Raspberry π

Teensy is Arduino gone nuts, really good microcontrollers but with the ease of use of arduino.
If you're looking at web access, especially externally, I'd guess a Pi might be easier as you have all the networking functionality of the os

And it runs Arduino software, that's cool. I've got another project (which I started 4 years ago...) that uses an Arduino but the one I've got is a Duewhateverthefuck so a Teensy would be a massive upgrade, I think I'll get one.

Seeing as I've already got a Pi-Hole going I suppose it makes sense to use that. I didn't actually know the Pi had IO pins...

The one caution with a pi is that anything that needs true real-time processing isn't possible, there's no way to stop the os doing it's thing with it's scheduler. It's mostly probably kinda fine for most home projects though, you can always deal with a little delay.

What was the 4 year ago project? I started uni with all the enthusiasm in the world for projects like this but it wore thin pretty quick when it was the day job too.

Don't need anything real time for my heating I suppose? It's just an on/off signal to control the boiler AFAIK...

The other project is a little MIDI keyboard that I can play with my feet. Basically what this guy has:

https://youtu.be/N4YEx8ypAgI

I was disassembling children's keyboards for a while before I realised I could just dump some pre-written MIDI control stuff onto an Arduino and just connect the buttons up

Did not get any further with the project, apart from getting the pi, had issues sourcing decent batteries for the temp sensors.

Problem was that I needed the set up to be reliable and run without any problems as I would not be around to keep an eye on it.

Better off with mains then no?

I'm lucky (well, sort of; I live in a minuscule 1-bed flat) in that my boiler and router are right next to each other, don't think I'll bother with the separate sensors...

The ESP32 is a good alternative to the Teensy, plenty of processing power, runs Arduino code, and has all the peripherals you can dream of. Don’t know if a Teensy has WiFi, although no need for the synth project obvs.

Big benefit of the ESP is that they can be had at about the tenth of the price of a Teensy on AliExpress.

There are a couple of real-time OSs that you can install on a raspberry pi, but yeah, if RT is a priority then teensy/arduino is probably a better bet.

Anyone had problems with DHCP PiHole failing to allocate IP addresses? I'm not a network person and PiHole annoyingly closes tickets after 21 days if no one comments on them preventing any fixes being written down

I have, but the problem was due to my network topology being screwed up with inadvertent loops, due to me misconfiguring my Sonos system.

What are your symptoms?

Not a network person either but presumably your other/old DHCP server is no longer acting as one? And what length of time was the DHCP server providing IPs for? Usually lease is renewed after 24hrs, but not sure what'd happen if lease time was set to 0 (i.e. forever) on the old DHCP server?

Have you restarted the devices after setting pihole as only DHCP server on the network? I'm guessing gateway IP is set correctly too on the pihole?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBXTnrD_Zs4

Don't think you can DHCP for the PiHole itself as the ip be keep moving when you try and set the dns on other things?

Try login on your router and find the PiHole and then set the ip to static then copy the ip/details of the PiHole down and input that into the other things which should still be set as DHCP set by the router?

No WiFi devices can connect. My laptop works with ethernet straight into the router. Pi can ping Google. Rebooting the Pi/my router doesn't help.

I think my next step might be to wipe it and configure it again unfortunately.

Good news is whilst I was pissing around trying to fix it I got the GPIO thermometer to work. 19.687°C ... ±0.5°C. Now to write an evil AI to control the heating for me.

To be clear, I've had it working as a DHCP server for over a month - I probably should have said that in the first place. It's suddenly broken of its own accord, either due to some pihole setting/update/etc. or something changing with the router/ISP/etc.

It has its own static IP already although pihole debug log says there is some sort of conflict -trying to fix this at the moment.

Worst comes to worst I'll just switch the router back to DHCP and look at a few ads.

Does the now working ethernet connected laptop have ads showing or not?

edit - if you have the PiHole settings open set something to be blocked and try it on the laptop to see it's for sure having it's dns go via the PiHole.

Wait, everything just started working again for no discernible reason. How very strange.

pihole debug it fixed/won the conflict?

pihole debug just cats various log files as I understand it. It still thinks there is a conflict - basically it says IP 192.168.0.250/24 does not match the IP found in /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf in which the IP is set to 192.168.0.250. It must not like the /24 bit for some reason.

I will forget about it for now and come back to it if it breaks again.

The thermometer is fun, it goes up to 31°C when I squeeze it between my fingers.

Frankenpi's monster lives!

Just you wait, I'm going to try to get it to start tweeting

I'm going to take a guess that it was assigning IPs from the same subnet that IP is in and assigned itself away to one of the other devices and then set itself back after.

Check the range on the DHCP settings and see that it can't give out 192.168.0.250? You could even put the PiHole on another range so it's like 192.168.0.250 and all the other things jump around on 192.168.1.1-256.

It's limited to give out 10-249. However something did just happen - my router switched off for no reason and wouldn't come back on - turns out the plug wasn't properly in. It has maybe just been switching itself on and off whilst I've been near the cables and that was causing issues.

pfft hardware issues, boring

That's 99.9% of all network issues. Plus, there's no guarantee I've solved it yet.

When I first setup my PI-Hole I had it as the only DHCP server on the network and also the only DNS server handed out to clients.

The pi it was running in had an intermittent boot up error, which sometimes meant I had to boot it two, three or four times before it came up correctly. After a tripped switch or a power cut I found this most anxiety inducing. It was a single point of failure that would kill all internet access for every device in my house.

So, I have done three things:

Reinstalled the Pi-Hole on a new SD Card. Now it boots reliably. For now.

Got another Pi running dnsmasq as a secondary dhcp server (it and the pi hole serve up different address ranges in my subnet)

Hand out the Pi-Hole as the first DNS server but an internet one (Google or Cloudflare) as a secondary one. (Thinking about it, I haven't actually done this yet - I need to read up about how clients use the DNS servers they get handed, to ensure they use Pi-Hole unless it is non responsive)

Hopefully that gives me much better redundancy.