It’s Always Something!

Late in September 2022, Risa stopped updating her stats. The worst possible timing, with launch service hours reduced for fall, checking and servicing becomes more challenging. Perhaps the Raspberry Pi died? As luck would have it, the Pi was fine (they are currently almost impossible to get due to the chip shortage!). It turned out that the constant flow of camera images wore out the SD card. My recent backup was not too old, and it worked, but I decided to use a SSD adapter that I purchased a while back made by Suptronics. The Pi and a drive attach to the adapter which has some port redirections for the HDMI and distributes the 5 volt power supply to both the Pi and the drive. I used a 120gb SSD (SATA compatable) that I removed from a dead laptop. Unfortunately, the backup image I had would not run off the SSD. I had to use a newer version of the Rasperian OS. While it ran well, it did not run the Vedirect Python script that I had found on the internet. I tried to debug it and worked through most of them. One stumped me. It was simple enough, appending the newly received character to build up the information string. Python complained that there was a type mismatch. I could not overcome this issue and ended up writing my own (much simpler) script to accomplish parsing and uploading the data from the Victron battery monitor.

Suptronics SATA adapter for Raspberry Pi