Use RS4D with RPi 4B and Raspbian Bullseye 64 Bit

Technical Support
1

I am considering to purchase an instance of RS4D. It will be the kit version. My use case involves placing it outdoors away from buildings and other noise sources. I already have a suitable power supply including solar panel and battery.
Comms is the main issue. I can purchase a 4G/5G USB dongle modem that can provide internet access. But I will need to run up a firewall to assist maintain security.
I am also considering hanging off some additional environmental sensors that connect to an existing IoT device that I have that lacks useful comms capability. But it could connect to an Rpi via Ethernet cable or I2C.

But all this makes me think that the standard RPI3 that comes with the prebuilt RS4D will not cut the mustard to run all those things including the siesmograph.
So an RPi4B comes to mind.
I like to keep everything the same.
My default OS of choice is Raspian11 /64 bit And I generally use a 64 Gbyte high grade microSD.

So that’s not what you supply on the SD card. It’s something else. You supply an image that is unzipped onto the S&D card. It’s not the standard way to install Raspbian, and it does not provide opportunity to set Locale, Wifi and other settings.

If I roll my own SD card to boot from using the standard Raspbian tool, I am going to need to install the Shaker programs separately. Whilst I get that your software is not open source, I do not see anywhere it can be downloaded from as installable distribution (not the disk image)

The user manual indicates that use of an RPi4B is an available option. But no information about how to build a new boot SD Card on your own OS boot disk. It’s also unclear if the software is happy to run on RPi’s having more than a teaspoon of RAM and 64 bit OS to boot.

Please advise me what’s possible here.

Secondary issues ? Well there’s the enclosure. It’s an acrylic thing that’s screwed together. But I’ll need an outdoor enclosure. What are my options ?

Thanks and cheers.

2

Hello bryn, and welcome to our community!

This sounds like a fascinating project to put together, a fully monitored low-noise Shake installation. It sounds awesome!

In regards to your observations, we ship all our Shakes with MLC-grade microSD cards (since 2018) but we also recommend using TLC-grade microSDs, due to their improved performance.

We do not have an installable distribution of the Shake software, which is built upon a Debian OS (raspberryShake-public / Raspshake Sd Img · GitLab). It is however possible to configure WiFi connections or dongles (How to configure Wifi and USB wifi dongles from command-line — Instructions on Setting Up Your Raspberry Shake) manually via command-line, or also via our rs.local/ interface.

Yes, some Pi4B modules are indeed supported, you will be able to find a complete list here: Technical Specifications — Instructions on Setting Up Your Raspberry Shake. We recommend that only the Shake OS runs on the Pi computer itself, to provide maximum processing power to the tasks it has to perform (Technical Specifications — Instructions on Setting Up Your Raspberry Shake), it is possible that, given a more powerful Pi base, more applications could be run at the same time. It will be a matter of experimenting with what you want to add, and check how much these additional software may or may not impact the performance of the Shake itself.

Onto the enclosure, we also have an IP67-grade outdoor enclosure that you can acquire from us, and that you can see by selecting the Outdoor variation in any Shake model on our shop (RS4D | Strong Motion Seismograph). It is fully weather proof, dust tight, and can also withstand being (temporarily, 30 minutes at 1 meter) submerged in water. External IP67 connectors will provide additional protection for power, LAN, and eventual GPS antenna.

If you have any other questions, or if I have missed something, I remain available.