A month or two ago I got a 40mm RGB fan with a cooler. In addition to the usual black and red power input leads, it had a third blue lead for PWM input. This seemed like quite a nice idea, slow down the fan when the Pi doesn’t need it and I’d have a much quieter setup.
So I plugged the lead into the nominated GPIO pin, downloaded the supplier’s script and ran it, only it didn’t do what I thought it would. The script just turned the fan on at full speed above a certain temperature (I think this was 55°C) and turned it off completely below this temperature.
A bit puzzled by this odd use of the PWM control pin, I then searched for some other scripts and all of the ones I found had some variant of turning the fan on or off at a certain temperature. Some did this through a python script and some used Raspberry Pi OS’s built-in fan control setting.
This solution obviously has some benefits as the fan is only running when it needs to be. But it isn’t really using PWM control. In fact with the 5-6mA current draw that these fans typically have, you could probably just plug the 5V supply lead into one of the GPIO pins and turn it off directly, you don’t even need a PWM fan. I wouldn’t suggest doing this permanently as there is a higher start-up current and you’ll probably run into issues if you add multiple fans.
So in this tutorial, we’ll fix that and write a script to make proper use of our fan’s PWM input.
Here’s my video trying out the scripts and testing the fan noise, read on for the written instructions:
What You Need For This Tutorial
Raspberry Pi 4B (This will work on any Raspberry Pi model) – Buy Here
Some of the above parts are affiliate links. By purchasing products through the above links, you’ll be supporting this channel, at no additional cost to you.
Testing The 40mm 5V RGB FAN
I started out by writing my own PWM script that actually uses a varying PWM output to control the speed of the fan, not just turn it on or off. The script fetches the CPU temperature, then scales the temperature from a range of between 25 and 80 degrees and turns it into a fan speed between 0 and 100, then sets this as the PWM fan speed.
You can download the script from my Github repository. I’ve included instructions further along on installing this script and configuring it to automatically run on startup.
I plugged the fan into 5V, GND and GPIO pin 14.
Then I hit run to try it out.
This is when I figured out why these scripts all just use 100% on or off as their so-called PWM control. These fans sound horrible if you actually try varying their speed. Running at any level of reduced speed, they’re way louder than they are when running at full speed, so there really is no point in reducing their speed.
I thought that this might be related to the PWM frequency. I had this initially set at 100Hz, as this is what was in the other scripts, but I tried reducing it to 50Hz, and increasing it to 120Hz. This made very little difference, it just changed the frequency of the noise that the fan produced.
And this wasn’t just a bad fan, I literally tested this on over 10 different fans and from different suppliers. Some were a little better or worse than others but they were all noisy to the point where it was quieter to just run the fan at full speed all the time.
Testing The 40mm 5V Noctua Fan
I then recalled buying a Noctua PWM fan for a build a while ago that I had never gotten around to using. This has a four-pin connector as it provides RPM feedback as well as PWM control, but we’ll just leave the RPM feedback disconnected for now.
You’ll need to replace the MOLEX connector or use some male-to-female jumpers to pick up on the pins to connect it to your Pi.
Like with the RGB fan, I plugged this fan into 5V, GND and GPIO pin 14 and tried out the same script.
This time it ran perfectly. Noctua fans are known for being quiet, and being a small 40mm fan you can still hear some fan noise at full speed, but anything under 50% is practically silent. You can also actually slow the fan down to almost zero without any issues or weird noises coming from it – something the RGB fan struggled with.
Installing And Using The PWM Fan Control Script
When I was happy with the way in which the fan control worked, I then cleaned up the script. I actually landed up making two versions of it.
The first is the one that I used for my testing. It turns the fan on when a minimum temperature has been reached and then ramps the speed up sequentially to full speed at the Pi’s thermal throttling temperature of 80 degrees.
This is fine for the Noctua fan, but if you use a fan that produces any noise or frequency hum then it gets annoying having the pitch of the sound constantly changing. So the second script addresses this.
The second script ramps up the fan speed in steps rather. So anything over 25 degrees is 25% on and this then increases in steps with each temperature band. This means that the fan operates at a fixed speed for a given temperature range, so the pitch of the sound it makes doesn’t change that often.
To install the scripts from my Github repository and get them to run automatically on startup, use the following commands.
