ClockworkPi uConsole

Finally Got it

I ordered a ClockworkPi uConsole back in October of 2023. It finally arrived at my house last week while I was out of town. I drove home yesterday from Colorado, late. This morning I woke at 0558 and proceded to build the device (it comes as a kit). I was done in ten minutes, but no display. Turns out that the CM4 can indeed be inserted into the carrier board 180-out. A google image search later and an image of someone else's build showed my mistake. Flipped the CM4 over and voila, it booted.

I am a tiling window manager user, the default Raspbian GUI doesn't appeal to me so I installed i3. Somehow this hosed LightDM and I could no longer log in. I dropped to a TTY and apt remove'd lightdm and i3. I intalled SDDM instead and configured it to rotate the screen 90 degrees right (ths is one of those devices that uses a repurposed tablet screen and so it defaults to potrait, 90 degrees left). I installed sway since I know how to configure i3 and I have never messed with wayland before.

Next I installed emacs and it was v27 which is too old for my config. So, I removed that and installed from snap, which gave me v29. After this I installed tmux - I use it even in a gui. Next I installed Iosevka Nerd Font and riced sway a bit, using the read_file module in i3status to display my battery percentage. I don't care about charge status because I know if I am plugged in or not (and if I am plugged in but the percentage keeps dropping, I'd investigate).

This thing is made of aluminum, feels good in the hands. The keyboard is squishy, but servicable. It only has one USB port, and that is a USB 2.0 A port. The USB C atop that A port is only for charging. Many have complained about wifi reception, but mine is doing fine. I think this device is a fun addition to my kit.

XyloPi [IMG]