Ok, I am not a hacker or anything, I am just an average Physicists (maybe a bad one) with some experience in sensors, control, electronics and programming for industrial type energy loads and other stuff that might be unnecessary to mention but I am a bit afraid of where to start with this.
Uconsole might arrive soon and comes without a core, I suppose I need to get a CM4 and load Linux on it, so I wanted to ask of there is any tutorial on how to do this?
Will search in the next few hours too but any link that you know might come handy :D, thanks and sorry for the impromptu question guys
@WhyDev@white-round-square so, in the case a CM4 is used the OS will be stored in an SD card if use the lite CM4 then. So I flash the card with balena from what I understood. In this case the SD and the lite module need to be in place inside the uconsole or do I flash the SD card using my SD card reader and then I inserted this into the lite module and then this into the uconsole?
Yes I’ve been reading docs and apparently from what I understood I need a board to load linux on the CM5 using the onboard EMMC. Would love that but I think later I will go for mods like the CM5 and SSD after I get more hands on experience on the uconsole.
cm4 inside the uconsole, first sd OS flash will happen on another computer, either linux or windows. then the sd will boot the OS inside the uconsole. from there, once os boots comfortably, you can flash sd cards using an usb card reader on your uconsole.
prioritise the ssd upgrade if you are to do any. a cheap class 2 nvme would make a world of a difference, even with a cm4. i picked up a 256gb toshiba for 15 pounds on cex uk. dont buy an expensive drive, the uconsole will limit it anyway.
ps. dont get an emmc compute module, too much hassle
maybe have a look on Youtube for unboxing/assembly videos and some of them will even walk you through flashing your first image onto the SD card that you then put into the uConsole, but to be honest the little manual that comes with it is more than enough to get started, I had mine built and running in about 15 minutes.
Though I did have the CM4 module in the box too, so you`ll need to order one of those soon before you need to remortgage your house and sell a kidney to afford one! LOL
if you`re into sensors and things like that, it might be an idea to have a look at the RJ45 expansion card, I had the 4G card in mine but I`m going to be swapping it out for the RJ45 expansion card because you get 4 extra USB ports and GPIO pins! inculding TX0/RX0 so you`ll be able to add your own custom hardware for whatever your needs are later.
you can use Balena, Rufus or even the Raspberry Pi imager s/ware like I do, these will all write whatever OS you want to use onto the SD card.
Later you might want to upgrade the Wi-Fi antenna too, the one that comes with it isn`t very good.
the Trackball will suck! but it does get a bit better over time and use, if you have an external keyboard/mouse, use that when youre setting up, its so much easier!
Just take your time and think of it as an ongoing project that you customise yourself over time
ohhh I need to do this once I get more hands on experience on hardware… more of a theoretical guy here but I need to deep dive into physical stuff.
I wanted to plug in my case a microphone to detect sounds and analyse them, like frogs for example (bit rusty on my sound analysis stuff here too tbh). Had a little python software to book animals you see, tag the coordinates with a map and store them into a local databases, might connect mic to get the sounds too after I pass the program to the uconsole.
thanks Katie! yes I saw the extension card but did not knew all the details! thanks for the explanation.
It sounds good, I have some hands on experience with Arduino and other boards to use sensors and capture the data using C and work with it so I suppose that will be really really useful.
I think the WiFi will need and update as also the trackpad as have heard it is extremely hard to control the uconsole with the actual trackball. About the pi prices… dear god! I found a lite 4GB on 60 usd and I will get it today ASAP. I was talking with Alex trough mail about exactly this problem with all the RAM apocalypse and GPU apocalypse… I am assuming also will delay my project to make a devterm with a radxa until the next year u.u (I also need to focus on a master degree too, so better to not be wasting that much time u.u)
i used a cm4 antenna from pi hut. nothing fancy. the uconsole looks like it is about to cast for trout, but i never was trendy anyway. im looking into sound mods for the future. maybe an audiophile DAC soldered to internal usb headers on the addon board. wish me fingers crossed.
how you would use the DAC if I can ask? I am more into trying to get a mic using then IO port I have available when it arrives to test things first to record sound and later do some processing.
dac? the digital to audio convertionatorer? why for listening to either .flac or audio cds, on either grado headphones or on tannoy powered speakers. played by audacious. im thinking of puting an extra 3.5mm female audio jack onto the side of the case and connect it to dac output. word goes usb dacs are plug-and-play on linux.
for your microphone i would go usb route. either internal (2 options on hacker gadgets usb board) or external. but then i know nothing about gpio and sensors and programming. half my brain still thinks in windows and usb plugs
Normal, I will need to dig into my memories and new stuff about sensors too… the dac sounds interesting to play the records of animals in this case for example, I wonder how about converting seismic files into sound too just for fun now that you mention this xD
The DAC i hope to get would only allow better resolution playback. Unless the recording and the file is high resolution, an audiophile DAC wont change a listening session much. Apparently human ear (i havent checked myself) discerns up to 20 khz, to be able to hear that apparently (i have no means to extricate meaning out of this) we need to sample at 40 khz, therefore a 44 khz resolution is ultimately shoved up our standards.
And then thers file encoding. The more of it, the worse the sound. Encoding approximates human hearing and chops out unnecessary sound in order to shorten the file, greatly mutilating the sound. Mp3 is the worst culprit and flac is uncompressed audio cd quality.
And there is also recording quality. Some recordings suck even on audio cds. Especially electronic music that sounds the same on 128kbs and 1k kbs. But real music made without computers, made with real unprocessed voice and instruments suffers as soon as it gets encoded.
So unless you plan to record in a studio, just stick with the built-in uconsole sound. A good DAC wont help much.
Or maybe you have a high resolution microphone? I know nothing about those.
