Category Archives: misc

The Power of Raspberry Pi–MythTV tweaks and techniques

Posted on by under anchoring, Geekery, living aboard, misc, Systems, Weather

This post continues my previous ramblings about using the Raspberry Pi aboard the boat.  To start this story at the very beginning, go to this post. To go to the previous post in this series, go here.

Screenshot of MythWeb running on Raspberry Pi 2

Now to discuss some lessons we have learned about using our RPI-2 with MythTV aboard Schooner Mahdee to record over-the-air TV broadcasts for later viewing: Why record when so much is available instantly over the Internet?  Four reasons:

  • we are often anchored where Internet access is unavailable, or the speed is too slow to stream video;
  • we pay for high speed (4G) access per gigabyte;
  • broadcast HDTV provides an effectively free source of additional bandwidth and the HDTV programming is often many times much higher resolution than via Internet streaming;
  • those shows can be saved on a hard drive for later viewing anywhere and anytime.

Stunningly beautiful full 1080 HDTV programming is often broadcast and can be saved for later viewing on a big vibrant HD computer monitor–even in places with no Internet at all.  Those very high resolution shows consume around 5GB per hour.  If using our 4G hotspot, at that rate, our entire monthly Internet bandwidth for work and pleasure is equivalent to a couple of HDTV movies.  By comparison, in some locations, we can record HDTV shows around the clock for free–an incredible deal!  In practice, each 24 hours of saved H-264 encoded HDTV recordings exceeds our total Internet bandwidth usage for the entire month. Our only cost is for the hard drives and each $150 hard drive can save thousands of shows and take up less space on the boat than a small paperback novel.  So, even when we could stream videos over the Internet, we rarely do.

Since we obviously travel a lot, our settings for MythTV are not set and forget–in contrast to more stationary users.  We use Antenna Web in each new location to determine where HDTV transmitters are relative to us and how well we can expect to receive different stations.  We have both an omni-directional and a directional gain antenna to choose from.  Spinning around on a single anchor makes the directional antenna unusable, but if the boat is fixed in orientation with multiple anchors or shore-tie, we can use it to increase reception of more distant HDTV stations.  Sometimes we can get great reception with the antenna below decks in a stealth mode.  For more challenging stations, reception may require an antenna be raised on a flag halyard–not so stealthy.

We have an inexpensive account at Schedules Direct which interfaces very well with MythTV.  With an Internet connection, we generally upload new schedule data every day or two.  There is limited (just the next 12 hours) program schedule data provided for free by the stations themselves on the transmitter frequency using EIT, but scheduling works best with longer range data and Schedules Direct provides about two weeks of scheduling. That data also includes lists of actors and other credits as well as descriptive information which we retain with our recordings and in a separate custom Ruby-on-Rails (RoR) web interface and database.

Schedules Direct also allows us to have four different locations in our profile.  Thus, we have one for each major city area we typically visit.  In those profiles, we can remove stations we do not want–such as those without English language audio–and our custom settings will persist until our next visit to that area.  I am constantly amazed at the number of over-the-air broadcast stations we can receive even when we are far from a metropolitan area.

With our large MythTV database of over 10,000 previously recorded shows, nearly 100 channels of available broadcast programs in many locations, and large number of rules and priorities about what we want to record, it can take several minutes after starting the MythTV back-end for it to figure out what to record. During that time, the MythTV front-end and MythWeb browser interface running on the RPI-2 will will show no scheduled recordings. Whenever possible, I use the command-line mythtv-status to see what is in the recording queue rather than running the more resource-intensive front-end. Even mythtv-status can take several minutes to complete and will show that nothing will be recorded until all of the data has been parsed and prioritized by the MythTV back-end.  Loading new schedule data from Schedules Direct can take nearly 20 minutes to process on our–admittedly overloaded–RPI-2. Sort of like sailing tack to tack to get to one’s ultimate destination, patience is required and one can not expect a newly added show to be put into the recording queue right away. I plan for the RPI-2 to take up to five minutes before a new recording is reflected in the queue.

