Episode: 3646
Title: HPR3646: arm, slackware, forth oh my!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3646/hpr3646.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:46:34

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3646 from Monday the 25th of July 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Arms Slack or Fourth Omai.
It is hosted by Brian in Ohio and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is a description of a laptop.
Hello, Hacker Public Radio Brian in Ohio here.
I'm out from under my rock and I'm doing another show for HPR this time, hopefully something
of interest.
It's a description of a laptop I purchased.
So the laptop I've got in front of me and the one I'm recording on is a Pytop 3.
And so Pytop is a UK-based company.
They're one of these places they're getting seed money and they've raised about $24 million
in funding I think but maybe more.
They have three employees and they produce some products, Pytop Seed, Pytop 2 laptop,
a Pytop 3 which is the one I have.
And right now I think all they make is a Pytop 4 which is sort of a case and extra stuff
to hold a Raspberry Pi 4 and that includes some kind of robotic kits stuff.
I own right now a Pytop Seed which is a sort of a screen and some hardware to connect
a Raspberry Pi 3.2 and it's got some experimental stuff and it's not a laptop, it's not portable
though.
And then I've had a Pytop 2 and Pytop 2 was a very wet shaped laptop that had a keyboard
and it's very, you could tell the difference if you look for pictures.
Pytop 2 has the track pad off to the right.
And now the Pytop 2, the keyboard was bad, that's definitely the reviews everybody would
talk about.
But the battery was worse, I killed my Pytop 2's battery within short order, it only accepted
a few charges and then it died and it was a problem.
They did send me out some new batteries and did it again so it was a problem and kind of
just disassembled that thing.
And then the Pytop 3 came along and it looked very interesting, slightly different form
factor.
And so I found one on eBay and I bought it and it's a 14 inch screen, it's got a regular,
it's got a keyboard, it's actually not too bad, better than the Pytop 2 and it's got
the track pad at the bottom.
And what's, it's different in that the whole keyboard and track pad are on sort of a sliding
like a drawer and it opens up and it exposes the inside of the laptop where to the left
is the Raspberry Pi, there's a board that does all the charging and interconnect between
other external devices and it actually has some USB ports on it else has the audio jack
on it.
And then there's a heatsink device that also acts as a flow through for all the GPIO
pins.
And my purchase came with a Sartles bread board that plugs into that middle board and
then I also on my, and I'll have a picture on the show notes, there's a daughter board
that I made that I'll talk about here in a little bit.
So of course I put slackware on it and actually I've been wanting to do the show for a while
but slackware has been, was going through updates and so I put slackware 15 on the device
on the Pytop and but unfortunately that's a 32 bit system and there's, there are things
that like Firefox, there's no really good, there's no regular graphical web browser
for a 32 bit arm right now, it doesn't seem like it or at least I couldn't find anything
to work.
And but then a 64 bit version came out through the slack-round arm port of slackware and
then it took a little while but the Sarpy project which I described earlier in another
HBR on putting slackware on Raspberry Pi, the Sarpy project finally updated to the 64
bit for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 and so finally got that installed.
So I'm running a 64 bit slackware on this Pi 3 and some of the, some of the things
are pluses with the, so putting slackware on it you lose some of the custom scripts that
I think were written in Python to do things like get information out of that middle board,
that power board I would call it on battery life and things like that and so I needed
a way to, to being, knowing how, how, if your battery needs to be charged or not, it's
kind of an important thing for a, for a laptop so I came up with a solution for that.
Also as far as for, just a slackware thing, I'm, I'm running EMAX as my window manager.
It's, it's X, it's a full X, a tiling window manager and so I just, I'm in the EMAX environment
and I can pull up graphical programs and other, in buffers and EMAX it works out pretty
good.
It seems to be a, a good way for me to be able to get X programs without having a huge
desktop and still and then because most of everything I do with this laptop is really
on the command line so it gives me a nice tool that I'm used to which is EMAX to do all
that stuff and so that's what I'm, I'm running on the, that's what I'm running right now
on the, on the device.
