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- Aug 28, 2019
SBC / Low Power boards general - Raspberry Pi and what not
- Thread starter tehpope
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Moist Boys
kiwifarms.net
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- Mar 15, 2023
Christopher Barnatt from Explaining Computers scratches the autism button in the most dry and deadpan way possible. When he opens things, he has a minor character named "Mr. Scissors". It's a pair of scissors.
- Joined
- Jul 6, 2021
fuck a board with PoE or anything actually useful, no, why not a rainbow keyboard.
I long for the day when Radxa's line of SBCs are actually in stock and have better software support.
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2020
Personally, the Pi 500+ seems silly. I have a 500 for a "Garage" computer to look things up when I'm working on stuff but it doesn't need fancy colored keys. Nor does using them in an educational or similar environment.
I skimmed through it, but I didn't see him mention the laptop that seems like inspiration for the mockup in the screenshot.
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2019
Jeff Geerling mentioned there being room for PoE on the Pi 500+, kind of like the unpopulated M.2 from before: https://youtu.be/Dv3RRAx7G6E?t=257
For their SBCs, they lean on the optional HATs to add PoE. I guess they will never make it present by default: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/poe-hat/
You have to do some mental gymnastics or really be into mechanical keyboards for it to make sense. A discount like Micro Center -$20 + open box -20% would help too.
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- Apr 21, 2013
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2019
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2020
Stanley the Knife is another minor character, named after a popular brand of box cutter (a box cutter is commonly known as a "Stanley Knife" in the UK and Australia).
Christopher is one of my favourite tech YouTubers.
I can see the appeal of the Pi 500+ if you're a hardcore Pi fan and don't already have a Pi 400 or Pi 500, or if you can't stand the keyboard on either of those. imho the Pi 400's keyboard is little better than a rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum, and I would consider buying a Pi 500+ to replace my Pi 400 if I used said Pi 400 on a regular basis.
But yeah... it feels like the Raspberry Pi Foundation is straying a little further from its roots with every new product release.
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2020
I finally broke down and got my travel Pis mostly setup.
One, a Pi 5, has an encrypted NVMe drive attached and a second Wifi on USB. The internal WiFi acts as a local hotspot then I set the 2nd one to connect to the hotel or other guest wireless. This way I only need to auth once for all my devices to share the uplink. Eventually it will also handle the VPN back to my home network so I don't have to enable it on each device. the NVMe carries all my TV shows, MATI I haven't watched and a copy of $HOME from my home network. It exports as SMB, NFS and HTTP to the internal network. Either the Wifi or Pi Ethernet port.
The second Pi is a Pi zero 2w which just acts as a 'smart' Wifi harddrive. It can do the same as #1 but just has a 1.5TB microSD that I used to use in my phone and has my portable media so I no longer need to copy it to each device. The idea is I can hook it to a powerbank and just copy the next couple shows I want to watch to the iPad or Phone before, or while I'm on a plane.
One, a Pi 5, has an encrypted NVMe drive attached and a second Wifi on USB. The internal WiFi acts as a local hotspot then I set the 2nd one to connect to the hotel or other guest wireless. This way I only need to auth once for all my devices to share the uplink. Eventually it will also handle the VPN back to my home network so I don't have to enable it on each device. the NVMe carries all my TV shows, MATI I haven't watched and a copy of $HOME from my home network. It exports as SMB, NFS and HTTP to the internal network. Either the Wifi or Pi Ethernet port.
The second Pi is a Pi zero 2w which just acts as a 'smart' Wifi harddrive. It can do the same as #1 but just has a 1.5TB microSD that I used to use in my phone and has my portable media so I no longer need to copy it to each device. The idea is I can hook it to a powerbank and just copy the next couple shows I want to watch to the iPad or Phone before, or while I'm on a plane.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
The problem with a lot of tehse cyberdecks I see - and a problem that rarely gets mentioned - is that the battery life is often abysmal. Barely three hours at the very best, mostly less if you actually use it for anything. They're basically not portable at that point. What's the point if not having a measure of portability? It's fine in my opinion if they're not ultra-portable (meaning you could for instance use them comfortably sitting on a bench in a park, smartphones and tablets will never be topped there) but they should at least be "portable" (meaning you could comfortably transport them from working space to working space where you spend a few hours working on them at location, without needing a power socket nearby). If they can't fulfill the latter without a power socket they're pointless IMO and you might as well carry a mini PC around and have a proper PC. Get a portable monitor, a small keyboard, and you have a great "semi-mobile" setup. Really. if you want the cyberdeck form factor, do it with one (or several) microcontrollers. They're dizzingly powerful now (you can run something like ulisp or a forth and pretend it's your OS, which it is) and you can combine several. Even in a small case, if cleverly done with a carefully selected screen, you'll get a battery runtime measured in days.
