EEVblog #871 - Find Aliens With Your Raspberry Pi! - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:02:37 am
content: Dave shows you how to get the distributed computing platform BOINC and the SETI@Home project running on your Raspberry Pi.How many MIPS per Watt is the Raspberry Pi 2 compared to Dave's dual processor Xeon machine?Dave's machines on SETI:http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_user.php?userid=10304357http://boinc.berkeley.edu/Download SETI@Home for your machine:http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

author: station240
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:29:43 am
content: First lolSETI = Search for Extra Terrestrial IntelligenceDave doesn't actually say this till 6:16 in...

author: botcrusher
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:33:43 am
content: Estimated time to work completion: 6 months

author: Barny
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:36:19 am
content: Quote from: station240 on April 22, 2016, 10:29:43 amNo.Dave was first!

author: bktemp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:39:14 am
content: Dave, did you notice the undervoltage warning on the Raspberry Pi (the rainbow coloured square)?That's why I hate USB power supplies, because you never know how much voltage actually reaches the target device.

author: botcrusher
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 12:37:10 pm
content: 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.

author: bktemp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 12:47:49 pm
content: Quote from: botcrusher on April 22, 2016, 12:37:10 pmOn the Raspberry Pi 2 there is a small square shown at the top right corner when the voltage is too low or the cpu to warm:https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=82373

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 01:18:10 pm
content: It's interesting to see Dave so excited about this. The SETI forums people must be really nice.I wonder if the under-volting would have reduced power consumption. Most of the current would be sucked through a DC-DC for the processor but some might be used in other areas directly.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.txtUnix 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.

author: peteb2
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 01:22:06 pm
content: Sheeze! That 1st frame still of Jodie Foster as Eleanor Arroway in the movie Contact on Dave's post just had to be about my most fave SciFi movie.... at least the part where they have the indications they are receiving radio signals showing signs of intelligence.... I admit that at the cinema the 1st time i saw the movie in '97, that moment became a little bit emotional and for geeky me, faintly tearful...I keep thinking what the hell's it gonna be like when the day comes and we actually do 'hear' something...

author: woox2k
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 02:47:09 pm
content: Ugh, until now i didn't know this thing existed, thank you!I started this up on all my 3 machines to try it out. I will not continue running them for too long at this pace though, i can feel the heat in my room and electricity supply guys rubbing their hands already...On the other hand I might be able to sneak some tasks into my work servers....Quote from: Whales on April 22, 2016, 01:18:10 pmOT: Now let's finally make a text editor that can work with gksudo or something warning/asking you password when trying to write root owned file. I'm a Linux user and still sometimes get annoyed when i open up config files as regular user and try to save it...

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 05:38:09 pm
content: $400 a month for a 20Mbit connection with a data transfer limit??Ouch!

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 06:04:04 pm
content: Quote from: peteb2 on April 22, 2016, 01:22:06 pmThe whole of religion will be discarded and we'll all realize how stupid all those lines drawn on maps are...?

author: Fulcrum
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 07:19:41 pm
content: Quote from: Fungus on April 22, 2016, 05:38:09 pmI had to do a double take and scroll back when I first heard him say that. It's 7 times more than what I pay for my 100/100 line! Absolutely ridiculous.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 07:46:23 pm
content: Quote from: woox2k on April 22, 2016, 02:47:09 pmBut at least it is easy to fix, make a desktop shortcut that opens up your editor of choice using Gksudo and then simply copy the whole thing over to it and save and overwrite, and save the first window as a backup.I got tired of my old motherboard having USB issues so did a one click and password to restart hald. Seems to be working better on the new computer, so not used but still there and available. Beats the crap out of having to restart Windows if it does that, whipping the tablecloth out from under the dishes and sliding a fresh one in works on Linux mostly, on Windows it will often do horrid things.

author: rgammans
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:15:57 pm
content: The reason why the raspberry pi enables overscan is because TVs lie about their resolution in the advertised EDID.Matthew Garrett has done a some blog posts on this, the one I found quickly washttps://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html.I set mine up to correct for it , but found some lovely aliasing error when watching interlace videos. Although I did find a de-interlace mode which fixes it when you enable to option - none of these effect will be much of a surprise to anyone who has studied sampling.On a different note I believe the on important reason the 'task's have expiry dates set , is so they can be re-allocated if you or you boinc client disappears of the network. So it not AIUI at least design to encourage use of faster CPUs - rather to reclaim task from clients which have failed in some manner.

author: adcurtin
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 01:53:47 am
content: The reason the normal text editor couldn't save the file was because of permissions; it was being run as a user. When you used nano, you ran it as super user. You can use invoke the gui editor as the super user from the command line. Looks like it's leafpad on rasbian. So you could sudo leafpad /boot/config.txt instead of using nano.

author: bitwelder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 05:24:27 am
content: Thanks for the video.I did know about the SETI@home project, but not about the BOINC application and the range of other @home projects to which you can 'donate' your CPU time.Excellent followup to that video is the linked talk by Paul Horowitz (although, it was a bit painful to see him rush though the slides)

author: TheSteve
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 06:17:27 am
content: The Paul Horowitz video was great. Two of my Pi's are media centers, the third is a full on web/ftp server etc. I remember years back when the distributed model became popular. I recall one project which was generating random packets and decrypting them to see if they did anything useful. The packets were simulating messages sent from a satellite receiver to the smartcard. The goal of the project was to find a packet which could be used to enable a back door on the smartcard - the project was successful.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 10:08:28 am
content: Quote from: Fungus on April 22, 2016, 05:38:09 pmYes, and that isdirt cheapfor internet in a business park in Sydney. I am not kidding.

