Cabinet with raspberry pi -- ran out of disk space

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rincorvia
 
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Cabinet with raspberry pi -- ran out of disk space

Post by rincorvia »

Hey guys. My students made an arcade cabinet powered by a raspberry pi zero. They used the firmware and wonderful directions you have here. https://learn.adafruit.com/makecode-arc ... rmware-3-1

Everything has been going great, however we have run out of disk space.

Whenever I try to drag a uf2 over it says that it is out of space. So far we have loaded about 32MBs of my students 40ish MBs of games. This is confusing since there is a 32GB card in there.

It is also really sad because I was hoping to be able to also load all of next semester’s students on to the cabinet also. So I’d need around 100MB of space for games. Is there anything I can do?

Here is a picture of it in our hallway. The kids flock around it every class exchange. It has turned a lot of students into programmers.
IMG_20221107_093240.jpg
IMG_20221107_093240.jpg (63.74 KiB) Viewed 1558 times

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blnkjns
 
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Re: Cabinet with raspberry pi -- ran out of disk space

Post by blnkjns »

I'm a little confused when I read the instructions. What software is running on the PI? Is it some simple runtime, and not a full Debian install?
You did format FAT32? The default for 32GB is usually ExFAT.

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keansargent
 
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Re: Cabinet with raspberry pi -- ran out of disk space

Post by keansargent »

Cool idea. Sorry you have problems with it.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Cabinet with raspberry pi -- ran out of disk space

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Unfortunately the SD image for that project is kind of complicated: it holds a very small OS called piCore which then uses a system called Docker to create a virtual Linux computer from the 9.0.3.gz file (which contains an entire Raspbian file tree).

By default, Raspbian assumes the SD card has a BOOT partition that holds 32MB. It looks like the data that builds the virtual filesystem still uses that 32MB limit, which is where you're running into size limits.

There isn't an easy fix for that, but I've sent a message to the author of the project to see if they know how to increase the size of the partition.

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rincorvia
 
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Re: Cabinet with raspberry pi -- ran out of disk space

Post by rincorvia »

Thank you so much. I have made a work around:

I load all the games I can onto the 32 partition. Then I pull the SD card out and backup the PRJ folder that has all the .elf files. Then I delete everything in the PRJ folder and put the SD card back into the pi.

Then I load more games onto 32mb partition and repeat the process of backing up until I have all the game .elf files backed up on my PC.

Finally, I put the SD card in my PC and merge all of the backups into the PRJ folder.

This work around is super slow. It requires me opening up the cabinet a few times to manually swap the card around.. but it works :)

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Cabinet with raspberry pi -- ran out of disk space

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

I'm glad to hear you found something that works.

I talked to the project developer, and modifying the partition sizes would be an advanced, in-depth project. The partitions don't exist physically.. instead they're emulated by the UF2 bootloader. To change the partition sizes would involve modifying the boodloader.

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