Raspberry Pi 500+ First Look

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Nicely packed

It was fate. On Wednesday I discovered that I’d earned some some more royalty payments. On Thursday I discovered that Raspberry Pi had released a new keyboard computer, Raspberry Pi 500+. So, one thing led to another (keyboard lighting joke there) and so yesterday it arrived. It’s very nice.

Size comparison

It is slightly larger and a lot heavier than the Raspberry Pi 500. It has proper clicky keys which are backlit If you don’t like the keycaps (and I do) you can swap them out for different ones. You are even given a key puller to remove the existing ones. You can get replacements (but make sure you buy low-profile keycaps or they might not work when you press them). You also get a tool to make it easier to take the computer apart, although bearing in mind it has 16G of RAM and a 256Gb built in solid-state disk I’m not sure why you’d want to get inside.

Use FN + F3 to step through other colours

The backlights work very well. Hold down Fn and press F4 and you can step through a set of different presets. Hold down Fn and press F3 and you can step through colour options for the presets.

There’s even an animated rainbow effect that looks awesome but might be a bit over the top.

Setting up the 500+ is a breeze because the internal hard disk has the Raspberry Pi operating system already loaded onto it. Just turn on the power and work through the very well organised setup. If you fancy something different you can always plug in a MicroSD card to boot from instead.

The machine has the same core components as a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16G of RAM and a 256G hard disk. There is no internal clock battery (boo) but you can buy one and plug it in. There’s no extra cooling, but it doesn’t seem to need it. There is a little internal extra in the form of a PICO which looks after the keyboard mapping and light display.

You can get direct access to the keyboard from Python. There’s a program which you can install and use to configure the keyboard from the command line. You can find instructions here. If you want to get your hands properly dirty you can write programs that interact directly with the keyboard lights. You can find all the source you need here. I’m looking forward to spending more time with the machine and making my own programs that use the coloured keys.

The Raspberry Pi 500+ is a lot more expensive than the Pi 500, at around twice the price. For that you get oodles of memory, an SSD, clicky keys and key lighting. I really like typing on the new keyboard. If you plan on spending a lot of your time typing you might find it is worth it for that alone. I wish the 500+ had a bit more personality though. It is just a minimal keyboard with sockets on the back. Of course you can add your own personality with keycaps and colours, but a strip along the bottom proclaiming its origins wouldn’t have come amiss. But I’m glad I got one and I’m looking forward to spending more time with it.

Web Security and Wasm at The Tech Sessions

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We had a couple of great talks at the Tech Session yesterday. If you are in the Hull area you should keep an eye on what they are doing. You can find them here. The first talk was from John Smith (yes, that is is real name). It had the title “Your cloud got hacked, and they like it”. John is a senior security architect and did great job of explaining just how vulnerable cloud applications are to bad actors. He put the bad actors into categories, from the “Chancer” (there for the money, only knows how to use freely available tools) all the way up to “Ghost” (has the tools, skills and persistence to live in your systems indefinitely without being detected). Things I took away from the talk:

  • There are freely available tools that make it easy to do things like search GitHub repositories for keys to online resources. Use them yourself to see if you are vulnerable. Start with GitLeaks and remember that the bad guys use these all the time.

  • Avoid using long term credentials. And change them regularly - like your underwear.

  • Monitor your resource usage to detect changes. And set limits.

  • Don’t have “one ring to bind them all”. Put different resources under different accounts.

  • Code is a depreciating asset. You must budget for the effort needed to keep it up to date and secure (and to test for security).

  • Open source can be dangerous. Bad actors will target tools used by millions of applications to inject malware into your systems.

  • Developer systems in a company are the holy grail for hackers. They usually have lots of extra permissions and interesting source files on them.

  • At the end of the day it is all about Risk (how surprising). Actively attack the security risks you are running, and keep looking for new ones.

Next up was a talk from Joe Axon This content was a little more relaxing (at least for me) but no less interesting. Joe was talking about using Web Assembly (Wasm) to write games that can run on your machine in your browser. Running programs in your browser usually means JavaScript, which is a great language but not really good for games. JavaScript is a scripting language. It contains lots of high level abstractions and behaviours that are kind of hard to convert into simple machine code. Web Assembly (or Wasm) is a simple stack based language which, from the examples Joe showed us, is very close to what hardware does. This makes it very easy to convert into native machine code that would run at much higher speed. Things I took away from the talk:

  • Wasm is stack based and looks like assembler to me. The text format (i32.add, etc.) is deliberately low-level and easy for humans to read if you’ve seen assembly before.

