Hello Michael,

There is a lot of uses for these things.  Within the limits (in my case)
of 64Gb it works for most anything I would want to do with a laptop.  
the difference (in the case of the Raspberry Pi and the Odroid) is these
things take much less power to operate than a laptop and are much
smaller.

In my case I have a few things I am working on that will be on more than
one of these things.  One is to use this for a DSP server for the SDR
radios I am working on.  Eventually we want to use these on the mesh
network http://usercontent.aredn.org/K/5/K5DLQ/livemap.html as we
install these at the MTEARS sites ( http://mtears.org/ ) to control the
sites and pass custom audio and control capabilities between systems.

There are numerous advantages to these over laptops.  No fans, 5 watts
(or less) of power, no hard drive etc.  In the case of the Odroid it
handles video as well as my laptop or desktop machine.  The only
disadvantage for my specific hardware is the limitation of 2GB of RAM.
If I have an external display hooked up (HDMI) the display will use much
more power than the computer. 

Dave

On Wed, 2016-05-04 at 13:47 -0500, Michael L wrote:
> I must say this sounds interesting to someone who doesn't know much
> about Linux and doesn't like being tied to Microsoft.  Can anyone tell
> me what purpose these multiple RPi's serve because I've been thinking
> I should buy one or two just to find out.
> 
>   M
> 
> 
> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Chris McQuistion
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>         There are higher-end SD cards that supposedly include wear
>         leveling.  Those would be the cards designed for HD cameras
>         and such.
>         
>         
>         You could go that route or you could just image your system
>         and make periodic backups.  If the card goes bad, replace it
>         with another $10 SD card, restored from backup, and call it a
>         day.
>         
>         
>         I have two Raspberry Pi systems at home and that's what I plan
>         to do (just back them up and replace them when they die.)
>         
>         
>         On a system that isn't do a large number of writes, an SD card
>         should last for a LONG time since reads don't wear a card out.
>         
>         
>         Chris
>         
>         On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 1:04 PM, Bruce Martin
>         <[email protected]> wrote:
>                 I know that dd is one of those fundamental linux
>                 commands that are used occasionally but like rm need
>                 to be used carefully.
>                 
>                 I admit to being a rather “Appliance” operator when it
>                 come stop Linux these days. I use the bistro as it is
>                 and usually install only the software and updates that
>                 are part of the distribution. In the past I did
>                 download the source of the latest version of software
>                 i wanted to run and compiled it after tweaking the
>                 makefile and sometimes some of the code. These days I
>                 do not do that very much. Lazy? Maybe but the
>                 distributions have gotten better at keeping things
>                 reasonably up to date and stable and bleeding edge is
>                 not my forte anymore.
>                 
>                 That being said I have been playing around with
>                 Raspberry Pi for the last few years. I tend to buy two
>                 or three of each version as they come out. I have two
>                 deployed for specific Ham radio stuff and am embarking
>                 on a project to help some friends out by setting up
>                 some Broadband Speed monitoring nodes. One of the
>                 shortcomings of the Raspberry Pi (RPi) is the use of
>                 SD cards. Even when you are not doing a lot of writing
>                 to the card the life of a card seems to be less than a
>                 year or so.
>                 
>                 I have read that the newer SDHC cards incorporate wear
>                 leveling much like an SSD does. With this in mind I
>                 want to set up an SD card but only partition it to use
>                 a third or a fourth of the disk space and leave the
>                 rest of the card free and unformatted for wear
>                 leveling use.
>                 
>                 My experience, thus far, is that when setting up a
>                 card for the RPi the distribution expands itself to
>                 use up the entire card. I want to try setting things
>                 up on an 8GB car. After everything is configured I
>                 want to create an image of the card and then write
>                 that image to a 16GB or 32GB card. Is there a
>                 parameter in dd to limit how much of the card is used
>                 and leave the rest as unformatted? Do I need to create
>                 the partitions on the 32GB card and image each
>                 partition separately from the 8GB card and write that
>                 image to a specific partition on the 32GB card? Is
>                 there some other/better way to do this?
>                 
>                 I want to try to get to the point of being able to set
>                 up a RPi and let it sit and run for years and not have
>                 to redo the card every year. Stories of servers stuck
>                 in closets or left in a wall void during remodeling
>                 come to mind. We had an APRS Igate node at Vanderbilt
>                 that ran the better part of a decade without a
>                 purposeful reboot that was running on a floppy drive
>                 distro that Sean Jewett and a few others worked on. I
>                 want that kind of longevity in the RPi nodes I am
>                 deploying.
>                 
>                 Thoughts?
>                 Suggestions?
>                 Questions?
>                 
>                 Bruce
>                 
>                 --
>                 Bruce W. Martin, KQ4TV
>                 Trustee for AA4VU
>                 Vanderbilt University Amateur Radio Club
>                 
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