NanoPi R4S - router overkill?

January 20, 2021 Technical Ben Zucker

Introduction

A few weeks ago I received the most recent board of FriendlyARM: the NanoPi R4S with 4G of memory.

With its lack of HDMI and other screen connectors this board is clearly designed for headless application like acting as a router, home server, network-attached storage (NAS), media station or everything together the same time. Paying 60$ plus shipping and tax might sound a bit much for a headless board but depending on the usage it can be well worth the money.

I have to admit I do not really know why I bought a board with dual gigabit NIC. I just knew I need to have it. Maybe I have a weakness for (powerful) headless SBCs 😄

Anyway let’s have a deeper look.

The Pinebook Pro

January 20, 2021 Technical Ben Zucker

Introduction

As you might have already got through Twitter I recently received a Pinebook Pro. While it looks like a normal well made laptop from the outside its internals are way different than you are used to. There is no such thing like a BIOS/UEFI that greets you and it is quite likely that you are stuck with a blank screen if you do not know what you are doing.

~~Also I will explain why this laptop does not come with a charging adapter by default.~~ Update: It DOES come with a PSU. Check below.

So let’s dive a little into it.

Station P1 - desktop usage

January 9, 2021 Technical Ben Zucker

Station P1 wedged between another box and a monitor

I have been using the Station P1 mini-computer for a while now and as already stated occasionally I am pretty happy with it. For the last couple of weeks it’s been used on daily basis. Fun fact: I am writing this article on it right now.
The main reason for that is its electric efficiency. While my main workstation wastes lots of power for mostly being idle all the time the Station P1 barely exceeds 20 watts of consumed power while being very busy. For comparison the graphics card in my desktop computer consumes twice the amount while being idle(!).

Each time I think about this NicoD comes to my mind for his description for desktop PCs as “giant space heaters”. There is a bit of truth in these words.

Not the same procedure...

January 1, 2021 Less Technical Ben Zucker

… as last year 🤔
Noticeable quieter.

Not your average New Year’s Eve ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway happy New Year to all of you around the globe!

Armbian - using CREATE_PATCHES

December 25, 2020 Technical Ben Zucker

The Armbian build script has a built-in method to automatically create patch files from changes you do within the sources.
The official documentation writes about this:

prompt right before the compilation starts to make changes to the source code, separate for U-Boot and kernel, and will create patch files out of this. If you want these patches are included in the normal run, you need to copy them to their appropriate directories.

While this basically puts stuff in a nutshell for beginners this could be a bit confusing. In this post I will show you step by step how this works in a practical example.

What is needed to start this process?
Where are the sources to edit?
Where are the created patches?
How to apply them next time you build?

Station P1 - first start and mainline

December 20, 2020 Technical Ben Zucker

A while ago I received a parcel from China which contained a Station P1 Mini PC which I was lucky enough to get for free in the scope of a giveaway.

In exchange they were kindly asking to provide some feedback and share experience with hit. Which I already started to do in Armbian forums by sharing a few pictures from unboxing.

Zuckerbude 3.0

December 18, 2020 Technical Ben Zucker

The whole website has been reworked. Why? Because I can. After a very long time it is now time to say goodbye to Wordpress and say hello to Hugo.

What is Hugo?

Hugo is “The world’s fastest framework for building websites”. You can learn more here.

Simplified it takes your input files, which are formatted using the Markdown syntax, and a template and creates a ready to upload website from that.

There is no web interface or fancy WYSIWYG-editor thing. You can use any text editor, preferably one with syntax highlight or even a small IDE like VScode.

After editing the changes can be previewed locally by using

hugo server --disableFastRender --ignoreCache

which will provide a http server that serves the website on localhost. Once satisfied the output of the public folder is pushed to the webserver and the changes are live immediately.

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