With an Internet connection, MythTV gets program meta data for each recording so that we have images of cover art–which makes the front-end display nicer.  MythTV can also flag commercials so that they can be easily skipped during replay or even removed from the file entirely.  Commercial detection is very resource intensive, so we set MythTV on the RPI-2 to not do any commercial detection on the recordings. With this setup, the RPI-2 is also very useful as a desktop computer for me to browse the Internet using Firefox/Iceweasel, read and write email and other miscellaneous things all while displaying current weather data and monitoring anchor holding.

One glitch that I have encountered is that the MythTV startup script does not always work in Debian Jessie due to incompatibility with SystemD. The symptom is that the startup script completes with no errors, but the back-end is not running–starting and restarting MythTV using has no effect. The problem seems to be related to the init-functions command. Adding the following just before that call in /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend as follows helped:

_SYSTEMCTL_SKIP_REDIRECT=true
. /lib/lsb/init-functions

Then that fix failed so I am now manually starting MythTV using the old InitV command:

/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start

It is also good to ensure that MythTV is not running before starting it and to make sure there is no file named /var/run/mythtv/mythbackend.pid. First kill hung processes and then check for the pid file and delete it if necessary before staring MythTV using the above command. Since I rarely reboot the RPI-2, manually starting MythTV works fine and the InitV command is trouble free.

Another glitch is that the HD HomeRun recordings sometimes fail leaving MythTV thinking the recording is still happening. After upgrading the HomeRun to the latest firmware, this situation happens less often. Still, every few days I need to stop MythTV and wait for all the threads to be killed and then restart MythTV.

Next, I will cover some system-wide optimizations that we have made that make MythTV more reliable given the highly loaded RPI2 we run it on.

Addendum: this conversation continues on our technology-focused website Windward Ho!

The Power of Raspberry Pi–the new resurrection

Posted on by under living aboard, misc, Systems

beryl and RPI On Lap Monitor
For background and to start this story at the beginning, go to this post. To go to the previous post in this series, go here. The Raspberry Pi (RPI) on Schooner Mahdee has continued to work well in its primary task–weather and boat data logging to hard drive and serving and displaying that data plus tides and currents as well as performing alarms for anchor position and wind speeds.

The RPI was clearly not good at interactive GUI applications except simple email and very basic web surfing. It was also not working satisfactorily as an Internet gateway and a Wifi access point. The harder we pushed the RPI, the more often it crashed and shutdown. Then the RPI-2 was released with 4-CPU cores and 1G RAM–four times the cores and twice the memory of the RPI–and I thought maybe now I can get everything I want.

The new RPI-2 is designed to use a more advanced ARM architecture which meant that a standard Linux distribution could be used rather than the Raspbian distribution required for the RPI. I like Debian, so I installed Jessie on our new RPI-2. The RPI-2 has a different setup of IO-ports so our woody Ti-Bow case was not usable. That gave me an excuse to keep the RPI in its case and temporarily mount the RPI-2 next to it without a case.

During the extended transition of applications and functionality from the RPI to the RPI-2, I connected the two together with a simple Ethernet cable–no hub needed. The 50W regulated 5V DC power supply we have on Mahdee has more than enough capacity to run both Pi’s, the HDMI monitor, Passport hard drive, along with various other USB accessories and device charging requirements. I describe installing Debian Jessie and setting up the RPI-2 to run the chart plotter OpenCPN here. That article also includes a link to download an installable copy of OpenCPN that I created.

Because we are sometimes without any Internet access, I try to anticipate and install applications before they are needed and while we have good Internet access. Whereas the RPI is well equipped with a 16G SD card, the Sandisk Extreme SD card we purchased for the RPI-2 has a capacity of 64G. More than 6000 packages are now installed on the RPI-2 using over 80 percent of those 64G. SD storage is primarily programs and their documentation because most data is saved on the external Passport USB hard drive. So we have lots and lots of programs. More programs than may ever be used.

