2018-11-13
Getting Raspberry Pi ready for winter
Since mid October, i had to stick a tiny fan at each window, to keep it free from condensation. Thanks to Daniel Rüd for the idea. I got both 12V ball bearing fans by taking apart an old HDD case. And to get them going, i found two old AC to DC 8V power supplies by Siemens, from an ancient time when they sold mobile phones, next to Ericsson and Nokia. This way the window in front of the Raspberry Pi Camera stays clear, even at cold days with humid air indoors. FYI, from my experience, sleeve bearing fans are less noisy, especially if the ball bearing counterpart had to sustain a shock at some point.
To get my Pi Zero Ws even more stable, i have lowered the resolution to 1920x1442, which is the size i use to archive my time-lapses anyway. And to compensate for less data, i slightly bumped up the JPEG quality. Since some months, i save all output to external 32 GB USB thumb drives, eventually to be downloaded via SSH and psftp. Now the microSD cards are dedicated only for running OS and applications, and relieved from the heavy read and write loads. Otherwise the flash memory may slow down everything by becoming a bottleneck, and eventually crashing. This way the wear and tear is no longer directly happening at the system storage, possibly extending the lifetime too.