Hey all. I’ve finally decided to upgrade my ancient fuzzewuzze laptop/UNO brewpi system to Fermentrack. Some questions:
Is FT happy running on the latest rpi-4b and 64-bit rpi Foundation OS?
Actually, What I’d really like to do is keep using the laptop instead of an rpi because it’s got a nice screen for the UI and sits nicely on my chamber mini-fridge. Will FT run on the latest pi OS for PCs? (I didn’t even know that existed until tonight.) That’d be ideal. And I’d save a couple bucks not buying a rpi, which would be redundant.
Maybe I should just try it.
-100amps
Sorry for having missed this!
Short answer:
- Definitely works (tested) on the latest Raspbian running on RPi 3/4/400 (32-bit armv7/armv8 arch)
- Probably works (untested) on the latest Raspbain running on older RPis (1/Zero/Zero W/older 2s) (32-bit armv6 arch)
- Definitely works (tested) on the latest Ubuntu (and therefore probably Debian) running on traditional desktop/laptop hardware (64-bit amd64 arch)
- Possibly works on anything else you throw at it
The long answer:
Raspbian (now RPi Foundation OS) is based on Debian, but is designed to run on either the 32 bit armv6 (RPi Zero/1), armv7 (some RPi 2s), or armv8 (other RPi 2s, RPi 3, 4, and 400) architecture. As you noted, the newest armv8 Pis also support the 64 bit arm64 - for which they are
currently working on a 64 bit version of Raspbian. Raspbian packages are typically provided for the combination of the architecture and the debian distribution (e.g. wheezy, stretch, buster) that version of Raspbian is based on. Given that 99%+ of packages compiled for 32 bit armv7 work on armv8 they typically end up compiling the 32 bit packages twice per distribution - once for armv6 and once for armv7.
With the advent of the 64 bit RPi OS they now have to compile all the packages a third time - for arm64.
Fermentrack itself isn't compiled to binary, so as long as its dependencies are available it should work just fine. While I have tested and can guarantee availability for 32 bit armv7 on the latest distributions of Raspbian, I haven't tested it on other architectures. It should work on armv6 (though there are reasons I'd avoid the Pi Zeros if possible) and might work on arm64, though I haven't tested it.
In contrast to all the above, Debian for RPi Desktop is - as the name suggests - just Debian with some extra "stuff" thrown in. Debian has far wider package compatibility than Raspbian for desktop architectures - both 32 and 64 bit - so it's likely that anything that works on Raspbian will also work on Debian. Fermentrack works just fine on Ubuntu which is Debian based - even without the RPi Desktop "stuff". (My dirty little secret is that my "production" Fermentrack box is actually a VM running Ubuntu on my NAS at home. Tell no one.
)
Separate from all the above, again - python package compatibility is really the key. Fermentrack works great (after a few tweaks) on MacOS. I've also heard it works well on Windows. So long as you're willing to take the time to fix the supporting architecture around Fermentrack (or live with a few broken features) then you can probably get it up and running on whatever hardware/OS you have lying around!
With apologies, I didn’t realize there was a separate thread for Fermentrack. I thought this one was all things Thorrak.
All good - and again, sorry I missed this!
I prefer to use this thread for firmware questions, but there are plenty of Fermentrack questions asked here. There's also the
Fermentrack thread (where people sometimes ask BrewPi-ESP8266-related questions). There's the
TiltBridge thread for questions related to that - and the
BrewFlasher thread if you just want to flash some stuff.
And more coming soon!