This is in the nature of a ‘just for fun’ post.
The Raspberry Pi is a ‘credit card’ sized computer that was originally developed to help children become interested in programming. Costing only around $35, it is a fully fledged computer that runs the Linux Operating system and can be used for a wide variety of purposes – including being a FHIR server!
To test this out, I downloaded the HAPI CLI Server on to my Raspberry Pi 3 and set it up in the same way as on any other Linux server. Somewhat to my surprise it worked!
Here’s a picture of the pi3 (not that particularly exciting I admit)
and here’s a screen dump of ‘top’ – showing the pi struggling (the Java process is the HAPI server) – but succeeding!
Interestingly the cpu usage drops off markedly once the server is up and running, though the memory seems to remain at around 85%
Performance wise, it actually isn’t too bad – once it has fully initialized. Getting a conformance statement for the first time takes ages (sometimes times out) but after that saving and querying for resources is sub-second. It really does consume all the pi’s resources though – even connecting via SSH from a remote computer can be flaky if the HAPI server is running.
But the fact is that it runs. And James reckons that there is a lot of stuff in the server that could be disabled to create a ‘lite’ version that will perform much better on small devices – we’ll talk more at the Montreal Connectathon next week.
So it becomes quite feasible to have a home-based FHIR enabled system that communicates via wifi or bluetooth (the pi3 supports both ‘on the card’) – for $35!
cool eh?