So I did some slight improvements on my audio player project, and have started work on expanding it more.
I added the ability to use the USB-C charging port as a pass through port to plug the DAC into a computer. Most of this work was hardware, as I had to connect the unused data lines from the charging port up to the DAC. When plugged in to a computer, the DAC is receiving power from the battery, so the battery system needs to be turned on, but the RPi turned off. So, I rewired the hold switch, so that it cuts the power to the screen and on a certain page of the app also shuts off the RPi. Overall, this was a simple addition, and adds another functionality to this device. It also becomes an improved version of the original DAC since it now plugs into a computer via usbc instead of micro-usb and the extra weight of the device minimizes it sliding around on a desk.
I tried to make it shutdown with a 30 second timer instead of a 1min timer, and found out about the limitations of the linux shutdown command. Turns out, the time options are either now or anything greater than 1min. I could do a scheduled task, but that might be more hassle than it is worth.
I have started on improving my software update process. In app, there is currently only the option of pulling the git branch that it is currently on, but does not display which branch it is on. So, I have started the process of getting all branches to display, and adding the ability to switch between branches. This will minimize my need to have to SSH into the device during development.
Warrantied my 8 FAILED seagate drives and those are coming back so I can finish up my NAS.
Next steps are getting more comfortable with ssh, figuring out why ubiquiti teleport and mDNS don't seem to work as expected, and then eventually converting my server to headless.
Also need to poke more at my F#/Falco/Datastar dev stack to see if I can abstract out some basic rendering so I can do quick design and prototyping.
They failed out of the gate so I didn't lose anything. Some spun up and then failed, others literally wouldn't spin at all even when testing on another machine. Maybe there was some user error in there i'm unaware of, but I had 3 other drives (which were higher rpm) and those slotted in and just worked so I guess bad batch or something.
SATA or SAS? New or aged? I've got 12 WD SATA drives pushing 5 years and 125 days of spinning, alongside 6 Seagate SAS drives at 1 year and 103 days spinning. Only failure I've had was one of the WD drives at around 2.5 years.
The literal item was the IronWolf NAS Hard Drive-ST4000VN006, brand new from seagate (whiiiiich you can no longer do it seems)
8 TB 5400 RPM.
Threw them in the NAS, 3 never registered as connected. When removed and connected to my main machine through an adapter I tested with 2 other drives, never even spun or acted as if they were connected.
The others, upon attempting to make my RAID, all failed. At first it said it could just be one of the drives, so try making the raid again with the minimum amount, but several iterations of testing later, I had no working combinations. They all also failed (differently) when connected to my machine.
Almost everyone I know is having trouble with hard drives, WD or Seagate, purchased in the last 8 months or so. I'm very concerned that the stupidity of the AI market means they've shifted their QA and stuff that normally wouldn't make it out the door is now "consumer grade" (if you can get it at all).
Hilariously, Seagates warranty will only let you do batches of 5 items, so I made two RMA requests and then shipped it all in one box (since shipping is on me).
Today I just got a box marked as "for shipping 11-20 drives" with 3 sitting inside. I have an email saying the other 5 are on their way.
While I don't work there anymore, I used to work somewhere where we dealt with big arrays of spinning drives in Dell PowerVaults and would get the rare occasional failure every now and then because of how heavily they were used day-to-day. I'm curious if that's become a nightmare at this point with the drive trouble increasing. Maybe not since those are corporate purchases, not consumer level stuff, still makes me wonder though how that entire landscape might have changed since I've been gone
Sounds like SATA, I don't think any SAS drives spin as slow as 5400 RPM.
I initially built out my home server with SATA drives as they are generally easier to obtain; however, the benefits of SAS are measurable for someone intending to spin the drives 24/7. Especially in a machine that will house multiple disks (they get warm on their own, warmer when they're stacked next to each other). SAS drives are better built for these kinds of environments. Of course, that means you need a backplane that can accept SAS drives, I'm not sure that (most?) consumer grade NAS can. Just food for thought when you have to one day replace those drives!
