Page 1 of 1

Viable use for the Pi?

Posted: Tue May 20, 2014 9:21 pm
by delgriffith
Hello,

I know nothing about the Rasberry Pi, however I have a possible need for a computer that can be inside a vehicle and connected to a mobile WiFi router on the Ethernet port running a script. The unit would need to run on vehicle power, boot up when the vehicle is started and start the script within a minute or so. It would be shut down when the ignition was shut off. This would run every day, year round, cycling on and off several times each day. The script would ideally be something like a bash script involving some use of cURL. I could work in other languages if need be though.

A little more detail: Unfortunately the router's firmware does not have a feature to boot off clients who are burning up all the allotted data, however it logs data use per client and you can boot them manually from the admin webpage. I was thinking to write a script to continually monitor and boot users who download too much. I was hoping to do this remotely, however the router gets a non-routable address from the mobile data carrier.

Thanks for any suggestions,
D

Re: Viable use for the Pi?

Posted: Tue May 20, 2014 11:58 pm
by FLYFISH TECHNOLOGIES
Hi,
delgriffith wrote:I was hoping to do this remotely, however the router gets a non-routable address from the mobile data carrier
Store/update/maintain commands/data on a public server and implement periodic polling of this server by RasPi, which then executes related commands.


Best wishes, Ivan Zilic.

Re: Viable use for the Pi?

Posted: Wed May 21, 2014 12:25 am
by allfox
I follow FLYFISH TECH. :D
How about get a new email address for Pi? You could let Pi pick up router's log and send them to you via email. And you could send commands to Pi via that email address either, Pi check inbox and do what need to be done.

And for the on/off circle, power off Pi by pulling off power supply could cause problem. I think you may need an OS running completely in memory and never write to SD card. I'm thinking about using tinycore linux could be cool(http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.ph ... ,57.0.html).

Re: Viable use for the Pi?

Posted: Wed May 21, 2014 5:53 pm
by delgriffith
Thanks for the suggestions, good ideas. I was mainly concerned about the pi being used in a black-box type application. Power cycling frequently without proper shutdown and being in a vehicle environment, subject to temperature extremes -30c to +25c where we are. As far as memory concerns, I have no need to write information that I would need later for anything. It would only be temporary caching memory used to run the script. I don't think it would be a problem unless the memory got corrupted where it couldn't be written to anymore due to some problem that happened during a write that occurred on shutdown.