ASUS Tinker Board

The article I read is: ASUS' Raspberry Pi rival can play 4K video.

I was initially quite interested, but it faded away as I saw the price. While it's nice that it's a pretty good step above the Raspberry Pi 3, the fact that it's just about the same price as the Banana Pi M1+ is a bit of a deterrent for me. I like that it has gigabit ethernet (and its specs), but I don't like that it doesn't have a SATA port or USB 3.0 (I would've been more likely to buy one if it at least had the latter). Though, in technicality, I don't have to connect a storage unit to it to have a local (in terms of the machine) copy of my music library, and I could just mount the file server and utilise the copy on it, but that doesn't entirely sit well with me.

From what it seems like, it is the same size and hole pattern as the Raspberry Pi, so it essentially could be a drop-in upgrade, though there's probably only the standard distro for it at the moment (unlike the numerous distros available for the Raspberry Pi).

Looks like something that can do well, but I don't think it's for me.

Absences... Introspection... Reflection... Etc...

I think I've mentioned a couple or so times before that I write stories, which usually makes up a good majority of the time that I fail to write here on the blog. While I do like being able to be long-winded about the things I do with the theme of my blog (as much as I enjoy doing that stuff), it's difficult to maintain a balance.

I suppose in more clarity, I become more focused on something that I don't want to do anything else, or feel like doing anything else... Something like that I think.

Story-writing is indeed important to me (as you all are able to see with my periods of absence), but it is as equally important to me as all the projects and tinkering I do. I won't say "I don't have time for everything", but I will say that it's somewhat difficult for me to make time for it all when working a full-time job.

During my couple years of unemployment, it was nice to be able to do what I wanted to do, in between looking for employment, but there's so much tinkering that can be done before money becomes an issue. I remember having some project I wanted to try/make, but didn't have the money for any of the parts.

While I'm buried with all the projects and stories that I want to work on, I can't really curse work for it, as it is the catalyst that better taught me about electronics that has sparked many of my electronic projects; I'm sure it's fairly noticeable by now.

I definitely understand those who wish they had multiple bodies, as I do wish that a bit at this moment with so many things I want to work on.

Anyway, as I said in a previous post, I had gotten into Pokémon Sun for a couple hundred hours, as I was utilising it to take a break from the story I was mainly working on to be able to re-sensitise myself to a certain aspect of the story. But after things slowed down when I reached the endgame content for Pokémon Sun, I haven't been compelled to work on the story again.

I had started a couple other stories, one of which I finished since it was something short, but I still wasn't compelled to write. Eventually I remembered that I had quite a few updates to write about, and thus began my posting spree here.

Honestly, I was subconsciously hoping that I would be able to work on the projects I ordered parts for to hopefully "get it out", but things didn't work out that way with the relay on backorder.

I don't want to say that I'm going to discontinue the blog or the things I do (again, related to this blog's theme), but it does feel difficult sometimes to keep up with everything. I'm not entirely sure who or how many people actually take the time to read what I have to say and/or what I've done (since I don't really know how to interpret the traffic and view counts), but I definitely do appreciate it, even though I never see any comments/feedback or whatnot.

I doubt I will move my blog to a different platform either, since I feel that it's not going to be much different somewhere else (in terms of views, comments, and stuff), but if I do end up doing so, I'm obviously not going to migrate all 300 something of my posts (I think 300 something is accurate? XD).

I might give the "favourite links" its own page and remove it from the sidebar, since it slowly grows with the things I do... It would also allow me to give my description of the site the link is to. Might be a bit of a project, but I think it may be for the greater good of the blog  (Is there such a thing? XD).

I think I'm finished ranting. I apologise for speaking my mind a bit with something completely unrelated to this blog's theme, but I did want to explain a bit about my recent absence (as well as previous and future absences). It also did help me understand my thoughts and feelings a bit better, so I actually want to apologise if it sounded a bit melancholy and maybe a bit too personal.

Anyway, I'm done with my blog-posting spree for now, and unless I find an article to write about, I'll be back posting again in March.

Articles Backlog

I had quite a few articles saved that I wanted to talk about, but most are from so long ago that I don't feel it would be entirely worth writing a separate post for each one any longer, and it won't follow the usual format.

• Intel/Lenovo prevents Linux users from installing Linux on Yoga notebook:
• It wasn't the best idea, and they did remedy the problem, but hopefully they learned from it.