Update your Raspberry Pi’s software and reboot the Pi:
Set up crontab to run the script automatically on startup:
$ crontab -e
Add one of these lines to the end of the crontab file, depending on which script you’d like to use:
@reboot python3 /home/pi/FanProportional.py &
or
@reboot python3 /home/pi/FanStepped.py &
You can then remove the downloaded folder and reboot your Pi to test it:
$ sudo rm -rf PWMFanControl
$ sudo reboot
If a quieter fan is something you’d like to try, then I definitely recommend getting the 40mm 5V Noctua fan that you can actually PWM control without increasing the fan’s sound. It’s obviously a lot more expensive than the clear RGB ones shipped with most cases and coolers ($15 vs $5.50 at the time of writing), but it might be worth it if you value silence.
I’m interested to see if anyone has had any luck with getting the clear RGB fans to run quietly under PWM control, if you have please let me know what you did in the comments section below.
Today we’re going to be taking a look at the new CrowPi-L, a Raspberry Pi 4 based laptop by Elecrow. This is essentially a slimmed-down and slightly more refined version of the popular CrowPi2.
They’ve taken some of the community feedback on the CrowPi2 onboard in producing this laptop, so it’s got a number of nice upgrades. They have included an internal 5000mAh battery, which should power the laptop for up to three hours, and have simplified the way to install and remove your Raspberry Pi.
Take a look at my review video or read on for the written review:
Where To Buy A CrowPi-L
The CrowPi-L is primarily available through Elecrow’s web store. A single product page allows you to select from all of the available options for the laptop and add-ons.
First up are two versions, the basic kit which just includes the laptop and then the advanced kit which includes the laptop and the Crowtail starter kit. It’s also available with a black or a white keyboard and you can select it with an optional 4GB or 8GB Raspberry Pi. Given the price difference, I’d probably look at getting a Raspberry Pi elsewhere. You can then also select your plug type at the bottom.
I’d really like to see a slimmed-down version of the CrowPi-L for the Pi Compute Module 4, but until these are readily available again that’s probably not viable for them.
The CrowPi-L comes in a white branded box with a neat carry handle on the top.
Opening up the lid, we’re greeted with the CrowPi-L.
Alongside that is a white wireless mouse to match the laptop, some hardware to mount the Raspberry Pi within the laptop and then a little red adaptor board. They call this the Crowtail adaptor board and you basically use this in conjunction with the Crowtail starter kit to tinker with adding sensors and electronics to your Pi.
In the compartment at the top, we’ve got a power adaptor. This has a USB type C connector on it but says it supplies 12V, so I assume it’s a USB type C power delivery adaptor although it doesn’t say that anywhere and it doesn’t have any specs for the other lower voltages, so I’m not too sure. I’d probably be cautious plugging this into a standard USB type C device.
Taking a look around the CrowPi-L, we’ve got an 11.6″ IPS display with a webcam and microphone above it.
We’ve also got a nice full-size keyboard along with the power button and trackpad above it. I’m not sure why they’ve put the trackpad in this spot. It seems a bit odd to me, but at least it gives you a way to use the pointer if you can’t use the regular mouse or don’t want to carry it around. Alongside the trackpad is a GPIO pinout diagram.
On the left side are the Pi’s ports, so we’ve got an Ethernet port, two USB 3 ports and one USB 2 port. The second USB 2 port on the Pi is used by the CrowPi-L presumably for the trackpad and keyboard input as well as the webcam.
On the opposite side is a compact GPIO header, a 3.5mm audio port, HDMI port and the USB C power port.
The GPIO header is not the same size as the one on the Pi, it is a more compact version that the CrowTail adaptor board will plug into.
On the back, we’ve got two speakers for stereo audio and some ventilation holes in the middle.
On the bottom, we’ve got two removable covers. The larger one that is held in place with some screws covers the battery compartment and this smaller one at the top is where we install our Pi. This is just held in place magnetically, to make removal of the Pi much easier – something that the community asked for on the CrowPi2. The adaptors are all designed for a Raspberry Pi 4, and you can use the 2GB, 4GB or 8GB variants.
Taking a look at the battery, it looks like it’s two lithium-ion cells making up a 7.4V pack with a total capacity of 5000mAh.
Installing The Raspberry Pi
To install our Raspberry Pi, we need to plug this adaptor board into the ports on the side, and a smaller one into the top USB port. The small adaptor connects to the larger adaptor with a short ribbon cable.
We’ve then also got this really cool microSD card adaptor. This allows you to insert microSD cards into the slots on both sides and you can then use a switch on the A side to choose which card to boot from. So you can dual boot your Pi really easily without having to swap cards. I think this is a really cool feature.
The whole assembly then connects to the CrowPi-L through a ribbon cable.
The Pi is held in place magnetically, so we need to add some included screws to the bottom for the magnets to attach to.