  • Wasm looks very easy to convert into machine code.

  • It supports integers, floats and blocks of data (although the are now SIMD - single instruction, multiple data vectors too). Anything else you have to structure yourself.

  • You have to do all your input and output (including the display) by passing blocks of data between Wasm programs and JavaScript. The code to do this looks easy to use, but comes at a price in terms of performance.

  • You can get compilers that take most high level languages you’ve heard of and convert them into Wasm - making this an interesting way getting things like C++ or Rust to run in a browser at a sensible speed

  • There is a tool (KNI) that can take XNA games (written for MonoGame) and, after a bit of fettling, create Wasm code that runs at speed in the browser.

So, after a really interesting evening I drove home thinking about scanning my repositories and porting some of my old games to the web. Great stuff.

Jurassic World for Microsoft Flight Simulator

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The Jurassic World plugin for Microsoft Flight Simulator is bit more expensive than the Humber Bridge one I mentioned earlier. But you do get a lot more stuff to look at, including a complete archipelago to fly round complete with wandering dinosaurs. It all looks great and we had a lovely time last night flying around in helicopters. We’ll be back again next week. Well worth a look.

Tech Sessions on 25th September at Hull University

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Tech Sessions are great fun. And there’s usually free food and drink. You get to meet up with a bunch of tech folk and learn something. The next one is on Thursday this week and s all about WebAssembly & Cloud Attack Stories.

Joe Axon will be talking about high performance computing and browser based game development using WebAssembly. Then John Smith will describe how things go wrong when cloud installations aren’t as secure as their operators thought they were.

I’ll be there, taking notes. The sessions start around 6:30 pm and are in the Brynmor Jones Library at Hull University. You can sign up here.

Liquid Glass - Thanks but no thanks

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First reaction to Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” display: “That’s pretty”

Second reaction to Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” display: “I wonder how you can turn it off”

Note to graphics developers who have impressed themselves with their ability to overlay text on a background image and make the background blurry: There’s a reason why newspapers, magazines and books are not printed on semi-transparent paper. It’s because a distracting background makes something much harder to read.

LCD Panel coming to Connected Little Boxes

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I thought it might be useful to add an LCD panel to the Connected Little Boxes. It took a bit longer to get it working than I expected, mainly because the library I’d been using wasn’t compatible with the suspiciously cheap LCD panels that I’d bought.

If you have problems getting your PCF8574 driven LCD2004 panel working with a PICO I would suggest that you do two things:

  • Remove the jumper on the back of the PCF8574 board and connect the LED pin to the VBUS pin on the PICO so that the backlight is powered properly.

  • Use this library to drive the device. It’s the only one I’ve found that works.

Installing FreeCAD on a Raspberry Pi

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We had a really nice Hardware Meetup last night. Although I’m still having network woes. Simon and I were talking about FreeCAD as you do. Simon mentioned that it turns out to be tricky to install the latest version of the wonderful FreeCAD program on a Raspberry Pi. I’ve had a little look and he is right. So I’ve done a bit of digging and come up with this. I’ve also added it to my FreeCAD tips.

Install FreeCAD

If you have a Windows PC, a Linux PC or a MAC you can obtain the latest version of FreeCAD from here There are installers for all these platforms.

Rasbperry Pi installation

If you have a Raspberry Pi things are a little trickier. The most recent versions of FreeCAD have yet to be built for the platform. You can have a go at building it yourself, but this is not a job for the faint hearted (and it takes overnight to build the program). You can get version 0.20.2 very easily:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install freecad

The above commands install Version 0.20.2 from 2023 and this works OK.

Version 1.0.2 on Raspberry Pi

If you want the latest version (1.0.2) you have to do a bit more work and install Flatpak. Flatpak is a Linux app packaging and sandboxing system that lets developers ship applications with their dependencies so they run consistently across different distributions. Flatpak works well, but it does increase the size of installed applications. Make sure you have around 4G of disk space free before installing. These are the steps you follow to install Flatpak and FreeCAD. 

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y flatpak

sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

sudo flatpak install -y --system flathub org.freecad.FreeCAD

flatpak run org.freecad.FreeCAD

This should start up FreeCAD 10 on your Pi running within Flatpak. If you reboot the Pi you will find that FreeCAD shortcuts have been added to the Education and Graphics program groups. If you've already installed version 0.20.2 you can install version 1.0.2 alongside it.

