gadgetoid

Airmash still lives at https://airmash.online/ and there’s also a space mod - Starmash - at https://airmash.cc/

I apologise in advance for the hours you’ll lose to these (again?)

The community revived it to https://airmash.online/ pretty sharpish, does this count as dead?

Secret Lab Chairs still get away with listing totally imaginary “Non-Direct Pricing” despite the ASA saying- and I quote- “we think it likely to have breached the Advertising Codes (“the Codes”) that we administer.” And their 5-year warranty extension obliges you to become part of a social media Astro-turfing program- https://secretlab.co.uk/pages/redeem

Oh wait, did I forget about the Pi, Pi[co], Pi[nout] logo?- I was thinking of the earlier pixel-Raspberry logo.

Thanks! Aha, that was made in a bit of a hurry for pinout.xyz back in July 2013 when uhh I fell afoul of Raspberry Pi trademark terms! Necessity is the mother of invention.

That’s a good question- it could probably adopt some of the things I’ve learned from the Pico layout (light/dark modes for starters) but it’s left-aligned in order to fit text and details about individual add-on boards. It also once had a Pi outline peeking in from the top left to help people orient the pinout.

How do I summon Jeff Geerling - he just interviewed Eben on this very topic.

I can say that we - by which I mean my employer Pimoroni - will now sell you a whopping TEN Pi Zero W boards in one order.

It takes some time to decode, but I can grab- for example- this 259k JPEG: http://placekitten.com/3840/2160

And display it from the microSD card with this code: https://gist.github.com/Gadgetoid/0b8e352e377135d743338c9483...

As more or less demonstrated by this example: https://github.com/pimoroni/pimoroni-pico/blob/main/micropyt...

Decoding is done via Larry Bank's JPEGDEC: https://github.com/bitbank2/JPEGDEC

It uses roughly 20k RAM to provide the necessary buffers both for decoding JPEGs into blocks which are passed to a drawing routine that handles copying the data into the display RAM buffer (on our larger Inky display this is backed by PSRAM). I don't believe there's a hard limit to the size of the JPEGs you can display. The main bottlenecks are decoding time and the relatively limited scaling options: FULL, HALF, QUARTER, EIGHTH.

This aside, the authors solution is actually quite elegant. As long as you have control over the image pipeline there's no real reason to encumber the device with handling large (both in bytes and pixel dimensions) files. You'll also get much better dithering results writing your own routine to convert files from JPG to the raw 4-bits per pixel format for the display. Our built-in dithering is just a plain ordered dither matrix and, while quaint and retro, it leaves much to be desired visually.

If you're trying to use a public API you can also make GitHub actions automate the whole image conversion process and publish the results to GitHub pages. This works great for, for example, the daily XKCD, serving both to reformat the strip for the display, credit the author, extract the "alt" text and avoid excess requests to the origin. Eg: https://pimoroni.github.io/feed2image/xkcd-800x480-daily.jpg. Though the astute will notice I still opted for jpeg in this case.

They found an astonishing number of animal bones here, too- https://molaheadland.com/murder-they-croaked-investigating-a...

Not quite on topic, but a bit of Bar Hill Adjacent history- the local news mailer is archived on Archive.org dating back to 1967- https://archive.org/details/bar-hill-news?&sort=date

And there’s a screamingly quaint 1980s documentary about the village on YouTube- https://youtu.be/qIovK-4yq9I

Good effort for a place that’s 50% Tesco and Golf course.

Yeah, they are very definitely not production grade! But we had laser cutters, mylar sheets, pots of solder paste, questionable quality spatulas and way too many different prototype PCBs. A means to an end.

It didn’t really stay personal, but I built a very basic Raspberry Pi Pinout website hosted on a Raspberry Pi [1] back in 2013. The intent was to collect the pinouts for some boards I was tinkering with at the time. It got wildly out of hand since [2] [3], but I think the original site meets the spirit of this question.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20130505194305/Pi.Gadgetoid.com/... 2. https://pinout.xyz 3. https://pico.pinout.xyz

Laser cut Mylar stencils are an acceptable method of applying solder to pads if you have the means. And solder paste syringes are pricy but very, very handy if you need a little extra paste somewhere specific. Great little project! It’s been an age since I hand assembled anything like this. Makes me wish I was tooled up for more than just soldering headers.