Lastly, we fit an adaptor onto the top to direct the Pi’s GPIO pins through to the port on the side of the CrowPi for the Crowtail adaptor board. This adaptor also has a fan on it to provide cooling to the CPU.
That’s our Pi installed and ready to be used. They’ve done really well with the design here, it’s one of the neatest and most functional I’ve seen. Usually, you need to connect a number of loose cables between the Pi and the laptop or tablet, so this is a really clean setup.
First Boot Of The CrowPi-L
Now that we’ve got our Raspberry Pi installed, let’s get it booted up.
The first thing I noticed is that the display is really good. The details are sharp, the brightness is great and it’s got an anti-reflective coating which really helps when working in areas with bright lights or windows. A lot of these sort of products take shortcuts with the display to keep the cost down, they definitely haven’t done so with this one.
This is running Elecrow’s version of Raspberry Pi OS, so you get some nice features specific to the CrowPi-L, like the battery monitor in the bar at the top. This shows you the remaining battery capacity in quarters and indicates whether the battery is charging or being used.
The trackpad isn’t great. It is usable but you probably wouldn’t want to use it as your go-to device. You also can’t rest your wrist when using it or you’ll push keys on the keyboard, so it’s not comfortable to use for extended periods.
Performance-wise, you’re going to get the exact same performance you’d get out of a standalone Pi. This is effectively just an all-in-one package for a Raspberry Pi, so it’s not going to give you any better or worse performance than the Pi itself would by itself.
Using The GPIO Pins & Crowtail Starter Kit
If you’ve looked at the pricing, you’re probably wondering why you’d spend around $350 for this laptop (once you’ve added in your Pi) when you could get a second-hand or low-end laptop with better performance for a similar price.
The biggest benefit I see is that this is a really good, ready-to-run learning platform. It comes with Pi Panel pre-installed and this guides you through a number of projects step-by-step. All of the required software, drivers and libraries are ready to run as well. You can start out with drag and drop block coding using Letscode and then move on to Python programming in Thonny once you get more comfortable.
To get the most out of this functionality, you’ll probably want to get the Crowtail starter kit or another 4-wire sensor kit so that you’ve got some basic electronic components to work with.
The Crowtail starter kit comes with 22 modules as well as some breadboard jumpers and 4pin cables. Some of the included modules are a PIR sensor, moisture sensor, buzzer, button, capacitive touch sensor etc.. The full list is available on their product page.
They also have Crowtail starter kits available for Arduino and Micro:bit, take a look at their full product range.
Each module has a four-pin interface that you can use an included cable to plug into the Crowtail board. So it’s all plug-and-play which is great for beginners.
The kit also includes a base shield which you can use directly on your Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins if you aren’t using the CrowPi laptop. It’s basically the same sort of adaptor as the Crowtail but to be used straight in your Raspberry Pi.
As a beginner, it can be quite intimidating to open up a box of electronics and have to figure out how to connect them while also learning how to code the software. This package makes the first step a lot more manageable with the modules all being plug-and-play and the software preconfigured, so you can progressively work on more and more advanced projects.
Trying Out An Included Project On The CrowPi-L
To get a feel for how the included modules and software work, let’s try one of the included projects. I’m going to go with connecting an ultrasonic sensor and display to the Pi and we’ll use Letscode to drag and drop the program.
The lesson takes you through each step, from what you need to how they work, and from the circuit connections to the actual program. They even give you an example program at the end of the lesson.
Now let’s see if I’ve got this right.
So yeah that’s all working the way it should and the whole program was pretty simple to put together by following their instructions. I didn’t have to install any additional packages, libraries or drivers to get this working.
They also have similar lessons for Python as well. These are obviously a bit more involved and are great for learning the basics of Python programming too.
Dual Boot Using The Included MicroSD Card Adaptor
When installing the Pi, we saw that we could boot from either microSD card. So I’ll show you how easy it is to switch to a different operating system.
We just shut down our Pi, open up the magnetic cover and flip the switch over to the second microSD card and turn it on again.
This is a really cool dual boot system that I haven’t seen implemented on a Pi before.
Potential Issue With The 12V Power Adaptor
Getting back to the power adaptor. If I plug it into my USB tester it immediately comes up as being 12V, so I’m almost certain that this isn’t a power delivery adaptor and will likely fry any non-power delivery electronics you plug it into.
So that’s something to be cautious with. Generally, if you plug a power delivery adaptor into this tester it defaults to 5V because this meter doesn’t have to power delivery circuitry required to request a higher voltage.
