So, this morning I decided to shut the whole lot down and switch to the new solar controller. There’s some clean-up work to be done, but for now, it’ll do. The new controller is a Powertech MP3735. Supposedly this one can deliver 30A, and has programmable float and bulk charge voltages. A nice feature is that it’ll disconnect the load when it drops below 11V, so finding the batteries at 6V should be a thing of the past! We’ll see how it goes.
I also put in two current shunts, one on the feed into/out of the battery, and one to the load. Nothing is connected to monitor these as yet, but some research suggested that while in theory it is just an op-amp needed, that op-amp has to deal with microvolt differences and noise.
There are instrumentation amplifiers designed for that, and a handy little package is TI’s INA219B. This incorporates aforementioned amplifier, but also adds to that an ADC with an I²C interface. Downside is that I’ll need an MCU to poll it, upside is that by placing the ADC and instrumentation amp in one package, it should cut down noise, further reduced if I mount the chip on a board bolted to the current shunt concerned. The ADC measures bus voltage and temperature as well. Getting this to work shouldn’t be hard. (Yes, famous last words I know.)
A few days ago, I also placed an order for some more RAM for the two compute nodes. I had thought 8GB would be enough, and in a way it is, except I’ve found some software really doesn’t work properly unless it has 2GB RAM available (Gitea being one, although it is otherwise a fantastic Git repository manager). By bumping both these nodes to 32GB each (4×8GB) I can be less frugal about memory allocations.
I can in theory go to 16GB modules in these boxes, but those were hideously expensive last time I looked, and had to be imported. My debit card maxes out at $AU999.99, and there’s GST payable on anything higher anyway, so there goes that idea. 64GB would be nice, but 32GB should be enough.
The fun bit though, Kingston no longer make DDR3 ECC SO-DIMMs. The mob I bought the last lot though informed me that the product is no longer available, after I had sent them the B-Pay payment. Ahh well, I’ve tossed the question back asking what do they have available that is compatible.
Searching for ECC SODIMMs is fun, because the search engines will see ECC and find ECC DIMMs (i.e. full-size). When looking at one of these ECC SODIMM unicorns, they’ll even suggest the full-size version as similar. I’d love to see the salespeople try to fit the suggested full-size DIMM into the SODIMM socket and make it work!
The other thing that happens is the search engine sees ECC and see that that’s a sub-string of non-ECC. Errm, yeah, if I meant non-ECC, I’d have said so, and I wouldn’t have put ECC there.
Crucial and Micron both make it though, here’s hoping mixing and matching RAM from different suppliers in the same bank won’t cause grief, otherwise the other option is I pull the Kingston sticks out and completely replace them.
The other thing I’m looking at is an alternative to OpenNebula. Something that isn’t a pain in the arse to deploy (like OpenStack is, been there, done that), that is decentralised, and will handle KVM with a Ceph back-end.
A nice bonus would be being able to handle cross-architecture QEMU VMs, in particular for ARM and MIPS targets. This is something that libvirt-based solutions do not do well.
I’m starting to think about ways I can DIY that solution. Blockchain was briefly looked at, and ruled out on the basis that while it’d be good for an audit log, there’s no easy way to index it: reading current values would mean a full-scan of the blockchain, so not a solution on its own.
CephFS is stable now, but I’m not sure how file locking works on it. Then there’s object storage itself, librados. I’m not sure if there’s a database engine that can interface to that, or maybe to Amazon S3 storage (radosgw can emulate that), that’ll be the next step. Lots to think about.
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