author: Towger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 11:41:57 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog link=topic=66841.msg925106#msg925106But you are being ripped off. Compared to the rest of the world.

author: jhalar
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 11:55:39 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 23, 2016, 10:08:28 am$400 per month is cheap. My work is paying $1000 for a 20/20 link with max 750GB per month in West Melbourne.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 12:02:27 pm
content: If you think Sydney is bad try South Africa. You have a choice of supplier, Telkom, Telkom or ( surprise again) Telkom. Alternative is to use a wireless service, and share the LTE, 4G, 3G, HSDPA or EDGE, depending on weather, location, your WASP, loading and such, and hope you are in a serviced area when shopping.In all cases you will be using a connection with shaping or capping. The one ISP did post the 10 heaviest users, and the top one was a 40M business ADSL line which was doing just short of 4 TB per month. Must have a shed load of gaming going on on that network and hosting the game engine, along with being the preferred steam bittorrent client.

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 01:14:11 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 23, 2016, 10:08:28 amIt's literally 100 times what I pay per megabit, and I don't have a data cap.At least we know why the EEVBLOG live cam switches off on ahardwaretimer.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 01:56:08 pm
content: 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.** Subject to their 'fair go' policy - which just means don't suck the bandwidth dry all day.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 02:00:35 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 22, 2016, 10:02:37 amJust watched Terminator 3 - and I was intrigued by the similarity in the architecture of BOINC and SKYNET.Be careful ... that Raspberry Pi might just be plotting your demise!

author: Towger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 02:06:55 pm
content: 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 msJitter: 2 ms4/23/2016, 3:02:33 PM

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 02:47:23 pm
content: Quote from: Fungus on April 23, 2016, 01:14:11 pmLiterally a motor, cogs, and a microswitchEven 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.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 03:06:33 pm
content: Quote from: Fungus on April 22, 2016, 05:38:09 pmAnd 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.

author: Carl_Smith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 12:31:28 am
content: 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...

author: LapTop006
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 04:45:57 am
content: Quote from: botcrusher on April 22, 2016, 12:37:10 pmWhen 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.

author: TJM
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 08:15:20 am
content: 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.

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 10:09:45 am
content: Quote from: Brumby on April 23, 2016, 01:56:08 pmI 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...

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 12:53:25 pm
content: 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.

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 02:27:14 pm
content: 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

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 03:57:36 pm
content: Quote from: Brumby on April 24, 2016, 12:53:25 pmI just did a speed test:http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5275346649Not bad for $40 a month

author: calli
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 05:04:34 pm
content: 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

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 05:17:54 pm
content: Quote from: calli on April 24, 2016, 05:04:34 pmIs there no way to lower the task priority? I assumed BOINC would always run at low priority, but ... you never know.

author: calli
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 05:22:47 pm
content: 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

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 12:34:02 am
content: Quote from: Fungus on April 24, 2016, 03:57:36 pmImpressive....Most impressive.

author: Melt-O-Tronic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 02:40:47 am
content: Mmmmmm, SETI . . . nearly as efficient as nichrome wire but with more blinky lights!

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 08:03:25 am
content: Quote from: Melt-O-Tronic on April 25, 2016, 02:40:47 amYeah, it's unlikely/difficult, but ... imagine if we did hear something.The end of religion, etc.? We can only hope.

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 08:09:17 am
content: Quote from: Fungus on April 25, 2016, 08:03:25 amNo way, believers would instantly claim it's not aliens but $deity finally talking to them openly, thereby proving it exists...

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 08:44:41 am
content: Quote from: Kilrah on April 25, 2016, 08:09:17 amWhat 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...)

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 09:38:07 am
content: 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...

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 02:14:01 pm
content: Quote from: Kilrah on April 25, 2016, 09:38:07 amDoes 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".

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 02:43:29 pm
content: Quote from: Brumby on April 25, 2016, 12:34:02 amI'm sure you have better test gear than me though...

author: apis
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 01:32:59 am
content: Quote from: Whales on April 22, 2016, 01:18:10 pmRight, 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.

author: lwatts666
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 04:16:19 am
content: Quote from: Melt-O-Tronic on April 25, 2016, 02:40:47 amResistance is Futile! You will be assimilated.

author: mechatronicsguy
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: May 16, 2016, 11:09:20 am
content: 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

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 16, 2016, 11:15:28 am
content: Quote from: mechatronicsguy on May 16, 2016, 11:09:20 amSweet build Gav!I'm going to tun my Orange Pi One cluster into a WOPR, just, because.

author: mechatronicsguy
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: May 16, 2016, 11:32:19 am
content: Outstanding Dave!There's a few designs on Thingiverse that might be a good starting point:http://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=wopr&sa=

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 16, 2016, 02:14:01 pm
content: Quote from: mechatronicsguy on May 16, 2016, 11:32:19 amDon't think I can 3D print this, I want to put like 50 or something Pi's in there. That's a lot of ethernet cable, switches etc.But yeah, some good base designs exist.I always wanted a life size WOPR, but, you know, wife, kids, space. Although technically I could build one in my bunker...