malcolmputer

I think for me the main issue is the lack of a decent search. Take for example buying a power supply from Newegg.com or Amazon.com:

I want a 750W PSU, made by Corsair, Seasonic, Antec, or NZXT with at least 4 Molex, at least 1 GPU power (8pin) and a Platinum efficiency rating.

With newegg I can set those filters, then sort by lowest price or highest reviews or re-evaluate the filters.

With Amazon I can search for 750W Power supply, and then maybe have some of the choices on the left, but not every vendor lists their product correctly.

Looks like the rpi3 may have onboard ethernet and wifi, but it's still just one ethernet (100Mbit to boot) and single band wifi.

The point still stands that a $30 router blows away a rpi in terms of network connectivity (which should matter for a router).

They are really completely different ecosystems, each with their own use cases, but off the top of my head:

1. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically break out the ethernet interfaces, and require a USB>Ethernet.

2. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically have onboard wifi, this means you will be putting all of your traffic over USB, which as AC rollout happens you don't have enough bandwidth/latency with USB 2.0

3. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically have multiple ethernet interfaces.

A "Standard" OpenWRT router has between 2 and 5 onboard ethernet interfaces, a small power efficient processor, and between 1 and 6 onboard high power Wifi interfaces.

Now, Monowall/pfsense can be a great route to go, but even then you don't use an Rpi because you want your interfaces hanging off of PCIe instead of USB.

  Location: Plano (DFW) Texas
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: PCB Design, Schematic work, Design for Manufacture, Hardware Design
  Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rvus7c3m7gt4y0n/resume_Malcolm_Galland.pdf?dl=0
  Email: malcolmputer@gmail.com

The other way to see progress on `dd` is to issue a signal 3 (USR1, iirc) to the dd process. kill -3 <dd pid>

Be careful with this on some distributions and compilations of DD. Purely anecdotal evidence, but in college I had a friend imaging a very large (5400RPM) drive and about 10 hours into the process he lamented that he wished he could see how far along it was.

I popped open a terminal, ps -A |grep dd, kill -USR1 $PID, and it just exited.

He was rather pissed that I lost him 10 hours.

Yeah, I am still working on that. You will notice my HN profile is less than a day old.

If you want to go that route, have a contractor review at various stages. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two, and most contractors will do it with the hope that if you make it big you will remember them and their services.

1. Contextual Electronics does have a really good course on kicad.

2. Kicad is a very good PCB software package.

Word of warning though, kicad is currently in a state of "flux" with the latest stable from 2013, and the bleeding edge versions having all of the features you want to use. I personally use nightly builds and the 2013 version quite often, and neither are what I would call professionally stable.

I can recommend Practical Electronics for Inventors. It is very helpful in getting practical prototypes designed pretty quick. I sometimes still refer to it when I need something simple I haven't designed in a while.

Honest advice? Hire someone to do it. There are so many things that you won't know about how to make things manufacture-able it would be worth your time and money to just pay a contractor/employee to optimize things for you.

(shameless plug, my username @ gmail.com if you would like to discuss what services I can offer you)