Friday, June 11, 2021

The Weather Channel

well not quite, but the Weather Pi.


I've got the raspberry-noaa-v2 distro up and running on my Raspberry Pi4.

Been going quite well for months, up until a few weeks ago when it just "stopped".

I thought possibly a hardware glitch or some corruption of the file system, perhaps a lightning strike or gamma rays? :)

At any rate, finally got around to checking it out and lo and behold it was a basic system admin issue: The downloads of weather images from the NOAA 15,18 or 19 satellites or the Russian METEOR satellite are processed via audio captures from a NOELEC RTL-SDR dongle at 137MHz. The wav files are then processed and converted to digital files via wxtoimg.  However, my scripts were saving all these raw audio files.  The poor little Pi 64Gig "file system" simply ran out of space.  So much that the OS could barely boot, took some quick interrupts of the boot process, disabling all crontab entries, removing the dongle... to get the OS up so that I could look at it, and finally (DUH!) so there was no more space. 

A little digging around found a .noaa-v2 environment variable called "DELETE_AUDIO"... which I've now set to "enabled" to hopefully remove the old files automatically, sparing me a headache a few months from now when this would inevitably happen again!