Watchdog for Raspberry Pi

Maybe not all of you know that Raspberry Pi has an integrated watchdog timer. This can be really useful, especially when you need to leave your RPi unattended for some time.

For those who doesn't know what is a watchdog, let's see just a small explanation...

Immagine that you made an incredibily wonderful home surveillance system and you are going to use it to check your house during an long trip abroad. After a bunch of days, something goes wrong and your system hangs, so it become unuseful. The only way to solve this problem would be to reboot the system, but you are away from it...

Watchdogs do this reboot for you.

Make Raspberry Pi SD card last longer

If you have one Raspberry Pi always on or running several hours every day, probably you also had some SD card faults.

Unfortunately SD cards have a limited number of writings allowed. After that number the internal electronics is no more reliable and there could be read/write errors.

Debian usually do several writings on the os partitions, so the maximum writing cycles is rapidly reached.

So, what could we do to make the sd last longer with our RPi?

Using AirPlay with Raspberry Pi

AirPlay is an Apple protocol which allows wireless streaming of audio, video, photo and so on. Even if it's a proprietary protocol, it can also be used with Android devices or personal computers by installing simple apps.

Of course you can also install AirPlay on a Raspberry Pi.

When I built my Sphaera, I also added an external audio card, an audio amplifier and a speaker. Initially I used this audio system just for some notification, but going from that to a wireless speaker it really easy.