• OpenOffice devs debate retiring OpenOffice:
• Honestly, Apache shouldn't have touched it and left it dead. I haven't looked into this further since the articles, but I'm hoping they decided to retire it and let LibreOffice reign.

•  Apple Airpods:
• There were quite a number of people not happy with Apple's decision to pull the plug on the audio jack (pun partially intended), and there are other manufacturers also following the path. I do like having a headphone jack for headsets for when I do send/receive calls on my mobile phone, but I'll have to adapt when it's time to replace the Nexus 5X that I have. Other than that, it doesn't bother me all that much, considering I have a digital audio player for my music.

• Windows 10 Anniversary Update:
• Luckily I didn't become victim to this (Yay for utilising Windows less than one percent of the time!), but it still didn't look good on Microsoft to release a large update to have it cause problems on a majority of PCs.

• Overnight phone charging:
• I had always charged my phone overnight at 500mA to have a fully-charged phone for whenever I left the house so that the battery would last the longest time possible. Things changed with the Nexus 5X, since it uses USB Type C. Since the device communicates with the charger on the amperage it would like, I now use a Type C charger and let it decide the best amperage (whatever it may be).

• Ubuntu server hacked:
• The article is titled "Here's another really great reason to never touch Linux". The article title still gets me riled up, even though the article is written sometime last July. It seems like the writer isn't too familiar with the Linux universe, which is much more vast than just Ubuntu. Ubuntu is Linux, Manjaro is Linux, Fedora is Linux, but most importantly Linux is not Ubuntu. I would have been more settled if the article title used "Ubuntu" and not "Linux", but no sense in beating a dead horse.

Well, I think that takes care of the list that I can see from my saved articles. It seems like the articles I've been wanting to talk/rant about are slowly declining, but only time will tell though.

2017 Linux Distributions to Watch

The article I read is: The Best Linux Distros to Watch Out for in 2017

First distro in the article is Solus, and they go on to say that it's a new distribution that's not a derivative of some other distro and is based on the rolling-release model. While I haven't taken a close look at Solus (by perusing their website or utilising the Dell to test it), there are topics that come to mind.

First off is desktop environments and window managers, while the article doesn't specify about what desktop environments are included, it's usually best to support the ones that people can quickly become familiar with, ones that are lightweight, ones that are well known, and/or any combination of them. Over the time I've been toying around with Linux, I've used GNOME 2, GNOME 3, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, Unity, Openbox, and whatever Fedora uses. Taking a shot in the dark, I would think Solus probably has GNOME 3 and KDE as their "official" desktop environments, and then maybe LXDE and XFCE as their "supported" desktop environments. I could be wrong, but I'm not entirely in the mood to poke around Solus' website and find out for myself.

The next is the software repository... well, a couple things here, but let's just delve into it anyway. I'm assuming that they have some sort of GUI and/or CLI package manager specifically built for their repositories (for example: openSUSE has zypper, Fedora has yum, and so forth), and that it's not using one and/or based off of one from another distro (that would defeat the purpose of being a non-derivative, yes?). The other issue is with niche packages (the packages that have some sort of demand, but doesn't get prebuilt packages like popular packages). Does Solus walk in the same footsteps of most other distros by having their users manually compile these packages from source, or do they have something similar to the Arch User Repository?

Another is architecture support. This is always a major topic because it's not just x86_64 computers that Linux users install Linux on. Obviously I'm not saying that they need to support RISC, MIPS, and so forth, but they should at least support most of the popular ARM types if they want to "compete" with the other distros.

So while I do like the idea of a non-derived, rolling-release distro, I don't think it's for me. While Manjaro is a derivative of Arch, it is a very similar concept to Solus, and I prefer being able to utilise the AUR to automatically compile the not-popular-enough software that I use when it is updated (assuming someone didn't orphan it beforehand). Depending on the architecture support, it may become something worthwhile to me if it's something I can utilise on the Banana Pi, assuming it properly writes the boot data for kernel upgrades (with openSUSE Tumbleweed, I'm better off downloading the new image and setting the system back up than trying to utilise zypper to upgrade the kernel.

I do think that it should be great for most other users that want a rolling distro and not be using a derivative of some other distro.


Second up is Liri. While I've heard of the Papyrus project a bit, I can't say the same with Hawaii. I don't really have too much of an interest in it from the article itself, but I'll at least say that the desktop environment looks nice.