Ah yes it's SATA. I'm big on trying to keep this whole project as a hobby, not a second job, so I didn't want to home build my NAS. And for comparison everyone I know has used SATA successfully until recently, and if you've got some hot swap built in it wasn't supposed to be that big of a deal.
Further, unlike many it seems, my NAS is ACTUALLY just that. It's connected to a MS-01 which does all of my server/app hosting.
With those things in mind, building one myself was right out (at least out of the gate) and synology ensured they'd never have my business when they tried to vendor lock everyone, and i've heard mixed things on QNAP/UGreen
I'm already in the ubiquiti ecosystem, so when they started making NAS equipment it seemed like a good first step as they idiot proof a lot of things and i've been happy with their equipment so far. I was planning on being able to easily scale up if my needs were higher, but then all hardware become spice and suddenly I couldn't if I wanted.
I'd considered an eventual upgrade to something stronger, but I have to see what my ACTUAL demand is. I have no desire to become the data hoarder but part of the point of this project is to become the family cloud provider for things like home videos/photos/documents. I don't think I should need that much more space depending on how I do the RAID/backup and a more enterprise grade device struck me as overkill.
on a whim i decided to try and reinvent the wheel and create my own notepad
so far ive been torn between a few different programs. CherryTree is my favourite text based one and obsidian slowly took over for doing mindmaps and using the canvas mode. but both of them struggle a lot when it comes to large adhd sprawly projects and my admittedly quirky preferences.
whipped up a little prototype with Qt6 and just using files and text files as the storage. it feels sort of like a spreadsheet on account of the monospace and selectable cells, and because i can move text around and have the whitespace (spaces) merge, its rly fun to just doodle trying to do ascii art while im bored
every little difference i notice is usually a positive and just works so much better for my brain (go figure when you make ur own tools) but for example, before when id do a numbered list and then want to add a new item in the middle of the list, i would annoyingly redo all the indexes myself but now i can just slide the entire list down and just add a new number to the very bottom.
like its tantamount to just taping more and more scratch paper to your notebook just generally being able to sprawl notes out without worrying about positioning or how it flows linearly.
put just under a week of mileage on the first prototype, using it to document all the painpoints and ive got quite a healthy list of goated features to have. but honestly im just really stoked that it all just kinda worked and none of the quality of life stuff feel that impossible, so this is gonna be one of the rare projects to get a v0.2 instead of just the first attempt.
someone has gotta have made something like this before because it feels like such low hanging fruit. being that theres a load of different canvas drawing apps (i even tried to make my own again, inspired by that world of text website ) and yet text canvases are easier and way rarer? what gives lol
Started playing with Godot engine. I've done these tutorials before, but now I have at least a semblance of a vision for some games I want to make. Fingers crossed I can keep with it this time.
Still working on my book tracker, still ironing out the wrinkles of the duckdb -> sqlite rearchitecture. But also made some improvements to the 'log progress' UI and added in configurable units. Hoping this weekend I can finally stop noticing other issues and redoing the DB long enough to get to configuring the default dashboard.
Two projects this week have provided moderate enjoyment:
One is a geospatial search tool. The bones are finished but could use a lot of tweaking to figure out the right sorting. Two of the cool things are the ability to search places directly from PBF files (without indexing first). It's slower but needs a lot less space than Bleve. The second cool thing is a similar idea but pmtiles.
PBF is the most complete data to seach because it's the full OpenStreetMaps database and still it is surprisingly fast for small areas!
PMTiles are a much smaller subset of data but they still scale up to larger areas because you can use their built-in spatial index.
The other thing is a tool to make global satellite image pmtiles maps from the ESA's preaggregated quarterly mosaics. The code is much smaller but almost equally satisfying:
IsildursBane | 19 hours ago
So I did some slight improvements on my audio player project, and have started work on expanding it more.
I added the ability to use the USB-C charging port as a pass through port to plug the DAC into a computer. Most of this work was hardware, as I had to connect the unused data lines from the charging port up to the DAC. When plugged in to a computer, the DAC is receiving power from the battery, so the battery system needs to be turned on, but the RPi turned off. So, I rewired the hold switch, so that it cuts the power to the screen and on a certain page of the app also shuts off the RPi. Overall, this was a simple addition, and adds another functionality to this device. It also becomes an improved version of the original DAC since it now plugs into a computer via usbc instead of micro-usb and the extra weight of the device minimizes it sliding around on a desk.
