EEVblog #871 - Find Aliens With Your Raspberry Pi!

[EEVblog]

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=10304357
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Download SETI@Home for your machine:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

[station240]

First lol

SETI = Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
Dave doesn't actually say this till 6:16 in...

[botcrusher]

Estimated time to work completion: 6 months

[Barny]

First lol

No.

Dave was first! 

[bktemp]

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.

[botcrusher]

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.

[bktemp]

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.

On 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

[Whales]

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.txt

Unix 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.

[peteb2]

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... 

[woox2k]

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.... 

/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.

OT: 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...

[Fungus]

$400 a month for a 20Mbit connection with a data transfer limit??

Ouch!   

[Fungus]

I keep thinking what the hell's it gonna be like when the day comes and we actually do 'hear' something...

The whole of religion will be discarded and we'll all realize how stupid all those lines drawn on maps are...?

[Fulcrum]

$400 a month for a 20Mbit connection with a data transfer limit??

Ouch!   

I 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.

[SeanB]

OT: 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...

But 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.

[rgammans]

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 was https://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.

[adcurtin]

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.

[bitwelder]

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)

[TheSteve]

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.

[EEVblog]

$400 a month for a 20Mbit connection with a data transfer limit??
Ouch!   

Yes, and that is dirt cheap for internet in a business park in Sydney. I am not kidding.

[Towger]

Yes, and that is dirt cheap for internet in a business park in Sydney. I am not kidding.

But you are being ripped off. Compared to the rest of the world.

[jhalar]

$400 a month for a 20Mbit connection with a data transfer limit??
Ouch!   

Yes, and that is dirt cheap for internet in a business park in Sydney. I am not kidding.

$400 per month is cheap. My work is paying $1000 for a 20/20 link with max 750GB per month in West Melbourne.

[SeanB]

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.

[Fungus]

$400 a month for a 20Mbit connection with a data transfer limit??
Ouch!   

Yes, and that is dirt cheap for internet in a business park in Sydney. I am not kidding.

It'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 a hardware timer.

[Brumby]

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.

[Brumby]

Dave shows you how to get the distributed computing platform BOINC and the SETI@Home project running on your Raspberry Pi.

Just 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!