General Raspberry Pi stuff

[Nick]

Bit harsh. But I take the point.

[Neal]

Aw balls I forgot the

[jack]

Aw balls I forgot the

Really?

Back on topic: there's going to be a market for silent, better quality, fans. The official one is really grating...

Has anyone used the official debug probe on an RP2040?

[Neal]

Yes the active cooling fan is noisy, very irritating pitch. Ive found the official case fan is a bit more acceptable, lower in pitch and a bit quieter…

I had to remove the fan from the heatsink and rotate the case fan housing and fan 180deg so it would fit…

[Neal]

Seems there's a kernel bug in Ubuntu 23 regarding the fan speed being on full speed no matter what the CPU temp.

Found a workaround with:
$ sudo cat > /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device0/cur_stat

Then type 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 (4 full speed, 0 is off) to set the fan

cntrl-d to exit

[jack]

...
Found a workaround with:
$ sudo cat > /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device0/cur_stat

Then type 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 (4 full speed, 0 is off) to set the fan

Going to be a bit tedious doing that in real time...

Looks like there might be a fix:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=356881

[jack]

Yes the active cooling fan is noisy, very irritating pitch. Ive found the official case fan is a bit more acceptable, lower in pitch and a bit quieter…

I had to remove the fan from the heatsink and rotate the case fan housing and fan 180deg so it would fit…

Just done the same thing - good call - bit of a tight squeeze, but works and is nice & quiet. I'm amazed that the other fan was ever let out - maybe some silicone mounts or similar would quieten it down?

[jack]

Hmmmm... Rotating the case fan means that the pin headers are now obstructed..., so a bit of Dremelling (*) to do...


(*) Is that even a "thing"?

[jack]

Not cheap but Interesting.... I like that you can just keep stacking them...

https://digilent.com/shop/mcc-daq/data- ... c+daq+hats

Tomorrow's plaything:

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[Neal]

Desktop Ubuntu works well on the RPi5 better than Raspian IMHO which seems clunky graphics wise. Raspbian does fix the fan issue though but it should only be a matter of time until a new kernel fix from Ubuntu is released.

Thinking out loud, I do wonder where the RPi is going, would you buy one just to be a mini desktop….Im not sure it’s the best choice when you can get mini PC’s with Windows for 150 beer tokens, ok quality may be an issue but they have more horse power. For a lot of single application stuff you don’t need so much compute power or memory and a Pi3b or lower works very well. Still the educational side of them is still great, just don’t know if you need the extra expense or compute power ….

[Neal]

NVMe on the Pi

[jack]

NVMe on the Pi

V. Interesting!

[Nick]

I know its my age, but every time I see that, I think of things like this.

[jack]

I know its my age, but every time I see that, I think of things like this.

VME Bus FTW !!!

I like the 68040 hiding in plain sight...

Apologies to Neal (going OT for a short bit):

This was my first bit slice (AMD 2900-series) design with a 6800 front end and serial terminal (300 or 1200baud)... FWIW, I got the 1980 IBM UK prize for the best undergraduate computer project for this! All assembly code for the 6800. Nice thing about bit-slice processors is that you design your own instruction set... I found a copy of the thesis when clearing out the loft. Scary. Subsequently, I designed and built a synthesised PDP11 (without the FP instruction set) out of stacked AMD2900-series 4-bit devices... DEC also used these chips in later PDP11s and early VAXen. Not surprisingly, I turned down IBM (all blue shirts and grey "slacks") and was hired by DEC

How the world has changed...

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