We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: cheap

  • Raspberry Pi vs used Thin Client

    I saw Jenny List’s post on Mastodon the other day:

    I need a small server to do a thing.

    I totted up the price of a Raspberry Pi 5 with all the accessories I would need, and came up at more cash than an equivalent x86 box.

    I’m sorry to say this, but there’s no reason for me to use a Pi there.

    along with Jonty Wareing’s reply:

    … Other than hats or pins I find there is rarely a good reason for a pi these days. You can get cheap x86 thin clients that beat the pants off them – the dell wyse ones are very cheap on ebay and excellent, the 5070 has an m2 slot and upgradable ram.

    I’ve had Raspberry Pis since they were launched. I used to work for an Official Reseller. I’ve been hired for my expertise with them. They’re so much part of the woodwork around here that I’ve never really considered them expensive. So how do they compare to an ex-corporate thin client box?

    Dell Wyse 5070

    ebay sold item page for "Dell Wyse 5070 Thin Client J5005 @1.5GHz 8GB RAM 128GB AC Adapter- NO OS/Stand" with picture of a small thin client computer box

    I found one on eBay from a local reseller, GREENSTAR💻⭐. For $68.44 including sales tax (that’s €42), I got a used thin client box including:

    • a great big power supply brick;
    • Intel j5005 quad core cpu, fanless;
    • 8 GB of DDR4 RAM (dated 2021);
    • 128 GB SATA M.2 SSD;
    • 3× DisplayPort video ports, 1920×1080 at 60 Hz;
    • 5× USB 3 ports, 1× USB C port and 2× USB 2 ports;
    • a real 9-pin serial port;
    • no wifi!

    This isn’t a detailed hardware review: for those, I suggest you read Gough Lui and David Parkinson. To get this machine up to a usable spec, I added:

    • a DisplayPort → HDMI cable (about $20);
    • a replacement BIOS backup battery ($1);
    • a cheap USB wifi adapter. I’m still finding old RTL8188CUS dongles about the house from the early Raspberry Pi days, some still in original packaging. These work, but aren’t great, but I can’t beat the price.

    All in — excluding monitor, keyboard and mouse — I’ll say I brought it in for $100 inclusive (about €61).

    Raspberry Pi 5

    To come up with an equivalent system (bought from an Official Reseller that I didn’t work for) I’d need:

    Description Price
    Raspberry Pi 5 8GB $114.95
    Raspberry Pi 45W USB-C Power Supply $21.99
    Case (with fan) $13.95
    MicroHDMI to HDMI Cable (2 m) $9.95
    128GB SD Card $24.95
    RTC Battery $7.00
    Subtotal $192.79
    Sales Tax $25.06
    Total $217.85

    (or €134)

    Not all of these items are available from the one reseller, particularly the 128 GB SD Card and RTC battery. I’ve included the RTC battery so you can do timed power-on tricks as with a regular PC. All the parts are from Raspberry Pi themselves. Curiously, you can pay more for non-official accessories with the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 5 Starter Kit at $224.95 + tax.

    Raspberry Pi 4

    An equivalent 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4 system breaks down like this:

    Description Price
    Raspberry Pi 4 8GB $104.95
    Raspberry Pi 15W USB-C Power Supply $10.95
    Case $6.95
    Case fan $6.75
    MicroHDMI to HDMI Cable (2 m) $9.95
    128GB SD Card $24.95
    DS3231 Real Time Clock Module for Raspberry Pi $9.95
    Subtotal $174.45
    Sales Tax $22.68
    Total $197.13

    (or €121.)

    This is surprisingly expensive, and unless you must have this particular SoC, likely better to go with a Raspberry Pi 5. Again, the RTC is optional, but timed power-on can be handy in a small computer. Most of the “RTC for Pi” boards use a cheaper DS3231M clock chip which can’t issue alarms for power control. You might have to shop around a bit to get this particular part.

