Tenrec

Tenrec is a Raspberry Pi 4B

2020-May-09 arrived from Newark

I set it up as a build machine, with its faster processor and more RAM and SSD on USB3 it runs circles around violet (Pi 3B+) and of course my little Pi Zeroes.

Hardware

• 4GB 4B
• Seeed heatsink kit so cute, had to have one. Probably superfluous.
• 7" Pi touch screen from Element14
• Multicomp Pro case, clear
• Corsair GTX 240GB SSD
• Startech USB3 SATA3 cable (lsusb id is 174c:55aa with ASMedia ASM1053E chipset)

I drilled a couple holes in the bottom of the case, attached RAM mount hardware.

I am borrowing the USB3 hub that lives in the back of my monitor and using it to power an Apple keyboard and a Startech USB3 SATA cable.

The combination of USB3, SATA3, and a reasonably fast SSD is working well.

Screen and touch screen rotation

In this case, the 7" screen is upside down. You can fix this! https://raspberrypiprojects.com/raspberry-pi-rotate-touch-screen/ Also the image did not fill up the screen, perhaps it was defaulting to 640x480?

In /boot/config.txt,

lcd_rotate=2
framebuffer_width=800
framebuffer_height=480

On the login screen with these settings there is a white band on the right, one or two pixels wide but I don't care. It goes away after login.

Power

I had the lightning bolt low voltage warning almost continuously until I plugged in only a hub to the USB ports. I am using a 5V 4A switching supply and a USB-C cable. My power meter says it's pulling just over an amp at 5.1 volts.

Software

I installed Raspian Buster Lite on the 8GB SD card that I am using to boot. I installed the window environment on the SSD. Also it goes without saying, emacs.

sudo -s
dpkg --configure -a
apt update
apt full-upgrade
reboot
apt install emacs-nox
apt install xserver-xorg xinit
apt install raspberrypi-ui-mods
reboot

Now I have a lightdm login screen, so I log in. I think the server has an idea that I have a 4:3 screen too and not 16:9 so that needs fixing.