A laptop with a mahogany case

The Compu-tor Is A Raspberry Pi Laptop In A Mahogany Case

June 9, 2022 by 21 Comments

The Compu-tor, designed by [Henry Edwards], is one of those things that doesn’t neatly fit into any categories. It is a clamshell-type portable computer, although unlike most laptops, it doesn’t come with a built-in battery. It has a sleek custom-designed case, but lacks the futuristic sci-fi looks typical of a cyberdeck. The keyboard can act as an input device, but can also turn into a musical instrument.

In short, it’s a bit of all of those things, but the most striking part is the beautifully-machined mahogany case. The two halves are connected through two beefy friction hinges and a silicone ribbon cable: the bottom half contains the keyboard, speakers, USB ports and power connections, while the top half holds a Raspberry Pi and a 10″ touchscreen. The display bezel has that curved shape typical of CRT monitors, fitting nicely with the 1970s vibe given off by the dark wood.

Another retro touch is in the connections between the various circuit boards and the front panel switches: [Henry] used wire-wrapping, something we haven’t seen for a while. The keyboard is a simple grid of identical keys with handwritten labels. Other labels, like that of the power connector, are made from traditional embossing tape.

The Compu-tor runs Debian, and seems to be quite usable as a compact laptop. It even comes with USB ports to hook up external devices, and with a simple 12 V input it should be no problem to find an external power source for it. Wood seems to be a popular material to build Raspberry Pi-based laptops from: we’ve seen them housed in anything ranging from wooden cigar-boxes to laser-cut plywood, and even incredibly tiny boxes.

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A Raspberry Pi As An Offboard Display Adapter

May 9, 2022 by 6 Comments

The humble USB-C port has brought us so many advantages over its USB ancestors, one of which is as a handy display output for laptops. Simply add an inexpensive adapter and you can hook up everything from a mobile phone upwards to an HDMI display or projector. There’s a snag though, merely having USB-C is not enough as the device has to support the display feature. It’s a problem [Gunnar Wolf] had to face with a Lenovo ARM laptop, and his solution is unexpected. Instead of an adapter, he’s used a Raspberry Pi 3 and some software tricks.

The obvious route to an off-board Pi mirroring onboard video is to use VNC, which he tried but found wanting due to lagginess. As a user of the Wayland compositor he found he could instead use wf-recorder and send its output to a stream, and thus capture his screen in a way that the Pi could read over the network. It’s not quite as convenient a solution as a pure-hardware adapter, but at least it allowed him to share the screen.

It’s surprising how often we find projects needing to mirror the display of a computer using what hardware is to hand, at least this one is more elegant than some others.

A Real GPU On The Raspberry Pi — Barely.

April 28, 2022 by 36 Comments

[Jeff Geerling] saw the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and its exposed PCI-Express 1x connection, and just naturally wondered whether he could plug a GPU into that slot and get it to work. It didn’t. There were a few reasons why, such as the limited Base Address Register space, and drivers that just weren’t written for ARM hardware. A bit of help from the Raspberry Pi software engineers and other Linux kernel hackers and those issues were fixed, albeit with a big hurdle in the CPU. The Broadcom chip in the Pi 4, the BCM2711, has a broken PCIe implementation.

There has finally been a breakthrough — Thanks to the dedicated community that has sprung up around this topic, a set of kernel patches manage to work around the hardware issues. It’s now possible to run a Radeon HD 5000/6000/7000 card on the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module. There are still glitches, and the Kernel patches to make this work will likely never land upstream. That said, It’s possible to run a desktop environment on the Radeon GPU on a Pi, and even a few simple benchmarks. The results… aren’t particularly inspiring, but that wasn’t really ever the point. You may be asking what real-world use is for a full-size GPU on the Pi. Sure, maybe crypto-mining or emulation, or being able to run more monitors for digital signage. More than that, it might help ensure the next Pi has a working PCIe implementation. But like many things we cover here, the real reason is that it’s a challenge that a group of enthusiasts couldn’t leave alone.

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PiSquare Lets You Run Multiple HATs On A Raspberry Pi

April 13, 2022 by 8 Comments

The Raspberry Pi’s venerable 40-pin header and associated HAT ecosystem for upgrades has been a boon for the platform. It’s easy to stack extra hardware on to a Pi, even multiple times in some cases. However, if you want to run multiple HATs, and wirelessly at that, the PiSquare might just be the thing for you.