    For roughly $2 more, you could go for the official Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kit (tiny 16 GB SD card, two HDMI cables, guidebook, no fan, no RTC — but includes the surprisingly lovely Raspberry Pi Keyboard and Hub and Mouse). For a whole lot more ($259.95), you could go with the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 EXTREME Kit.

    (As a former employee of a reseller, I suspect I’m permanently blocked from sharing why official resellers bundle third-party bits with their kits, always with a considerable price bump. Let’s just say that, during the Pandemic Chip Shortage, it was very galling to get a rare shipment of Raspberry Pi boards, go to extreme lengths to cancel multiple orders [oh the javascript injection hack attempts that I saw] and hurry to ship the boards out. The next day, we’d see what had to be the same hardware appearing on eBay at a 300% markup. And there was nothing we could do about it …)

    Testing

    I’m not interested in testing:

    1. Network throughput — Beyond having a working connection, I don’t have the skill or attention span to test networking stuff
    2. Video performance — I don’t really do video things. Raspberry Pis and thin clients are going to struggle with full screen 60 fps video anyway, and optimizing this is not my jam
    3. Power consumption — I don’t have the right kit for this. All I have is a 20 year old Kill-a-Watt clone which doesn’t have the necessary resolution.

    I’m going to have to rely on benchmarks. Benchmark results are notoriously easy to fiddle and give only a rough idea of how a system will perform in real life. I’m going to present the results of three systems (Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, Dell Wyse 5070: all running stock but up-to-date Raspberry Pi OS or Debian) in three tests, in decreasing order of arbitrariness.

    1: MP3 Encoding

    The time, in seconds, to encode Aphex Twin’s minimalist opus aisatsana [102] (5′ 21″) from a 55MB WAV file to a 6.8MB MP3 with:

    time lame -V 2 aphex_twin-aisatsana.wav
    System Time
    Raspberry Pi 4 14.2 s
    Dell Wyse 5070 8.6 s
    Raspberry Pi 5 5.7 s

    The thin client comes out between the two Raspberry Pis. It’s not a bad result at all: 8.6 s is still 37× real-time encoding.

    2: pichart

    pichart is a processor benchmark developed by Eric Olson for ranking numeric processing power of various computers against Raspberry Pi boards. It’s documented here: A Pi Pie Chart.

    It’s possible to tweak this benchmark endlessly with compiler options, but I stuck with whatever version of gcc the system came with. I also used exceptionally conservative compiler options of -O2. I reckon that if your compiler has got to version 12, it won’t be producing terrible code with simple options. Anyway:

    info graphic comparing multi core numeric performance of several small computers, including Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5 and Dell Wyse 5070. The centre is dominated by a large pie chart, and there are individual results around the corners for Prime Sieve, Fourier Transform, Merge Sort and Lorenz. With some variation in relative results, the Raspberry Pi 5 has the best performance, followed by the Wyse 5070 and then the Raspberry Pi 4

    (raw results, if you must: Wyse5070-vs-Pi.txt)

    All of these are OpenMP multi-core, multi-thread results. The Wyse 5070 holds a pretty solid second place to the Raspberry Pi 5.

    3: UnixBench 6.0.0

    byte-unixbench must be a very serious benchmark because it wraps a whole suite of results into one impenetrable number. We’re supposed to believe that This Number has some respectable heft. It certainly takes a long time to run (almost half an hour) and if your computer has fans, things can get loud.

    Since all three machines have four cores, it’ll save a lot of words to report only the multi-core System Benchmarks Index Score:

    For all its purported repeatability, this set of scores surprised me most. The Wyse 5070 doesn’t feel much slower than either Raspberry Pi board. Could the small SATA SSD be a bottleneck? I’d have to spend money to find out.

