchmark values may be high, but that's just a synthetic number and it does not mean anything in BOINC world. Try to compare real workunit processing speed, I'd bet that any decent (and not too old) desktop CPU would do more actual work per Watt, and that opinion comes from 10+ years experience crunching various BOINC projects. Sure there are some lightweight projects which actually run quite fast on 'small' CPUs but even there I highly doubt Raspberry 2 would be 5x more power efficient.

[Fungus]

My domestic service is with Optus and will give me 30/1.5 on a good day.  Upload speed is not much chop for high volume data unless you're patient.  Data is unlimited** and I got it on a $90/month special.

I work at home and I've got a fiber-optic cable connected directly to my router (they heat-welded the fiber to it with a big gadget). I get symmetrical up/down speeds and my spinning-rust hard disk is literally too slow to keep up with bittorrent - I have to manually restrict the download speed to stop things going pear shaped.

Yes, I could probably get a faster disk, but... what's the point? I need a minute or two to pee and fetch the snacks.

Cost? $40 a month.

Edit: Oh, and unlimited phone (landline<->landline) included as well... 

[Brumby]

Please excuse me while I turn a slight shade of green.


We have our NBN project that started off talking about FTTP (Fibre To The Premises), now we are lucky to get FTTN (Fibre To The Node) and many places are getting the so-called 'latest and greatest' through wireless link for the hop to the home.  It's a work-in-progress ... and it will be churning along for some years yet.  The roll-out map for Sydney is disheartening.

[Kilrah]

At least it's not like here where we get FTTP - but for absolutely no good reason given a decently priced plan only gives you 20Mbps and lousy latency due to proxy/filtering 

[Fungus]

Please excuse me while I turn a slight shade of green.

I just did a speed test:



http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5275346649

Not bad for $40 a month 

[calli]

After watching the video I reactiveated my Account at SETI and put my Raspi2 on duty.

However I needed to restrict boinc to 3 Cores, because while printing 3D (my Pi also serves 2 3D Printers) the printing paused some fractions of a second here and there leaving blobs. The automatic detection is not fine enough to make it automatic.

Carsten

[Fungus]

After watching the video I reactiveated my Account at SETI and put my Raspi2 on duty.

However I needed to restrict boinc to 3 Cores, because while printing 3D (my Pi also serves 2 3D Printers) the printing paused some fractions of a second here and there leaving blobs. The automatic detection is not fine enough to make it automatic.

Is there no way to lower the task priority? I assumed BOINC would always run at low priority, but ... you never know.

[calli]

Probably did not found the right preference. I found lowering the aount of CPU percentage and the number of cores. I was not sure if CPU percentage would be enough. Have to try it later, now I needed a fast solution not to loose the print.

Carsten

[Brumby]

Please excuse me while I turn a slight shade of green.

I just did a speed test:



http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5275346649

Not bad for $40 a month 

Impressive.... 

Most impressive.

[Melt-O-Tronic]

Mmmmmm, SETI . . . nearly as efficient as nichrome wire but with more blinky lights!   

[Fungus]

Mmmmmm, SETI . . . nearly as efficient as nichrome wire but with more blinky lights!   

Yeah, it's unlikely/difficult, but ... imagine if we did hear something.

The end of religion, etc.? We can only hope.

[Kilrah]

The end of religion, etc.? We can only hope.

No way, believers would instantly claim it's not aliens but $deity finally talking to them openly, thereby proving it exists... 

[Fungus]

The end of religion, etc.? We can only hope.

No way, believers would instantly claim it's not aliens but $deity finally talking to them openly, thereby proving it exists... 

What if they're broadcasting images similar to 1930s Nazi Germany? How would that be from one of our mainstream Gods?

(yeah, I know, it would be from Satan...)

[Kilrah]

Wow, the 2nd page of a thread is quick to reach the Godwin point!

History shows that various religious groups have done way worse than Nazis in the past. It's further away both in time and location and in the name of $deity, so it makes it "okay enough" not to talk about it too much I guess... 

[Fungus]

Wow, the 2nd page of a thread is quick to reach the Godwin point!

Does comparing Satan to a Nazi count as a Godwin? 

I only used that example because the blog entry was on SETI and homages the movie "Contact".

[Fungus]

Impressive.... 

Most impressive.

I'm sure you have better test gear than me though... 

[apis]

Issues saving/writing to /boot/setup

/boot/config.txt is a file owned by the 'root' (admin) user.  Only the root user is allowed to edit or save over this file.  You were logged in as an ordinary user and leafpad (your text editor) was also running under your username, so it was not permitted to change this file.

Nano itself was not what fixed your problem: the key was that you used the 'sudo' command.  Sudo means 'run as root'.  eg: sudo leafpad /boot/setup.txt

Unix permissions are all very alien if you're not used to them.  Many *nix environments discourage you from logging in as root directly and running a graphical environment as root, whilst Windows lets you log in as an 'admin' user just fine.  There is no architectural reasons why, it's just the opinion of many devs that you should not do it for security (ie limit the ability of malware to infect anything beyond the current user's files) and stability (ie through accidental deletion/modification of important files) reasons.  Instead it's generally recommended that you use sudo (or similar) on a case-by-case basis when you know that you want it.

Right, and the reason all config files require admin (root) privileges is because *nix systems have always been networked multi-user systems. If any user could edit config files it's pretty obvious that chaos would follow. Windows/dos was originally stand alone single user machines and did not add such features until relatively recently.

If you want to do administrative tasks on Linux you have to learn to use bash or some other command line shell anyway, the graphical user interface is fine for most applications but lots of administrative tools are still command line only. It requires a little bit of effort to learn, but once you get the hang of it's easy.

It's a bit ironic since for a newbie Linux is easy, since newbies does not want to edit config files anyway, only use a browser, email and openoffice, etc. It's most challenging for the intermediate user who want's to do fairly advanced things but, and once they start to poke around they will hit the CLI "wall" or break something.

[lwatts666]

Mmmmmm, SETI . . . nearly as efficient as nichrome wire but with more blinky lights!   

Resistance is Futile! You will be assimilated. 

[mechatronicsguy]

Hi Dave,

I got inspired by your vid (actually by someone else who got inspired by your vid), and made this:
https://tinkerings.org/2016/05/16/home-supercomputer-using-spare-raspberry-pis/

Cheers,
Gavin

[EEVblog]

I got inspired by your vid (actually by someone else who got inspired by your vid), and made this:
https://tinkerings.org/2016/05/16/home-supercomputer-using-spare-raspberry-pis/

Sweet build Gav!
I'm going to tun my Orange Pi One cluster into a WOPR, just, because.