Librem 5 and Pinephone assembly
The first prototypes of these phones are built and shipped to some developers.
The Librem 5 is planned to be manufactured in batches that will be
progressively refined. The first one is named "Aspen", to be followed by
"Birch". Here is a video showing Aspen being disassembled and
reassembled:
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=74dhBddET2E
Interesting, it has no heatsink. A heatpipe is planned for Birch. The
speaker, Tod Weaver, states that he has to charge the battery twice per
day, but is hoping it will eventually get down to once per day. That
would be very light usage without heatsink. I wonder how many hours of
actual usage in the day?
Whatever, that is so far off we expect with modern phones. My Huawei
rarely gets below 90% in a day, in which I might, say, go on a train
ride to the city and be browsing all the way there and back. If drive
somewhere and use the GPS, it does consume a bit more.
The SoC is, I think 28nm technology, and I think I read that late in
2020 they plan to progress to a 14nm NXP SoC. The two m.2 sockets with
external modem and ...what's in the other socket, can't remember
...anyway, that configuration is going to be current-hungry.
The Pinephone is an alternative. They both have modem separate from
the SoC, in the case of the Pinephone it is soldered in, so the phone is
much slimmer. Here is a video showing assembly of the first prototype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyeD1sfQNoM
Interesting, it looks like the back of the LCD is being used as the
SoC heatsink. I haven't found any information on battery life, but doubt
that it will be good news ...but premature to give any opinion.
One good thing about the Pinephone, it has a modem with frequencies suitable for Australia.
Tags: tech
Librem5 phone first batch
The first batch of Librem5 phones has been manufactured. This is
their first iteration, somewhat larger than the planned final version to
allow for some experimentation, for example with the antenna.
I have posted a few times about this phone, for example:
http://bkhome.org/news/201806/librem-5-an-open-source-linux-phone.html
Purism announcement:
https://puri.sm/posts/first-librem-5-smartphones-are-shipping/
And here is an FAQ about the first batch:
https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-batch-faq/
I had gone off this phone, in favour of the Pinephone, as the Librem5
did not have a modem with frequencies suitable for Australia. However,
they have just announced that they will be supporting the BM818 modem --
this has a "T1" variant that supports the B28 band that we require for
Telstra. However, it is not yet known whether the phone will support the
T1 variant. I suppose one problem will be the antenna design, to handle
all the different frequencies.
EDIT 2019-10-04:
Here is a video, showing using phone, first batch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvnt78mK-Ac
Tags: tech
Car ball and nut steering
A different blog post from usual!
Modern cars have "rack & pinion" steering, which gives tight (minimal sloppiness or deadzone).
Many years ago, cars had "ball & nut", or "recirculating ball",
steering. The main problem with this is a deadzone, or sloppiness, which
got worse as the linkakes/bushes wore.
I was reminded of this recently, when read about the new 2019 Suzuki Jimny, and posted to this blog:
http://bkhome.org/news/201903/new-suzuki-2019-jimny-4x4.html
I was surprised that this Jimny still has ball & nut steering.
Back in the 70's I owned an early Suzuki 4wd, one of the "LJ" series,
with a 2-stroke engine. I recall, it was dangerous on wet roads.
Especially a wet road with tight bends -- I found that the steering
would get out of my control, and I had to slow right down.
In the mid to late 80's, I owned an old Holden, an "EH" model I think, a
3-speed automatic. I was cash-strapped at the time, and bought this
secondhand. Don't recall what price I paid, but do remember selling it
for AU$300.
It had various problems, such as tending to overheat -- but they made
engines out of iron in those days, it could survive repeated
overheating.
It had the old recirculating ball steering, don't recall if it was power
steering. It was worn, with considerable slack. Near where I lived,
there was a dirt road, that turned to mud when it rained. I discovered
that when driving home on that road, and the car lurched to the right,
the steering wheel snatched violently out of my hands. I pulled the
wheel left, and it got snatched out of my hands again as the car lurched
to the left.
Thus I zigzagged across the road, until I had reduced speed to a crawl.
The problem was the tyres sinking slightly into the mud. If the front
tyres turn very slightly from true forward direction, a small wall of
mud then forces them to turn more. Which can happen due to the slackness
in the steering linkages. When the wheels have been twisted more than a
few degrees, the wheels get violently pushed to the side, and the
steering wheel spins out of my control.
So, pretty awful type of steering, hey! However, I am over-dramatizing
the risk. My Holden was old and the steering linkages very worn. If I
had got it fixed, replaced some bushes, the steering slack would have
tightened up considerably, and I would probably have been able to race
straight through that muddy road.
Apart from the Jimny, apparently
some trucks still have this, I don't know about other 4wd vehicles.
With the Suzuki 4wd cars, a popular after-market addon was a "steering
damper", a hydraulic mechanism that will minimise the kind of scenario
that I have described above.
It seems that Suzuki added it to the Jimny 4wd series, and it is in the
2019 model. Thank goodness. There is also power steering, so it would
seem that the two mechanisms would be fighting each other -- well,
apparently, it does cause the steering to have a "dead" feel, with no
feedback from the wheels.