Next is LXLE. As a distro to revive old PCs, I'm somewhat interested in it, but in honesty, I'm more interested in PIXEL. I may give it and PIXEL a shot on the machines that are less powerful than Ziggy, but it will become a matter of which ends up being better.


Last in the article is KDE Neon. I've never been much of a fan of the KDE environment , since I had felt it to be awkward to use sometimes and a bit too much customisation in its appearance. While I do like making things nicely look the way I want things to look, the days of changing colours of every window aspect are long past me these days, and I just want a colour scheme I can grab from somewhere that fits what I'm looking for. There's a possibility that I may try it out to poke at KDE 5, but I highly doubt it.


None of ones in the article really struck me as well, since my needs are fairly met (with the old machines, ARM boards, and iBooks as the exception), but I will still keep my eyes peeled for something that seems would help me get closer to having my needs fully met.

Soundcard Switchboard

As mentioned in my previous post, I have ordered the parts for this project and I haven't said a word about this. Why? Because the idea was realised between the second and third updates for the soldering station and protoboard power project thingy.

I don't really remember too much about how it was sparked, but I did remember that I had a PCI cover plate thing that has nine holes drilled 1cm apart. I actually have two of these, and I think one of them is being used for the Intel build at the moment, but that's not important for the moment. The plates came from a couple PCI capture cards that was used to record video and sound for a surveillance system (it's what the Dell originally was for before the HDD(s) corrupted to where the restore disks were of no use.

Anyway, I figured out that the very best way to switch between the soundcards was to have an internally-mounted board that has holds the latching relays to have the all the audio jacks as close as possible to each other, and to reduce the lot of external cables and the box. I opted for some pushbutton switches that has an LED in them instead of a toggle switch to make it easier to find, for durability, and for look. I had recalled seeing something that fit the description quite a bit before then when I was poking around for cheaper part alternatives for work.

I found some PCB-mounted audio jacks that fit the profile I needed (since 1cm spacing between the audio jack centres is fairly close), but was offset with the needed plated slot that was indicated in the datasheet. I drew a couple of variations for the part to accommodate with what OSH Park's DRU would "allow" me to do, though it was more of just ignoring the errors and tweaking the DRU a bit for some inconsistency I found between OSH Park's capabilities and their DRU.

Anyway, I drew a board to test OSH Park's capabilities seeing that they can do plated slots, but (like castellations) isn't fully supported.

I dunno what's floating around that's causing it to auto-zoom like this, but it should be good enough.

I didn't change all of the of them to be the same, and it doesn't show the actual cutouts with the holes, but you can see the lines with the holes where the cutouts are supposed to be. I think I stuck the third one in to satisfy the minimum size requirement, but I don't remember. Eventually I ordered the board along with something else, since it was fairly small (it also got automatically upgraded to the swift service thing as well).

I did draw another test board because I was having troubles uploading it to OSH Park... Rather it was that OSH Park's server was having trouble processing them, though it seemed to be fine the second time around... It also might've just been a hiccup in the transmission as well.

I was fairly surprised when I received the boards, since I was fairly edgy with their "we can do it, but we can't guarantee it'll turn out well" sort of attitude (for lack of better word). The slots weren't parallel with the board edge, but with the thickness of the pins and the width of the cutout, it's not going to matter much (the cutouts were parallel to each other, however). The large hole turned out fairly well, but there was the minimum distance missing from the hole plating from the board edge (0.015"). I'm glad the plated slots turned out decently, since I really wanted to avoid using the large hole for trace routing issues and having to utilise a lot of extra solder to fill the remainder of the hole.

I took pictures of the board, but lost it when my phone locked me out of the encryption after the November Android patch. I'll take a couple pictures when I'm at home and whatnot, but I probably won't upload them until the next post for this project, which will be in March when I get the audio jacks.

With the ability to use the plated slots confirmed, I then did the baseline design for the board, which was just lining up the audio jacks properly. I first decided to use the 4-pin Molex power connector to get power to the board, since the stand-alone SATA power isn't readily available (though if it would, it'd probably be more expensive anyway), and drew and tossed it onto the layout just to have it there for later placement.

I then decided how I wanted to connect the buttons to the board, and I had originally thought of using a 6-position connector and having a 6-conductor cable (22 AWG wire) route it to the front to a breakout board that would hold the SMD resistors for the LED and some 3-position connectors for the switches. I eventually decided that it would be much easier to solder a wire to each terminal than to awkwardly tie the positive to one of the switch terminals and the anode of the LED (and also that it would make the resistor have to be on the ground line instead of the positive line... though it doesn't matter).