The PiSquare consists of a board featuring both RP2040 and ESP-12E microcontrollers. It interfaces with Raspberry Pi HATs and even lets you run multiple of the same HAT on a single Raspberry Pi, as it’s not actually directly using the UART, SPI, or I2C interfaces on the host Pi itself. Instead, the PiSquare communicates wirelessly with the Pi, handling the IO with the HAT itself.

It’s unclear how this works on a software level. Simply using existing software tools and libraries for a given Raspberry Pi HAT probably won’t work with the wireless PiSquare setup. However, for advanced users, it could serve a useful purpose, allowing one Raspberry Pi to command multiple HATs without the fuss of having to run more single-board computers where just one will do. Boards will be available on Kickstarter for those interested in the device.

We’ve seen other creative things done with the Raspberry Pi and the HAT system, too. If you’ve been cooking up your own neat hacks for the platform, drop us a line!

It’s Almost A New Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. But Not Quite

April 8, 2022 by 21 Comments

We know that readers are familiar with the global chip shortage and its effects on product availability. The Raspberry Pi folks haven’t escaped its shadow, for even though they’ve managed to preserve availability of their RP2040 microcontroller, it’s fair to say that some of their flagship Linux-capable boards have been hard to find. All of this has had an unlikely effect in the form of a new Raspberry Pi, but unexpectedly it’s one which few end users are likely to get their hands on.

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module has been part of the range since the early days, and in its earlier versions took a SODIMM form factor. The last SODIMM Compute Module had a Pi 3 processor, and this unexpected new model is reported as having a very similar hardware specification but featuring the Pi 4 processor. It seems that the chip shortage has affected supplies of the earlier SoC, and to keep their many industrial customers for the SODIMM Compute Modules in business they’ve had to produce this upgrade. As yet it’s not surfaced for sale on its own and there’s a possibility it will stay only in the realm of industrial boards, but as the story develops there’s a Raspberry Pi forum topic about it for the latest and you can find the pertinent info in the video below the break.

Of course, the Compute Module of the moment remains the CM4 in its newer form factor, which we see as possibly the most exciting of all the Pi products of the moment. Meanwhile this is not the first custom industrial Raspberry Pi to be seen in the wild.

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Raspberry Pi Test Stand Tells You Which Glues To Use

April 7, 2022 by 6 Comments

Not all glues are created equal; or rather, not every glue is good for every application. But how is one to know which glue to use in which kinds of joints? The answer to that is not always clear, but solid numbers on the comparative strength of different glues are a great place to start.

To quantify what can ordinarily be a somewhat subjective process, there’s probably no one better than woodworker and hacker [Matthias Wandel], equipped as he is with his DIY strength-tester. Using its stepper-driven power to blast apart glued lap joints, [Matthias] measured the yield point of the various adhesives using a strain gauge connected to a Raspberry Pi.

His first round of tests had some interesting results, including the usually vaunted construction adhesive ending up in a distant last place. Also performing poorly, at least relative to its reputation and the mess it can cause, was the polyurethane-based Gorilla Glue. A surprise standout in overall strength was hot glue, although that seemed to have a sort of plastic yield mode. Ever the careful empiricist, [Matthias] repeated his tests using hardwoods, with remarkably different results; it seems that glues really perform better with denser wood. He also repeated a few tests to make sure every adhesive got a fair shake. Check out the video below for the final results.

It’s always good to see experiments like this that put what we often take for granted to the test. [John] over at the Project Farm channel on YouTube does this kind of stuff too, and even did a head-to-head test of epoxy adhesives.

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A Power Button For Raspberry Pi, Courtesy Of Device Tree Overlays

April 4, 2022 by 11 Comments

As a standard feature of the Linux kernel, device tree overlays (DTOs) allow for easy enabling and configuration of features and drivers, such as those contained within the standard firmware of a Raspberry Pi system. Using these DTOs it’s trivial to set up features like as a soft power-off button, triggering an external power supply and enable drivers for everything from an external real-time clock (RTC) to various displays, sensors and audio devices, all without modifying the operating system or using custom scripts.

It’s also possible to add your own DTOs to create a custom overlay that combines multiple DTO commands into a single one, or create a custom device tree binary (DTB) for the target hardware. Essentially this DTB is loaded by the Linux kernel on boot to let it know which devices are connected and their configuration settings, very similar to what the BIOS component with x86-based architectures handles automatically.

Ultimately, the DTB concept and the use of overlays allow for easy configuration of such optional devices and GPIO pin settings, especially when made configurable through a simple text file as on the Raspberry Pi SBC platform.

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