Flatpak management

Note that Flatpak applications are not managed in the same way as those installed using apt. These commands might be useful.

# List flatpaks
flatpak list

# Update just flatpaks
flatpak update

Hasselblad H1

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I now have a new favourite camera. It weights a ton. Two tons if you don’t use the “stock” lens and switch to the super-heavy wide angle or telephoto. It is over 20 years old. The shutter sounds like a small mechanical explosion. It can’t take video. On a good day you can take one shot every few seconds. It has no image stabilisation. In poor light the results can get grainy. In bad light you have to fetch the tripod. But the pictures it produces are some of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s a Hasselblad H1.

I took the above pictures in York. Admittedly the light was lovely and I could have got vaguely similar results with my phone. Except that everything would have been in focus and artificially crisp. Phone cameras are amazing. But they do lots of things to your pictures that you might not want. They add dynamic range. They sharpen everything. They tweak the colours. They add digital blur to separate foreground and background elements. And their images look unreally good.

The Hasselblad has super sharp lenses, so no need to sharpen the image. These lenses are a long way from the sensor, so you get your out of focus effects from physics. It takes real effort to cart the camera around and you have to work hard to line up shots. The viewfinder is optical and shows you the view straight from the lens. The good news is that this makes taking the pictures super fun. The bad news is that it is very hard to see exactly what the camera has captured. My camera has a tiny screen (also around 20 years old) which shows me what I’ve photographed but I need to view my shots on my computer when I get home to discover what they are really like.

However, it turns out that I really like this way of working. I really feel that I have a hand in the results that I get. At the moment I can’t think of taking any other camera out if I go and take pictures.

The Hasselblad brand is associated with very pricey cameras, but the good news is that the very old ones are not that expensive. And the really good news is that all the lenses for the system are all superb and reasonably cheap (certainly compared with modern ones). My complete setup has cost me less than just a camera body for one of the modern systems.

I realise that I’m running a few risks. A device this old could suddenly fail and turn into a paperweight. But I bought most of the bits from MPB.com who give you a one year warranty. And because the camera is made up of separate bits (body, lens and sensor), failure of one component won’t affect any of the other bits. So if the body fails I’ll simply pick up another one and use it with the lenses and bits I’ve already got.

If you are thinking of getting into photography and want to stretch yourself a bit I would strongly advise taking a look at the Hasselblad H system. The older H models (H1 and H2) don’t cost that much and the Phase One digital backs that work with them are not that pricey. The newer versions can be scary expensive but are completely awesome (and you can use all your old lenses with them). The cameras have large sensors which makes for a lovely look to your pictures. And they help you build upper body strength too.

Thunderbirds on the Big Screen

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To celebrate 60 years of Thunderbirds (blimey!) they’ve re-mastered a pair of the best episodes and are showing them in movie theatres in the UK. You can find out more here. The show was shot on 35mm film so it should look great on the big screen. They’ve re-mastered the audio too, so it should also sound terrific.

We’ve got our tickets. Looking forward to it.

Wevie Stonder are wonderful

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If there’s one thing I’m sure of at the moment, it’s that the world needs more silliness. Stuff that is just daft. Wevie Stonder are silly, but clever too. Their new album, Sure Beats Living, is a hoot (with some very atmospheric touches). It’s a while since I’ve heard a record that made me laugh out loud. And they can build a mean soundscape too.

You owe it to yourself to listen to at least track 9, Customer Services. Splendid stuff. It is as if the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band were back in business and using synths and samplers.

Oh, and have you worked out how they came up with their name yet?

Creating with the Rabbit R1

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I’ve been creating with my Rabbit R1. It’s great fun. You tell the Rabbit what you want and then it makes one for you. I asked it this:

I'd like a set of coloured display animations which fill the whole screen. I would like coloured particles, lines, shapes, clouds, each with light trails and a selection of colour palettes. They can aminate into the centre of the screen or across or up and down. When you tap anywhere on the screen a menu of buttons will appear which will let you select colour scheme, speed, pattern type and whether the update will be controlled by audio picked up by the microphone. It should be possible to use the wheel to adjust the sensitivity of the audio input when the audio input is in use. At other times the wheel will adjust the speed of the display. There should also be an option to enter a text message which will be scrolled across the while height of the screen on top of the current display or a clock display which fills the screen. All the text on the screen should be as large as possible and use a colour scheme for maximum legibility. All settings should be retained on the device so that each time the application is started it will have same settings it had when last used.

