I have an original Chuwi Minibook and would not recommend buying from them unless you're willing to treat the hardware as disposable. Their support is REALLY bad, warranty is useless (cheaper to buy replacement parts yourself on AliExpress) and the hardware has some baffling cost cutting decisions- I replaced the included jet turbine with a much quieter fan for a couple bucks, but most people won't want to solder their own harness to replicate this mod.
They make great deals but if you can afford the 4x cost competition, I would recommend doing that instead.
I'd rather not have to underclock the RAM and be careful in which order I plug my USB hubs in order for the system to be stable even if I still end up with great performance.
It may be less valuable now because of RAM/SSD prices, but I was able to benefit from my framework's modularity on Day 1 by saving hundreds of dollars by buying those components a la carte Instead of paying the heavily marked up prices some vendors charge for upgrades.
Not just Zoomers. I'm nearly 40 and also thought it smelled weirdly good. Though there's a difference between the original LCD and OLED models, with the latter's smell being much weaker and more like generic plastic off-gassing.
Confirmed: Gen1 LCD smelled about the same as the gen2 LCD units, but the OLED version doesn't smell as strong/good. I still huff it. I'm also over 40.
On an M4 Macbook Pro it's mild and faintly sweet but not really pleasant the way the LCD deck is. Requires a lot of heat for a long time to become noticeable. Vent is less convenient for sniffing.
Some conformal coatings, which protect PCBs from dust and moisture, can emit ethyl acetate or butyl acetate if they weren't fully cured. The smell is sweet but absolutely revolting.
"Investigators scoured more than 3,000 channels of video and telemetry data covering a very brief timeline of events – there were just 93 milliseconds from the first sign of anomalous data to the loss of the second stage, followed by loss of the vehicle."
I haven't seen anything about latency--are you sure that's a problem in the telemetry stack?
> SpaceX’s new implementation (for Falcon 9 “Full Thrust” flights) of non-
deterministic network packets in their flight telemetry increases latency, directly resulting in
substantial portions of the anomaly data being lost due to network buffering in the Stage 2 flight computer.
However it looks that finding might've actually been corrected in the months before Amos-6, so moot point!
At one point, the raspberry pi was a decent option if you wanted something hobbyist friendly that could toggle GPIOs and connect to the Internet (and later Bluetooth).
I suspect Espressif has mostly taken over that market now
The pi, particularly the pi zero is still useful if you need something that can run normal software but not a full mini pc. One example I've seen is using a Pi zero as a "wireless usb" where you can plug it in to a machine that accepts files over usb, and can now drop files on to it over the network.
Maybe you could do this with a ESP32 but it's easy on linux where you can use all the normal tooling and filesystem drivers.
ESP32 can run FreeRTOS, and I think people nowadays have no idea how much stuff we could do in MS-DOS PCs even with all their limitations for the epoch.
ESP32 hardware is much better than they used to be.
Not everything needs to be under Linux monoculture, thankfully.
I have yet to even get started with ESP32, mainly because software-defined radio is my main use case. Once you start getting into absurdly high sampling rates, you start to need a lot of horsepower, and that's where the more powerful SBCs shine.
As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)
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