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Gadget WEEKENDS
rgdot:
A caddy I got a while ago to swap an old ThinkPad's DVD drive for a 2.5" drive instead.
Gadget WEEKENDS
mSATA to USB, have a mSATA drive in the same ThinkPad's WWAN slot and this is useful.
Gadget WEEKENDS
Shades:
Finally got the ZimaBoard yesterday. It's aesthetics I like. I was using an 12+ year old PC as a OPNSense router, but it failed after a brown-out. Managed to get it back up and running and ordered this ZimaBoard as a replacement. I'll use the 4-port NIC from the old system with the Zimaboard instead. I bond 2 internet connections from different ISPs. Forum post told me that people like the Zima gear to act as their router after adding non-Realtek NICs to the unit.
Got the 8GByte one and I have played with the CasaOS that comes with it. It all works decent enough. If you are a bit patient and don't visit intensive websites, It is practically good enough as a replacement for a normal computer. Needed to get a cable that converted the mini display port to a more useful type of connection in these parts of the world. Once I did that, I connected an SSD to the device and that makes quite a positive difference. The SSD had still a Linux Mint installation on it and after the a somewhat lengthy first boot, it booted and worked fine.
As far as I know, Raspberry Pis are much more constrained regarding available computing resources, so how useful those would be for my particular use case, I do not know. A friend of mine abandoned his RPi 2, he's totally into ESP32 devices now. He's making all kinds of measuring devices with those in an attempt to automate his home. He got an ancient massage chair from NL Replaced motors and redid all the electrical logic with an ESP32 instead of repairing what was there, programmed a web-interface in Home-Assistant for that ESP32 device and now he can control that massage-chair via his computer/laptop/phone. Works wonderfully well.
ESP32 can't do much computationally. But they are very versatile. And for the 2 to 3 USD cost-price per unit, much more useful than his RPi2. Especially in combination with Home-Assistant and its 'Node-Red' extension/plug-in.
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