Gav's World : News : November 2020

2020-11-28 : New 3D Printer

This is one of these gadgets that I've been wanting for years - pretty much since they first came to market... but I've just never been able to fully justify it. Technically I can't now, but there was a good sale on at Pimoroni for a Vertex Delta 3D Printer that I just couldn't pass up on.

This is an open source hardware platform (with 3D models of all parts should I need to print any - which I've had to already after breaking a bracket that holds the print bed in place), that runs Marlin, open source embedded 3D printer software (no... it's not firmware!). There is also a freely available slicer: Ultimaker Cura which itself is composed of open source libraries etc. which (best of all) even has a native appImage for Linux!

There are thousands of 3D models of all sorts of things on the Thingyverse, and when it comes to having to design a model myself, then FreeCAD is also available for Linux!

Let's see what I can print :-)

2020-11-10 : New Raspberry Pi 400

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Now some may think that having more than 10 Raspberry Pi computers is a bit excessive - I don't :-)

So, when a new one was announced, the Raspberry Pi 400, I felt that I really needed to add it to my collection (which takes this up to the 17th Pi that I've bought!).

It's basically a Pi 4 (bit a bit quicker - 1.8GHz compared to 1.5GHz) with a new board layout to allow all connectors to appear on the rear of the unit, and built into an official Raspberry Pi keyboard... just like the good old days of (in my case) the Acorn Electron and Atari ST where this was the case. However, the Pi 400 is way more powerful than any of the 1980s and 1990s computers, ovbisouly!

I'm initially playing with the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Server but since it's a "computer" as opposed to a headless server, I'm going to install Xubuntu desktop on it too.