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Yes, some days I don't even bother to gnaw through the straps...
Is there some way to get around the CP restriction against direct contact? We used to be able to directly email our peers, but Chris told me that it became a privacy problem, and had to be discontinued. I have a need for a SCADA solution, and your skills would be valuable in finding a solution, given the need for a IoT approach. Yes, there are companies who do this stuff commercially, but I like to include family members in my solutions, and CP members are family. Any thoughts?
Will Rogers never met me.
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sure. can you discord?
I'm honey the codewitch on there. we can exchange contact info on that platform.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Roger Wright wrote: We used to be able to directly email our peers, but Chris told me that it became a privacy problem, and had to be discontinued.
Not totally, but restricted to badges (I can still see it).
Roger Wright wrote: I have a need for a SCADA solution, and your skills would be valuable in finding a solution, given the need for a IoT approach.
which kind of SCADA? Depending on brand I could help too
Roger Wright wrote: Any thoughts?
If you don't have Discord... I already have witch'es contact, I can send you an email, once you answer me back, I can connect you both
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
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That would be great!
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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That would be great! I'm not sure yet where I want to go with this SCADA thing, but something has to be done. I'm running a solar farm backed by a Tesla Megapack, connected to a highly reactive grid with a trio of diesel generators on it. Twice now we've experienced outages that are completely unexplained because there is no decent metering at the various load points on the campus. I can't diagnose or fix these events without the ability to monitor and record!
Will Rogers never met me.
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pm sent
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I should note that I've not worked with anything explicitly called SCADA, but I've worked in environments where they were basically SCADA, like when I was monitoring potlines with moto 6800s at an Alcoa aluminum smelting facility.
I was going to land something using Wago PLC, but then my contact for that project dried up. I don't know what happened to it, so I learned about it a bit, but I haven't used it.
I already have thoughts in terms of monitoring, but one thing I'm not is an electrical engineer, particularly with analog circuits and high power circuits. I can do simple discrete digital circuits, so it all depends on what you need from me. I would certainly need someone to be point on the electrical end of things.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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SCADA is just an acronym for System Control And Data Acquisition, and the control and reporting are all digital. The actual measurements are made with transducers that digitize key signals that need monitoring. Possibly one of the most useful would be the abilty to capture signal levels in a streaming fashion, but retaining measurements for a set period of time so that, when an event is triggered, it is possible to rewind for a time to see what led up to the event. For instance, I recently had a transformer failure - complete meltdown - in the solar yard. Clear across campus, on the one meter I can access, we recorded a 1600 Amp neutral current two days before the meltdown. That signifies a huge fault in a single phase of the grid, but there's no way to tell where it might have happened. Distributed measuring and recording modules, interconnected and capable of sounding alerts, would make this a whole lot easier!
We also control the PV Inverters and diesel generators using a Tesla Site Controller via MODBUS/TCP communications, and Tesla doesn't record any logs of the commands sent or the responses received! Who does that??? I suspect that they actually do keep a record, but won't admit it because of their paranoid secrecy about proprietary systems. Sadly, there's no way to prove that. But if I could find a way to configure a device that can record every bit of traffic on those communications lines, I'd know a lot more about what's really going on!
Will Rogers never met me.
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I looked it up before I responded. It does seem familiar, but I've never actually seen the term before you used it.
As far as your project, that sounds interesting. It would be a bit of a learning curve to understand all the moving pieces, but yeah - let's see if one of the senior CPers here can connect us. 
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Barring that, I've sent you a missive on Discord. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Done
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Years ago I took a very pricey gunsmithing course which delivered content via DVDs. The first round was about 90 DVDs, plus a number of individual armorer's courses over the years. That brought Level II Professional as a certification point, and covered in detail about 400 to 500 types of gun. I didn't bother to advance to the Master-level courses, since a lot of the cost was all the tools they included; I already owned those tools - lathe, mill, grinders, band saw, welding equipment, etc. I recently found they have yet another level - Advanced Master - which builds on the previous work I'd done and adds a few hundred more DVDs, but no longer includes the tools. Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years, and I know DVDs don't last forever.
Is there a machine I can buy to speed up copying a bunch of Gunsmithing DVDs to a single HDD to avoid the risk of losing the information. I know many of you have been copying music to HDDs; what do you to make this simpler?
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger - sounds you are more into guns than DVDs. I'd recommend staying out of DYI and look for a professional company that does it for a living. Your request is certainly a niche'. Example: I had a bunch of compact VHS, 8mm, and VHS family tapes. Shipped them off and the company affordably (and no stress on my part) created mp3s.
Charlie Gilley
“Microsoft is the virus..."
"the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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charlieg wrote: sounds you are more into guns than DVDs.
It's a hobby, but one I can fall back on for income in bad times.
I hadn't thought about using a copy service, since this is copyrighted material and I expect many companies might balk at that. But I do have a legal right to make a backup, I believe - at least, it used to be true. But I like our resident codewitch's idea of using SSD for longevity. I'll look into that.
Will Rogers never met me.
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My friend melted his motherboard doing what you're looking to do, running massive transfers overnight.
