My New Laptop; Starlabs Star Lite MkIII

 

I've owned heaps of laptops, probably over 20 if I sat down and wrote a list, and almost all of them have been 2nd hand. In fact I've only ever bought a couple of laptops new and, until this one, the Starlabs Mini Lite MkIII, I've never bought bought a new laptop with factory installed Linux. In fact Starlabs offered a list of Linux distributions that could be preinstalled. I've used lots of different distributions over the years but I've become a bit lazy with them and tend to just stick to Ubuntu. I know, it's a bit bloated, but I like the interface and stuff seems to just work for me. 

So any company that's creating Linux laptops gets some attention from me but what really made me want to own one and support Starlabs is that they are pretty great in terms of repair and hacker friendliness. So for a start, opening the Star Lite doesn't void the one year warranty. HELL YEAH. Secondly they have made a point of making their products simple to work on and the only tool you need is a Phillips screwdriver. I love this stuff, it's important in terms of actually owning the things you own and it's important in terms of keeping hardware alive longer. 

So to the Star Lite MKIII. It's great!  It's small and super thin and has an 11" screen. I've always lent towards portables/UMPC and road warriors rather than larger desktop replacements so it's perfect for me. Specs wise, it's interesting, with a Pentium Silver N5000 processor that on paper doesn't look like the faster thing ever but paired with fast RAM and a blazingly fast star drive SSD, so far this machine absolutely zips along!

It's all aluminium chassis wise and super lightweight, yep it's definitely one of those laptops that falls into the "I'm checking my bag twice to see i it's actually in there". The keyboard is good, which I think as my daily driver for years has been an old Thinkpad X220 with arguably one of the best ever keyboards, is fine praise. The keys have a nice stroke length and the keyboard is back lit (with a couple of adjustable brightness levels) which is a feature I've wanted on a daily driver laptop for a while. The matt screen is also worthy of mention, it's a total joy! I find it much less fatiguing on the eyes than other screens. 

So coming from a background of usually installing Linux on machines it's nice that seemingly everything works well on the Star Lite. I know that might sound odd, but I've usually had something on a Linux'd machine I've needed to sort. A small script to stop Bluetooth turning on at boot or perhaps the hardware keys for screen brightness have needed solving etc. So far on the Star Lite, none of these things apply. 

In use I've mainly hammered it with browser tabs, multiple terminals and a fair bit of Libre Office Writer which I do most of my writing in. I've also been playing with the FreeCAD app image on it and it's actually a very good experience and certainly capable of handling most of my CAD needs. I imagine, if you are designing hugely complex geometries and assemblies this may change, but for my needs most of the time it's perfect. Battery life is good, not sure I'm getting the stated 7 hours, but certainly 6 hours which will do me. All power related stuff, hibernation, wake from sleep, are all working as they should as well. 

So rounding out this... yep, they get my vote! At £400 this is a cracking little machine and if you want a laptop that replaces the windows key with a "super key" you should buy one today!

Playing with the Raspberry Pi Pico!

I've been incredibly lucky to get to play with the new Raspberry Pi Pico in pre release and, in short, it's rather brilliant! First up, this new board contains custom Raspberry Pi silicon, the RP2040 chip, which will also be sold as a standalone product for people to develop products/systems/boards with.

The Pico is set to retail at  less than a £5er and you'll want to check out this page for the full spec and the pin in/out of the Pico but the highlights are;

Dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ processor, with clock running up to 133 MHz

264 KB of SRAM and 2MB of flash onboard

26 multi function GPIO

2x SPI, 2 x I2C, 2 x UART, 3 x 12bit ADC, 16 PWM channels

8 x PIO Programmable state machines

It  has USB Host and Device, compatible back to 1.1 and it's programmable via drag and drop using mass storage mode. If that last line didn't make sense, put simply, you create some code, attach the Pico via USB (whilst holding down a button)  it appears as a drive and you drag your script file to the Pico and it is automatically installed! Simple!

Language wise there is a C/C++ and  a port of Micro Python and I've played a little with both, working through some of the examples in both C/C++ and also Micro Python. All my tinkering has been done using my Raspberry Pi400 and it's worked excellently as a pairing! 

I started following the Getting Started PDF for C/C++ and installed the SDK/ toolchains. The guide walks you through installing everything you need from the terminal and steps through how to make and build the examples. Many will opt to edit and create code in something like Visual Studio (again bundled into the Rasbian image) but for my simple tinkering I opened some of the examples using nano, tweaked and then rebuilt them in the terminal. You honestly don't need to be a terminal guru to get to this point, simply follow the documentation. The resulting tweaked examples, when built, create a .UF2 file which you can drag and drop to the Pico which flashes incredibly quickly. 

