DIY Pi notebook

Under £2 on ebay in the UK and in France from EU sellers. e.g.

I rather got the impression Tristan wasn’t UK/Europe (either that or has free time at the wrong time of the day)

I’m living in the wrong decade. Not celluloid. Whatever they back the flat ribbons with these days.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/FPV-Micro-HDMI-Mini-HDMI-90-degree-Adapter-5cm-100cm-FPC-Ribbon-Flat-HDMI-Cable-Pitch/32862500237.html

I still need to find the original one that I mentioned with the solder pads instead.

Lots of ‘I’. Anyway, I live in Australia. eBay is a joke these days. Way past it’s prime. Amazon was good for… a month? They opened an Australian warehouse this year, then a month or so later gave us a special Amazon Australia site with access to a tiny, tiny subset of the items available internationally. Pretty much an act of spite because they were asked to pay tax.

Pretty much an act of spite because they were asked to pay tax.

It must be more complicated than that; Amazon has collected NZ tax for years and we still have access to the US, UK, Japanese etc sites.

I suspect it has something to do with Aussie GST being at different rates for different items; I can imagine Amazon not wanting to have to figure out the correct GST amount for every single item on every single Amazon site just in case someone from Australia buys it.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-31/amazon-blocks-australia-shopping-deal-how-it-affects-you/9820312

First article in a search. Was early days but captures the spirit.

My Pinebook arrived. Intact no less!
I’ve got it charging from my modified USB hub. The options for PS were UK or US. Both pretty useless. The adaptor connector thing is sadly different to other international devices I have. Couldn’t they have offered China as an option? It’s almost identical to Australia, except the pins are about 1mm longer and I think their whole plug is up the other way. Plugs in fine to most things. Falls out of some powerboards.

The Pinebook doesn’t seem to have a charging LED so I’ll just leave it for a while.

The USB plug melted into the hub. Whoops! I can only guess the cable I used was rubbish or a Pi3 would have done that trick to the hub ages ago.

Amazon’s tantrum has finished and we aren’t blocked from buying from the international site anymore. Hooray!

Is the tantrum really over, or is it because tomorrow is (god help us) “Black Friday”?

They even have it here in France, although the French didn’t quite get it so some retailers (hello Système U!) are advertising “Black Friday Week”!

PS: My autocorrect keeps wanting to say “Bleak Friday”. I’m afraid this time I think it’s correction might be right…

Apparently it is. They agreed to apply GST to items below $1000 and allowed the ability to purchase from the main site again.

Steam on the other hand… Coincidentally got even worse.

I haven’t given up. Just no time to do anything. A simple Pi based DIY device still seems like a good idea. Admittedly I’ve been contemplating one of the larger TFTs, like a 10" or perhaps a little less with the driver board. I didn’t go that way partially because the board is a packaging nightmare. They are essentially an in car entertainment LCD without the case.

Last night I had a quick go of the test release of Armbian on the Pinebook. Today armed with a USB drive with the pre-mangled DDE I got the RO Linux port up and running in minutes. Progress. Good! Dug myself a bit of a hole with using GitHub though. Again DIY Pi book with maybe a Vonets or something is the way to go.

Absolutely everything is stalled out right now due entirely to me. However I did find online what seems to be a shaped or fused acrylic case for the 5" display and seemingly a Pi 3. The LCD came with “captive” screws and long spacer rods so realistically the type of SBC shouldn’t matter too much, peripheral hole alignment aside.

Packaging has been given quite a lot of thought. For a more notebook type layout the best idea would probably be a 10" display with separate adaptor board because it could be tucked away in the keyboard base with the Pi.

In my case with what I have, the best solution seems to be to look to the father of the laptop. The portable. I think it may be possible to stuff in a power bank, or even a decent sized battery salvaged from some portable electronics like a phone. Have an exposed hub or whatever to plug in a keyboard and mouse and the result is something portable.

My earlier spaghetti tests used a big power bank I have which shows power level. The Pi Zero with the LCD barely made a dent in the battery after using it for a while with RO. Supply filtering is needed IMHO. Seems to be rather noisy coming from the power bank. Perhaps they are using a buck converter.

I’ve toyed with a large fresnel in front of the screen. My eyes!!!

Can’t recall what I said, but I opted to order a length of ribbon (Just the flat insulated stuff) style HDMI cable and some solder on HDMI connectors. The cable arrived today, sort of. I thought I ordered 30cm of HDMI cable, not a 30cm HDMI cable. Ie it is a cable proper, with HDMI connectors on the end. The price certainly made me think it was just a short length of cable.

While not pretty, at least it’ll let me plug a Pi into the GPIO header. While I did put leads with connectors on the TFT, I feel for mucking around the header is preferable for solidity.

Given an extreme shortcoming in Linux regarding trackpads, the Pinebook is still less than optimal for running the Linux port unless I use a mouse.
To put it plainly, Linux is a shambling mess. X11 / XOrg / Wayland (that says enough) is even worse. Fragmented to hell and so many rotting and forgotten chunks of code. Turning to the internet for answers just finds a hundred people with a hundred different answers. Really, as far as I’m concerned I’ve done everything I can to just set up the trackpad with middle mouse button emulation. Here is one place where the answers online are the same. Trackpad support is broken. Has been for years. evdev might as well not exist. Configuring it doesn’t seem to change anything except occasionally break inputs.

/rant.

Stuff is arriving slowly, but I’m in no hurry.

Fragmented to hell and so many rotting and forgotten chunks of code. Turning to the internet for answers just finds a hundred people with a hundred different answers.

Let’s see:

• Supporting my printer (circa 2013). Many pages of commands on how to change the entire printing subsystem for one that works. Good luck finding help if something goes wrong.
• Conqueror (spelt with a K but I’m not teaching my phone that) refuses to connect to my main server using a password and private key. Trying it from the command line says I must enter the key’s password. There isn’t one.
• Erratic and/or partial detection of hardware inside my PC. It’s a P4 model built for XP so hardly cutting edge. It gets it mostly right, though you’re SOL for the boys it can’t see.
• The DVD writer. Can’t remember the name, sounded like game Italian. Yeah, it does whatever the hell it wants and not what the user tells it. I know what a DVD trying to write at 4x sounds like, and thanks to Linux I now know what a DVD trying (and failing) to write circa 48x or 52x sounds like (even when explicitly told otherwise).

That’s just the first couple of days. I got fed up and went back to Windows…

I agree with all your experiences. In some sense I’ve experienced all of those. I can waffle on for way longer too. Especially since the simple way things used to be configured has been scattered and changed so there are a whole lot of semi redundant config files which all have different syntaxes and have to be synchronised by hand.

Configuring networking is now painful. As is X11. Oh! svnserve. The most official source I’ve found on how to actually get it to start at boot is to copy paste and edit a script from someone’s blog. Yeah…