That is what I am talking about. They could post, or even cross-post the same stuff. They don’t need a moderation team.

I think there definitely would be less anxiety about shipping on these forums if they had a community manager who could speak about delays proactively

To be fair, they appear to have been posting in zh-CN elsewhere, which is fine. I ordered a uConsole the day after the announcement and followed it here, and there were a lot of really hostile people throwing accusations and insults. In CPi’s position, I would probably have stayed away from the place where that was going on.

They’re making these cool devices that appeal to hackers, and the uConsole is enough of a “product” that it attracted a broader audience, people that don’t really understand the engineering process or what “lead time” means or how thin the margins can be, and thus were somewhat less sympathetic.

the CEO of Mastodon (LOL) blocked me

Ha! Everything I have to say about that is off-topic here.

moderating is a pain

I have spent most of my time on there actively avoiding doing moderation and it is still a pain. Some people sign up just to try to grief the mods, so whatever the rules are, they will come up with something.

You’d want an organization running a mastodon server to be capable of moderating the service. There’s one staff member here who posts in one thread once a month.

You might need to moderate it if it’s got open registrations, but if the only people with accounts on the instance are CPi staff, you don’t need a moderation team.

It doesn’t have to be something grandiose, that’s the point: if they are on fedi, people with accounts on other fedi servers can follow them.

I’m actually really delighted with the R01. I expected it to be fun, but it’s very usable and runs super cool and it’s kind of astonishing how well-supported the chip is: everything compiles cleanly, no strange crashes. I was able to get Slackware installed and it works great for daily use.

A RISC-V board with a little more RAM and a few more cores would be an amazing addition for the DevTerm and the uConsole.

What I use on my R01 is usually just bloat ( bloat - A web client for Mastadon Network , I have a version with a lot of changes at GitHub - pete/bloat: Mirror of a minimal set of changes to BloatFE / git.debu.gs Git - bloat/summary ). It runs fine on w3m or other super-minimal browsers. I use bloat from mothra: the R-01 runs drawterm ( http://drawterm.9front.org/ ) just fine, so I can connect to the Plan 9 machines.

There’s also sshocial ( Duponin / sshocial · GitLab ) which doesn’t require a browser, but I haven’t used it; the instance I’m on has an ssh interface built in.

I kind of wonder why CPi doesn’t run an instance. It’d be pretty cool to be able to get news there. (I locked my Twitter account and quit using it in 2018, but you can’t even use Nitter to read Twitter accounts any more.) On the other hand, every time I talk about the DevTerm or uConsole on fedi, people tell me it’s not a useful device and that it’s impossible to do work on it, even if I am talking about having worked on it all day.

You’re missing a space. sudo cp target/release/upico /usr/local/bin.

I finally decided to try another way to wake it up, by plugging in an external mouse and keyboard, and I discovered the system immediately woke up and was responsive.

Check powertop. One of the screens in it has a list of USB devices and whether their power management status puts them to sleep or not. If the internal keyboard/trackball go to sleep (or maybe are put to sleep by the OS/DE combination you are using, so if you are using a DE, check if it does any power management in its settings), but an external keyboard doesn’t, then that might be that the reason your device has trouble waking up.

They’re compatible, yeah, even swapping between DevTerm and uConsole. The R01 is really fun and it has ridiculous battery life. A few times I was reading on my DevTerm and fell asleep and it was still running when I woke up.

relies heavily on the “mod” key, which is the “Super” key by default so Fn + AltL on the uConsole

I do not know how easy it is to remap things under Wayland, but on the uConsole, I use the volume button for the window manager’s meta key. (escape XF86AudioLowerVolume in ratpoison. I use ratpoison on the DevTerm, too, but I use the Cmd key, which is Super_R. I have the volume up/down buttons mapped to screen brightness, and Fn+< and Fn+> cycle through windows.) One thing you might try is remapping the right Ctrl/Alt keys, depending on whether you need both pairs.

I was wondering if there is a way to use one of the gamepad buttons

There are some dip switches on the back of the keyboard that can be used to send normal keypresses instead of gamepad keypresses, but they’re mapped to letter keys. (I seem to recall the dip switches are actually on the board, but it’s a bit more involved to disassemble than the DevTerm is.)

You could try getting the Arduino devkit to work (if anyone knows a way to rebuild the firmware for the keyboard without going through Arduino’s IDE, please let me know) and that’d enable you to just tweak the appropriate bits in the firmware and reflash. Remapping a single key is not difficult. Have a look at uConsole/Code/uconsole_keyboard at master · clockworkpi/uConsole · GitHub . The bit that handles the presses for the A button is here: uConsole/Code/uconsole_keyboard/keymaps.ino at master · clockworkpi/uConsole · GitHub . It looks like it’s mapped to “j” when the switch is toggled, so if you wanted it to send the same keycode as Cmd/Fn+Alt does, then, per line 670, it looks like you want to use _CMD_KEY.

For a first LFS, you’ll have an easier time doing it for a more standard machine first before doing it for a quirky SOC with a lot of custom hardware. Especially if it’s your first time, it can be tricky to determine if something breaks because you haven’t done it before and you missed something, or because it’s a different CPU, or your cross-compiling toolkit has some problem, or whatever else. It will take a while to build some things and you’ll have to deviate from standard LFS for the bootloader and image format, you’ll have to add some of the CPi-specific bits for hardware support (like the gearbox if you go with A-06, drivers for the fan, printer, etc.).