    (I also ran sbc-bench, but the results are even less enlightening. The only thing I could discern was that the Wyse 5070 was running some kind of custom thermal regime. Since it has no fan and only a modest heat-pipe cooler, this is no surprise. My results, have at ’em: sbc-bench)

    Conclusions

    I can get two Wyse 5070 systems for the cost of one Raspberry Pi 4 or 5. This is what makes the decision for me, and every other issue is window dressing. So much of “I made a thing with a Raspberry Pi!” is really “I made a thing with a small Linux computer!” these days, and the 5070 and other thin clients excel at this.

    Yes, the Raspberry Pi 5 is likely to be slightly faster that the Wyse 5070. And if you’re locked-in to their cameras, HATs or GPIO layout, you’re probably going to stick with Raspberry Pi. Likewise, if you’re kitting out a classroom, Raspberry Pis are all repeatable, from the same vendor, and have a proper warranty. Nobody in education got fired for buying Raspberry Pi — even if the micro:bit is the STEM board of choice round these parts.

    Even if the supply can be a bit variable, and you can’t be quite sure you’ll be able to get the same spec every time, the Wyse 5070 represents great value for money. I’ll definitely think twice about buying a Raspberry Pi next time.

    … about those GPIO pins

    If you’re not constrained to using Raspberry Pi’s 40-pin header or specific HAT hardware, you’ve still got options, including but not limited to:

    • an FT232H Breakout and PyFtdi. It may be possible (with some fiddling) to make the FT232H appear as a Linux gpio chip directly;
    • u2if (USB to interfaces) running on a Raspberry Pi Pico, talking to Python on the Linux end;
    • and of course, Firmata running on an Arduino is exactly where you left it in 2011. It still works, it hasn’t gone away, and is still at the heart of many custom interactive installations.

    Parting thought

    “raspberry pi computer” is an anagram of “temporary price burps”. This, I feel, is important for you to know.

  • Making cheap HP plotter pens + yet another HP-GL viewer

    If you’re running an old plotter, getting pens can be a worry. While there are some companies that might still make them (Graphic Controls/DIA-Nielsen, for one) they are expensive and limited in range. They’re also felt-tip, which means they’ll dry out if not carefully re-capped.

    While eBay might supply all things (like these Roland DG plotter pens I scored a couple of days back; fine, black, new old-stock, or these German plotter pens), I also found this:

    $_3It’s described as “11.5*28MM cutting plotter vinyl cutter pen holder 50mm for Roland holder Pcut”. I bought two, and eventually the slow boat from China came …

    pens

    The one on the left is an unmodified pen holder. Well, it’s really a ballpoint-refill holder, as it comes with a (random colour of blue) refill.  To modify these to fit into an HP desktop plotter, you will need to:

    1. Cut ~10 mm from the end of the holder. A Dremel + cutting disk is a satisfying way of doing this. The gap between the knurled bit and  the thread seems to be a decent place. Clean up the sharp edges
    2. As the knurled lock ring will stop the pen engaging in the carriage (my HP-7470A does a lovely little hesitant try… nope; try… nope; try… give up sequence), you’ll have to do without it. Find another way of jamming the threads of the threaded collar in the right place. I used electrical tape, and it’s held so far. Wiser users will use different colours of electrical tape for different pens, ahem …
    3. Stick the pen refill in and tighten down the collet lightly with pliers. ¡¡¡ Do not try to pull the refill out while it is in the collet !!! (The ballpoint insert will likely pop out, and viscous ink will start to blort out everywhere. Ask me how I know!)
    4. Snip the end of the refill flush with the end of the pen holder using diagonal cutters. Best to do this directly over a rubbish bin, as pen ink is nasty. Dab off excess ink from the end of the refill, and clean your cutters, too.
    5. The base of the threaded collar should be around 29 mm from the pen tip, otherwise nothing will plot (if it’s too short) or you’ll poke holes in the paper (if too long). This measurement doesn’t seem to be extremely critical: my Roland pens have it at 28.5 mm, the DIA-Nielsen pens are 28.9 mm. One of my homebrew pens is working at 30½ mm, but then, my basic plotter has no force control, so it may be more forgiving than more elegant beasts.

    modified holders and cut/not-so-cut refills

    My modified pens look like the above.