This issue doesn’t affect the operation of the CrowPi laptop as they state in the manual that it can run using other USB C power delivery adaptors, but it’s something you’ll want to be cautious of if you ever use this adaptor with other USB C devices. I’d go as far as to suggest throwing it out and getting a replacement, you don’t want to forget about this issue and then use the cable to try and charge a mobile phone, action camera or even plug it into a Raspberry Pi and destroy it.
This might not be an issue – there is a chance that this adaptor does work with 5V devices and this is a non-issue, but given the results from my USB tester this is not something I’m willing to try out on my devices.
Final Thoughts On The CrowPi-L
Overall I think the CrowPi-L is a really great product. The design is well thought out and the display they’ve used is excellent.
I would have liked to have seen some internal support for an SSD, maybe through using one of the USB 3.0 ports instead of the USB 2.0 port. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the trackpad is also in an odd place, but that’s about it. I don’t really have any other complaints about it.
It feels like it is good quality, it runs well and the effort that they’ve put into making this an education platform rather than just a laptop I think makes it well worth the price tag.
Let me know what you think of the CrowPi-L in the comments section below and also let me know if there is anything you’d like to see me try out on it.
Today we’re going to be using the new LattePanda 3 Delta from DF Robot to build a cyberdeck that packs up into a rugged, waterproof case that you can take with you almost anywhere.
The LattePand 3 Delta is a pocket-sized single board computer with a powerful processor and a great combination of IO. It can run a range of operating systems, like Windows 10 or 11 and distributions of Linux and it even has an onboard Arduino that provides 12 Analogue inputs, and 23 digital IO pins.
As the name suggests, this is the 3rd generation of LattePanda board and it features a few upgrades, the most significant being the new quad-core Intel N5105 processor running at 2.0Ghz, with a burst frequency of up to 2.9Ghz. It provides double the CPU performance of the previous LattePanda and three times the GPU performance.
Here’s my video on unboxing the LattePanda 3 Delta and building the cyberdeck, read on for the write-up:
The LattePanda 3 Delta comes in a black branded box with the board’s PCB and large heatsink and cooling fan as the main feature. It’s also got its specifications and contents listed on the side panels.
First up when we open the box is the LattePanda in a clear plastic case. In addition to the board, this case also includes a quick start guide and a small packet with the Bluetooth and WiFi antennas.
Beneath it are two power cables for different outlets (American and European), a set of nylon standoffs to mount it on and then the power adaptor.
The power adaptor is a branded 45W USB-C adaptor that supports power delivery up to 20V at 2.25A, so there is plenty of power for the LattePanda to work with. I like that the adaptor has a removable cable so you can replace it to suit your country’s power outlets. Or if it gets damaged.
In addition to the upgraded CPU, the LattePanda 3 Delta also has 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 64GB of eMMC storage, dual-band WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2.
On the bottom of the board, we’ve got an M.2 B-Key port for a mobile network module or SATA SSD and an M.2 M-Key port for an add-on graphics card or NVME SSD. There’s also a sim and microSD card slot.
There are three ways to hook it up to a display, you can use the obvious HDMI port on the side or the eDP connectors on the bottom or drive a display through the USB type C port that’s also used for power. So you’ve got support for dual 4K monitors through the HDMI and USB C ports.
There are three USB 3 ports on the side, one USB3.2 Gen 2 port (on the left) that supports data transfer up to 10Gb/s and two USB3.2 Gen 1 ports (on the right).
On the opposite side is the USB type C port for power input, a 3.5mm audio jack, a gigabit Ethernet port and the HDMI port.
My favourite feature of the LattePanda 3 Delta is the onboard Arduino which gives you a lot of options for IO for your electronics projects. These pins along with a range of other interfacing pins are broken out on headers on either side of the cooling fan. The board has been designed with makers in mind, so it’s also got some additional features like a watchdog timer that’ll reboot your system if it detects that it is no longer responding or has crashed.
Booting It Up For The First Time
Now let’s install the antennas and get it booted up. The Bluetooth and WiFi antennas are physically identical and need to be installed on the pins alongside the small silver Intel adaptor on the bottom of the board.
Another nice feature of the LattePanda is that it can be powered via USB C or through the 12V JST PH2.0 4 Pin connector next to it. Their documentation also says that you can switch between the two while powered without interruption, which is pretty cool. The board will automatically switch to the supply that provides the highest voltage.
The onboard fan is impressively quiet. It’s PWM controlled so it ramps up when the CPU is loaded, but with low-intensity tasks, you can barely hear it.