There is some stuff (actually a lot) on the SD card that really isn’t needed there. Given our experience driving an SD card to its premature death by writing gigs and gigs of weather data to it, we are sensitive to this. Further, an SD Card with more free space will distribute writes so as to extend its life; a nearly full SD Card can not do this and is more likely to fail prematurely. Since the Passport USB hard drive is always connected (using an entry in /etc/fstab), we can move a few things there. My criteria is to only move things that are not needed to boot the RPI-2 and preferably things that have lots of writes; mostly static files that are primarily read can be left on the SD Card.

I create a directory on the Passport drive such as rpi2_rootdir and in that directory, I create the subdirectory rpi2_rootdir/var/cache. Then I move /var/cache/apt into that subdirectory and create a link to the new location in its place. The only time I really need the apt cache is when updating and upgrading and that subdirectory ends up with lots of data and writes that I would rather have on the Passport. Another file with lots of activity is /var/swap which is used by the package dphys-swap. That file is a swap file for when memory is scarce and therefore (unfortunately) can be heavily used in my setup. One can also move the /var/log directory to the Passport once everything is stable. Further, I create a subdirectory in my user home directory which links to a directory on the Passport drive and I use that directory (on the Passport) for most of my user data–e.g. my email folder, downloads folder, music folder, application data, etc.. With those changes, my usage of the SD card is now less than 50 percent–including a complete copy of NOAA charts on the SD Card as a backup.

After email (using Mutt) and general writing using VI/VIM, my most used interactive application is a web browser. In the original RPI, I often tried to use Midori, but it’s development fell behind and it failed to render a lot of sites. Net Surf and some other light browsers don’t work well for me. The new official light browser for the Pi is the Epiphany Browser. I have not been impressed by that browser either. Google Chrome is not available from the Debian ARM repository and I have not found an easy way to get it. My favorite browser, therefore, is Iceweasel (the Debian fork of Firefox). I install the Vimperator add-on which makes the browser usable without a mouse–you just need the keyboard–and then my web browser works much like my VI editor which provides a user interface consistency that is very nice. But, Iceweasel/Firefox is a resource hog! Fortunately, there are several configuration changes that can greatly improve the usability of Iceweasel/Firefox on a resource-limited device like the RPI or RPI-2. I use the modifications described here. Also, I add the following line to my .profile:

export set MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE=1

Before these changes, Iceweasel would slow down the RPI-2 the more it was used until the RPI-2 was virtually unresponsive. With the changes the RPI-2 works great with Iceweasel. I do try to limit the number of open tabs in Iceweasel, but I currently have 25 tabs, along with about a dozen terminal windows, my QT Weather program, XTide and can even use LibreOffice and have the interface feel responsive! All in all, a very nice computer experience.

The Debian Jessie install went great and the only real hitch for me is not limited to the Raspberry Pi. Jessie uses the new SystemD and that breaks a lot of UDev scripts I wrote to automatically start services such as the Weather data logger when the Airmar USB cord is plugged in, and the GPS position and time servers when the USB puck is plugged in, and the Internet gateway when the Palm is tethered. Jessie has packaged some automatic scripts which work with common new devices, but not our GPS, Palm, or Airmar. For the Airmar, it turns out that my automatic testing and recovery scripts will get the data logging started. The problems with my other old devices may not affect those with newer devices, but my solution for them will be covered in the next post along with some new stuff.

The Power of Raspberry Pi: over reaching and hitting the wall

Posted on by under anchoring, living aboard, misc, Systems, Weather

For background, see the previous post here. At this point, the Raspberry Pi (RPI) has proven itself aboard Schooner Mahdee by reliably logging data from our Airmar weather station plus other boat data and displaying that data on an HDMI monitor, as well as monitoring that data and sounding alarms as required. We built in the capability for more than one computer to read the Airmar weather/boat data from the RPI network port at the same time. To realize that potential, we needed a Wifi access point. A USB Wifi dongle, supporting the access point protocol, with the right software (in our case HostAPD) turned the RPI into an access point for all Mahdee users. A good access point provides some basic network services that were set up on the RPI–such as IP address assignment DHCP server–and is a domain name server (we used Bind9 server) for all the Wifi-connected computers aboard the boat.

