[Yesterday: Watson Road]
My autonomous weather station is not doing so well these days. It will run for a day or two and then seize up. I take the cover off, and the indications seem to be that the BeagleBoneBlack single-board computer is just halting. I have yet to figure out why. I restart it and it will run for a couple of days… repeat.
At first I thought that maybe it was running out of “disk” space (which is actually on some sort of memory chip). But I cleared out some stuff and that didn’t fix the problem.
I would like to find some way of preserving the system condition right before it halts so that I could determine why it does.
Maybe what I ought to do is buy another of the next generation BBBs and reinstall using that. We are using that version over at the Starkville installation and it seems to be working fine. Of course, it may be that the Starkville one will find a similar glitch eventually.
It has been a multi-year exercise. First I got the thing running on the original BeagleBone (Starkville). We eventually discovered that the flash-card based system is not a long term solution because the number of read/write cycles on a flash card means the system will eventually have “disk” corruption and crash.
While that one was running we installed BeagleBoneBlack (Columbus) which was an easier install (already having Debian linux on it). And then we went to the next generation BeagleBoneBlack (4G memory – Starkville). And now the original BBB (Columbus) is dying. Maybe the BBB-II will follow.
I am coming to the conclusion that the SQL-based weather station software we are using is too disk intensive. And the other conclusion is a re-established respect for any commercial products which have to work in a non-attended way for long periods of time.
(Later note: I was wrong about the BBB-2G, it has Angstrom Linux on it, same as the original BB. I guess it seemed easier to do the install because I had been through it before. The BBB-4G has Debian Linux on it and the wview package is an easy addition.)