Low Tech & Co, laptops and nav stations

Here are a couple of links, intending to help to build useful and cheap devices. They've all been tested in the real world.

• The cheapest Nav Station, Here.
• The cheapest laptop, already mentioned, but slightly updated here.

---

The links above will lead you to pages were you'll find all the required STL: files (for 3D printing) and descriptions of the required hardware.

Point par relèvement, avec ou sans lunettes

 On était en mer ce week-end, et j'ai constaté quelque chose que je ne connaissais pas, et qui mérite d'être  - au moins - partagé. 

C'est l'influence de mes lunettes sur la déviation du compas de relèvement.

Au début, j'étais très fier de constater que je savais toujours faire un point, ne passons pas à côté des choses simples.

J'ai bien fait d'en profiter, car peu après, c'était n'importe quoi... Mais j'ai trouvé la cause du problème : c'est mes lunettes.

Sans lunettes:

Avec lunettes à proximité, plus de 10 degrés de déviation !!

À garder en tête (ou dans la poche)...

Ceci me rappelle ces "anciens" compas de relèvement qu'on tenait à bout de bras..., et qui étaient sans doute absous de cette déviation incongrue. Le premier que ça fait rire se ramasse une baffe.

Fair winds to all !

Gabor's law

We are not going to ban the printing press because there are idiots who write nonsense... But any technological advance can also give rise to all its perversions.
Dennis Gabor.

La loi de Gabor

On ne va pas interdir l'imprimerie parce qu'il y a des andouilles qui écrivent des âneries... Mais toute avancée technologique peut aussi donner lieu à toutes ses perversions.
Dennis Gabor.

Another (new) concept?

We would call it Flake Computing, as opposed to Cloud Computing.

Think of it like Cloud Computing without Internet...

For example, you are on your boat, crossing an ocean, you do not pay those big fees to get a satellite communication and connexion, but your boat is equipped with sensors - TCP (or so) enabled. You have a single board computer on board (<- now THAT's a good one! like a Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, etc), that can emit its own network, WiFi or not. 

Nothing is preventing you from pulling the data emitted by the sensors, to process and compute them. Networks and Internet are different things... LAN, WAN, etc. (EZ: Entropy Zero...)

And nothing is preventing laptops, tablets, cell-phones or any such devices to get connected to the same network, to display the data processed by the single-board computer in a nice Web GUI (or any other GUI).

More later.

Night at 8

It's quite interesting to see that in several languages (mostly of latin or european origin), the word "night" begins with an "n", followed by something sounding very much like the number "8", in that language...

Language	Eight	Night
English	eight	night
French	huit	nuit
Spanish	ocho	noche
Portuguese	oito	noite
Italian	otto	notte
Latin	octo	nocte
German	acht	nacht
Dutch	acht	nacht
Britton	eizh	noz
Norwegian	åtte	natt
Romanian	opt	nopți

Several configurations for a Raspberry Pi Laptop

The Raspberry Pi is a cool single-board computer, modular, onto which you can hook up web cam, loudspeakers, external hard drives, all kinds of devices.
It has wireless and bluetooth connectivity, several USB ports, an Ethernet port. It has everthing I expect from a computer.
It can play music and movies, with the new Raspberry Pi 4 and its 8 Gigabytes of RAM, I can even do real development work without any problem, with tools like PyCharm or IntelliJ.

The Raspberry Pi 400 has recently been released, this is a very cool configuration to think about. For 100.00 USD it comes with the board (4Gb of RAM), a keyboard and a mouse. "All" you need to add is one (or two) HDMI screen(s).
A desktop HDMI screen can be an expensive device...

Along the same lines, below are a couple of configs I came up with before the Raspberry Pi 400 was released..., keeping in mind that those configs are mobile configs, not desktop ones.

The different configurations presented here can be acheived for less than 150.00 USD. And they do work for real.
Note: The configurations presented below have small screens... But nothing is preventing you to plug in a big one.

Here are several configurations for a small Raspberry Pi based laptop, to be taken on the go.

Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

The links in the text below will lead you somewhere in this git repo, with all the STL files and details on the hardware used for each configuration.

---

In its Pelican box, with a 7" touchscreen (no keyboard needed, it's like a tablet). The Raspberry Pi is behind the screen, ducked in the foam.

---

With a wood and plexiglass custom case, a breadboard, wireless keyboard with touchpad, and a 7" HDMI screen

---

Raspberry Pi 4, 7" HDMI high-definition screen, wireless keyboard, in its own 3D printed holder. (STL files for 3D-printing are available here).

Same config, but without the holder, in a Pelican case	It all fits in
Putting things to work	At work!

---

Yet another config, in a waterproof box, with webcam, 5" HDMI screen and small wireless keyboard (STL files for 3D-printing are available here).

In the box, closed.	Connecting the loudspeakers
Unpacking	At work.

---

With an Adafruit 3.5" TFT, as explained here:

Same config, with another enclosure (all STL files available here):

And there is a Raspbian OS 64-bit version in preview... I'm looking forward to the 16Gb version of the Raspberry Pi 4!

Mac Look and Feel, on a real computer!

 Definitely something to check out: Twister OS. 

It runs on pretty much any Raspberry Pi 4, it comes loaded with tons of cool apps, and it possibly looks like a Mac Desktop 😀.

I'll look deeper into it, but it sounds already promising!