💾 Archived View for seydaneen.nahtgards.de › leuchtturm › dwemerartefakte › blog › 2024-01-17.gemini captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:10:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
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I'm playing around with the ClockworkPi uConsole a while now. The most annoying things are the battery life and the crappy wifi antenna.
At least i got the wifi problem fixed with a small 3db 4cm RP-SMA IPEX antenna - the official antenna for the Raspberry Compute Module is also a good choise. I just glued the female connector in the lid above the screen with hot glue. Even if i not connect the antenna the connection is much better than with the flat antenna that comes with the uConsole.
I also improved the battery charging time with some device rules. Here a little shell command for this:
echo 'KERNEL=="axp20x-battery",ATTR{constant_charge_current_max}="2200000",ATTR{constant_charge_current}="2000000"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-uconsole-charging.rules
If only the battery would last a little bit longer... the cm4 and the screen seem to suck a lot of power. I tried to reduce it with only enabling 2 cores or trottle the clock to 800 Mhz max. But this doesn't have much a effect.
With the USA Gear case for a GPD Pocket i can now take the uConsole with me. At the moment i'm on the go and typing these lines in a terminal via micro on my little handheld.
Since the Lapdock has a quite ugly display resolution of 1366x786 and there is a bug in Raspberry Pi OS for the cm4 (and Pi 4 in general) the Lapdock doesn't work out of the box.
I found a solution on the official Raspberry bug tracker on github. Sadly with just putting a xorg config into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ i didn't have much success but with following little script i can correct the messed up screen after connecting the Lapdock:
#!/bin/bash xrandr --newmode "Lapdock" 70.01064 1368 1414 1446 1498 768 772 776 780 +hsync -vsync xrandr --addmode HDMI-1 Lapdock xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode Lapdock
I put it into my ~/.lobal/bin/ and run it if needed.
With this all the uConsole gets finally somewhat useable for me. I run a terminal (sakura) maximized at login, encrypted my home, sync via syncthing with my workstation - and write this little gemlog entry with micro directly on the uConsole.
I hope i find a good solution for the battery life. About 4 hours are not great for such a good portable console / handheld pc. But for the price and value if the uConsole is just awesome.
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