What have you bought recently?


Klumpen said:
I've been told, that the rPI4 has serious overheating issues and will massively slow down after a few minutes of casual use if not used with a fan or at least an aluminium case, I guess I should have ordered this one instead since apparently WLAN and BlueTooth still works with it, or so they say.
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Yes. True. I bought a cheap case with a fan. It connects to gpio pins and no issues. It isn't a big deal at all.

The case was ~$12 with fan and power cord.
 
Swordfish II said:
Yes. True. I bought a cheap case with a fan. It connects to gpio pins and no issues. It isn't a big deal at all.

The case was ~$12 with fan and power cord.
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How loud is the fan after which period of time?
I'm opting for the aluminium armor block case with the many ridges atm.
 
IMG_20191020_015216.jpg

Am I doing it properly? ;)
 
Klumpen said:
Does anyone here have a rPi and if yes, what do you use it for?
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Sure, one of my rPi is running Kodi at my parents'.

The other had been turned into an incoming email notifier at my workplace. Quite handy actually.
 
I just found one solution for the weak youtube playback: Lineage OS
720p works perfectly, no stuttering
Maybe I should try Kodi, too
 
Klumpen said:
How loud is the fan after which period of time?
I'm opting for the aluminium armor block case with the many ridges atm.
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I can't even hear it unless i put my ear next to it.

Using the gpio pins it provides constant power so the fan is on when the pi is on. You can set it to low or high.
 
For some unknown reason I should not ask people about components. It always ends a few months or years later with enormous amounts of them.
A few months ago I decided to gather parts for a few hardware projects, including CT1024 terminal. I needed 6 chips of 2102 memory for it. I quickly found 3 of them in my stuff, and after asking some people I found 3 more. Recently someone sold me a large box of TTL chips, in which there were >25 of 2102s by some accident. These were the only non-74 chips there.
Similar thing with MFM hard drives and these full-height 3.5" ATAs (40-80MB). Last Friday a friend just dropped me a bag of them. "Hello, 5 years ago you asked about drives, here, I don't need these".
In these drives, I found a Nec D5146, one of the early units. Hand-written 4-digit serial number and date (1985). Generally it works. No bad sectors, no surface defects, survived NDD and will probably survive SpinRite tests. It's not a total "tank" like ST225, which just runs for 30 years the same way, but it is also quite durable. But the sound it makes is just awful. It's not the motor or bearings, but grounding contact to the hub, the metallic screeching causes pain in the teeth.
Temporary solution: Replace existing ?iron? metal grounding clamp with copper one. Good thing that it's fastened, not soldered.
 
i got an RPi 3 a few years back for using as a Minecraft server for nephews and a few friends. however, all have moved onto v1.14, which the RPi 3 can not handle. :{ thought about getting an ODROID N2 to replace it...
 
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hitbyambulance said:
i got an RPi 3 a few years back for using as a Minecraft server for nephews and a few friends. however, all have moved onto v1.14, which the RPi 3 can not handle. :{ thought about getting an ODROID N2 to replace it...
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I really like the 4. 4GB ram, gigabit ethernet, 5ghz wifi, dual screen, hardware h265 decoding.

I like pi's because of the popularity and with it software/hardware support.

All around impressive machine. Def get a fan case with it though.
 
A DVI to HDMI adapter. Moved a user's dual screen setup from an old tower PC to a Deskmini case running a modern Athlon.
In order to support local business and be somewhat more ecological I bought one from MediaMarkt. Their website, interestingly enough, quoted an availability within 2 - 3 business days after ordering.
Granted, the site was lying, they had 3 different adapters and one cable in the store.
So I acquired one of those dumb adapters for the low, low price of tah-wenty €urons.
 
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I know, Apple Fanboy and so on, but i bought the Apple Airpods Pro,
Not bad so far, the ANC seems to work pretty well, now you can change between a Modi where you ditnt hear anything from outside, and you hear everything from outside, "Transparenc Mode",
its needs much more time to test everything, but they work pretty good..
 
That's a good idea. I thought a long time about how to make a box that would mix car noise and things from outside so I could cross the road more safely while wearing earphones, but never got round to implementing anything about it.
 
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The ANC works pretty good: I’m currently installing a new Update on my GPD Win, and it’s fan is pretty loud, I listen to music via AirPods Pro, put ANC on and the noise of the Fan is gone ^^
It’s a cool headphone but I think I would wait until they are a bit cheaper..
 
Recently I bought a Soviet microcomputer. It has been probably made in Moscow plant, designed in 1980s, but made until 1990s, my unit is from 1991, when it was sold either as a TV game, or as some kind of hobbyists tool. The computer is 8080-based, has some amount of 8255 for I/O and a 8253 timer. 2kB ROM consists of a monitor with rudimentary tape input routines to bootstrap the proper loader from tape. There is also a DMA controller, display generator (also some Intel clone) and 32kB of RAM in sixteen 4116-like chips. I'm not sure yet are these negative-voltage versions or not, but if they are and PSU was bad or someone tried to run it with 5V only, I'm deeply in the bottom.
I have visually inspected the mainboard. The laminate has a poor quality, much worse than Polish or even Ukrainian computers made these times. If something will be bad, I'll just borrow hot-air and try with it training on some old boards before, as using a typical soldering iron will destroy tracks quickly.
The keyboard looks and feels nice, but there should be definitely one more spring in space key. They installed one instead of two in the factory.

I have also looked into power supply unit and there was a thing which surprised me: There is a linear regulator in TO220 package fastened to the large, aluminum heatsink (mounted on holes for TO3 case which was probably not accessible). This heatsink is a typical extrusion, it has a flat part to mount components and a few fins protruding about 1.5cm, there's about 1.5cm between them. Fins end with smaller fins parallel to the flat part, leaving a few mm between.
According to all rules of power supply design the space between these fins should be kept clear of components to allow convection cooling. But in the factory they designed a PCB a bit different and decided to go a different way.
Let's put electrolytic capacitors in there! What can go wrong?
Yes, they put electrolytic caps inside the heatsink windows. I desoldered two and tested them. And after an hour of pumping their maximum voltage, measuring loss current and periodically checking ESR, another surprise: These things are NOT broken.
 
got myself an unicomp ultra classic keyboard. i loved the model m keyboard that came with the late original 'ibm at' i had access to back in the day, so yeah got one again and it's superawesome! :)

here is a video (not mine, i have iso-de layout with large enter key)



now i have to find a source where i can get the tux windows replacement keys here in germany...
 
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