Raspberry Pi and Cat

Further adding to the roles for the RPI, I wanted to be able to read email without turning on any other computer, so we needed to set up internet access on the RPI. We set up the RPI to use either a Sprint phone with a data tethering plan using PPP or our Verizon Wifi hotspot using a second USB Wifi dongle. Since Brenda’s Windows 8 machine can’t tether directly to the Sprint phone, we decided to make the RPI Mahdee’s internet gateway that can be switched between either Sprint or Verizon. That also meant a better firewall setup for the RPI.

The RPI doesn’t have a hardware clock (by design it would rely on an internet connection to set the time on boot), so when we rebooted the RPI, sans-internet, in the middle of nowhere in Alaska, the data logger had the wrong time stamps. To fix that, we setup a USB puck GPS as a time source for the RPI. This meant also running a GPS position server on the RPI which is then available on a network port of the RPI for other computers aboard Mahdee. The fast high resolution GPS data was also setup to be used by a Python anchor watch and position alarm which I’d previously written for the Nokia N810. The sound system on the RPI is not very good nor very loud even with our USB powered amplified speakers.  For the alarms we setup a piezo-electric buzzer which is energized by a RPI GPIO port so that we can hear alarms anywhere aboard the boat. The RPI also uses GPS time stamps to provide a network time basis for other computers aboard.

With the 2TB Passport hard drive attached to the RPI, it only made sense to put a copy of our public file archive on it and thereby make it available to us 24-7. The public file archive includes repair manuals in PDF form for most boat systems (nice to have in an emergency), all of our photos as well as digital books and magazines (nice for passage entertainment). This nicety meant putting PDF and e-book readers on the RPI. Then, to enable access to those files from Windows computers, we setup a Samba server which also requires a network time server. Fortunately we already had the GPS-based network time server on the RPI.

To enable us to read our email when there is no internet connection available, we setup the RPI with OfflineIMAP to sync mail from our main email server (an off-boat/shore-based virtual private server) whenever we have internet access. I read email using Mutt which can run in a terminal on the RPI. Brenda likes to access email using SquirrelMail webmail via her computer’s web browser, so we added an Apache2 web server to the RPI along with Squirrel Mail and an IMAP server.

In among the public archive data is our music collection, so we setup RPI as a network music player. On those long passages, we thought it would be nice to listen to music, but this is where things start to break down. The poor, now very overloaded, RPI just couldn’t make the music sound even decent. I also setup my Bluetooth stereo headset on RPI, but that was even worse than listening to broken up music through the speakers.

Many boaters want their RPI to run a navigation program like OpenCPN. I had managed to compile a version of OpenCPN on our first RPI, but running OpenCPN required all the resources of the RPI and I was not willing to forego all the other important roles our RPI was needed for–simply to use OpenCPN as a backup chart plotter.  Our real chart plotter is used to display radar and chart data including charts for other countries without free official charts (like Canada). Not needing to run OpenCPN helped a little with our overloaded RPI situation.

From the RPI GUI interface, I found web browsing to be very slow and unproductive. I could get email and read it using Mutt just fine, but there was other trouble lurking. Brenda informed me that basic web access from her computer through the RPI Wifi access point was way too slow. I tried it using my main computer and had trouble too. I had had hopes–fantasies perhaps–that RPI would also run a contact and calendar web service. Most people would just use Google for this, but we are often not near internet access and besides, who really wants to trust the big guys with all of your sensitive contacts and scheduling. But, it was not to be–at least not yet.  Stay tuned for the next installment in this series of posts about the RPI and how we turned the corner towards success.

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