uConsole: The off-the-shelf cyberdeck

hi this is the Raspberry Pi 400 it's essentially a Raspberry Pi 4 with a membran keyboard in a nice little case I use it in the lab as a simple computer for looking up data sheets and playing music from shoutcast servers when I bought this thing I couldn't help but wish that I could take this with me to play emulators dos games or use it for ham radio stuff but that would mean also carrying around a power bank or use PC power supply and more importantly a screen this is the NEC PC C 8201a it features a large keyboard that's quite comfortable to type in a small company called Clockwork Pi has created what's essentially Raspberry Pi pod version of this their def term uses the same form factor albe it Runk down I love that idea but the keys are too close to each other and they are too small for comfortable typing while the whole device is quite bulky and made of plastic so Clockwork made this this is the U console it's an open source open Hardware battery powered handheld Computing device it's made from machined aluminum and held together by a single type of screw just like the de term it comes as a kit that is easy to put together I'm not going to go over the assembly in this video there's plenty of content out there showing how this is put together Clockwork calls this a fantasy console but I feel they missed the marketing opportunity here this is an off-the-shelf cyber deck as with the def term you can get a variety of single board computers with this in addition to the raspberry cm4 there's also the A4 with a quad core a53 and 2 gigs of RAM the A6 with two a72 cores and 4 a53 cores in 4 gigs of RAM and a low power single core RV 64 risk processor with 1 gig of [Music] RAM you can get this cm4 version with or without the raspby cm4 included if you want to Source the cm4 yourself don't make the mistake I did and get a cm4 with integrated emmc storage since that will disable your SD card slot and even though the a06 is faster than a cm4 I would still recommend the cm4 because long-term software support for the ao6 is questionable I would not want to type long texts on this for Shell commands editing files game input and such is perfectly fine and thumb friendly but the keyboard Arrangement is a little bit unusual both in special key placement as well as thanks to the top letter row which is shifted to the right to make space for the tap button on the plus side the keyboard is back lit with two brightness levels the battery lasts about 4 hours though I did manage 7 hours with the screen brightness turned down and doing some less demanding tasks unfortunately the stock charging speed over USBC is very slow I measured 500 milliamps however searching in the Clockwork forum and Discord reveals that there is a simple oneline command that you can type in to increase the charge speed significantly with the setting recommended in the forums charging from 43% to 75% took 25 minutes I don't know why this isn't set by default in the supplied OS image but I'm glad it's something the user can change there is one minor issue with the battery percentage not being completely accurate some tools will show 100% state of charge when in actuality the batter is at 90 that's because there is a hardcoded capacity value in the battery controller's driver Source the community has already fixed this for the a06 and since the driver is identical it should only be a matter of time until you can get a pre-made kernel for the cm4 with that fix a more severe problem I ran into is bad Wi-Fi reception while there is a stick on external antenna included in the kit it doesn't really help much and yes I did enable the external antenna in the SCM for boot config file people on the Clockwork forums have posted pictures of their own antenna mods and I eventually broke down and 3D printed one that I felt was the least visually disturbing addition to the smooth metal lines at least if you get a short antenna it tucks neatly inside instead of sticking out the screen is nice and bright it's a little reflective but it's not too bad the viewing angles are good but they're not the best of ever seen the aspect ratio is much more sensible than on the death term and the resolution is adequate still text can get quite small the two speakers are both on the right side of the device and they get decently loud but they lack any sort of Base they get the job done [Music] though I'm thirsty as for ports you get a usba port one USBC Port micro HDMI and one 3.5 mm headphone and microphone combo check Clockwork provides their own OS image which is currently one version behind the official raspberry OS unfortunately it's not just a matter of writing a different OS image onto a Micro SD card and plopping it in the screen and keyboard use a custom compiled kernel and although Clockwork do provide the patches on GitHub this is not for the faint of heart if you plan to upgrade to Debian Bookworm for example you have to apply kernel patches and manually merge some of the conflicts in the colonel source code but do you really need to be on the bleeding edge I personally think that for a device like this always having the latest Linux kernel isn't that important that said I do hope that we'll see native support in future versions of raspian and other dros and there is work on the way to automate this process in the future like this kernel Patcher by renzen Nikolai which isn't finished just yet the good news is that in the OS image provided by Clockwork everything works Wi-Fi audio the special keys like brightness control keyboard backlight and volume control they're all functional on the software side Clockwork ships the image with a selection of games and several emulators most interestingly for me both dosbox and dosbox staging are pre-install it's still just a Raspberry Pi 4 but one that you can actually take with you and that has a full keyboard so that should make it the perfect machine for classic dos games there's plenty of other videos showing Game Boy SNES and similar console emulation so I won't bother with that [Laughter] here most dos games work just great dosbox staging has fantastic emulation for the Sound Blaster gravis ultrasound and even the roll on mt32 Classics such as day of of the tentacle salmon Max Doom heretic tfx Jazz Jack Rabbit they all look and sound exactly as this [Music] sh [Music] some titles run relatively slow like dark Forces here and some are downright unplayable like Duke Nukem 3D well these games are best played using native ports instead of the dosbox emulation another use case for the U console is hamr radio you can lock your radio contacts run ws jtx jtdx and js8 call and use it as a terminal for digital modes you can use grit tracker to visualize your contacts on a map or you could just run mmss TV to transmit and receive images over shortwave radio if you have a portable rig like the zyu x6100 then all you need is a single USB cable between the radio and the U console you can also use it as a portable pen testing tool and run things like Angry oxide to check how secure your wireless network is because we all know you'll only do this to your own Wi-Fi right you'll probably want to run hashcat on a Bia machine though note that you need a USB Wi-Fi dongle that supports monitor mode for many Wi-Fi pen testing tools because the chip on the cm4 doesn't support that the U console cm4 version without the compute module is $120 you can get a complete kit with cm4 included for $190 there's shipping and possibly also customs fees on top and there is also quite a long lead time until orders are manufactured and delivered the cm5 is right around the corner but there is no official word on an adapter board yet I do hope that Clockwork will offer this in the future it should be possible after all they went from the cm3 to the cm4 using a new adapter board all the hardware is open and the schematics are available meaning that anyone could design add-on or replacement boards down the road though curiously the PCB files are currently missing on GitHub there are already several thirdparty add-on cards like the UPA board which adds an rp240 and a side-facing IO connector or the UOP which gives you three additional USBC ports these ports slot in where the 4G module would go so you can't combine multiple modules that said I don't want to recommend something on the mere possibility of future improvements let's face it you can get a used laptop with more power for the same price and for console emulation gaming you can get a handheld emulation device that has better buttons better d-pad and costs half the price of a U console with the cm4 at the end of the day this is not the most practical handheld Computing device out there but it also looks way more interesting than a cheap old laptop and it is much much more solid than what you can typically get at that price [Music] point even with the limited processing power of the Cam4 it is still a really good portable doll simulation device and a great companion for mobile ham radio operations and these are just the things I use it for I'm curious to see what Clockwork will think of next perhaps something portable but with the true mechanical [Music] keyboard for now I'm happy that there is a company that makes an all metal open source cyber deck that is actually [Music] useful

Channel: JustAddFlux

Views: 33,339

Keywords: clockwork, raspberry pi, ham radio, electronics, dos, retro, gaming, cyberdeck, uconsole

Id: Qm0zVqc8EuY

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024