Small update from my luggage project that I am sure is the talk of the farms: I just can't live with the screen for long stretches of time. It isn't so much the size or even the low resolution, but the general quality of the panel and mostly the aspect ratio which feels cramped after a while, no mattter what you do on it. In contrast, I have a 9.7" panel at 2048x1536 (old iPad panel, if you google for it you can find it) at the objectively superior aspect ratio of 4:3 I use as monitor on my Amiga 600 (for which it is excellent) which I can use for hours and hours on end, no eye strain or size annoyance. I'd love to use something like that, even though it is bigger. I ordered more of these panels for other assorted retro systems and got thinking that the panel definitively has to be replaced, even if it means changing everything.
The battery time is long. My calculation turned out to be very conservative and I ended up making the battery a big bigger, too, because there was so much space. I traveled around the european countryside a lot this year and battery time was basically never a concern or something I needed to think about and I just topped it off whenever it seemed appropriate. If I had to wager a guess, in my normal usage pattern the battery lasts about a week. This is with an MCU keyboard controller running and a tiny 8 bit STM for housekeeping tasks. I also threw in an LTE modem (for interfacing with my computer at home and access to LLM APIs) and a small USB hub and it basically doesn't matter, power-wise.
With some longer term experience I can now say that the mainline kernel support is a bit hit-and-miss. There's no proper support for idle, and the GPU drivers wig out sometimes with X in strange ways, like not filling the screen completely. Beware of "good mainline support" proclamations, not-x86 is always spotty IMO. Video hardware decoding is theoretically reachable if you jump through a lot of hoops but I gave up and that should tell you everything about it there is to know.
Cool machine anyways, also it's limitation to being basically an (e)lisp machine being used far away from home inspires a creativity I don't have at home with all my luxuries and distractions there. For example, I completely reworked emacs' deprecated wordstar mode into something modern and actually working I use now, something I would have never had the patience or inclination to do at home. That's pretty cool. I love typing on a proper keyboard vs. these completely castrated "humiliation ritual" notebook keyboards and it makes me feel like a writer traveling with his typewriter. The screen is a pain in the ass for long sessions though, easily the weakest link and something needs to be done here. I ended up not doing a lot of retrogaming or tv show watching on it, mostly since it's something I just apparently don't really feel like doing when traveling.
I am still kinda jonesing for a proper eink screen and there is a ~10" one by Dasung with 60 Hz (!) refresh. My guess is that the refresh is fake in some way but it looked good enough in videos I saw (I mean, you're not gonna play vidya or watch movies on it anyways) - also 4:3 (1872x1404 which at 10.3" is ~227 PPI which means crisp vector fonts even at small sizes) which as it is known the best aspect ratio for a computer monitor there is. They also exist in color but the screen is considerably less contrast rich and the color palette is only 12 bit, IIRC. There'd also be the possibility to take some waveshare eink SPI/USB based panel and write drivers for it but all their fast refresh ones just up and disappeared it seems, I can't find any of them for a reasonable price, even reasonable considering eink. Might be worth a thought to turn the Radxa into a keyboard computer (making some small modifications to the keyboard case of choice to lead out mini-HDMI and USB) and then use an external screen that's powered through it. You could then also externalize the battery cell, put it into it's own case too, or work it into a backpack that can also carry the rest of the computer when not in use. You'd lose the homegrown effect of the luggable, but it might turn out to be the more practical setup, especially since it allows you to interchange parts on demand, for example the monitor. I did invest quite a bit of work in the luggable though and it would feel kinda wrong to just completely abandon it but such is the evolution of engineering something. We'll see.
Small update from my luggage project that I am sure is the talk of the farms: I just can't live with the screen for long stretches of time. It isn't so much the size or even the low resolution, but the general quality of the panel and mostly the aspect ratio which feels cramped after a while, no mattter what you do on it. In contrast, I have a 9.7" panel at 2048x1536 (old iPad panel, if you google for it you can find it) at the objectively superior aspect ratio of 4:3 I use as monitor on my Amiga 600 (for which it is excellent) which I can use for hours and hours on end, no eye strain or size annoyance. I'd love to use something like that, even though it is bigger. I ordered more of these panels for other assorted retro systems and got thinking that the panel definitively has to be replaced, even if it means changing everything.
