A_Rich

Hi all, I have a project I could do with some help on. I want to create a timer that triggers when a button is pushed and held. For the duration of time the button is held for, a timer should count up from zero in seconds until the button is released. This timer would be shown on a display attached to the Pi. For those who are wierd coffee people like me, I have an ECM Mechanika slim. This comes with a semi-manually actuated grouphead (E61), When the leaver is lifted, it pushes on a switch which then powers the pump. My thoughts are that a Pi Zero would be great for this due to its size and availability of screens for it, but something I noticed is that most screens will take up all the GPIO pins on the board. I've never gone into this kind of thing with much depth so I don't know how I'd send the switch signal into the Pi while also running the screen at the same time? I appreciate this is probably super basic, but the internet is a damn rabbit hole and I just want to know from some experienced people if I'm starting out on a rediculous task or not? Cheers! Note: I've not managed to measure the volatage accross the switch while it is activated, I know that while open, it's zero volts accross it. I did read somewhere that it may well be 120v across the switch while activated but i need to check with my machine to double check.

Hi all, I've just recently bought a new NAS to take my usable storage from 8tb up to 20ish, I'm currently migrating all my data accross onto the new server and I'm having a number of really frustrating issues. I managed to get a buffalo linkstation ls520d to help tide me over until I got hold oft this new nas, and it has a couple of big folders on it and I cant get them off it. One of the folders is about a terrabyte so not enormous but also not a quick 5 minute job. I keep trying to transfer it to the new server and each time the transfer starts out at about 50 or so MB/s and then after a couple of minutes just tanks down to 1 or 2 MB/s or even just fully stops doing anything. every so often it will also just disconnect fully, but no error codes are logged and I'm just left with a crashed transfer. I have no idea why it's so bad, all the cables are good, the nas receiving the data is coping fine when copying similar sized folders from elsewhere, it's just this linkstation being a pain. any tips would be great, I unforunately can't just take the disks out and transfer it directly from my computer as the linkstation is set up in to pool both its drives together in raid so that's a no go. the only thing I have left to try is to plug a passport drive into the back of the nas and copy using the built in usb 3.0 port but I'm guessing that's also going to be a right arsepain! note: I'm aware windows file transfer is not ideal at the best of times, so any suggestions of a different solution using windows but maybe via a different program would be appreciated! TIA

I've just started training on an indoor turbo trainer for my road bike, and using a game called Zwift to actually do my training on. Zwift is a game which requires a fairly decent gpu to run smoothly, at like 60fps. I have a rig in the house with a GTX 960 and an i5 4440, so no powerhouse, but ample for what i do most of the time. It's ideal for running the training software, but lives in the house. My training setup lives out in the garage, where its about 10+ degrees colder (and also away from people) which is also ideal. I am currently using an old laptop to run the software but it really isnt up to the task. I have a pc which im more than happy to leave in the garage, so my plan was to use steam in home streaming, which works great with the app. my only issue is that the trainer communicates to the software via an ANT+ dongle which sends all the information the game needs (power, speed, cadence etc.) currently, unless i could somehow route a 30ft+ usb connection via cable (not realistic by any means) im stuck. Steam uses VirtualHere as a usb pass-through on steam links but this doesn't seem to work on in home streaming. There seems to be loads of software online that will happily route a usb connection on a remote pc to a server, but they seem to cost waayy over $100 which is ridiculous. Does anyone have an idea how to do this for (hopefully) free? I would buy a steam link, but i would have to buy a new screen for the garage and it would start getting expensive if that was the case. Its something like this that i would like to do: https://www.flexihub.com/usb-over-ethernet/ (but without spending $160...)