The frustrating twist is that - under the hood - this screen is CMYK. There’s a magenta “ink”, which would fill out a huge gap in the colour gamut, that we can’t even use. The same applies to cyan. Both colours are fundamental to the display tech and yet poorly represented in the very boring 7-colour palette.

I don't know. If I claimed to uphold the sacred tenets of free speech and expression I probably wouldn't want to be associated with a website that has a profound chilling effect on free speech and expression.

Is hate and ridicule expressed publically and unchallenged not just a DDoS against a group of people's right to expression?

When it's evident that some speech can quell other speech, which speech do we choose?

Cloudflare say "both" by taking money from the oppressor and giving it to the oppressed. I'd suggest this is- while something of a poetic justice- wholly insufficient and that Cloudflare should exercise the morals they claim to possess.

I fear the definition of legal speech on our respective countries differs too vastly for me to venture any reasonable answer to this.

I suspect our personal interpretations for what constitutes censorship might also. To lay out my position- I don't believe that a DDoS attack is a foregone conclusion if protections are removed, and I don't believe that a DDoS attack resembles censorship any more than a traffic jam resembles imprisonment. Which - I suppose - means I concede that it does, somewhat.

I may be missing a trick here, but what - exactly - gives Cloudflare - a company that provides web services - the moral authority to flatly claim:

"that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities."

... and use that as a defense for inaction?

It's like saying "Oh, well I can't give the poor money, they might spend it on drugs."

Since they claim that their own moral compass aligns with those asking them to fire a customer, what precedent - exactly - would be set? Are they relying upon the notion that the moral tides might sway, and that the vulnerable and marginalized communities might become those under fire next? Why- given their moral standing- would they be complicit?

This doesn't add up. It feels like they're only paying lip service to a corporate moral stance that lacks any real substance (if it exists at all), and requires that they do nothing in public that might upset their customers/shareholders. It's rote, corporate apolitical cowardice. Morals sacrificed upon the alter of profit.

In conclusion it seems to me that claiming to know better than the marginalized and vulnerable people clamoring for action is a really deeply condescending take. Coupled with the narcissism dripping from the fire service analogy this all serves to do them rather less justice than just... saying nothing, or sticking with "free speech absolutism".

And... that's quite a feat, for something that only really intended to say "Sowwy, taking too visible a political stance is bad for business but we pinky pwomise we're tooootally on your side."

Yes, I sent them a heads up- they nuked it from orbit.

There’s no support for mapping external memory but you can apparently get creative: https://github.com/yocto-8/yocto-8/blob/main/doc/extmem.md

I haven’t come across an RP2040 I couldn’t overclock to 250+ MHz. Couple that with DMA into the PIO state machines and it smashes through stuff like the weird WS281X timings, HUB75 matrix scanning and even DVI and usually has a whole spare CPU core to actually do something with whatever device you’re driving.

It feels like it sits nicely between regular MCUs and the quirky every-peripheral-is-emulated-in-a-core awesomeness of the Parallax Propeller and - though I’m probably biased by experience and necessity - I love it.

Not quite the same ballpark yet, but I sincerely hope they get there. System76 are rolling their own distro - Pop!_OS - and their own tiling window management add-on - Pop! Shell - both of which I've switched to using even on a non System76 machine. Star Labs test with various Linux distros, but they haven't shown quite the same deep involvement with software, community and ecosystem yet. But that's no easy feat!

I can't comment on build quality- I've never laid hands on a System76 system, as alluring as they are! The Star Lite is pretty damned nice, feeling a bit like an 11" MacBook Air but just a little bit more sensibly proportioned. I haven't seen many - actually good - 11" laptops and I feel they've hit that particular niche pretty well.

The Star Book and Galago Pro - both with i7-1165G7 options and close specs overall - seem to be pretty toe to toe, but with only three laptops in their lineup, no desktops and slightly lower entry prices Star Labs seem to be serving a slightly different market, or at least taking their time before they gun for the greats.