If you have a Rabbit you can scan this to get the creation

The creation tool (the Rabbit Intern) then asked me what I wanted to target and then chuntered away making it. When it had finished I got a QR code I could scan on a Rabbit device to install the creation, a link to the application (which you can use to have a play with it) and a download link to all the code.

The app is a pretty good reflection of what I asked. It doesn’t seem to store any settings, but it does essentially what I asked it to.

On the right you can see the menu for the app. The buttons let you step through the specified options. I specifically asked for the text in them to be as large as possible because the first application I wrote had button text which was impossible to read.

I had a quick look at the application source code and it seems quite sensible. All the logic ends up in a file in the apps\app\dist\assets folder in one long line of JavaScript code. It’s is quite fun to read.

To create applications (and do other things) you use the Rabbit Interrn mechanism. This is a task based AI assistant. A program created by a task is exposed as a hosted JavaScript application. You can share a link to the app for other people to use. A task doesn’t have to involve writing a program though, it might create a document or presentation. You can also start a task just by discussing your requirements with an agent via the Rabbit device, so in theory you could make something and then use it on your Rabbit.

You get a few free intern tasks with your Rabbit, and you can try making a task for free. Further tasks are rather expensive, at 10 dollars each (3 for 30 dollars) or around 2 dollars each (30 for 70 dollars). However, the price does also include hosting, so you really could make something and then deploy it all in one shot.

The biggest problem with this way of working is that there is no way of iterating your solutions. If you discover something wrong with your creation you can’t ask the intern to update an existing creation with some changes. Instead you would have to add the extra requirements to your description and make a new creation, using up another of your precious tasks. You can wade into your source code and make changes to it, but I don’t know of a way of “round tripping” a modified version so that it is visible on the Rabbit or via their hosting service. This is really sad.

If would be completely wonderful if Rabbit released a plugin for Visual Studio Code that let you grab a creation, fiddle with it and then push it back. As it stands, I think this is a really exciting development for Rabbit owners, and almost an incentive to get a device if you don’t already have one (plus you get the awesome Magic Camera). If nothing else it lets you experiment with turning ideas into code and learn how to explain what you want to generative systems.

Magic Camera Fun and Games

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I really love the Magic Camera feature in the Rabbit R1. It turns pictures into delightful illustration. I wondered what would happen if you took a picture in the wrong orientation.

That went well…

The results weren’t pretty. But they were very amusing. Incidentally, if you have a Rabbit you’ve not played with for a while it might be worth getting it out again. The new RabbitOS2 is now available and it is a bit of a game-changer. I’m playing with it at the moment and I’ll report back later.

Using the PICO2 with the Arduino Framework on PlatformIO

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The title says it all really. I’m working on my Connected Little Boxes and I really want to run the code on the Raspberry Pi PICO2. Annoyingly, this is not one of those things that “just works”. But it can be done. First you need to make sure that your PlatformIO installation is up to date. Navigate to the PlatformIO tab in the Visual Studio plugins. Then select New Terminal from the options. This will open up a terminal window. Now issue the following commands:

platformio pkg update -g
platformio platform update raspberrypi
platformio run -t clean

Once this has completed we can create a PlatformIO.ini entry for the PICO2 platform:

[platformio]
; uncomment the build that you want to select
;default_envs = rpipico
;default_envs = ESP32_DOIT
;default_envs = d1_mini
default_envs = rpipico2

; other environments go here...

[env:rpipico2]
platform = raspberrypi
board = rpipico2w
framework = arduino

; Use Philhower core (RP2040/RP2350 support)
platform_packages =
  framework-arduino-pico @ https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico.git
board_build.filesystem_size = 0.5m

This fetches the libraries from the Earle Phillhower site and configures the target device. The system will only have a half a megabyte of data storage, you can increase this size if you wish. When you have built the code you can find the firmware.uf2 file in the .pio/build/rpipico2 folder. Turn on your PICO with the BOOTSEL button pressed so that it pops up a storage device and then drag this file onto device. 

upload_protocol = cmsis-dap
debug_tool = cmsis-dap

If you have a Raspberry Pi Debug probe you can add the above lines to the file so that the program will be deployed to the probe. If you want to deploy to the PICO2 (not the Wi-Fi version) just change the board to rpipico2