Last night I installed Immich on an HP laptop with ease. The issue I came up against is that laptops sleep and hibernate after a few minutes unless you are actively using them. This means that you need to use them whilst files are being transferred if you do not want tasks to be interrupted. That’s why, this morning I decided to try installing immich on two different raspberry Pi devices.
Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.
I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them.
For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.
Yesterday I decided to play with the Common Unix Printing system (CUPS). I followed this tutorial and within a reasonable amount of time I had set up a pi 3 to serve as a print server for an old printer. Sometimes you use printers and scanners by plugging them in to the laptop you’re currently using. With modern macs this means finding a USB 2 to USB C connector, moving to the room with the printer or scanner, plugging in, printing or scanning and then moving on.
For a long time I wasn’t tempted to play with Home Assistant or the Apple Home app. I don’t have smart light bulbs, or a smart fridge, or a thermostat that I can control remotely. I don’t have solar panels that are feeding a battery. In essence I thought that if I played with Home Assistant I would not be able to do anything. Now I see that this idea was wrong.
Today I installed Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 and configured it so that the router routes traffic through the Pi Hole before returning to the devices on my network. Installing Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 is relatively straight forward. Find the two or three lines of code, run them, and a minute or two later the device is ready and waiting.
You’re then asked to give the Pi a static IP address, and to modify the DHCP DNS listing so that traffic from the Swisscom router, in my cae, passes through the Pi Hole before arriving at the desired machine.
While playing with Nextcloud I saw that the raspberry pi was overheating so I played with a fan for people to cool the device. It worked well, except that when you’re holding a fan you’re stuck holding a fan. I looked at various Raspberry pi cases and decided to get a Joy-IT case with an integrated fan.
The case is simple. It consists of a base plate, a middle block, and a top plate.
Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with Nextcloudpi. The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.