Berkeley Raspberry Pi meeting this coming Sunday 01.17.21
Meeting Details:
Give away for this meeting is a Thinkpad X230. I have mentioned this before -- it has a couple
issues. Mainly wobbly corner on top cover. I thought that some epoxy and paperclip wire for
reinforcement would work but looking at it now I don't think so. It is a nice machine though.
So for news:
In Linux there is a USB "gadget mode" If the USB is not connected through a hub. Usually
your computer has an internal hub, so this is not possible. But the Pi Zero has a single port as does the model A. The Pi 4 with the USB C power port.
Find the details on Jeff's github.
If you need a webcam you can have one of my webcam on a stick. It is just a repurposed laptop webcam that I soldered to a USB cable. I've been using one for months during the pandemic when webcams were hard to buy (And I lent my only one out) You would have to
figure out the mounting. I just duct taped it to my monitor (the sticky residue was a little hard to clean)
This is a small computer that is based on the RiscV architecture instead of Arm. RiscV was
invented at Cal Berkeley as a free and open cpu design. The BeagleV is the first affordable
RiscV general purpose computer board. So another alternative now that Nvidia is buying Arm.
Recall the Pi has a Broadcom Arm cpu.
I don't have a particular project in mind for this meeting. I have some laptop fixing to do
which involves some soldering board repair. But Sunday meetings are a bit early for me
(and I'm often half hour late) so I may not have enough brain to do it.
Also I have a portable USB monitor where the DisplayLink controller board is bad. The board
can be had on Aliexpress but I thought why not just get an HDMI controller board and convert it. So I could do that instead.
Thomas