Gadget WEEKENDS

[Renegade]

You have 2 RTX3080 video cards in your new PC?  Better put in a 1200 Watt power supply. When both video cards have a 100% load, the 1000 Watt power supply will make your system unstable.

-Shades (March 08, 2021, 06:12 PM)

I wanted 2, but they'd only give me 1.

Where are you going to find that 3080 is the question.. the graphics cards are impossible to find in stock these days..

-mouser (March 10, 2021, 03:10 AM)

I ordered the computer built by probably the top high-end computer dealer in Canada. They've got a good relationship with the manufacturers.


KNIVES! EDC!

I finally broke down and got myself a couple decent knives. I've always had garbage knives. A good number of them cost less than $2.00. Canadian.





Not the best, but decent. I still want to get a flat grind. I'm finding the serrated ones are great, but they are limited in some ways.

Today I got the sharpeners for it. These ones arrived a week or so ago:



And these arrived this weekend:







I sharpened my 2 new knives, and they're damn sharp. Like, scary sharp. Since they're serrated, I can't "shave" with them, but man... are they ever sharp.

I've tried on other old, garbage knives, and it's simply IMPOSSIBLE to get an edge like on a decent knife made with decent steel.

My old Victorinox Swiss Army Knife gets sharp... but nowhere near the Spydercos. The others? Pfft. Hopeless. Quality really, really matters.

I carry the Rescue knife much more than the Cricket. I'll switch it up & see which I like most.

The Rescue knife I got in part because of that time (posted here long ago) that I had to smash a car window to pull a guy out of a burning car wreck. Had I have had something like this, it would've been much easier & faster. You just never know.

But really, I'm using the new knives mostly for opening & chopping up boxes. It's a LOT more fun & enjoyable with a decent blade.

[Deozaan]

I got the above heatsink case to go with my Pi. I'm normally very utilitarian and don't care too much about how things look and just go for black, but I really like the colorful options this case comes in.

My only complaint about it is that it doesn't quite fully encase the board. Which, in practice, means that the microSD card is poking out a few millimeters, exposed to damage from bumps or drops. On the other hand, this also makes it a bit easier to get in and out. But on the other other hand, my device isn't really going anywhere (so I'm unlikely to bump or drop it) and I'm not doing anything with it that requires frequent removal/reinsertion of the microSD card.

-Deozaan (December 11, 2020, 11:03 PM)

My Raspberry Pis were collecting dust, so I decided to sell them on eBay recently. I had gotten another case for my Pi 4, which didn't work out as intended, so I sold it bundled with the Pi. But that means I still have the above Pimoroni case for a Raspberry Pi I no longer have.

I'm willing to send it to any established member of the forum who wants it, as long as you're willing to pay shipping costs. If I don't get any takers in a week or so then I'll probably try my luck on eBay.

[4wd]

It's been awhile so time for some gadgets:

Last time I was in the UK, (2022), I picked up a Samsung Gear 360 kit, (VR headset plus the camera), for the princely sum of £25 on eBay.
Wanted it for the camera^w which I've used while 4wding, works well.

Gadget WEEKENDS

Budi multifunction stick.
uSD storage and card reader, SIM storage and removal tool, USB-C to USB-C cable with USB-A, micro USB-B, and Lightning adaptors, plus a phone stand.

Gadget WEEKENDS

ZimaBoard 432, mid-range version. 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC storage, 2 SATA ports, 2 Gbe ports, PCIe x2 slot, silent.
Thinking of plugging a WiFi 7 card in and using it for pfsense or OPNsense, depending on how good wifi support is.

Shown mounted on a 3D printed 'sled' for mounting in a rack, along with two 120GB SSDs, and a 4 port Gbe card.

Gadget WEEKENDS

Just recently, Akaso Brave4 action cam for upcoming trip, (4 cruises back-to-back, Sydney->New York, 67 days), comes with a load of mounting accessories.

Gadget WEEKENDS

VEEKTOMX 22.5W 10Ah Power Bank, wanted something a little smaller and lighter than my usual Romoss 74W 20Ah Power Bank with PD and QC.