I think the project sat for a while before I came back to it and realised that it would be much more efficient to run the wire from the switch directly to the board, since it would be less parts, less cost, and less work. Luckily I hadn't done any work with the design of the board, so it's not like I had to fix anything. I also decided that I would use the free circuit of one of the five DPDT latching relays to switch which light would be lit up, which would allow me to use just one resistor and to reduce the power consumption (by a measyly 20mA).

I decided to utilise the relays (and layout of the relays) from the first design for the board of the soundcard switchbox version 3, since it would be awkward to attempt to implement something that uses the single-coil relays that the soundcard switchbox actually uses. I also considered utilising only one pushbutton, but that would require me to utilise another relay (along with the fact that it might be difficult to properly select the side since the pushbutton would constantly switch between the soundcards until released).

I arranged the relays so that they would span the same amount of space as the audio jacks and then took some time to decide how I wanted to arrange the jack order to make routing the traces easier, I eventually opted for a similar arrangement to the soundcard switchbox, where all the greeen jacks are adjacent to each other, and so on. Basically it's where the output of a colour (green, to say) is flanked by the inputs of the same colour (I'll have a screenshot up in a moment).

With the traces done I placed the Molex power connector and the 4-position connectors before getting some measurements to find that I'm hitting the PCI express header housing, but is easily remedied. I can't remember if I had done the traces for the connectors or not, but it's probably not that much of a concern.

Anyway, I have the LED set up so that the LED of the inactive card is lit. For example, if I'm in Linux, the button to switch to the Windows sound would be lit, making it easy to find in the dark. With the silk screen, I marked which side is the motherboard, the pinouts for the connectors, the ordering of the audio jacks, and "Soundcard Switcher 3.0" on the flip-side (which would be visible through the window in the day).

Before and after ratsnest tool.

I really wanted to keep as much of the audio signals on the "top" side of the board (red traces), but didn't have a whole lot of options. Obviously, both sides have ground planes to somewhat shield any EMI, though the audio traces are relatively short anyway that it probably won't pick up anything. I remember having to redo the traces for the two 4-position connectors, but don't remember why - it might've been the movement, but I can't be certain. All the connectors and components are mounted on the top of the board (which becomes the bottom when mounted in the case), and I might do a bit of sleeving or something to make the cables look nice for the little they appear before disappearing into the power supply cover thing of the case.

It was a bit tough to figure out how I wanted to mark the ordering of the audio jacks, but eventually I decided to go with a sort of "type" and colour scheme (so WG is Windows Green, OG is Output Green, and so on). Also for once, I actually used the proper colour for the center and subwoofer channel which is orange and not peach.

I honestly really wished I spent more time thinking about this and coming up with this, but from the time I was developing the third version of the switchbox, I hadn't the crimper that I do now (and that I'd thought would never be so versatile). Such is life though.

The pushbuttons will be mounted in the front on a external 5.25 inch to 3.5 inch adapter that holds the card reader, and should look fairly nice, if the holes are drilled properly.

I think I've exhausted all I have to say about the project thus far, and I'll have to figure out how to nicely drill the holes so it looks fairly professional into the adaptor.

Soldering Station and Protoboard Power 3

I would like to first apologise for my lack of posting again, I've been working on my stories as usual, and then more recently getting sucked into Pokémon Sun for about 200 hours. I'll probably post more about it separately... Maybe...

Anyway, at some point, I looked for a better replacement for that bloody square relay, and found one of the same model line as the others, which I think ended up being a bit cheaper as well, but I was more happy with the fact that the bloody relay was gone from the design. I, obviously, redesigned the board, and at some point, I found a questionable error with the glass fuses. I couldn't find any real solid answer, but it seemed to be that you can use AC fuses for DC systems, but it's not entirely recommended. I decided to look for something else and the only real option was SMT fuses. If I remember correctly, it raised the cost of the parts I needed to get from Mouser, but it also condensed the board size quite a bit (more on this in a bit).

Before and after ratsnest tool.

