Something to hack, but I don't see how to easily type braces and parentheses. Looks like a non-starter to me because for me, I hack by writing in languages that require parentheses.
> As we know, it's always been somehow difficult or tricky to add sound for RaspberryPi. Some use gpio to generate pwm to make sound for speakers, some use I2S audio module to generate sound for speakers. But they all have some shortcomings. PWM generated from gpios on raspberryPi have much noise that make the speakers nealy usable, and I2S audio module will occupy the very precious gpio resoureces(usually take 3 gpio pins). And in some operating system there is no driver for these pwm or I2S audio module. Due to the reasons above this is how I solve the sound problem. [1]
Ok, digging into the schematic, I think I see the problem.
Almost all of the normally free GPIO is eaten up by a DPI (Display Parallel Interface) connection to the screen.
The screen should instead use the currently unused MIPI pins if you're already at the level of sophistication of laying out PCIe and USB3 traces.
That gives you back nearly all of your GPIO to use for stuff like I2S, and you can then even expose more non USB externally than just that one stemma port.
On top of that, for a project like this, I would disagree with the quality you get out of the pwm as audio thing. It's not audiophile by any means, but neither is some cheap Bluetooth receiver chip, and it's certainly good enough for the speakers that weren't designed for this case.
When I've used i2s it has required setting spi clocks that made my spi devices not function. While it does have all of these IO buses, using more than one at a time is a bit of tetris. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some hardware constraint making i2s impossible.
The design artifacts are released with a liberal license, it shouldn't be TOO hard to fix that. Though I've never worked with SPI or I2S sound chips before.
I'd say the opposite. There's one interface, BT; pair your headphones, pair the internal speakers, there can't be a conflict, nor two places to look at.
It's a wireless device that is burning battery making negotiations with itself and wasting precious bt bandwidth in the process, and since most of Linux Bluetooth stack is user space stuff provided by the wm/de managers it guarantees no console sound compatibility without another layer of work. I think I could live without a pre console system beep but the other issues are pretty major oversights.
Iirc, CM5 cannot really deep sleep like phones or tablets do (at milli watts). Meaning you can't really use it for anything really portable - and that's a huge problem. I think RK3588 does, and it's a big win.
Edit: Sorry I meant deep sleep, not idle. Corrected.
I'm really wanting a clamshell-like device with console controls in addition to the qwerty keyboard, with a large 7" screen (even if resolution is lower than 1920x768) based on the RK3588.
I want what the Pandora/GP2X could have been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(computer) but with a larger screen and a more easily acquired SoC. Using replaceable 18650s (and charging via USB-C) is on my requirements as well.
I want to play games, basically, but set up my own linux distro for it, complete with mame and some ROMs.
If it can do games other than mame, then so much the better!
I suppose you can DIY this with the RK3588 - but I haven't used it myself.
I had previously experimented with the CM5, and found out that you can't really use it for anything portable without attaching a heavy battery. With its excellent software stack, CM5 could have been everywhere if they had gotten this right.
It seems to be a really hard problem. Deep sleep even with Raspberry Pi Zero and Pico product lines has been problematic. I hoped they would make Pico 2 deep sleep better, but it still needs external deep sleep RTC like DS3231 to make it truly useful.
This sounds like another device that will end up in a drawer, as an experiment it looks good but not sure what you are going to do on a 4" inch display that cannot idle at low milliwatts
Seems to be the case with most of the Pi projects left these days. It's turned into a bit of a "oh cool, thats neat" thing that nobody is practically using day to day as there's better alternatives that are cheaper and/or better.
Yeah that's a problem, I "want" a lot of tech too but I also know I would never use it on the regular. Gadgets are cool, but it's more of a "I want to have it" than a "I really need to use it". Same with e.g. the Flipper Zero, it's a cool device but other than some fiddling I'd never use it.
I have a bunch of Raspberry Pi's in a drawer, lol. Although I did pull one out the other day to set up a PiHole.
I have one of these. It's so pretty. But the keyboard is borderline unusuable. It's a lot smaller than it looks, the keys are tiny, and have no feedback whatsoever. They're just squashy rubber. Like the ZX Spectrum, but a quarter the size.
I had waited forever for this to stop being a pre-order, like literal years, and by the time I gave up, I'd come to the conclusion that the keyboard layout would just be a nightmare and I wouldn't use it, think I made the right decision, even if I do look at it occasionally and think it looks like a really nice cyberdeck.
I've got big hands and I think the allure of pocketable full-keyboard devices is just not for me.
The Raspberry Pi is in dire need of a DP Alt mode USB C port. Those small portable devices would pair nicely with the current wave of Display/XR glasses but they all need Displayport via USB.
And while you can work around that with an adapter it takes away from the simplicity of just plugging in the glasses ( and most of them get quite hot too).
An interesting alternative to the SQFMI Beepy / Beepberry [0][1] which is just a rpi zero but has a Sharp Memory Pixel display that I love. Both could use some work on adapting the UI to the little blackberry touchpad. Neither using a mouse cursor nor meta/ctrl modifier combos are very ergonomic on these little handhelds.
That's adorable, but the censored/pixelated keyboard is a little offputting. Am I guessing right that they're using Blackberry overstock and censoring trademarks?
Yeah, it was also rebranded from "Beepberry" to "Beepy" because RIMs lawyers had nothing better to do than rush to the defence of a long-dead brand apparently.
