things are going just great for raspberry pi:

[moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org]

@zzt @jpm @neoluddite
If the Raspberry Pi company cared about hackers, they would've leaned way harder into the DIY portable electronics scene.

Imagining a world where every vaguely motivated user builds their own laptops and phones around standardized components (just like with desktops): instead of making gross compromises to get the features they want.

[jpaskaruk@growers.social]

@kirtai @zzt if you're hacky, I was told there is a script of sorts for installing the Zynthian UI on any Debian system in the repo somewhere. Might be worth trying that on an Orange.

@jpm @neoluddite

[mewsleah@meow.social]

@zzt @jpm @neoluddite that sure explains how Eben Upton went from "completely open thing built on a microcontroller beloved of the open hardware community with a Python REPL in ROM" to "this PoS my employer saw the chance to get a tax break on offloading, but hey, it's much faster and runs Linux - job done, right?"

[moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org]

@mewsleah @zzt @jpm @neoluddite
The Broadcom VideoCore line's Wikipedia page reads like a goddamn marketing brochure.

[crzwdjk@mastodon.social]

@zzt @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite That last bit is not quite true, for rpi4+ there are fully open source GPU drivers developed with funding from the raspberry pi foundation and even some small cooperation from broadcom. But yeah the original scheme was that the GPU driver was an opaque blob that ran on the secondary processor and the main OS would basically just do OpenGL over RPC calls to the blob.

[zzt@mas.to]

@crzwdjk @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite unfortunately, the open source Mesa and DRM drivers haven’t changed anything about the root of trust or boot firmware I’m referring to. https://macoy.me/blog/programming/PiGPU has some good information on why; Igalia, who Broadcom hired to do the open source driver work, has a privileged position in terms of the information they can access, and have released only enough code to release and upstream their drivers specifically.

[zzt@mas.to]

@crzwdjk @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite here’s the closest thing I can find to open source boot firmware: https://librerpi.github.io/ (it’s terribly incomplete), and note that UEFI on pi4 and 5 is still just called by the GPU, it isn’t actually boot firmware

here’s a relatively recent official position on the GPU: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=381252 don’t ask, stop being curious about your hardware, you don’t want to use the GPU for anything

[zzt@mas.to]

@crzwdjk @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite for me, Broadcom and Igalia working together on Mesa and DRM drivers is almost indistinguishable from Rockchip and Collabora doing the same. it’s great to have but I won’t applaud it, because upstreaming drivers in a way that barely checks boxes is pretty standard for embedded vendors. Rockchip just doesn’t have a PR arm shaped like a nonprofit to make it look fluffier than it is, and they didn’t structure their architecture such that the GPU is in control.

[kyle_pegasus@scalie.club]

@zzt @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite I just fell into the raspberry pi trap because it's the only platform where VLC's setting to display video on a specific monitor actually works.

in exchange for that feature, it starts "playing" the video before loading it, so the first two seconds are cut off.

£46 well spent!

[icil@app.wafrn.net]

Man, rpi fell off. Minecraft pocket edition with scratch programming was cool when I was in primary

[dan@axillae.telent.net]

@zzt ha, same experience with nixos rpi-installer. And it doesn't refuse to write the image, or tell you the provisioning didn't work, so you sit there like a lemon for ten minutes staring at a headless SBC with a flickering led thinking "I wonder how long first boot is supposed to take surely I can ping it by now".

I ended up installing my RPI zero w using an HDMI video capture usb dongle and vlc running on my laptop

[jwz@mastodon.social]

@zzt Did you try a rubber band? Alternately maybe you should re-mill whatever it is out of a cube of titanium?

[zzt@mas.to]

shit actually I’m gonna follow up on this since “it works now byeeeee” is one of my least favorite types of posters

for the waveshare 2.8 inch DSI display, just follow the directions on the vendor’s wiki to pull in the proprietary dtoverlay: https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/2.8inch_DSI_LCD. this won’t work at all for non-rpi SBCs unfortunately (it’s not a normal display by any means) and you’ll have work to do to get it working on other than raspberry pi OS. other than that it’ll just fire up on reboot as an fbcon

[zzt@mas.to]

don’t use that LCD-show shit, it’ll fuck up your config in various ways and isn’t compatible with Debian Trixie images (the vendor dtoverlay is). you don’t need to run any weird shit to get the display working with DRM or xorg other than rotating it normally as you would any other fbcon or xrandr display, if you want it in landscape

the waveshare 2.8 inch HDMI display is a fucking timing disaster that the orange pi 3b’s HDMI PHY can’t drive but my laptop can, so it’s not a great DSI alternative

[zzt@mas.to]

@jwz I’m fucking amazed I haven’t gotten “why didn’t you simply write open source drivers for the LCD” yet

(this project has already turned into future patches for qemu, somehow. it’s a nightstand computer inside one of those clocks shaped like a Mac 128k)

[resuna@ohai.social]

@zzt

So are the RiscV SBCs any better?

[brendanjones@fosstodon.org]

@jpm @neoluddite @zzt I’ve recently been returning to the idea of finally setting up a pi hole with a Raspberry Pi, but this thread gives me pause. Would it be better to do it on an Orange Pi than a Raspberry Pi?

[zzt@mas.to]

@Brendanjones @jpm @neoluddite I highly recommend used x86 hardware for non-embedded computing tasks (essentially anything where you don’t need GPIOs, a specific form factor, or passive cooling).

my home file server is a Dell Optiplex 9020M USFF that I got from an enterprise surplus sale for $20. it’s currently running about 10 fairly heavy daemons and a ZFS NAS with the 8GB RAM it came with. they’re a bit more expensive now — eBay says $40, but it’ll be cheaper if it’s available locally

1/

[zzt@mas.to]

@Brendanjones @jpm @neoluddite in spite of its name, it looks like pi-hole will work fine on x86 hardware: https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/ from my experience, it’ll run much better on x86 than it will on the pi. it seems like Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora are officially supported.

if you go for one of the Dells I mentioned, take note of its ports and available upgrades (this is enterprise hardware so Dell’s docs are still available). if you need above gigabit Ethernet, you may need a USB adapter.

[zzt@mas.to]

@resuna someone with more experience with the SBCs than me might have to answer that — I like the instruction set and have tinkered with it some on FPGAs, but most of my RISC-V SBC experience is with the Ox64, which I can’t recommend because they’re awful janky things that I’m not convinced anyone has used successfully in a project, but that’s more a Pine64 problem than a RISC-V one.

I’d be happy to hear if there’s a good vendor doing open RISC-V hardware.