It’s here!

Take a look:

Clockwork Pi uConsole

Yes, I’m typing this using it, although i expect the post will be short. 😉

it’s got a RPi with 4 Gig of RAM, but it runs off of an SD card, so it’s a bit slower than I’m used to. It also normally runs off batteries, but it doesn’t include the 18650s it needs in the package, so I’ll have to go get some today.

Overall, I really like it. The only thing I’ll say is *man* is that text small for my old eyes!

EVCO

I was out for my usual Saturday morning e-bike ride, when I decided out of the blue to stop for a coffee at the Second Cup on Merivale Road. As I was parking my bike, I was approached by a couple of gents who wanted to talk about the brand and my experiences.

After chatting with them a bit it turns out they were members of the Electric Vehicle Council of Ottawa (EVCO), which is a group of electric vehicle enthusiasts which meets regularly at various coffee shops around Ottawa.

Today, they were checking out an electric Fiat 500 that one of the members had brought up from Montreal. As a past Abarth owner, I was very interested. It’s a nice looking mini car, which would be fine for zipping around the city, although I did wonder about range limitations versus driving from Montreal. Hm…

Regardless, it’s always nice to see more people who understand the value of electric vehicles.

My new minimalist blogging platform

The phone that I’m always carrying around anyway, plus a really compact — say about 2 stacked credit cards in size when folded up — iPhone stand, plus a Logitech Keys-to-go.

Blogging on the run

The Keys-to-go is surprisingly reasonable to type on. I’m able to touch type at full speed.

Notes:

  • Apologies for the potato quality photo. Since I was taking a picture of my phone, I had to use the webcam on my laptop to take the picture. 🙂
  • Yes, I know the picture doesn’t show me blogging. I used the WordPress iPhone app to write this post, but the post wasn’t written when I took the picture, so…

Raspberry Pi 5

So…

RPi 5 with stock cooler

I had pre-ordered a RPi 5 a couple of months ago, but really had no idea when it was going to show up, so it was a pleasant surprise when I got the email from PiShop earlier this week to say that it had arrived. A quick trip over to their warehouse on Colonnade Road et voilà.

As you can see from the above picture, I also got the stock active cooler, but that was it. It’s actually mounted to the bottom panel of an old RPi 4 case I had lying around, just to keep it elevated off of the desk. Hopefully that will help to keep it cool, and reduce the chances of damage to the board.

Speaking of cooling, like many other RPi enthusiasts, I was surprised by how hot the wee beastie gets. I haven’t done a lot of testing yet, but just based on the CPU temp plugin in the taskbar, idle temp is around 38° C. As soon as you start doing anything (like typing a blog post) it rapidly goes up to around 48°C. Somewhere around this temperature the fan on the heat sink will spin up, but because it’s variable speed, even with it running there is next to no sound. The only time I’ve heard the fan spin at full speed is during boot up, and even then it’s still quite quiet — i.e. it’s not the screaming monster you might expect a fan that tiny to be. Regardless, the heat sink fins do get hot enough that you probably don’t want to touch them while it’s running.

I have been holding off upgrading my webserver Pi to the latest debian bookworm based OS, since there was no (official) upgrade path from the previous version and it’s a pain to move all of the hosted sites over to a new install. Now that I have a Pi 5 too, I think it may be time. The combination of more performant hardware and the move from PHP7 to PHP8 in bookworm should provide a significant boost. Note: I really don’t *need* to do this, the current sites load just fine, but a few pages (like the NextCloud dashboard) aren’t quite where I’d like them.

Anyway, I’ll post again once I have moved the server over to the new hardware. For now, I can say I’m very happy with it. If you’re looking for a super cheap, small form factor desktop, the RPi 5 will definitely work for you. It’s still not a speed demon, but it will play 1080p/60fps video without dropping a lot of frames, and feels quite snappy to use (running off an SSD). Peace!

Cicada Sound

In case anyone who reads this blog is a eurorack gearhead in Ottawa, I’d like to make a plug for a (relatively) new music store I discovered recently.

Cicada Sound
1198 Bank St
Ottawa, ON K1S 3Y1
613-909-4124

I was, in fact, pointed at them by someone from L&M because I had been bemoaning the fact that they no longer had any eurorack modules on display. The person I was chatting with suggested I check out this new store, and wow am I ever glad they did! I also greatly appreciate a vendor that will send you somewhere else when they can’t satisfy your needs. Thanks, L&M!

Cicada Sound has a range of synths and some guitars, etc. but their main focus seems to be eurorack gear, which is something I have been desperately looking for in Ottawa. As you can see from the picture, they have lots of modules set up and wired into workstations with headphones on each, so you can actually figure out what the modules sound like before buying them. Woot!

In the spirit of “putting your money where your mouth is”, I purchased a Cre8Audio NiftyKEYZ modular case+keyboard from them. After some fiddling here’s a picture with it filled with some of my eurorack modules:

I really like this device. I can honestly say that this is the nicest euroack controller I have ever used. It has some things I’d tweak if I had access to the firmware, but really it’s great.