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Raspberry Pi In Space
mikejuk (1801200) writes "When British astronaut Tim Peake heads off to the International Space Station in November, 2015, he will be accompanied on his 6-month mission by two augmented Raspberry Pis, aka Astro Pis. The Astro Pi board is a Raspberry Pi HAT (short for Hardware Attached on Top), and provides a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer, as well as sensors for temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity. It also has a real time clock, LED display, and some push buttons — it sounds like the sort of addon that we could do with down here on earth as well! It will also be equipped with both a camera module and an infra-red camera. UK school pupils are being challenged to write Raspberry Pi apps or experiments to run in space. During his mission, Tim Peake will deploy the Astro Pis, upload the winning code while in orbit, set them running, collect the data generated and then download it to be distributed to the winning teams.
The ISS itself uses radiation-hardened computers, but these "AstroPI" are just using stock chips. The only thing different afaict is the custom peripheral board. I would guess the duration of the experiment, combined with it not really being a mission-critical part, makes radiation hardening not needed.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The reason they use older laptops is not because of the density of the chips but simply because they're known commodities -- any quirks they have have already been figured out and they get the job done. Getting anything certified (for mission critical purposes) is a very time consuming process, and once it's done ... the item is no longer state of the art, that's just the nature of the beast.
The Raspberry Pis don't have to go through the same certification process, though of course if they were expected to only work "for eight seconds" I think NASA would have told the people sending them up that to pick something older. I'm guessing that NASA knows a bit about the radiation environment up there and advises people who send up experiments appropriately.
And as others have said ... humans are living in the same environment for months at a time -- it can't be *that* bad.
What, no "Pi in the sky" jokes? I'm disappointed.
I have never, ever seen this happen. I run mounted read-write, read-only, multiple partitions.
I run RPis off batteries, UPSes and dirty apartment building power with cheap Chinese power adapters. I've seen every combination of power loss during reads, writes, to primary or temporary fs.
Never ever seen corruption. I smell PEBKAC, as in your choice of sd card.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.