As far as, so modifications, first off I did like I said I put the slackware on it and
so because of the loss of the, of the battery monitoring what I ended up doing was, on that
experimenter board, the, the sort of the spread board which is a board in the middle there,
there's power where, you know, where you can measure with a, with a multimeter, the voltage
of the battery, the battery it seems to be is three lithium ion batteries which would
be probably about 11, 11, little over 11 volts when fully charged and so what I did was
I, I realized I could take that, those, access to those voltage readings and if I could
use a microcontroller to, to measure that over time I could have a monitor and maybe flash
an LED or something like that or give me some kind of, and it's what I ended up doing
is flashing an LED to let me know that I need to plug in and so I've, I've used a microcontroller
running a fourth of course and, uh, wrote a few words and, uh, had to build a voltage
divider and, and that to, uh, to help them measure the voltage safely with my microcontroller
and, uh, so it's not a cron job it, uh, powers up the, the little microcontroller once
every few minutes, checks the voltage and if it's within a certain range it, uh, I should
say if it's below a certain level it flashes, it turns an LED on and it flashes and it
it, it continues to flash until either plug in or the battery dies one or the other and
so that's, uh, my solution to, to, uh, battery, battery level problem, um, the other thing
that's nice to have is a real-time clock, um, on, on, uh, laptop because sometimes you'll
it's power up and you may not have Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi access but you want the date to be current,
uh, if you're just going to do something without, without being on the internet and so I've
got a real-time clock module, the, and the instructions for setting that up are actually
on the SRP project, uh, website and so it's just a DS307 real-time clock, they're pretty
cheap little devices you can get from on eBay also and it's wired into the GPIO pins
and it talks to the, to the, um, the Raspberry Pi directly, um, I communicate to the, to
the chip, the fourth chip via the built-in UARTs that are, uh, that are on the, um, Raspberry
Pi, it's, uh, comes out as dev slash dev slash TTYS0, uh, you have to, you have to enable
that in the config.text and the boot loader or in the boot file in, in the, in, on the
system and you just, uh, you enable that and then you have access, that's connected directly
to the fourth machine and then I can use minicom or any other, I can actually, I don't
have to use minicom anymore, I can use, uh, the, uh, built-in serial terminal on EMAX
and I can talk directly to the fourth, uh, operating system that's running on the, on
the microcontroller and so, um, so I have access to, uh, that microcontroller directly
through, through, uh, through the, through the laptop and so if I need to modify it, I
can do it or if I want to just play around with fourth, I can try words and, and try different
things and, uh, and mess around and, um, see if things work, uh, if I'm, just, just, if
I want to play around with fourth, who, which who wouldn't want to do that, um, so the
pluses for this PITOP 3 are, it's definitely has a better keyboard and the design of the
whole device is better, the, the mechanical design, this sliding keyboard, like a drawer
thing, it makes access super nice and easy to the, to, um, to anything they've put in
here, the, uh, it's got, definitely has better battery life and the battery charging has
been working great, I've been at any problems and the screen is really good, it's a 14-inch
screen and it's actually really pretty nice, I'm probably one of the better, uh, laptop
screens I've ever had, so that's kind of cool. Uh, the minuses are, um, for the devices
that the, that middle charging board that, that's kind of the heart of the device, it seems
to be close source, I can't find any schematics for it or anything, it's definitely, maybe
they're out there, maybe I'm gonna look hard enough, but, uh, it's definitely, uh, the
secret sauce to this whole machine and, and it doesn't seem like, uh, uh, pie top is
interested in, uh, they're interested in, in getting what they can out of the maker
movement, but they're not really interested in being open source and, and moving things
forward. Um, the other, uh, uh, the other downside is, um, the old software is hard to find
and, uh, it'd be nice to be able to find those Python scripts because maybe you could
directly, uh, put those on Slackware and directly talk to that daughterboard, uh, I still
have to look around, maybe that's available to, um, and the other, the other, probably
really downside is that the devices tied to the, our Raspberry Pi 3 form factor, the
change in the form factor to the Raspberry Pi 4 makes it impossible to use, uh, any of
this hardware to, in this, in this laptop, um, I just stuck at the Raspberry Pi 3 level
as, as was balls down to. Yeah. So, uh, plan, those are, that's, you know, that's the,
the risk you take when you stick yourself to some other, some other company's device,
right? You could, they could change tomorrow and, and your game is over. Um, so, uh, plans
moving forward. Um, I'm really thinking about maybe leaving the Raspberry Pi all together
and going to a Pineboard. I believe there's a Pineboard that has the same form factor as
a Raspberry Pi 3, and I'm wondering if it'd be a way, if that would just be a plug-in
replacement to, uh, to, uh, this device. If, if not, maybe it would be just better to
take, uh, something like a Pineboard and just re-engineering that board and, and re, just
use the empty laptop as a place to put things and put them where they fit best with the
new board. Um, could possibly reverse engineer the charging board? I don't know. I, I don't
know how hard that would be or for people at the time. Um, it's probably easier to modify
the case than to, to accept new hardware than it would be to reverse engineer that thing.
Anyway, um, Pi top three, uh, cool device, uh, another arm laptop that's, uh, not Chrome
book based. It's been working fine. It does everything I need to do with a laptop, but
I'm not a developer or, I don't do any 4K editing, I think that, but it surfs the internet.
It does my email and it's, uh, got a great battery life and it looks cool. It's got a lime
green color, so it stands out. Definitely different than everything else out there. Um, well,
I guess that bottom finish finishes it. Thanks for listening. Um, if you have any questions
or comments, uh, record a show or, or, uh, ask the question directly or be a comment on
the show, uh, this is Brian and Ohio signing off, reminding everybody that, uh, speed doesn't
kill. It's the rapid dissipation of speed that kills. Goodbye.
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