Why hasn't Suzuki gone over to rack & pinion steering for the Jimny?
I don't know, there must be reasons. I don't know enough about the
topic to guess why. More info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering
Quoting:
The recirculating ball mechanism has the advantage of a much greater mechanical advantage, so that it was found on larger, heavier vehicles while the rack and pinion was originally limited to smaller and lighter ones; due to the almost universal adoption of power steering, however, this is no longer an important advantage, leading to the increasing use of rack and pinion on newer cars.
The steering damper does make driving safer, however there is another
concern. The deadzone means that the front wheels are not necessarily
going in the direction in which you are pointing the steering wheel.
This has been observed by testers of the 2019 Jimny on highway driving,
where the car tends to wander to left or right, and has to be
continually corrected.
This means that the driver has to be always alert, and it does make the
driving experience more tedious -- though, the continual correction does
become habitual. I also briefly owned a Suzuki 1.3 litre Sierra, the
model after the LJ series and before the Jimny series, and I recall this
wandering problem, but I adapted to it and found highway driving to be
OK, if a bit odd.
Thought that I would post these interesting observations!
Tags: tech
New Suzuki 2019 Jimny 4x4
The little Suzuki 4-wheel-drive car has a long history. I owned
an original model in the 70s, an LJ50 2-stroke. It was awful driving on
the road, fantastic off. In the mid-80s I briefly owned a Sierra, with
1.3 litre 4-stroke engine, and as I recall, if was OK driving on the
road, and took it for country trips -- it was even OK on the highway --
but then, my standard was probably quite low, as I had always owned very
small cars.
Both of those were purchased second-hand. Now it is 2019 and Suzuki
are advertising a brand new Jimny. The Jimny models superseded the
Sierra models. The advertised price here in Australia (by Suzuki
Australia, the importer) is AU$23,990 plus on-road-costs.
I enquired with local Suzuki dealers, and they are asking AU$27,990
drive-away price. That is a big jump from AU$23,990. Am I getting
cynical in my old age? A cynical person might think that the price hike
is cleverly contrived. And then there is an extra AU$500 for any colour
other than white.
There is no discount, you buy at the price they ask, and go into the waiting list. I am drooling over it, very fond of that little car, but probably won't buy one. Suzuki, if you put it on sale later this year, you will tempt me...
EDIT:
It seems that my cynicism was misplaced. Suzuki was genuinely surprised by the sales of the new model. They have one factory in Japan running 23 hours per day, and are planning to utilize another plant.
Australian Suzuki distributor:
https://www.suzuki.com.au/vehicles/suv/jimny
Review:
https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-reviews/suzuki-jimny-72749
There are plenty of YouTube videos, here is one with some on-road testing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGnrZDuCUwQ
An off-road video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIcqx23kl8
Tags: tech
PinePhone development kit
Wow, this is interesting! Those who read my blog, will know that I
have purchased the Librem 5 phone development kit, as reported here:
http://bkhome.org/news/201812/purism-librem-5-dev-kit-is-shipping.html
Mine arrived a few weeks ago, yet it remains unused. I am waiting
until they get the LCD screen to work. Apparently, it is a software
driver problem, rather than a hardware fault (thank goodness), but the
screen is the most essential component, that must be working.
Another worry is the immaturity of the NXP iMX 8m SoC. Apparently,
there is a fault in the chip as supplied with the dev kit, that prevents
it
from going into a lower-power mode -- the Purism developers reported
this to NXP and it is, apparently, scheduled to be fixed.
Even so, it is a concern, as the iMX8 has been "in the pipeline" for a long time -- first announced in 2013.
The Purism developers have been doing incredible work on the software
side, and hopefully the hardware issues will be resolved in a
reasonable time frame.
In the meantime, another group has produced a "copy". Well, not a
copy exactly, but very similar, a phone development kit, named the
PinePhone, based on the Allwinner A64 SoC. Photo:
As with the Librem 5, this has a separate modem -- you can see it in the above photo.
The SoC's used in phones all have the modem built into the SoC.
Purism are using an SoC without modem, as by keeping it separate they
can keep a watch on what traffic goes between SoC and modem, for
improved security.
So, the PinePhone is using the same security-minded approach, and
targeting the same market, and will be running the same Linux OS's as
the Librem 5. They don't mention it, but no doubt it will also run the
OS that the Purism guys are developing.
The PinePhone will be on show as FOSDEM 2019, here is a blog post:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7093
Pine64 are the same guys who make the Rock64, which I own and have
just today released EasyOS for. The above blog also announces an
improved Rock64, including RTC.
Anyway, the Allwinner A64 SoC, how does that stack up for use in a phone, and for Linux compatibility?
This is a great page to get a birds eye on Linux compatibility:
http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
Here is a report on upstream Linux support for the VPU:
https://bootlin.com/blog/allwinner-vpu-support-in-mainline-linux-november-status-update/
...how this pans out in practice, remains to be seen. All very interesting!
Tags: tech
SanDisk Ultra 32GB USB3 Flash drive
I posted yesterday about a very cheap Verbatim 16GB STORE-N-GO USB2 drive:
...sooo slow, then it failed after a few days.