Gadget WEEKENDS

LENCENT 65W Universal Travel Charger to keep things charged.

Gadget WEEKENDS

HGFRTEE 14" 4k portable IPS display, USB-C power/video input + mini-HDMI input, stero speakers

Gadget WEEKENDS

Flextail Zero Pump inflator/deflator.

Gadget WEEKENDS

[Shades]

You like the ZimaBoard 432?

Looking for a small device that can act as a OPNSense router (with at least 3 ethernet connections for 2 ISPs and at least one large(r) POE switch. I saw reviews on the internet, which are mostly quite positive, especially the 8GByte RAM version. Only a few talk about the existence of a 4GByte version, not really a part of their review.

For the envisioned router needs, 4 GByte of RAM is more than enough for at least the coming 5 years.

[4wd]

You like the ZimaBoard 432?

-Shades (March 16, 2024, 08:17 AM)

It's a great little unit, plenty of power for something like pfsense, at the moment I've just been playing with it seeing what its native OS is like, I'd need to redo my networking a little before incorporating it running pfsense but I don't have the time right now.

CasaOS is a container management front-end based on Debian, got a lot going for it but I found it rather flakey so just installed DietPi along with Portainer.

Have also installed ProxMox on it and run pfsense through that but it didn't really leave enough resources for the other things I was looking at running, 8GB version would have been ok though.

You might want to look at the ZimaBlade, same sort of thing but cheaper because you add your own RAM, (DDR3 SO-SIMM).
Downside is only one Gbe port but decent Intel secondhand PCIe cards are easy to get if you don't already have them lying around.

Base model with 2 core CPU is only US$64 with the 4 core at US$96 - they're pre-order ATM - looking back this probably would have been a better choice for me since I have spare RAM I could have used and therefore bumped up on the CPU.

Btw, don't know if it's still applicable but a first order on a new account got me a 30% discount, so the 432+SATA Y cable was ~US$115.

[Deozaan]

Anyone doing anything fun/interesting/useful with a Raspberry Pi 5? I realized today that I haven't really heard anything about the Pi 5 since they were officially announced.

I got rid of all my Pis (3 & 4) a couple years ago but I keep coming up with reasons to want another one. My problem in the past has always been that I would get the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi with some specific task in mind and then it turned out that the CPU wasn't powerful enough, or the I/O wasn't fast enough, or it didn't have enough RAM, etc., and then it just collected dust. So even though I think I'd like to get one again I'm hesitant because I don't want to spend the money buying the SBC and accessories and the time to set it up and tinker with it only for it to ultimately sit unused like all the others thus far.

[mouser]

I'm very much considering building a raspberry pi based device that you can plug an old standard analog telephone into, and have a game software interact with you over the phone.

[ayryq]

I would get the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi with some specific task in mind and then it turned out that the CPU wasn't powerful enough, or the I/O wasn't fast enough, or it didn't have enough RAM, etc., and then it just collected dust. So even though I think I'd like to get one again I'm hesitant because I don't want to spend the money buying the SBC and accessories and the time to set it up and tinker with it only for it to ultimately sit unused like all the others thus far.

-Deozaan (April 20, 2024, 01:42 AM)

I have the opposite problem: I have three pi 4's in continuous use right now and I bet I could combine at least two of them, since I'm not really taxing them. Two are in the basement running Home Assistant and Pi.Hole. The third is in the attic connected to two software-defined radios providing ADS-B data to not just me but sites like FlightRadar24. I've got another couple sitting on my desk which I had been trying to set up as a sort of Sonos-lite whole-house music player. If that doesn't work out I may use one as a add-on screen to my PC, for flight sim software.
My brother, who lives where the northern lights are often visible, just set a pi 4 (I think) up as a all-sky camera in a tube on his roof. Has a 360° horizon and the whole sky hemisphere in shot, with this software running it.

My new gadget this weekend is going to be a (used) Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III, but it hasn't been delivered yet.

https://www.flightra...feed-stats/?id=48382
https://globe.adsbex...m/?feed=dx4kRzUqNE5p

[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.