    The dollar store is a good source of cheap ballpoint pens. I managed to snag 8 retractable red pens for $1.25, and 4 black pens for $1.

    one of the donor red pens, plus the disassembled pen holder

    (These retractable pens more often than not eject the whole internals across the room when you retract ’em.)

    It’s probably a good idea to scribble with the pens a bit before and after modifying them, as they take a while to flow freely. They plot very lightly; the black ink looks more like a faint pencil line.

    Double-plotted nested bézier curves
    Double-plotted nested bézier curves

    If you look close up, not merely are the lines very faint, but something else important shows up:

    double-plotted detail, showing off-centre effects (actual size 17 × 17 mm)
    double-plotted detail, showing off-centre effects (actual size 17 × 17 mm)

    The lines — which should be a constant(ish) distance apart, if the paper has stayed in registration — are showing a varying distance from each other. It looks like the pen points are a little off-centre, so when the pen is swapped out, it gets turned to a slightly different position. This would really only matter for precise work, and I find the effect interesting.

    As for the HP-GL viewer? GhostPDL, by the makers of Ghostscript. You’ll have to build it from source, and its documentation isn’t quite where one might want it to be, but it implements a full HP PCL6  / HP-GL/2 interpreter than can output bitmaps, PostScript or PDF. The SVG graphic below was made using the tools/plot2pdf.sh script to convert HP-GL to PDF, then I used ghostscript to convert that to SVG. Nifty!

    weave.pltAs a bonus, GhostPDL comes with one of the prettiest plotter fonts ever:
    testlb

  • The strange world of the 808 Car Keys Micro Camera

    They have no viewfinder, no way of focusing, no controls beyond a power button and a multi-function shutter button (and two other seemingly useless buttons). They come with no manual, no readily identifiable manufacturer and you don’t really know what you’re going to get until you turn them on — yet they sell in their thousands. They are the 808 Car Keys Micro Camera.

    I first heard about them from This Camera is an Adventure on MetaFilter, then someone suggested one as a solution to my Halfbakery idea “Tiny high quality digital camera”. So I bought two:

    • a #3 from ebay seller liangmin9888. Total cost $14.59 shipped from Hong Kong.
    • a #16 from ebay seller elehomegood. Total cost $40.99 shipped from Hong Kong.

    I chose these sellers for their high reputation, and they didn’t disappoint. The cameras? They’re no Leicas.

    The #3 is supposedly the best of the standard resolution cameras. They have a large yellow timestamp permanently inscribed in the corner of any image or video. The one I have is loaded with lens aberrations, and makes a Lomo look like a view camera. Still, I see some potential in it.

    The #16 is a bit better. It still is miles behind my phone camera, and it only takes slightly soft 0.9 megapixel images. No video samples yet, but here’s a squinty picture I took in Lakefield today:

    Lakefield, rather wonkily by 808 #16

    I do feel a bit self conscious about using such a covert camera, but I’ll see what I can do with them.

  • cheap databases for Mac

    Apparently they all use the wonderful SQLite, too.

  • Make your own 120 Film Cans

    I wrote this ages ago, but it wasn’t in the easiest to find place. I discovered today that Ilford fit inside Agfa, and – with a bit of brute force – an Ilford will fit inside an Ilford. So I made a few more of these …
    I’ve often wondered why the relatively tough little metal-clad 35mm roll comes in a neat plastic case, while the bigger and more delicate 120 roll has nothing more than foil to protect it. You can buy 120 film cans, but they are expensive after-market things.

