POWER AND PRIVACY

There’s still a couple of first generation Raspberry Pis keeping things ticking over here at LXF Towers. These older models are great – just look at our Pi 2 running Volumio – but lots of projects (such as Mycroft) will require more CPU power, so for a lot of projects you’ll see at least a Pi 3 is recommended. If you have a Pi 4, you can even run a Jitsi instance that can handle a few callers with no problems. The trouble is, these later models require much more power, so it’s important to use a power supply (ideally the official model) that can provide a steady 5.1V supply at up to 2.5A. Cheap USB power supplies can cause all kinds of hard-to-diagnose problems, so if something’s behaving oddly, the power is a good thing to check.

Also we’re doing a lot of setting up of web services here, which have the potential to invite the whole world into your machine. So beware of leaving things running with default credentials, and do look at firewalling things that only need to run on the local network. You may want to run things in a virtual machine, or on a ‘disposable’ virtual private server to get a feel for them first.

It’s your responsibility to maintain these services and keep things up to date too. The journey is far from over once things are up and running. Many companies offer, for example, hosted Nextcloud storage, and this may be a better option for small businesses that don’t want the burden of administering a server.