mpr projects

mpr projects

Category: Projects

  • Building a DIY Spectroscope [Video]

    Building a DIY Spectroscope [Video]

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    In this post we’ll use a camera, an analogue pocket spectroscope and some software that I wrote to build a digital spectroscope. The spectroscope will be limited to roughly the visible range of light (~400nm to ~700nm). While it’s probably not as accurate as commercial devices we will calibrate it carefully to give decent results.

  • Mono-Conversion of a Canon 350D [Video]

    Mono-Conversion of a Canon 350D [Video]

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    In this video we disassemble a Canon 350D and we remove the top layer of the sensor, which includes the colour filter array. As a result we’ll end up with a monochrome camera. We also discuss auto focus calibration and a few related topics.

  • RPi NAS: Borg Backup

    RPi NAS: Borg Backup

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    In this post we’re going to use the software packages Borg Backup and Borgmatic to do system backups of both our Raspberry Pi and our main computer. We’ll also schedule automatic backups using both cron and systemd.

  • RPi NAS: Extras – Building a Case [Video]

    RPi NAS: Extras – Building a Case [Video]

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    We’ve finished setting up our NAS but all the hardware is just laying around, which really doesn’t look very good. So let’s replace the loose hardware with a pretty case.

  • RPi NAS: Extras – Overclocking

    RPi NAS: Extras – Overclocking

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    Raspberry Pi’s can be overclocked but could overclocking improve the performance of our NAS? In this post we’ll briefly discuss and test overclocking (and fix some problems it caused). First things first: I’m only doing this test out of curiosity. The NAS is already fast enough for my purpose. Even if overclocking gives a speedup,…

  • RPi NAS: Extras – HDD S.M.A.R.T.

    RPi NAS: Extras – HDD S.M.A.R.T.

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    S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Practically that means that HDDs that support SMART can run self-tests to diagnose problems and report them to us. Although Greyhole can provide our NAS with redundancy, i.e. no data is lost if an HDD fails, it’s still good to know how healthy our HDDs are before…

  • RPi NAS: Extras – Power Consumption

    RPi NAS: Extras – Power Consumption

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    The NAS we’re building should always be on so power consumption matters. One of the major reasons for choosing a single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi is it’s low power consumption. But how low is it? And how much power do the storage devices use? Let’s find out.

  • RPi NAS: Extras – Encrypting Samba

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    By default the data that’s sent to and from a Samba share is not encrypted. In this post we’ll enable encryption by changing a few settings in Samba’s configuration file. Encryption seems important. If the traffic to and from a Samba share is not encrypted, why do we only talk about encryption now, in some…

  • RPi NAS: Extras – Blocking Greyhole while Copying to the NAS

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    On the Raspberry Pi 4b the bandwidth of the USB bus is limited to 4Gb/s for all USB devices taken together. If you’re copying a lot of data onto the NAS then Greyhole will start moving it while the copy process is still active. This can cause a little congestion on the USB bus, especially…

  • RPi NAS: Extras – Replacing a Drive, Drive Selection and Space Balancing

    RPi NAS: Extras – Replacing a Drive, Drive Selection and Space Balancing

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    Sometimes hard drives fail but luckily we’ve set up our NAS so that at least two copies of each file exist. So we shouldn’t have lost any data. To make sure it stays like that we’ll look at replacing the failed drives in this post. Replacing Broken Hard Drives Let’s assume the drive at /nas_mounts/drive3…