    Since I also (used to) shoot 35mm, I tend to end up with a lot of empty film cans. Some brands of film, I noticed, have quite different can diameters. Fuji seems to have the narrowest, Ilford next, and then Agfa the widest. A Fuji can slips quite neatly inside an Agfa can — in fact, if you bore a small hole in the bottom of an Agfa, fill it with water, and slide a Fuji can in as a plunger, it acts as quite an effective single-shot water pistol. But I digress …

    But best of all, I discovered that a Fuji can is a tight interference fit into an Ilford can. Since I knew that a 120 spool is a smaller diameter than a 35mm roll, and is less than twice the length, I knew I could do something with this.

    ilford and fuji film cans, knife.

    You will need:

    • an Ilford film can. It doesn’t need to have a lid, as it will be acting as the base of the “stretch” 120 can.
    • a Fuji film can. I’ve only used the black kind you get with the faster films. I suspect that the clear cans that are used on the rest of the range might work, but won’t be light-tight.
    • a sharp knife. The pictured Opinel may not look much, but it has a razor-like carbon steel blade.

    fuji can with end sliced off.

    Slice the end off the Fuji can. It helps to poke a hole in the side of the can a couple of millimetres up from the end, and then start slicing where you made the hole.

    fuji can jammed in ilford can.

    Jam the now baseless Fuji can into the Ilford can, and push it down to the desire length. It really helps if you take the lid off the Fuji can, as otherwise you’d be working against air compression. It also helps if you have a spare 120 spool handy, to check that you haven’t pushed the two cans too far in to be useful.

    120 film can in use!

    And there you are! It might be rather rough and ready, but it works. I don’t know how durable or waterproof these things are, but they’ll afford considerably more protection than having them rolling about loose in your camera bag.

  • scrummy scran from the HAL Burgers man

    I really like HAL Burgers (244 Adelaide). Good burgers, clever decor and decent beer. Not the cheapest burger I’ve ever had, but one of the better ones.

    Update, August 2007: oh no, it’s closed! Notice of Distress on doorway dating back to July, so again I’m the last to know.

  • nostalgia for something that never existed

    The Verbatim FlashDisc seems to be a solution without a problem to solve.

    verbatim flashdisc

    It’s a cheap ($4) but very tiny (16MB) USB memory key in the vague form of some kind of magnetic media. There are problems:

    • $0.25/MB may seem cheap, but it would mean that a 1GB key at this price was $256
    • It neatly blocks most of the USB ports on a machine
    • Just what kind of media is it supposed to be? It looks closest to an old spool of mag-tape, but folks buying this wouldn’t remember that.

  • Maybe it was too easy …

    Configuring the rest of the Sempron box has been a slog. It seems that there isn’t a single wireless adaptor that works with 64-bit Linux. I might have to resort to a wireless ethernet adaptor, like the D-Link DWL-G820. They’re not cheap, but they may be the only option.

  • the computer does not work

    My 4 year old Athlon XP box finally gave up this week. It had been acting ropily for a few months, and now it won’t even boot. Don’t really need to replace it with anything powerful; maybe just a cheapo Sempron box. We’ll see what Canada Computers has to offer.

  • a joy forever

    a thing of beauty

    I finished fixing up the brakes on the Super Galaxy, and put new handlebar tape on the bars. I still suck at fitting bar tape; should’ve stuck to my old standard Benotto tape, which, while almost useless for shock absorption, is cheap and easy to fit.

    Once all was fitted, I took it for a spin. The new brakes are a delight; very positive and extremely powerful. I will enjoy riding again.

    (And yes, you bike nerds, there is no straddle cable in that picture.)

  • zeiss it ain’t

    fish sculpture

    For no good reason, I bought a very cheap ($20) mini digital camera at the airport. Its limitations make it quite fun to use:

    • has the astonishingly high resolution of 352 x 288
    • fixed-focus lens chock-full of chromatic and spherical aberration
    • no display, except for a cryptic 2-digit LCD
    • takes 20 images, then it has to be downloaded
    • grossly inaccurate viewfinder, which shifts when you press the shutter button
    • images have pronounced scan lines
    • refuses to take images in low light
    • weird non-standard USB connector

    It is very small, and can also work as a webcam. It also works as well as it could under OS X (use macam to download the pictures, or enable the webcam). Using the webcam does seem to delete the pictures, so make sure you download ’em first.