The mean time between failure for an HDD is 5 years, and you're about to put a year of wear on it in a matter of days. Get an SSD. Its MTBF is closer to 20 years
You're probably better off just copying the discs, to be honest.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Thanks for the idea! I hadn't considered that option, but it makes perfect sense. I may work out a plan to copy each disk, after I watch it, to a spare HDD, creating an index of some sort, and a structured file folder system to make it easier to find specific topics. Once the content is copied, I'll know how big a SSD I need, and I can buy it and do a bulk copy. That way I'll still have it all long enough that I can give it to someone in my Will!
Will Rogers never met me.
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If you use a ssd keep it in mind it has a limited amount of write cycles, which is probably fine for using it as a backup. But I've read that it needs to be powered on every now and then to refresh the nand memory.
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Jacquers wrote: But I've read that it needs to be powered on every now and then to refresh the nand memory.
I read that there are new types that get rid of that, but they still were expensive. Last 2 years I didn't check, maybe they got cheaper?
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Roger Wright wrote: Manually copying this much material to a HDD wil take years
Let me put a word in favor of manual copying. My collection has about 400 DVD's and the "pipeline" is very simple: create an ISO image; use Handbrake to convert it to MP4. It takes only about 15-20 min to create an ISO image and I do other things while DVD's are being copied. When copying is complete the program makes a ring-a-ding and I just plop another DVD in there. Conversion to MP4 takes much longer but Handbrake allows you queue many jobs that I let running overnight. I never kept track of how much time I actually spent converting those DVD's, but now if I do a short calculation, turns out to be about 2 full weeks.
I keep both ISO images and the MP4 in case I decide to fiddle around with Handbrake parameters (it has so freaking many parameters!) to get a better image.
Mircea
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Thanks for the tip, Mircea!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Long time ago, I had problems with my HDD and a friend of mine burnt a CD in Linux that took 1,5 minutes to be done. In Windows back at that time it had at least needed 15 minutes and that without checking for errors.
You could have a try with a plain dumb linux installation and some kind of ripper to *.iso? (you can later use Daemon Tools or something like that to use the *.iso in a virtual DVD)
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Ripping to ISOs is obviously going to be the fastest, but in terms of total storage requirements, I'd be looking at then converting to MP4 or some other format, as others have suggested.
Personally, I'm paranoid and wouldn't feel comfortable getting rid of either the original discs or the ISO files until I've watched at least a few. I've seen problems in the past where, after encoding, the audio would slowly drift from the video over time, so after (say) 90 minutes, people's mouths would be moving out of sync with the voices you heard. I don't know of any way to verify this without sitting through the entire thing.
Also I wouldn't simply copy to DVD-Rs (unless I misunderstood some people's suggestions). The idea is to move away from the hundreds of discs and onto something more convenient. A big pile of files sitting on a single hard disk is a lot easier to deal with than a big pile of discs. Even uncompressed, you can put nearly 1000 dual-layer (8.5GB) DVDs on an 8TB hard drive, which are pretty cheap nowadays.
Keep at least two copies of everything (one on a hard drive, another on SSDs?)...don't assume one's more reliable than the other. Then as larger capacity drives come out over the years, copy (don't move) the files onto the larger ones. Don't get rid of the other (older) drives unless you can make a few bucks from them, I suppose. Depends on how valuable this all is to you.
And if you're going to re-encode video, I suggest you look at the H.265 codec. It's intended for high resolution video, but still works very well for DVD - the resulting files are much smaller, and as long as the bitrate remains high enough, you won't be able to tell, visually, the difference with the originals. I would also imagine this sort of material is recorded (at best) with 2-channel stereo, and not wasting bits on 6-channels. H.265 takes longer to encode, and you need a somewhat faster processor to play it back in real time than older formats, but unless you're dealing with something like a 10-year old CPU, that should generally not be a problem nowadays.
I'm late to this thread, but I hope there was something valuable in there.
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Very helpful information! And yes, this material is mostly recorded lectures and demonstrations of how to analyze firearm failures, fabricate new parts, and fit them to make repairs. There's no fast parts, no high quality audio, just straight training. The originals I got 8 years ago were actually VHS recordings transferred to DVDs, so quality is really not a huge issue. Preserving the information is all that I care about, and having all of it in one physical place would be helpful simply to save space! With the new additions, I probably have 15' to 20' of shelf space needed.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: With the new additions, I probably have 15' to 20' of shelf space needed.
Wow!
Just think, you'll be able to carry this on a few MicroSD cards 
...and speaking of which: Large/cheap MicroSD cards and thumbdrives sold on Amazon (and other resellers) have been reported as downright fraudulent. Some cards will let you write to them, the OS report no error when writing, but the data's just missing. If you later try to re-read the files, there's nothing to be read back. So I wouldn't trust one of those until you know you can fill it and read it back. Steve Gibson has written a tool just for that verification purpose.
Not that a MicroSD card of thumbdrive would be my first choice when it comes to long-term storage for data of this nature.
modified 4hrs ago.
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dandy72 wrote: would also imagine this sort of material is recorded (at best) with 2-channel stereo, and not wasting bits on 6-channels. H.265 takes longer to encode,
Current hardware from anyone here should be more than able to cope with it
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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