It's $479, you're looking at the Star Book.

Star Lite - https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite

Star Book - https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook

It really doesn't help that the country selector dumps you back onto the homepage!

I worked for ~3 months exclusively on the N5000 version, writing C++ drivers for the RP2040 (in VSCode) and binding them to MicroPython, plus tending our 32blit (STM32-based) project. Sure I would have used something a lot beefier if I had the opportunity (I do now) but I managed to be productive with it.

The N5000/N5030 are not fast, but coming from WSL1 on Windows 10 over to a Linux-native machine gave me pretty much the same approximate build times.

I still leave my workstation (i9, 32GB RAM, Pop!_OS) in the office and work on the Star Lite if I'm doing some evening tinkering. Or just want to sit on the sofa for a change of scenery.

It's only happened to me once, so I haven't bothered to change it but at least on Linux Mint it's just Settings -> Power Management -> When the power button is pressed -> Do nothing. Problem solved! Bit of a waste of a good button, though and it doesn't look trivial to rebind (IE: not supported by the builtin Shortcuts GUI even though pressing the power button obviously elicits a flicker of the input box).

I managed to hit power and enter in quick succession on the Mk III accidentally just a day or two ago so... yeah... I'd be in strong support of putting it somewhere less under my fingertips. Confused the heck out of me, I thought the battery had run out.

A good, cheap keyboard would be a game changer for low-end devices, it's definitely the bit I find hardest to compromise on.

I tested the Mk III back in Dec 2020 before it dropped out of existence (parts shortage I think.) Due to relocating during the Covid chaos I actually daily drove it as my workstation for a few months (using VSCode/Slack/Discord and writing C++ for RP2040 and running more MicroPython recompiles than I'd care to imagine). The keyboard left a little to be desired (inconsistent actuation force), but having a Linux-first, mini laptop at that price point was compelling. The decent resolution (1080p at 11") screen, SATA SSD (rather than eMMC) and backlit (!!) keyboard made it worthwhile and I still use it for work.

If they've revised the keyboard/trackpad in Mk IV then it could be a pretty solid little machine.

I also had some weirdness with the USB Type-C power adapter (ha I wish this was the only hardware I could say this about) but that may or may not have been fixed (in the Mk III) with a recent firmware update. Though it did take them the best part of the year since my vague and difficult to reproduce bug reports. A 12v barrel jack supply was rock solid. No surprise there.

I know it's no Framework, but it's nice to have a System76-a-like this side of the pond.

As an aside to this- they'd already built an ecosystem around micro HDMI with the Pi 4 so changing it to full-sized HDMI would probably have irritated just as many people as not. They're also more economical to run through a pick-and-place machine, I believe.

Additionally, a little tidbit not included in this article:

"Also, full-sized HDMI connectors have no lead-in (to funnel the connector in). Whereas the micro-HDMI ones do, this makes auto-insertion of the connectors possible when testing which means we can do testing through the connector. This makes it cheaper and more reliable..."

Source: https://twitter.com/gsholling/status/1323322997315411971?s=2...

There's surprisingly little room inside- I've been trying to find somewhere to fit a tiny SSD, but without tossing out the heat sink (arguably one of its strengths since it keeps the temperature in check) it's a really tight squeeze.

It's also an absolute horror to get open- no screws, just plastic clips all around the outside edge. First try took a good 10 minutes of prying.

Am I the only one who prefers micro HDMI? I've heard good arguments to suggest it isn't very robust in the hands of kids... but from my own perspective all my micro HDMI cables are much thinner than my full-sized HDMI ones and they... just sit better. That said I've got an M.2 PCIe 2230SSD hanging out of the USB port on an adapter, so any grace or elegance is gone from my setup.

Edit: mini to micro (mini on the Pi Zero, micro on Pi 4/Pi 400)

"a blog from someone who had milled out the keyboard and integrated a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ into it"

Us, then? Haha! The dates check out:

https://blog.pimoroni.com/putting-a-raspberry-pi-3-a-in-the-...