    I’ve made a minicam gallery, which I’ll add to until the novelty wears off.

  • cheap beer frenzy

    Lakeport’s Wee Willy dark Scottish-style beer is not bad. At $1.10/bottle, it’s not bad at all.

  • Happy Nuke Day!

    Yup, Chernobyl was 20 years ago. Let’s just have a wee pause for a technology that’s still messing us up, yet we’re told it’s the green technology of the future. Yeah, and I bet it’ll be too cheap to meter, too.
    There are still farms in Scotland affected by the fallout from Chernobyl. Though, what with all the nuke plants in Scotland, it could be any one of them that’s the real culprit.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a wind farm to survey …

  • Tax Time

    Phew – that’s the 2005 income taxes filed for Catherine and me, and also my GST return in. I don’t grudge paying taxes (no civilization without taxation, after all), but I hate filling out the returns. I’m also too cheap to get someone to do it for me. Sucks to be me, eh?

  • The week of shaving carefully

    So how did my first week of shaving with a plain safety razor go? Pretty well, I think.

    I’ve discovered that Weleda shaving cream and after-shave balm work well for me. They have a muted, natural scent, and are very soothing.

    What didn’t work for me was Lush Prince shaving cream. This heavy, waxy preparation clogs up the blade, it smells too strongly of neroli, and is a horror to rinse off. I also cut myself the only time I used it. Styptic pencil owies resulted.

    Catherine has remarked on the closer shave (I suspect ‘cos I’m spending more time on it). It’s strange, but the stubble seems sharper. I wonder if multiple blades smoothed the razor-cut ends of the hairs, and thus gave an impression of a smoother, longer-lasting shave?

    I like my Merkur. Using it for a year will end up cheaper than any cartridge razor, and result in far less trash.

  • just yer basic yerba, mate

    Scored some yerba mate for Catherine’s cousin Phil yesterday. Seems there aren’t so many South American food stores in KCMO, while there’s a strip of them on Augusta in Kensington Market.

    The store at 239 Augusta had a whole yerba mate section. Since it was cheap ($2 for the half key), I got some for myself. Wonder what I’ll do with it?

  • cheap powermeter

    I snagged a UPM EM 100 Energy Meter at crappytire yesterday. It was a good bit cheaper than the old standard P3 Kill A WATT. We’ll see if it’s useful.

    (So I guess I’ve answered my own Talk Energy post.)

  • happy desktop

    Did some upgrades/maintenance to the Linux box tonight:

    • added a DVD±RW drive
    • finally fitted the cheapo Zalman fan controller to take the edge off the CPU fan noise
    • got X11 working with the nVidia graphics card again, under 2.6.14. It was fiddly.

    Some people might wonder why I keep maintaining a 3½ year-old Athlon XP1800+. It works, and with the amount of RAM I have in it, it’s plenty fast.

  • look ma, no wires!

    I’ve finally got rid of the ethernet cable that snaked across the kitchen floor to this linux box. A cheapo wireless PCI card (TRENDnet TEW-423PI, from CWO) plus ndiswrapper, and we’re laughing.

  • I hate Sony

    While I like my Cybershot P100, I can’t believe that Sony would make the Memory Stick Pro incompatible with older Memory Stick readers. It’s bad enough that Sony had to created their own expensive, proprietary memory card format (which does exactly what better than CF or SD?), but to make it incompatible between revisions of itself is beyond inexcusable.

    Y’see, I scored a cheapo Lexar multi card reader from CWO the other week because it was quite small and takes both CF and MS. I discovered this evening, when it failed to read my MS Pro cards (in the adaptor) but happily read my mum’s plain MS card, that the two formats are gratuitously incompatible. Um, hello, earth to Sony R&D …