I have to comment about this failure. Most of the Flash sticks that I purchase, including the very cheap ones, last for a very long time. Well, I have only had a couple of failures in several years. I even have a 128MB drive that is still working.
That Verbatim drive went into the bin, couldn't be bothered with taking it back.
This morning, wen to BigW and bought a SanDisk Ultra 32GB USB3 drive, for AU$14. That's it's regular price, not discounted.
Now we're cookin' with gas! I wrote the Russian build of Easy to it, and got a sustained sequential write speed of 28.7MB/sec.
Compare that with 3.9MB/sec for the Verbatim drive. It is so much worth it, to spend that little bit more!
Tags: tech
Bottom-rung USB Flash stick
Today I purchased a Verbatim STORE N GO 16GB USB2 Flash stick, at AU$4.25, from Officeworks.
I just wanted something cheap. I write different builds of EasyOS
onto Flash sticks, each labeled with masking tape, and keep various
older ones. Consequently, sometimes run out of a spare one to write to.
Anyway, thought that I would post this as a warning to others: recommend buy a more up-market Flash stick for testing EasyOS!!!!
I used the 'easydd' utility to write the EasyOS 0.9.18 image file to the Flash stick, and it recorded a write speed of 3.9MB/sec.
This is down at the absolute bottom. I did get around that figure
with an Emtec stick. My experience is, cheap Verbatim and Emtec Flash
sticks from BigW, Officeworks, etc., are not just low-cost, they are
also extremely slow.
At the other extreme, is an SSD at about 150MB/sec write speed, see test here:
http://bkhome.org/news/201812/thoughts-on-hdd-and-ssd-speed.html
If you want a fast USB Flash stick, the best that I have purchased is
a Sandisk Extreme, giving around 100MB/sec. But you don't have to go
that far. Pay a few more dollars than AU$4 and you can easily get around
7 - 20 MB/sec. A cheap USB3 stick will usually give faster performance
than a USB2 stick.
Anyway, after writing 0.9.18 to the verbatim STORE N GO, booted it.
It was not a pleasant experience. A lot of waiting is required.
The most alarming event was after clicking the "www" icon on the
desktop, a "starting for the first time" window popped up, and then
disappeared, and then.... nothing. waited and waited. Began to think
that I had done something wrong with this build, then suddenly SeaMonkey
window appeared.
Using it now. Once underway, it is working OK.
This post is a warning. Do not test running Easy, or any Linux, using
the cheapest Flash stick in your collection. Use the best one.
EDIT 2019-01-14
Oh man, it gets worse. This Flash stick is only a few days old. I
installed Easy 0.9.18 on it, have booted a few times. This morning,
started to boot it, and got an error:
Copying EasyOS to RAM, then mounting
cp: read error: I/O error
Only 4 bucks, won't take it back, just throw it in the trash bin.
Tags: tech
Crucial MX500 500GB 2.5inch SATA SSD
I wrote recently about the very pleasant experience installing a Kingston 240GB SSD in my Mele mini-PC:
https://easyos.org/install/how-to-install-easyos-on-a-new-ssd.html
The speed improvement is so phenomenal compared with HDDs, and the
price has dropped, enticing me to move my main midi-tower PC to using a
SSD. So, I have now purchased a Crucial MX500 500GB 2.5inch SATA3 SSD,
for AU$109:
https://www.austin.net.au/shop-categories/hard-drives-ssd/crucial-mx500-500gb-sata-25-7mm-ssd.html
What has prompted this purchase, is that I have redesigned the layout
of my projects for easier backup. Up until recently, my projects over
the years have been "all over the place". Also, "build" folders are
inside the projects -- for example, a compile for a particular
architecture, say x86_64, in oe-qky-src, is inside the project folder.
same thing for woof, building a release of EasyOS happens inside the
woof project folder.
This makes the project folders enormous. oe-qky-src for example, a compile may occupy a hundred GB or more.
So, I have redesigned all of my projects into one folder, named bk, with all builds taking place outside of bk. Downloaded source packages, however, are kept within bk, as there is no guarantee they will always be available online.
The size of bk is 408GB. This includes old projects, such as
t2, as well as recent woof and oe-qky-src. The size is convenient, it
will fit nicely into that Crucial 500GB SSD.
At first, I backed up bk to a 1TB USB3 hard drive ...and it took several hours. Hmmm.
I have decided to backup in a crude way, not incremental. No raid either. Just copy the entire master bk
folder, or even the entire partition, or even the entire SSD. If I also
have an SSD external drive, the internal SSD could be backed up in less
than half an hour.
The manufacturer's site:
https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/storage-ssd-mx500
Has this interesting statement:
Integrated Power Loss Immunity: Avoid unintended data loss when the power unexpectedly goes out. This built-in feature of our new NAND protects your data swiftly and efficiently, so if your system suddenly shuts down, you keep all your saved work.There is also hardware encryption, but only available with certain software on Windows. Anyway, I read somewhere that it is very easy to break.
Tags: tech