Oh LOL I didn't even notice that on the first link, yeah I guess they're just obscuring it for the logo. IRL it is a non pixelated keyboard xD
FWIW the project hit a wall and they didn't deliver the quantity they planned on, I ended up buying one on ebay for an extortionate cost (but buying rare electronics scratches an itch for me) - digging in the discords lead to discover an offshoot project that made some progress at a recent chaos comms congress, called Beepis
I'd rather have it in tablet format with more screen instead of the blackberry keyboard, now that there are very light cheap bluetooth keyboards that are comfortable to type on. I'm using one right now with my phone, and it weighs about the same as the phone. There are smaller and lighter ones around too.
It's much better for extended typing than a screen keyboard or blackberry keyboard. For non-extended typing, the blackberry keyboard is a small enough improvement on the screen keyboard to not be worth permanently dedicating space to it.
Just make the tablet battery swappable and sign me up :).
I quite like the idea of a physical keyboard on the device but I agree it's not really the best for extended typing.
It does cover the use cases I wan't from a linux hand held up to a point. If I could dock it to have a real monitor when I'm not on the go it would be perfect. Maybe through a usb-c output ? Just so I don't have to fiddle with multiple usb/hdmi cables when I want to set up
I love custom handheld computer projects like this.
Few years ago I wanted to build one as a hobby/toy project with parts that are more or less easily available. So I did [0]. Instead of using a pre-made keyboard I used simple push buttons and instead of specialized keyboard controller I used an Atmega328P. Most of the components are through-hole and easy to solder. Anyway, the couple of the handhelds I built are sitting in a drawer at home, but it was fun building it nevertheless.
I got the Hackberry Pi Zero from Elecrow recently and it has been excellent for playing around. I really miss real keyboards on mobile devices and it has been fulfilling to use it.
Same. The zero has only 512MB RAM so I started projects to rebuild the original BB OS for this while also adding Xpra to stream a browser running on a remote server (they all require 1GB+). Then priorities hit and I have not been back on this project since.
I recently sourced two Q20 keyboards (which wasn't easy) but you need quite tiny connectors to use it. There's a breakout you can build, if anyone is interested: https://oshwlab.com/amarullz/bbq20breakout
Unfortunately an ESP32-based gadget is not really in the same class as a rpi-based device; it won't be able to send/receive email, browse internet, run applications like ping/traceroute/tcpdumpetc (useful as a mobile diagnostic tool), run MAME (seriously, a portable computer that doesn't have games is useless to me) and can't easily be programmed for.
At this point, and at these prices, there are very specific use-cases for esp32-based devices, and they are mostly all single-use devices (i.e. capture then process some video, caching it then transmitting it for remote storage is one use-case I have seen in the wild).
Lilygo seems to have no BB keyboards anymore. If you check the product photos on the actual product pages, you’ll notice that they’ve developed their own keyboard and trackball solution.
Those devices use the older style BB keyboard, the one with the trackball.
The Beepy from SQFMI is another Raspberry Pi platform with the trackpad keyboard.
I think the Beepy can be considered abandoned by now. All the YouTubers got one, but they never came back into stock. There’s a waiting list but I’ve signed up to that list like a year ago and heard nothing so far.
I suspect an awful lot of us have a mausoleum of abandoned projects where this would feel right at home and is probably downright budget friendly compared to some of the other residents interred there.
The drawer that holds my Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and clones thereof is dangerously overpopulated as it is, but I think I've finally learned my lesson: Now I always have a cooling off period of hours after putting something in an online shopping cart before I click "buy" to see if my interest was just a passing one (usually the case).
What do you mean - I will get back to that project some year. It hasn't been touched in 15, but I'm still going to get back to it - sometimes around my 2700th birthday most likely (I'm trusting someone else will advance medicine such that I live that long)
Yeah... for me, my vision is rather deteriorated, just looking at the size of things in the screenshots I can tell I'd have trouble using it. I can't even use the Steam Deck for that reason. At least my daughter and SO get use out of it.
For about 5 years before Android/IPhone, I used a nokia phone that opened with the screen in the middle of a split querty keyboard on the phone... that thing was perfect for notes/text. I really wouldn't mind something like that or even this device as long as the text could be set to something reasonable for my poor vision to use. I have to max out my accessibility/text settings on android and that's a stretch at times (also exposes so main UI failings).
Yes, you are correct.
It has a 4k60 HEVC decoder, i forgot about that.
It has no h264 encoder or decoder or other encoders or decoders.
I know this from watching lots of people try to use it on 3d printers and discovering that their camera streams now take tons of CPU[1] after "upgrading" from a pi 4b to a cm5.
In any case, from just about any perspective, you are better off shoving a rockchip based cm5 compatible board in this.
[1] the commonly-used logitech cameras used to do h264 streams, but they removed the h264 encoder chips in all of their models a few years back, without changing any of the model numbers. All the current ones are like yuvy420 at 5fps or mjpeg at 30fps. Even for something like the mx brio. But for things like the c920,if they are old enough, they do h264, and if they are new, they don't.
Nice. there's also a project [0] that uses the RP2040 to talk I2C and present it as USB HID, created in service of the beepberry [1]. Now that I think of it tho this could be made into a very miniature home theater PC remote, a la the Logitech DiNovo
Yes. I tried to find a good video showing it, this one from the same creator shows it being used as a mouse and you can see it works pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568L-P2tBwc
Thanks for finding that. Nice. Starting at 14s in the video, looks like it's doing both coarse and fine movement. I don't know whether it would have to calibrated for best balance on the tiny display, but looks like it will probably work pretty well.
Fwiw, for other projects you can look at other SoC brands than Raspberry, such as OrangePi, BananaPi, ClockworkPi, KickPi, Pine64, Rock64, Odroid, Libre Computer, Radxa, ArmSom, Onion, Udoo, NVIDIA Jetson, ASUS Tinker, Khadas. I was kinda blown away by how many there are. Ask ChatGPT for specific models and feature comparison.
reply