Chris Combs (he/him)Oct 13, 2023

back on my nerd crap: there have been lots of little reasons nudging me towards a different hardware platform than the fruit-pie.

But I'm concerned about future artwork maintenance; I want to build around off-the-shelf platforms, in case something breaks in 20 years.

one road I'm venturing down a bit is MFF PCs--in theory if it's x86-64 and has usb ports, it oughta run ok if replaced by a different model down the road?

but this'd mean wrapping all i/o in some usb-attached layer. hmm...

Show threadChris Combs (he/him)Oct 13, 2023

and I've tried out a good number of other SBCs. Nothing really seems to have long-term support and reliability...?

OrangePi hardware has nice form factor and functionality, paired with hazardous reliability and community-only OS support.

against my better judgment I built something around a Pine64 Rock64 recently--and it turns out that it's just a well-known and accepted defect that when it's hitting RAM hard, the HDMI output glitches? reminds me of racing the beam. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCK64#Video_output_is_glitchy_during_activity

ROCK64

PINE64
Show threadChris Combs (he/him)Oct 13, 2023
I guess maybe I oughta start digging through the industrial stuff on Digi-Key. Maybe I can prototype on the cheap with fruit-pies and migrate to an industrial SBC or MFF PC once a piece is really coming together.
Show threadGrayDanceOutfit
@combs what kind of work loads? The BeagleBone AI64 is built on a new Texas Instruments SoC and looks pretty compelling.
Oct 13, 2023 at 3:10pmMastodon for iOS
Show threadChris Combs (he/him)Oct 13, 2023

@GrayDanceOutfit this kind of workload 😅 https://chriscombs.net/2021/09/03/one-to-many/ so lots of cpu and i/o over i2c and spi usually

I bought a bunch of BeagleBone Blacks during the depths of the fruit-pie shortage and was disappointed at how TI had maintained the docs and software. So many 404s just trying to get it up and running.

Do you use BBs? what OS do you recommend?

One-to-Many

Using 1,152 digits in “18:88” clock displays with 7,200 individual pixel elements, this artwork addresses themes of robotics, inevitability, and automation with imagery of fractal trees, geometric increases, countdowns, and scenes from the film Metropolis.

Chris Combs