I kept the height of the board and got rid of the length... Again, I'm fairly certain there's another board design between the one above and the one from the previous post, but that requires me looking on Melty, which I don't feel like doing (I'm using Mei-chan to write this). Anyway I think I chopped off about 20 USD from the board, which well makes up for the slightly higher cost of the SMT fuses. While I was a bit irked with the SMT fuses, it's also a bit better, since if it blew while someone else was using it, they couldn't just replace the fuse and (maybe) be on their way - the problem would have to be traced before the fuse can be replaced. I also rearranged the pins so that it would be more sensible.

Once that was finished, I properly arranged the items on the fan/light power distribution board, which turned out larger than I was hoping for, but there's not a whole lot that can be done considering the size and number of parts.

Before and after ratsnest tool.

I made the traces relatively symmetrical and did a ground pad for both sides. While the positive trace for the fan lines aren't entirely efficient, there's probably no better way without spending a lot of time to find a good arrangement to enable a relatively equal path. I think 6 screws might be a bit overkill, but I'll worry about that when I properly mount it.

With those done, I began working on the mounting plate that the board mounts to, which attaches to a power supply. I originally tried to do it all in LibreCAD, but eventually moved to QCad when I found QCad worked a bit more like I wanted to. It took a bit of time to clean things up, but I eventually got it all worked out and then worked on making the title block, which was a bit tricky. I had gotten it to where I liked it, but recently, when I went to submit it to get quotes, I simplified it more, since there's not really a real need to have revision levels and/or revision details.

Screenshot from QCad.

I made separate layers for both inch and millimetre dimensions, though either can be used. While it would be nice to be able to strictly work with one unit of measurement, computers are a huge mess of metric and inch dimensions. A power supply uses 6-32 screws (which isn't a metric screw), where the holes are 6mm from the top and side of the corners (we're ignoring the long side where the offset screw is). Also, the power supply is 150mm wide... (I'm going to stop here before I rant any further.) Anyway, It's why there's some "weird" dimensions like the .236 radius, because that's actually a 6mm radius. I'm not sure how places are with mixed dimensional units, but I think it's generally better to keep it the same. There might be a way to do dual units in QCad, but I've not seen an option for it. I kinda wish I did the drawing in Solidworks now, so that the machinist can see that the radius I used as an example is 6mm and not .236".

I had printed out a few copies when doing the title block to see the size of the text, since QCad uses "units", which I have yet to understand (I've at least understood it enough to figure out what I want).

Anyway, I've recently sent out a few quotes (four exactly), and gotten "two" back. One of them was an automated quote, which was really cool, since I just had to upload a 3D model (Solidworks, STEP, etc) and click a few options as it updated the price in real time. The other quote I got back was actually an email saying that they don't work with sheet metal. I'm hoping to hear back from the other two places before next Wednesday, but we'll see. So far it seems like it'll be about 62 USD for one plate (I wanted three, but 180 something USD isn't cost-efficient to me), and while I did kinda want it to be made at work, I feel really awkward about putting in the order, since it's a personal project (even though I'd be paying for it).

It was earlier this week that I firmly decided to get the quotes out and get rolling with the project, and I first started with ordering the PCBs (I also ordered the PCB for the soundcard switchboard which I haven't talked about yet). I ordered the parts from Mouser (again, with the parts for the soundcard switchboard), and found that the relays for the fans were back-ordered and wouldn't arrive to Mouser's warehouse until mid-March or something. I figured the best option was to just compile the entire order into one shipment instead of spending an extra 5 USD for one line item to ship separately. I had a feeling that I should've ordered the parts for the soundcard switchboard separately, but alas, it is too late.

It was Tuesday after work when I started looking and getting quotes out, finding that most places wanted a 3D model, which was still on my computer at work (of course). Wednesday after work, I sent out the other three quotes, since I now had the model I made in Solidworks (which was just importing the DXF and extruding it .0625 inches).

I did also order the screws, some 6-32 button head socket cap screws (BHSCS) a quarter-inch in length, some 6-32 phillips pan head screws (PPHMS) also a quarter-inch in length, along with a few other screws so that I don't feel awkward about buying 125 screws that would total 5 something USD. I think it was the day after I ordered it that I received an email saying that it would be a few days before they can get my order out to me, and I was thinking to myself that it doesn't matter anyway since it'll be March before I get to do anything with the projects.

From what it seems like, I think the place with the automated quote thing will be the place I'll be getting the plate from (which also quoted 10-day turnaround).

It'll be a couple months before I update again, but hopefully not later. I'm thinking to create a sort of bill of materials with projects, but the plate would be the most awkward to try to link (everything else is easy) - I'll see what happens when the time comes.