Perhaps more accessible for some is the Micro Python or "Pico Python"route, the first task here is to drag and drop the Pico Python firmware onto the device, for convenience a pre built binary is available on the Pico Getting Started page. Also in the getting started with Micro Python on Pico documentation there is a guide for you if you are keen and want want to build your own binary. Flashing the micro python firmware to the Pico is another simple drag and drop operation and you can, of course, swap between C/C++ and Micro Python by re-flashing.

Following the micro python getting started guide it walks you through interacting with the REPL using minicom within the terminal which is fun to tinker with. There's a decent walk through of all the examples in the micro python repository in the documentation. This includes examples that use most of the Pico's features, PWM, UART, SPI, PIO , but there's also examples for things like interrupts, and additional common sensors, Neopixels and LED's. 

Towards the end of the Micro Python guide there is a section on setting up an IDE, Thonny, to provide a nice environment for working with the Pico. Thonny is a nice simple IDE that's again bundled in the Raspbian OS, it's pretty straightforward to set up and get going and you can work directly with the REPL via a shell window or you can save and deploy scripts temporarily or with persistence to the Pico.

So! My thoughts, it's great, a low price, really fast and well spec'd micro controller that at launch already has a heap of resources and examples, I'm sure that at the price point it will attract a mass of users and a strong community which will create and share lots of wonderful projects. I can't wait to see it grow!

Repairing for Thriftyness! Zoom H4n tiny repair!

I'm always repairing stuff and find it a really rewarding thing to do for all kinds of reasons. I've been thinking about how repairs have different things that drive the desire to repair. Many times I repair because I need to use a tool that I've managed to break and can't wait for a replacement, sometimes I'm repairing something I've made, a crashed rocket or ripped parachute. Sometimes repairs are emotional and nostalgic, repairing an item I have an attachment too that is irreplaceable. Sometimes I feel repairs are important in terms of heritage, particularly older tools/ lathe etc. Anyway... today I was thinking, sometimes I repair because I am thrifty!

I particularly wanted one of these zoom H4n audio recorders as I wanted to explore a particular feature they have that's slightly different to others. They are an older model now that were about £250 originally but now can be picked up in good condition for about £100. However you can often find them cheaper listed with a bit of wear and a few faults. This one was listed with a few cosmetic scrapes, an intermittent fault on a button, and the SD card slot cover missing.... it was therefore much cheaper! 

On arrival a quick blow through the case with some canned air has cured the button press issue and it's always worth searching ebay for people selling scrap/spares/repair versions of your item. I managed to find an entire right hand side chassis component for £3.20 complete with the SD card slot. A quick swap and it's not quite as good as new, but it's 100% functional and ready to go! For the repairers out there these are pretty easy to work on, no glues and standard screws!

Round up of my stuff on Thingiverse

 

I realised I've never really blogged about my stuff on thingiverse. I tend to use thingiverse for smaller items with larger projects going on my gitlab but there's a growing random sprawl of little designs over on my thingiverse page so I thought I'd post about a few. 

First up is the latest project which is a small box for ER11 collets I use with my CNC router. Designed in FreeCAD the conic holes for the collets match the collet dimensions so that there's no rattling around. The lid is just a slip on cover as I don't tend to carry the collets around but I do want them to be protected from swarf and chips off the machine. 

Next up is a set of Mini Lathe Pinion gears this pair of gears sit above the tumblers on the mini lathe and select the direction and drive for the gearbox. I stripped one of my gears and whilst I could find lots of designs for the tumbler/change gear wheels I couldn't find a design to print these so there they are!

A while ago I wrote an article for Hackspace Magazine Issue 36 on "Functional 3d printing" where I looked at printing various useful little designs, I put most of the stuff from that article on my thingiverse including a small screwdriver handle to hold 4mm bits, some nice printable V blocks with clamps and various other small clamps and jigs and workholders. 

One project people seemed to like from a while ago on my thingiverse is a tiny vacuum former, I made it on my CNC router but the drawings could easily be laser cut as well, it's super cute but works well for small items in thin plastic using a small house vac. 

Finally there are a few other lasercut designs up on there. My first ever thingiverse project was this lasercut rocketry ruler which helps draw straight lines on tubes and also has a reminder about centre of pressure versus centre of gravity relationships on it! There's also a complex design for a lightweight indexing table and even a design for mounting fins on a flat pack workshop demonstration rocket!