First impressions after a day of heavy use

uConsole
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Some first impressions of the uConsole from actual use today:

Battery life is amazing. I’ve been using it quite a lot today for about 5h and it’s at 65% now. I’m using two 3500mAh cells.

The build quality is great. This thing feels really solid and reassuring. I should probably get a screen protector though.

The screen aspect ratio is quite wide. It’s a bit challenging to fit stuff but it’s ok. Setting up your desktop environment to that there’s nothing unnecessary taking up vertical screen space helps.

The keyboard is nice, but I wouldn’t want to type long form text on this. The space bar is a little hard to hit sometimes because you have to hit it near the center. The lack of a dedicated “meta” or “super” key makes working with some linux desktops difficult (Sway for example).

The tiny trackball works really well. I’m surprised.

The speakers are not good, as expected.

Boot time is very fast. It’s no problem to power down the device when it’s not in use for a while and then just cold-boot it again. But I can also leave it on with the screen off for hours and it’ll still last the whole day.

A desktop setup that has worked out well so far is LightDM + GNOME-Xorg. The Wayland version of GNOME has some rendering issues so I went with Xorg instead. I added the Dash-to-Panel extension to get a more compact taskbar that auto-hides for more vertical screen space.

I’m using my uConsole to run RStudio at university and general web browsing, reading PDFs and email. It works well for that.

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Literally the only thing I want from them now is a new CM4 OS image based on Bookworm.

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Totally share your experience after a week of fiddling with the unit, except for amazing baterry life part.

Which batteries exactly do you have? I ordered a pair of LG INR18650-M36 3600mAh - 5A for ~12$.

I maybe get 3.5 hours at best with the lowest screen brightness.

Maybe those are counterfeit cells or maybe there are some settings I can tweak for a longer discharge time? Or 3.5h is amazing? :grinning:

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I’m using two XTAR 18650-3500 cells and I get about 8-10h. I ordered mine from a dedicated electronics parts supplier in Germany (Reichelt) who I trust to sell genuine parts.

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Samsung cells - I purchased them based on recommendations on the battery selection for the DevTerm - https://forum.clockworkpi.com/t/battery-model-recommendation

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Thanks for sharing, my inner cheap Joe prevented me for spending more than 10$ per cell so I guess the performance I get shouldn’t be a surprise :laughing:

Going to source some proper ones from my trusty supplier. Cheers!

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You can always keep the first pair as a backup if you ever need some extra juice

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More battery life updates: I just compiled a pretty substantial Rust application (gurk-rs which includes libsignal) on my uConsole and while it did eat into the battery noticeably, it wasn’t bad at all.

I continue to be very impressed :purple_heart:

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I have started to collect my notes on what customisations I’ve made over the last few days and how I got the stuff running that I need, namely RStudio. My current setup already works really well so I’m probably at a point where I’ll only make minor tweaks now.

I was quite unhappy with the default Raspberry Pi OS UI so that was the main priority. GNOME Shell turned out to be a good option in terms of performance and screen space.

There’s also a few snippets I’ve gather from this forum here. I’ve added links where applicable and copied them for quick reference.

I hope this helps someone

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I started out with Amazon batteries as well - so called 3 amp hour ones - they are best used in rechargeable LED flashlights/lamps not heavy loads like hand held computers.

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Re: battery life,

My battery indicator starts showing 100% long before my batteries are fully charged, and keeps showing 100% long after I unplug. I was concerned my Samsung cells might be phoneys, but it turns out I can get a nice long battery life just by leaving it plugged in past the false 100% reading. (By the way, does anyone know how to fix this issue?)

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id problably check if these values are right…

/sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery/uevent

POWER_SUPPLY_NAME=axp20x-battery
POWER_SUPPLY_TYPE=Battery
POWER_SUPPLY_PRESENT=1
POWER_SUPPLY_ONLINE=1
POWER_SUPPLY_STATUS=Charging
POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_NOW=4173000
POWER_SUPPLY_CURRENT_NOW=680000
POWER_SUPPLY_CONSTANT_CHARGE_CURRENT=2400000
POWER_SUPPLY_CONSTANT_CHARGE_CURRENT_MAX=2400000
POWER_SUPPLY_HEALTH=Good
POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_MAX_DESIGN=4200000
POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_MIN_DESIGN=3300000
POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY=85
POWER_SUPPLY_ENERGY_FULL=8000000
POWER_SUPPLY_ENERGY_NOW=7500000

don’t i don’t think you can change the values in that file…

From fixing the charging current… I “think” you can do what is listed below…

the max or min voltage could be wrong…

you have to create a rule… like…

echo ‘KERNEL==“axp20x-battery”, ATTR{constant_charge_current_max}=“2000000”, ATTR{constant_charge_current}=“1800000”’, ATTR{voltage_max_design}=“4200000” | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-uconsole-charging.rules

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I’m very glad for your experience!
What equipment do you have?

I also recently received my uConsole (CM4+Lte).
I had to solve several problems. The last one was today.

  1. Low battery charge. (I did not decide the fairness of the indication)
    Create file:

/etc/udev/rules.d/99-devterm-charging.rules

KERNEL=="axp20x-battery",
ATTR{constant_charge_current_max}="2500000",
ATTR{constant_charge_current}="2400000"

  1. Not a transparent button. I really love the black button that came with the keyboard, but knowing what’s going on is more important

  2. Poor WiFi/BT signal.
    add to the end /boot/config.txt

dtparam=ant2

If there is no effect, do not throw away the default antenna. Carefully peel it off and glue it to the plastic. In my case, this helped significantly.

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After that my bt headphones is pairing and sound great. WiFi began to work stably and a little faster

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oh yeah!) upgrade os image is the best gift for the community

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I find padded double sided tape works just as well for the antenna but from others on this community, its better to upgrade the antenna. You could use an esp32/8266 as a nat router or a wifi repeater (GitHub - martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater: A full functional WiFi Repeater (correctly: a WiFi NAT Router)) which is a temporary as well as an over engineered way of fixing the wifi signal, i only have one just to able to ssh to other devices when im in a remote area with no access to any wifi.
I do have a battery problem which i need to work on, any help would be great and im going through here to find any other bits of information about battery

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Pretty similar to our first impressions. Got some MXJO 18650s and just running terminal/a bunch of terminal apps in zellij I can pull about 10 hours of battery life. Currently running i3 on top of XFCE which works pretty well so far, though can sometimes be a little bit clunky.

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