Protecting RPi SD card from getting corrupt on daily power cycles

Question

I'll start off with my questions since they are general and give some background below...

My questions:

• Is there a way to protect the SD card from being corrupted from unexpected power loss? - Can I specify the filesystem as read-only and keep an area reserved for the user program and have that as read-write?

• Is it possible for a microcontroller connected to a monitor via an HDMI-to-DVI connector send a power ON/OFF command to the monitor? Any reference for this would be appreciated.

Background:

I have a Raspberry Pi board - on power Linux boots from SD and runs a user program. It is connected to a monitor, speakers, GPIOs, and LEDs.

The project requires that all the power gets cut everyday in order to save energy. The result of months of this happening is that the SD card became corrupt.

Your help is much appreciated,

Thank you.

Answer 1

There are numerous ways to use a read-only filesystem and protect the SD-card from corruption. However the solution depends on your requirements and what trade-offs you can afford.

Please have a look at my project Nard SDK
http://www.arbetsmyra.dyndns.org/nard/
which may fulfill your first need. It's a minimal OS for embedded Pi which runs entirely from RAM. After bootup one can even remove the SD card and it will continue to run just fine. It's not "Raspbian" though and thus has fewer applications available.