Tag: raspberrypi

  1. A few minor mods to Pitop OS.

    28 July 2021

    Some time ago I wrote up a minor project I'd done, rigging up Raspberry Pi OS to run on a Pi-Top. And then never revisited the post.

    I think you can guess why. It didn't go very well.

    Even though all of the secret sauce software is available in the Raspberry Pi OS package repositories these days and there is a process for installing it, for whatever reason they don't quite work right. The speakers were never detected, nor was even the system hub detected. Finally, my tinkering wrecked the desktop configuration entirely. After some frustrated debugging, I kicked it …

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  2. Simple environment monitoring with spare parts.

    15 July 2020

    It's going on summer in the Bay Area, which means that it's warming up a bit both outside and inside (because air conditioning is Not A Thing out here).  That, coupled with the not inconsiderable research infrastructure I have at home has left me wondering and worrying about just how hot my office gets during the day while I'm working.  Now, I could just put a simple little thermometer on my shelf (and I did) but my concerns are a bit bigger than that.  What happens if my office temperature reaches a critical point and servers start melting down on …

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  3. Rigging up Raspbian Buster to run on a Pi-Top

    14 January 2020

    It doesn't seem that long ago that I put together a Pi-Top and started tricking it out to use as a backup system.  It was problematic in some important ways (the keyboard's a bit wonky), but most of all the supported respin of Raspbian for use with the Pi-Top was really, really slow and a bit fragile.  While Windbringer was busy doing a full backup last week I took my Pi-Top for a spin while out and about, and to be blunt it was too bloody slow to use.  At first I figured that the microSD card I was using …

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  4. War walking with a Raspberry Pi 0 W.

    06 May 2019

    You've probably noticed from the datestamps of my last couple of weeks worth of posts that they were autoposted by an agent.  This is because work has taken a turn for the extremely busy and I haven't had the time or the energy to write anything in particular; certainly nothing really useful.  Rather than wasting everybody's time I decided to relax a bit by picking up an older project, namely a new war-walking rig, and making it work.  Since I wrote that original post a few more security updates have come out for my phone and broke not only the …

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  5. It's a bit of a surprise when I don't have enough processing power.

    15 October 2018

    Earlier this year I got back into urban hiking by taking up war walking again around home.  Not too long after that, I started picking up buzz that upcoming versions of Android are specifically not going to make it easy (or probably possible) to wardrive or war walk by changing how the wifi drivers work.  By this, I mean they're making it possible to trigger a wireless scan once every two minutes instead of whenver you ask it to.  Unsurprisingly, if you read through that ticket's comments this is going to break a lot of other applications out there, but …

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  6. Spending quality time with the Pi-Top.

    05 May 2017

    A couple of months ago for my Lesser Feast I decided to treat myself to a toy that I've had my eye on for a couple of months: A Pi-Top laptop kit.  My fascination with the Raspberry Pi aside (which includes, to be honest, being able to run a rack full of servers in my office without needing to install a 40U rack and a new 220 power feed), it strikes me as being a very useful thing to have under one's desk as a backup deck or possibly a general purpose software development computer.  Most laptops have one unique …

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  7. Mini-Maker Faire project: Jade's Lunchtop

    13 October 2013

    Obligatory warning: If you are fandom-averse, you might want to skip right to the photographs.

    Some months ago, a good friend of mine dragged me kicking and screaming into the Homestuck fandom by way of a novel length fanfic she and a friend are writing.

    I won't tell you about Homestuck. That's not what this post is about. I will, however, tell you about the latest project to come off of my workbench, which was building as functional a replica of Jade's lunchtop computer as possible.

    Cutting to the chase, after being infected with the Homestuck meme and searching for …

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