That aside, I’ve been playing with ARM stuff for years and I love ARM (and the A-06 is wonderful, I love it), but so far, riscv64 is really nice and compiling stuff goes a little smoother. The chip’s less beefy than the ARM offerings by quite a bit but RISC-V is open (so dev support is pretty enthusiastic) and there’s so much variance in ARM that the R-01 goes a lot smoother when compiling anything.

It is the explaination . I have to find why .batteries are 9900 mAh GTF

That’s why. The 9900mAh batteries are false advertising. There’s a thread about it: Large Capacity Batteries in uConsole . Regardless of the advertised capacity, most of the Chinese batteries on Amazon are about 1000-1200mAh. There’s a link in there to a video, a place to buy reasonable batteries, etc. I haven’t used the store they link to, but I have had the same experience with Amazon batteries; I have had the best luck with the MXJO brand, the A06 lasts 4-6 hours on that easily. If you try out sudo powertop, you can see a lot of information, the screen brightness takes more power than the CPU sometimes.

I got the R01 just for fun but I think I use it more than the A06. It’s a really delightful chip.

Only one OS working .

It takes some effort to get another distro running. On the DevTerm, I’ve been running Slackware on my R01 and CRUX on my A06, though I’m running a stock CPi OS image on my uConsole (CM4). There are wiki pages for building the OS from scratch, they’re very helpful.

If you are trying to run Kali like you mentioned in the other thread, the easiest way to do this is to start with the official image and keep the kernel/DTB stuff in place and then clear out everything but /lib/modules and extract a Kali aarch64 rootfs over it. There is some userspace stuff you’ll want to keep from the official image or build from the git repo, like the gearbox.

Raspi 5 is ruuning most of linux distribution

It’s a very popular platform so more people are interested in producing images for it that work out of the box. The Clockwork Pi gear is excellent stuff, but it often requires some hacking; this is fine with me, I got it for hacking. They’re not really comparable systems, one of them is an SBC and the other is a full system that contains an SBC and a screen/keyboard and a lot of other hardware. There are a lot of people building add-on boards ( uPico Expansion Card ), building out distros (so many threads), creating music ( uConsole Music Production ).

The Raspberry Pi is useful and started as an educational tool and it’s now really popular as a small computer that people can use, but most of Clockwork Pi’s gear is designed for creative hacking: building strange software, soldering jumper wires for hardware mods (it was really pleasant how many solder pads and circuit diagrams are available), that kind of thing.

wifi lost the communication , I have to reconnect to my access point

There are a few threads about this. Did you check out the antenna mods? I haven’t tried them but people say that they work great.

On battery , it is switch off after 10 minutes even if batteries are full , without any alarm

This sounds like a problem with the batteries. What kind are you using?

USB speed isn’t fast enough , have to reduce sample from sdr radio to minimum

This sounds cool. What are you trying to do with SDR? I’ve been playing with gqrx and rtl_fm but I am fairly new to those. SDR seems pretty popular with these devices.

Well I 'm quite unhappy

This forum has been really helpful to me, but I think you will have an easier time if you focus on one problem at a time instead of making several top-level posts complaining. Try asking one question per topic. I like the device, but I didn’t design the hardware, I didn’t make it, complaining to people here just adds negativity. A lot of people here are really happy to help with problems! A lot of them solve these problems and then post the results.

It’s Debian-based, so apt-cache search mgba should help, and then apt-get install the package you want.

It comes with RetroArch preinstalled, though, and I think it includes mGBA. If not, apt-get install retroarch libretro-mgba should install it.

People have tried BananaPis without success; I don’t have a BPi or a Milky-V (though I have a DevTerm with the R01 installed and it’s delightful) to test, but I imagine you’d need, at minimum, the DTB overlays and whatever kernel patches the Milky-V wants.

There’s also some variation in models, like the embedded eMMC, wifi, things like that. So it depends on how compatible with the CM4 the Milky-V Mars CM is. The eMMC models apparently require some fiddling to boot because they have difficulty finding the boot device although it appears that the A06 will boot from a USB drive (which I found out by accident when I rebooted after my microSD card failed; I was building a CRUX system on the uSD card plugged in by a USB adapter and apparently had built out enough of the system to get a login prompt).

I had this trouble after some wear on the trackball (have been using the DevTerm somewhat heavily) and eventually had to replace the trackball (see The Cheapest Keyboard Hardware Mod - #9 by omgmog for information). Basically, the ball spins and there are some tiny gears and sometimes it doesn’t generate enough friction. You might be able to fix it by cleaning if you’re very careful.

DOSBox worked fine for me, but maybe because I’m using ratpoison rather than the full Xfce environment.

screen cuts in half unless I reboot my uConsole

This is an issue that DOSBox has even on my desktop system. Basically, in full-screen mode, instead of using its own scaling method, it adjusts the X resolution. Huge pain, especially in dual-screen setups.

It’s in the wiki on the Github repo: Create DevTerm R01 OS image from scratch · clockworkpi/DevTerm Wiki · GitHub

On average, a few months, but last year was a little crazy so there’s a backlog. Aside from that, it depends on the core you order. Sometimes helps to email and ask which one ships fastest before ordering.

Ha, after so long in this thread, I kept coming back to this thread out of habit and then to follow the adventures of the other people I had waited with.

parcels progress across the globe!

That is uConsole shipping-related!

replacement “spare” cpu board just in case

Oh, yeah, I’m gonna be ordering more CPi stuff this year. Very excited by the gear so far, I have been using this DevTerm every day for a year (literally every day), and the uConsole has been extremely fun.

@MHam68HC11 @star @Funcron

I guess I don’t have a reason to keep checking this thread.