The battery time is long. My calculation turned out to be very conservative and I ended up making the battery a big bigger, too, because there was so much space. I traveled around the european countryside a lot this year and battery time was basically never a concern or something I needed to think about and I just topped it off whenever it seemed appropriate. If I had to wager a guess, in my normal usage pattern the battery lasts about a week. This is with an MCU keyboard controller running and a tiny 8 bit STM for housekeeping tasks. I also threw in an LTE modem (for interfacing with my computer at home and access to LLM APIs) and a small USB hub and it basically doesn't matter, power-wise.
With some longer term experience I can now say that the mainline kernel support is a bit hit-and-miss. There's no proper support for idle, and the GPU drivers wig out sometimes with X in strange ways, like not filling the screen completely. Beware of "good mainline support" proclamations, not-x86 is always spotty IMO. Video hardware decoding is theoretically reachable if you jump through a lot of hoops but I gave up and that should tell you everything about it there is to know.
Cool machine anyways, also it's limitation to being basically an (e)lisp machine being used far away from home inspires a creativity I don't have at home with all my luxuries and distractions there. For example, I completely reworked emacs' deprecated wordstar mode into something modern and actually working I use now, something I would have never had the patience or inclination to do at home. That's pretty cool. I love typing on a proper keyboard vs. these completely castrated "humiliation ritual" notebook keyboards and it makes me feel like a writer traveling with his typewriter. The screen is a pain in the ass for long sessions though, easily the weakest link and something needs to be done here. I ended up not doing a lot of retrogaming or tv show watching on it, mostly since it's something I just apparently don't really feel like doing when traveling.
I am still kinda jonesing for a proper eink screen and there is a ~10" one by Dasung with 60 Hz (!) refresh. My guess is that the refresh is fake in some way but it looked good enough in videos I saw (I mean, you're not gonna play vidya or watch movies on it anyways) - also 4:3 (1872x1404 which at 10.3" is ~227 PPI which means crisp vector fonts even at small sizes) which as it is known the best aspect ratio for a computer monitor there is. They also exist in color but the screen is considerably less contrast rich and the color palette is only 12 bit, IIRC. There'd also be the possibility to take some waveshare eink SPI/USB based panel and write drivers for it but all their fast refresh ones just up and disappeared it seems, I can't find any of them for a reasonable price, even reasonable considering eink. Might be worth a thought to turn the Radxa into a keyboard computer (making some small modifications to the keyboard case of choice to lead out mini-HDMI and USB) and then use an external screen that's powered through it. You could then also externalize the battery cell, put it into it's own case too, or work it into a backpack that can also carry the rest of the computer when not in use. You'd lose the homegrown effect of the luggable, but it might turn out to be the more practical setup, especially since it allows you to interchange parts on demand, for example the monitor. I did invest quite a bit of work in the luggable though and it would feel kinda wrong to just completely abandon it but such is the evolution of engineering something. We'll see.
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2018
it definitely doesnt look like its 60Hz on video, but damn if it isnt fast for an eink. i wonder how much that refresh affects the power consumption though, which in my mind is one of the main reasons someone would even use an eink in the firstplace
- Joined
- Jul 6, 2021
Have you seen SHARP memory displays? They are a hybrid between LCD and E-ink but with low power consumption https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2019
I read text, books, or comics on tablets/laptops frequently, preferring infinite scrolling to page turning. Smooth scrolling and responsive UI alone would be a significant improvement for e-ink, while only intermittently using power.
For the larger e-ink displays (10-11" is pretty large for a tablet and there are ~23" desktop displays), you could pull off picture-in-picture, showing a small video in the corner overlaid on text content. Only the portion of the display being refreshed should be contributing to the overall power consumption, so it should be much less than playing video full screen.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
Yes, I thought so too but I did the research when my luggable project came together and believe it or not, eink is actually not all that low power if there's constant refreshes going on. Couple that with the fact that all kinds of eink monitor setups usually are pretty niche and don't have these off-the-shelf 1-chip-solution ASICs normal monitors have now and often use things like FPGAs and the power consumption of your average eink monitor is actually a bit higher than of a normal monitor. I hope that is not the case if you make small partial refreshes on a hopefully somewhat better put together screen like the Dasung. The trick ereaders use to be so low power is to redraw the page when you turn it and then basically cut the eink panel off and put whatever ARM SoC they use to sleep immediately. In monitor use on a normal OS it's not that simple I'm afraid.
