Raspberry Pi Desktop For UMPC Repair!

I love UMPC, the idea of being able to carry a complete system in a pocket or small bag has always appealed and I've had a raft of machines, from my old  HP Jornada 720 through to a (sadly died) One Mix Yoga. One that I had never owned is a Sony Vaio P Series. When one came up on ebay with no HDD and a wonky network card I couldn't resist. 

This is a P11z and is widely regarded as a bit of an overpriced dud in it's day! The 2GB ram and the 1.3MHz single core processor left a lot to be desired especially when running WinBlow$ Vista (aaargh) off a 4200rpm HDD. However, running a lighter distro and an SSD I wondered if it could be a useful note taker. 

So a 1.8" Zif 40 pin SSD was ordered and fitted and the network card issues where solved by simply re-seating it and re connecting the antenna cables! After my explorations a while back getting Linux to run on  Linx 1010b I was expecting a battle and also having read a lot of people struggling with drivers I was considering my options. Then a brainwave, I wondered how well the Raspberry Pi desktop would work, a quick test with a live USB was stunning, everything works! 

Whilst it's still not the quickest machine in the world its actually super fun to have the RPI OS on a super portable machine, I installed the image with all the optional software and whilst primarily this machine tends to hang around with notes for a project open in Libreoffice Writer, its fun to play with Mu and Wolfram and other stuff included in the RPI Desktop. 

FreeCAD mini series in Hackspace Magazine. Issue 37.

 

I've just updated the blogpost where I keep track of all my articles for Hackspace magazine (Here if you are interested) and whilst I have the cover feature this month on Robots I wanted to just post about the other piece I have in this month. It's the first part of a mini series about learning the wonderful FreeCAD software and is aimed at both beginners in CAD and beginners in FreeCAD. 

I haven't written much about why FreeCAD as opposed to other, perhaps more well known, CAD platforms. For me part of it is that I love the opensource movement and agree with its ideals in all sorts of ways. That aside, FreeCAD also has a few other benefits. Whilst it's complex, that complexity is also astonishing in terms of what it brings. I've played with FreeCAD for a couple of years and I still feel quite like a newb when I see the amazing things people in the FreeCAD community can design. Later in the mini series we'll have little overview of add on workbenches and some of the more esoteric sets of tools FreeCAD has. From designing and analysing hand gliders to simulating boats to FEA/FEM and more. It really is a feature rich piece of software capable of designing anything. 

More practically I like that FreeCAD isn't cloud based, this means that I can carry it with me regardless of connectivity wherever I go. Important in none ubiquitous WiFi N Wales but also important after this week where lots of the internet globally has been hit by outages. Finally, I'm loving how FreeCAD, due to it's opensource status, fits in with other software. There are some really interesting things going on in terms of FreeCAD and KiCAD, and the fact that FreeCAD can handle OpenSCAD scripts directly is a bonus. There are also some nice workflows between Inkscape and FreeCAD. These are things that are hard to find with less free, more proprietary CAD packages. Love it! Check out issue 37 of Hackspace Magazine here.