Thanks both. I've already ordered a RPi3 in the post. £50 with a 3.5inch display hat and compatible case, power supply, memory card and the Pi itself. Everything I needed. The display will be used to display my solar panel generation webpage I've made on the RPi 1. Wifi means I can put it anywhere I'm not very comfortable with messing around a not very widely supported hardware with Linux, thanks for your offer on the Pine64+. Thanks Jake, I'm not very keen on buying an Atom based machine because it'd be overkill for my needs and being always-on, I am very mindful of power consumption.
Thanks for asking. I'm still working out the kinks. Is ExFAT the best file system format to use here? FAT32 is out because 4GB limit is stupid. EXT3 and 4 have journaling which are not ideal for USB stick, EXT2 doesn't seem to complete format command. So I apt-get exfat-fuse and formatted the drive on Windows. But once or twice I have found the mounted directory to be empty..... fuse seems to have crashed. So I'm thinking EXT2 might be the best file system? Speed-wise, I think the USB stick is now the bottleneck. It seems to download faster than my router used to download, and web GUI no longer hangs, so I'm quite happy when it works. The display is okay. I would like to find a way to turn it off but there doesn't seem to be a way. It's displaying my solar power generation graph via Dygraph. Still need to work out how to add points on dygraph and delete old points, rather than the graph flash every few seconds due to page refresh.
I'd say just stick it to Ext4 unless you need it work in windows in which case format it to NTFS and add that to the pi. Alternatively if you need to share it with windows, make the usb stick a network share via samba and leave it plugged in.
I've set up Samba, but there seems to be user permission problems when trying to delete files on it. It's on my long to-fix list. EXT4 has journaling, isn't that going to destroy the USB flash drive?
I doubt it's going to destroy it. A quick Google shows that journaling can be disabled on ext4 if you are concerned. Gareth is probably the man to confirm whether using ext4 is ill advised though.
