Pi 4 build for nighttime uses

[Doug Coulter]

While the mega machine is super nice for editing videos and other intense tasks, we're entering the worst time of year for solar electricity*, and that machine does indeed drink the joules.
So, at the other extreme, I decided to see how low on power use I could go and still have something acceptable for goofing off, watching youtube, maybe playing some games (haven't yet, I've never been much of a gamer) or just hitting the lan of things webpages to control the homestead. Of course, the displays draw more power than the computer in this lashup, and it's the 24" asus computer model that is worst. My LG 42" TV (that has yet to be used as a TV) is good as it has selective backlight dimming and in general, uses less power than a smaller dedicated computer monitor(!). I could live with one screen if needed I guess, but this is super nice.

I think this is a success - there's some tweaking yet to do, but it's looking good.
I started with a 4 gb pi 4, and added an "ice tower" cooler and a gumstick SSD adapter. At the moment, there's a USB dongle for sound - I'm awaiting a cable for that trrs jack to see if I can skip the dongle, and a game controller I've never used and have no idea how to use - someday I'll learn to play mario or something. Right now - I have adventure (colossal cave) going again - my first ever and main game from the 70s. Getting back into that maze of twisty passages, all alike is a blast. Y2! Yes, there is an x86 and dos emulator that works on pi! And in fact, it's faster than the original dos machines were.

I now have it booting from the SSD, no SD card required, and am overclocking it somewhat. While it's definitely noticeably not as quick as the big box, it can do youtube videos at 480 or 720p (maybe more, but that DSL bandwidth...) with zero dropped frames. It does tend to run out of ram if I have my usual 20 tabs open - keeping it to 4-5 works fine, though.

The "ice tower" is really eye candy, but it works - almost as well as the pimoroni fan shim does - that latter is the best I've found based on achieved temperatures under load.
I added this SSD adapter and am using this sata gumstick. They reccomend NOT using a samsung for reasons they don't explain - that's what I use for everything else and am happy with, but...we're going with the flow here, and FWIW, all this worked flawlessly on first powerup. The adapter did seem a bit pricey, but when it was announced, it sold out instantly and I had to wait for the next production run. It does generate some interference on 2.4 ghz, which I'm going to try to address this afternoon - it makes the range of my wireless keyboard/mouse very short and plain old kills 2.4 ghz wifi (but I have 5 ghz too).

Getting the pi to boot from the ssd is now pretty easy, mostly involving an update and a single file edit to tell the pi it's ok to use that new bootloader.

At the moment, I'm running "Twister" as the opsys, which is a lot of fun. Someone added a lot of tweaks and skins to this - I'm using windows 10 dark theme just to mess with some heads, and it includes emulators for all the retro gaming stuff - the pi is faster enough than that old stuff that you actually have to slow the emulations down a bit in many cases....It's a good bit nicer than plain Raspberry pi OS at the moment. When real working 64 bit comes along, I may change to that, depending on whether I really do much gaming. I do want to replace my LAN of things master - the old pies get flakey after a couple years (Even with a good disk drive). The 64 bit stuff just isn't ready for prime time yet, and with this system - I'm running TWO 1080p screens at a time. I like that - one big one for movies or news, a mere 24" one but right at my coffee table - for editing code and controlling stuff. It works out nicely with how I think.
This video on twister was done before USB boot was so easy...but otherwise it's good. Overclocking is trivial on this OS, there's a utility to do it. I didn't go to the limit, only 2 ghz for the pi and 700 mhz for the gpu with overvolt of 6. It's enough and doesn't get too hot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkg5bxsG_xY


I'd add a pic of it, and might later on, but it's pretty much like the one at amazon link above for the cooler, and it's not running just now. Here's another video on the SSD adapter. It's very neat mechanically. I think that unshielded trick USB U-turn adapter is the source of the RFI, and I'm going to shield mine (and I'll report if that works, or what it takes - this is not the first time something USB3 has jammed up 2.4 ghz stuff).
https://youtu.be/Q1btyPoL0GI



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* solar
this time of year, the days are already getting shorter, but it's still warm so the fridge still runs a lot, and the leaves are still on the trees so I lose an hour or two of the reduced day due to that. So, batteries have to work longer at night, but don't get as much time to charge in the day. By the time it's at the winter solstice, leaves are gone and the fridge doesn't run much....you learn things like that living on solar. The best time of year is before the summer solstice for similar reasons but in reverse.

[Doug Coulter]

Posting from that pi. Shielding that USB kludge was no good. Creating a conductive bottm plate (because it was easy) also no good - made things worse. Did some short grounding from the tops of those standoffs to USB and Ethernet jacks at the front - worst of all. Super high frequencies are .. always interesting, and I didn't want to spend the time to do it "right" with "tiny fractions of a wavelength grounding" and so on, with no incidental "slot antennas" if that's even possible.
Seemed like a good idea at the time - you can also do it "wrong" and get lucky with cancelling radiations from different parts of a thing, and I just want this to work, not picky about how I get there.

Here's what I did for that connector - there's a bit of cardboard from a beer carton under the copper tape. This pointed up the fact I haven't transferred all my nifty tricks to here yet - like new file templates that do most of the boilerplate for various things, and a nice script for the file manager that shrinks jpegs down to size for this, hence the ridiculous unneeded res here. I'll get there. I did have to add exfat stuff via synaptic to eat my camera output. No biggie.

Oops. I don't have my auto-compressor script here yet.

As with other radiation, though, inverse square law is your friend. A little USB hub on a 6" lead danging from the mess with the wireless dongles in it solves all, better than ever. Ugly. Sigh.

For fun, EricR plays against the twitch hive while I watch chrome destroy the SSD via iotop.

I didn't really catch it in the act, but even when paused, there are around 4 lines popping up of some chrome subprocess writing in the 150kb/sec range apiece. WTF? No wonder pies kill SD cards.