New 8GB Raspberry Pi 4

You can never have too many Pi’s right?
Currently running my site on a Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2.

Would there be any advantage to running my adsb server on the new one? Is bigger always better?

TIA.

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If this is the only thing you have running on your Pi there is only one answer which is “no”.

I have two feeders, one 3B and a 4 with 4Gig. There are no benefits having the larger one. I only have added some things like Grafana, Virtual Radar Server and bit more stuff.

But for Flight Tracking/Feeding, it is overkill.

Exactly this, my Pi4 has never used more than 600Mb of RAM and that’s in a traffic heavy environment.

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As stated, mine is a bit of a playground. I am not even come close to the 4GB

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Looks like Raspberry have been busy with releasing an updated Raspberry OS and a beta 64bit version of the OS as well. Fun times ahead ?
Raspberry Pi OS (64 bit) beta test

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I’ve upgraded mine from an 1B to a 4B with 2GB and the first problem was the power supply and the second was the heat, that thing really heats a lot.
You can see the temperatura graph, RP1B, RP4B and finally RP4B with a fan.
system-localhost-temperature-180d

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The 4 does run hotter. I usually use a nice heatsink and the POE adapter with a fan.

This is in my attic with a heatsink and POE adapter.
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This is in my attic and has an Aurdusimple GNSS hat so I can’t use the POE fan at the moment.
I have adapters from Uputronics that should allow me to use the POE, however, they are stuck in transit.

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This is behind a dresser in my bedroom. It has an Uputronics GNSS and a heatsink.
It doesn’t get much air circulation and I don’t want to use a fan(too much noise)
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This is an RPI4 with POE adapter living in my basement. It runs cacti for all of my NMS stats graphing.
I think it has a lower temp threshold for the fan to cut in.
image

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I have been runing two stations (5252 & 6396) on a single Pi ($15 OrangePi PC) without any issues. :slight_smile:

I have posted the automated installation script for installing two receivers on one Pi (no 978Mhz only 2 x 1090Mhz).

https://github.com/abcd567a/two-receivers/blob/master/README.md

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It’s surprisingly hard to fill up ram on a pi, unless you are using it as a desktop. There’s just not that many services that require that much memory. I had a 4GB pi running a variety of services simultaneously - file and print serving, media server, and various other things and it never got close to running out of ram. CPU speed was a more limiting factor.

I have a 2GB pi 4 running all the adsb stuff and that rarely goes over 800MB used, including 24 hours of history in timelapse1090 and a second instance of tar1090.

I guess a plus to more ram that’s usually not needed is the ability to run log2ram with a huge /var/log ramdisk :call_me_hand:

Now that’s an interesting reason. My /var/log directory is only about 150Mb so I could use log2ram and create a 500Mb ram drive because I’ve got plenty of free memory, even on a 2Gb Pi4.

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That’s exactly how my 4GB RPi looks like.

Writing logs to microSD card shortens life of $10 microSD card.
Writing logs to RAM shortens life of RAM, which shortens life of $70 RPI.

How large are these log files? You can get name brand 128GB sd cards for $US20.
I bought a 200GB last year. I just checked and it is only $US31 now. Even the 512GB is less than $US100 today on Amazon.

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Thanks, now I have to wipe a bunch of coffee off my computer screen. :rofl:

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Good point. I had just installed it on another RPi, not ADS-B, and removed it now. By the way, you’re spending too much ($10) on microSD cards. Try Dollarama again. :rofl:

I appreciate a good uninstaller. Looks like it removed everything the installer put in there. Good uninstallers should be ‘mandatory’ with any project. :wink:

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I didn’t need to wipe my screen but that genuinely made me laugh. RAM is very different technology than that used in SD cards or SSD devices. It doesn’t wear out through use.

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I have two Pi’s running 24/7 since 2015, with same two 8 GB microSD cards.

Whenever I upgrade the distro or piaware version, I do NOT use command line. I write latest image to microSD card.

Both these 8 GB microSD cards are healthy & survived till today.
I have purchased these for Canadian $8 each (= US $5.50 each).

I am surprised why there is so much fuss to save a microSD card. :wink:
Simply save a backup copy on your Desktop/Laptop and that is all what is needed.

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No fuss, it’s just that with plenty of memory, it’s a shame to see it idle :smiley:

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I realize we’ve steered off subject (apologies to OP). SD cards are a crap-shoot. The MTBF’s have been increasing and larger capacities assist in that, but throughout my various projects, I’ve had several SD cards give up the ghost. While data was still accessible on all of the failed cards I’ve had, none could be written to or formatted. Sometimes it’s taken awhile to realize they even went poof since there were no errors when attempting format and/or rewrite.

To that end, minimizing writes to the sd cards can’t ever be a bad idea, but it’s not worth losing sleep over. You owe me a new screen @abcd567!

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