I tried to make it shutdown with a 30 second timer instead of a 1min timer, and found out about the limitations of the linux shutdown command. Turns out, the time options are either now or anything greater than 1min. I could do a scheduled task, but that might be more hassle than it is worth.
I have started on improving my software update process. In app, there is currently only the option of pulling the git branch that it is currently on, but does not display which branch it is on. So, I have started the process of getting all branches to display, and adding the ability to switch between branches. This will minimize my need to have to SSH into the device during development.
Eji1700 | 18 hours ago
Warrantied my 8 FAILED seagate drives and those are coming back so I can finish up my NAS.
Next steps are getting more comfortable with ssh, figuring out why ubiquiti teleport and mDNS don't seem to work as expected, and then eventually converting my server to headless.
Also need to poke more at my F#/Falco/Datastar dev stack to see if I can abstract out some basic rendering so I can do quick design and prototyping.
0x29A | 18 hours ago
I don't know how many drives you have in total but damn that's a lot of drive failures! At least they're warrantied
Eji1700 | 17 hours ago
7 and 1 for hotswap....
They failed out of the gate so I didn't lose anything. Some spun up and then failed, others literally wouldn't spin at all even when testing on another machine. Maybe there was some user error in there i'm unaware of, but I had 3 other drives (which were higher rpm) and those slotted in and just worked so I guess bad batch or something.
0x29A | 17 hours ago
Ah okay, yeah that's a better scenario at least and a bad batch would make sense
goose | 12 hours ago
SATA or SAS? New or aged? I've got 12 WD SATA drives pushing 5 years and 125 days of spinning, alongside 6 Seagate SAS drives at 1 year and 103 days spinning. Only failure I've had was one of the WD drives at around 2.5 years.
Eji1700 | 11 hours ago
The literal item was the IronWolf NAS Hard Drive-ST4000VN006, brand new from seagate (whiiiiich you can no longer do it seems)
8 TB 5400 RPM.
Threw them in the NAS, 3 never registered as connected. When removed and connected to my main machine through an adapter I tested with 2 other drives, never even spun or acted as if they were connected.
The others, upon attempting to make my RAID, all failed. At first it said it could just be one of the drives, so try making the raid again with the minimum amount, but several iterations of testing later, I had no working combinations. They all also failed (differently) when connected to my machine.
Almost everyone I know is having trouble with hard drives, WD or Seagate, purchased in the last 8 months or so. I'm very concerned that the stupidity of the AI market means they've shifted their QA and stuff that normally wouldn't make it out the door is now "consumer grade" (if you can get it at all).
Hilariously, Seagates warranty will only let you do batches of 5 items, so I made two RMA requests and then shipped it all in one box (since shipping is on me).
Today I just got a box marked as "for shipping 11-20 drives" with 3 sitting inside. I have an email saying the other 5 are on their way.
This does not inspire confidence.
0x29A | 11 hours ago
While I don't work there anymore, I used to work somewhere where we dealt with big arrays of spinning drives in Dell PowerVaults and would get the rare occasional failure every now and then because of how heavily they were used day-to-day. I'm curious if that's become a nightmare at this point with the drive trouble increasing. Maybe not since those are corporate purchases, not consumer level stuff, still makes me wonder though how that entire landscape might have changed since I've been gone
goose | 9 hours ago
Sounds like SATA, I don't think any SAS drives spin as slow as 5400 RPM.
I initially built out my home server with SATA drives as they are generally easier to obtain; however, the benefits of SAS are measurable for someone intending to spin the drives 24/7. Especially in a machine that will house multiple disks (they get warm on their own, warmer when they're stacked next to each other). SAS drives are better built for these kinds of environments. Of course, that means you need a backplane that can accept SAS drives, I'm not sure that (most?) consumer grade NAS can. Just food for thought when you have to one day replace those drives!
