orblivious

tech support survivor

  • she/her

👵🏻 older than the internet
🐧 longtime linux nerd
🧠 eternally brain fogged
🏳️‍⚧️ trans woman
RIP Cohost - you will be missed

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vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

Around this time 10 years ago I got a little money back from my tax return so I decided to spend some of it on something "fun", and ordered a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B. Since then it's been plugged in behind my desk, hosting all my little bot projects: currently, @lucasarts-places, @simcity2000bot, @endingsummary, @vs-everyone, @daily-emoji, @wadbot (on hiatus atm), @deus-ex-txt, @onepiece-characters, and @jojo-characters; and a few more over the years that have been retired.

I'd like to do a post soon specifically about the creative side of my bot-making practice, but for now I just want to thank this trusty little device for being exactly as much computer as I've needed to do lots of random little creative things.

I don't actually know that much about the "single board computers" space but clearly it's developed immensely in the past 10+ years. Raspberry Pi pissed a lot of people off ~18 months ago by announcing they were happy to work with cops and having their hardware used to spy on people, so I'd no longer recommend them, but I also haven't found a go-to alternative if I ever needed a new one. But there are multiple communities out there doing neat stuff with tiny cheap computers, and probably folks here on cohost know a lot more about em.


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in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

it'll definitely come back at some point! all that would be needed for it to have a new home here on cohost (by which i mean, hosting the full image posts as was previously done on tumblr) would be for the site to have a proper API for interacting with draft posts. then i could write a simple script to auto-post once a day from the pool of drafts that i'd previously generated (WADbot is the only one of my bot projects where i generate the posts in batches by running a script and upload them as drafts, so that i can do some light quality control and remove any posts of maps made by complete assholes).

wait i always thought that RPi was only partially open nvidia style? regardless there is an open source mali driver which is what most rockchips and most rpi alternatives use.

The RPi (broadcom) GPU drivers have been open source (apart from a firmware blob) since 2014 (https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTYyMjM), shipped to users since 2016 (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspbian-Feb2016-Update). This is about the GPU driver for RPi 1-3, IIRC the RPi4 shipped only an open source driver right from the start (same with RPi5 presumably).

Good to hear that there are now open source Mali drivers (for the relevant Mali generations) as well :)