I have some very DIY eink kit (panel + old mining FPGA modified for that eink software) from china and the power consumption was one of the highest I measured between my panel candidates for the project, IIRC. Same with anything OLED. If you want to have high power efficiency while maintaining maximal flexibility, the boring answer is to go with a VN or IPS panel. What I'd be doing here is to sacrifice some power efficiency for the "luxury" of eink, I don't believe the Dasung will use less power than the panel I already have. It's more likely it'll use the same (if lucky) or more. I'll order the Dasung and just see how it is, it's the only way to find out.
eink is a weird niche technology that's only still alive because it has a particular "appearance" some people (including me) really like. It's actually not particularly good at anything, including power consumption. It's only saving grace there is that it retains the image when the power is cut.
P
The more I think about it, the more I actually like the idea of a keyboard computer with an external battery brick. If there's room you could add a small battery to the keyboard too, so you would not have to shut down the computer if you switch power sources. The keyboard in question would need to be of decent enough size and plastic. A lot of the retro-fashioned mechanical keyboard kits have quite a bit of empty space because old keyboards were hefty. Instead of carrier PCBs you could secure things by filling the case with silicone which also would be easy to remove. Would need to carefully cut additional openings for connectors but it's not that hard (maybe slightly harder than in metal) and you could make it all fancy with laser-cut metal coverings too. You'd not be beholden then to one particular screen but just could connect it to whatever. Bit of a tight fit at any rate but especially considering the S905Y2 needs no cooling whatsoever, I think it can be done. The NCR80 or M0110 might or might not be candidates for the modification, I might look for measurements or order empty cases. There's also many full sized original cherry keyboards that might be usable.
Sirius
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 12, 2025
Never obsolete.
Partial joke aside, I really don't know why this particular core has persisted for so long in low-power applications like phones and SBCs. The A55 is from 2017 and still hasn't killed it off. I've heard that the A510 (successor to the A55) is apparently more power-hungry and inefficient, kinda boggles my mind. Any of you know what makes the A53 so special? I'm not the best with hardware, sorry.
Partial joke aside, I really don't know why this particular core has persisted for so long in low-power applications like phones and SBCs. The A55 is from 2017 and still hasn't killed it off. I've heard that the A510 (successor to the A55) is apparently more power-hungry and inefficient, kinda boggles my mind. Any of you know what makes the A53 so special? I'm not the best with hardware, sorry.
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2013
simplicity, low power draw, and small die size.
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2019
*Checks tablet* yeah I have eight of those.Never obsolete.
Partial joke aside, I really don't know why this particular core has persisted for so long in low-power applications like phones and SBCs. The A55 is from 2017 and still hasn't killed it off. I've heard that the A510 (successor to the A55) is apparently more power-hungry and inefficient, kinda boggles my mind. Any of you know what makes the A53 so special? I'm not the best with hardware, sorry.
I don't think Arm improved the A55 or A510 very much. I specifically remember AnandTech dissing the A510. You have to go to Wayback to find it because Future Plc are scum:
Older A55 coverage: page 1 + page 4
It's also possible that companies stuck with the old cores for licensing fee or legal reasons. I recall Allwinner stuck to all old core designs for a comically long time and got made fun of on CNX. Maybe a Chyna issue.
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2019
We got a big deal here.
Ars Technica: Qualcomm buys Arduino, releases new Raspberry Pi-esque Arduino board
CNX Software: Qualcomm acquires Arduino, introduces Arduino UNO Q “dual-brain” SBC
Ars Technica: Qualcomm buys Arduino, releases new Raspberry Pi-esque Arduino board
CNX Software: Qualcomm acquires Arduino, introduces Arduino UNO Q “dual-brain” SBC
@NH-8340
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Sirius
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 12, 2025
This doesn't actually seem all that bad. I think the A53 is a fantastic product even today for embedded devices (and well, Arduino stuff). I only expressed frustration with its continued use in consumer electronics, things like phone SoCs. It kinda reminds me of how the Intel Quark CPUs were using the same architecture as old Pentiums since they did the job and didn't use a lot of energy.