Eji1700 | 8 hours ago
Ah yes it's SATA. I'm big on trying to keep this whole project as a hobby, not a second job, so I didn't want to home build my NAS. And for comparison everyone I know has used SATA successfully until recently, and if you've got some hot swap built in it wasn't supposed to be that big of a deal.
Further, unlike many it seems, my NAS is ACTUALLY just that. It's connected to a MS-01 which does all of my server/app hosting.
With those things in mind, building one myself was right out (at least out of the gate) and synology ensured they'd never have my business when they tried to vendor lock everyone, and i've heard mixed things on QNAP/UGreen
I'm already in the ubiquiti ecosystem, so when they started making NAS equipment it seemed like a good first step as they idiot proof a lot of things and i've been happy with their equipment so far. I was planning on being able to easily scale up if my needs were higher, but then all hardware become spice and suddenly I couldn't if I wanted.
I'd considered an eventual upgrade to something stronger, but I have to see what my ACTUAL demand is. I have no desire to become the data hoarder but part of the point of this project is to become the family cloud provider for things like home videos/photos/documents. I don't think I should need that much more space depending on how I do the RAID/backup and a more enterprise grade device struck me as overkill.
ruspaceni | 10 hours ago
on a whim i decided to try and reinvent the wheel and create my own notepad
so far ive been torn between a few different programs. CherryTree is my favourite text based one and obsidian slowly took over for doing mindmaps and using the canvas mode. but both of them struggle a lot when it comes to large adhd sprawly projects and my admittedly quirky preferences.
the prototype ive got right now is loosely inspired by https://www.yourworldoftext.com/.
whipped up a little prototype with Qt6 and just using files and text files as the storage. it feels sort of like a spreadsheet on account of the monospace and selectable cells, and because i can move text around and have the whitespace (spaces) merge, its rly fun to just doodle trying to do ascii art while im bored
every little difference i notice is usually a positive and just works so much better for my brain (go figure when you make ur own tools) but for example, before when id do a numbered list and then want to add a new item in the middle of the list, i would annoyingly redo all the indexes myself but now i can just slide the entire list down and just add a new number to the very bottom.
like its tantamount to just taping more and more scratch paper to your notebook just generally being able to sprawl notes out without worrying about positioning or how it flows linearly.
put just under a week of mileage on the first prototype, using it to document all the painpoints and ive got quite a healthy list of goated features to have. but honestly im just really stoked that it all just kinda worked and none of the quality of life stuff feel that impossible, so this is gonna be one of the rare projects to get a v0.2 instead of just the first attempt.
someone has gotta have made something like this before because it feels like such low hanging fruit. being that theres a load of different canvas drawing apps (i even tried to make my own again, inspired by that world of text website ) and yet text canvases are easier and way rarer? what gives lol
ShroudedScribe | 5 hours ago
Started playing with Godot engine. I've done these tutorials before, but now I have at least a semblance of a vision for some games I want to make. Fingers crossed I can keep with it this time.
1338 | 8 hours ago
Still working on my book tracker, still ironing out the wrinkles of the duckdb -> sqlite rearchitecture. But also made some improvements to the 'log progress' UI and added in configurable units. Hoping this weekend I can finally stop noticing other issues and redoing the DB long enough to get to configuring the default dashboard.
xk3 | 4 hours ago
Two projects this week have provided moderate enjoyment:
One is a geospatial search tool. The bones are finished but could use a lot of tweaking to figure out the right sorting. Two of the cool things are the ability to search places directly from PBF files (without indexing first). It's slower but needs a lot less space than Bleve. The second cool thing is a similar idea but pmtiles.
PBF is the most complete data to seach because it's the full OpenStreetMaps database and still it is surprisingly fast for small areas!
PMTiles are a much smaller subset of data but they still scale up to larger areas because you can use their built-in spatial index.
https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/poisearch
The other thing is a tool to make global satellite image pmtiles maps from the ESA's preaggregated quarterly mosaics. The code is much smaller but almost equally satisfying:
https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/satmaps/