Turning The LattePanda 3 Delta Into A Cyberdeck
Since the LattePanda 3 Delta is aimed at being a powerful mobile computer, I thought it would be great to turn it into a cyberdeck. So I’m going to do that by installing it in a Pelican case along with an HD touch display, a fold-up keyboard and a low-profile mouse.
As the brains of the cyberdeck, I wanted the LattePanda to be visible, rather than hidden behind the display or keyboard. I also want to provide a path for adequate airflow and I want to be able to access the IO pins for hooking up sensors and other external devices if I need them.
I want to maintain the Pelican case’s waterproof design, so I don’t want to drill holes in the sides for cables or ports. I’m going to rather reroute the ports on the board to ports on the main deck to plug into.
Making Up The Custom Components
I sketched up some parts to hold all of the components in Inkscape, these consist of the bottom deck with a holder for the LattePanda and divisions for the keyboard and mouse, and then the top deck to hold the display.
I then laser-cut the components from a sheet of 3mm mdf. You’ll need a sheet of about 400mm x 400mm to cut all of the components from. I laser cut the acrylic cover from some 3mm clear acrylic, 2mm acrylic will also work.
I glued the pieces together using some PVA wood glue, clamping them together while the glue dried. I first glued the port frames and magnet holder into place, then the edges of the keyboard and mouse holder and then finally glued the support box together.
Once the glue was dry, I gave the parts a coat of general purpose primer and then a few coats of satin black spray paint. I allowed the parts to dry for a few hours in the sun before moving on to assembling the cyberdeck.
Installing The Components In The Case
Now we can start putting the Cyberdeck together. I’m going to start by installing the display in the top holder.
To hold the display in place, I’m going to use some M3 x 12mm button head screws and nuts. I pushed a screw through the front panel and held it in place with a nut on the back. I then used a second nut as a spacer before the display and then held the display in place with another nut. I did this so that I could accurately control the depth of the display behind the front panel/frame so that it was flush.
We need two cables for the display panel, one HDMI cable for the display input and one micro-USB cable for power and the touch input.
These can be fed through the cutout at the bottom which will then run into the bottom of the case where the LattePanda is.
To mount the LattePanda, I’m going to use some 6mm high M3 nylon standoffs. I’m not using the ones that came with the LattePanda as I want to mount it close to the base board so that there is more room underneath the compartment for cables.
I bought a couple of extension cables so that I can reroute the ports to the surface of the cyberdeck rather than having to reach the sides of the LattePanda to plug cables in. These press into the cutouts in the MDF so that the front of the port is flush with the deck surface. The press fit is quite tight so that they’re doing most of the support work for the port.
We can then use a bit of hot glue on the back as an extra measure to hold them in place.
I cabled tied the extension leads together to neaten up the wiring and to make it easier to install into the base of the pelican case.
Now get them installed in our Pelican case.
The display panel fits into the top and we can then secure it with some hot glue. I tried to put the glue behind the panel as far as possible so that it’s less visible.
I fed the HDMI and USB cables through to the LattePanda and again cable tied these to some of the existing cables to hold them in place. We can then glue the bottom into place in the Pelican case as well.
To finish it off, let’s add the clear acrylic cover over the board. This has a cutout for the fan and I’m going to install four magnets in the corners to hold it in place on four magnets on the MDF panel. I’ve held all of these magnets in place with some UV glue.
That’s it, our Cyberdeck is now complete and ready to use.
Final Thoughts
The onboard Arduino allows you to hook up sensors, servos and displays directly to the IO pins, so it’s great for tinkering with electronics or deploying as a project solution. By adding some of DF Robots hats to the Arduino pins, you can easily hook up grove sensors, I2C displays and even use industrial communication protocols like RS232 or RS485.
The touch display is a little small to work with comfortably, but it’s a nice addition if you’re working in an area where the mouse is not practical to use.
I’ve hooked up the USB3.2 Gen 2 port to the top panel, so we’ve got a port that is perfect for use with high-speed devices, something like an SSD or a high-speed network adaptor would be ideal.
For additional IO you can also use a power delivery adaptor like this on the USB C port. This one adds an SD card reader, two more USB ports and an HDMI port while still allowing you to power the LattePanda through the same USB C port.
Overall I think the new LattePanda 3 Delta is an awesome little single-board computer. It has enough power to be used as a standalone computing device and, with the addition of the onboard Arduino, it’s perfect for makers to use for their electronics projects.
Let me know what you think of the new LattePanda Delta 3 in the comments section below. Also, let me know what you think of my cyberdeck and if there is anything you’d add or do differently.
The last couple of times I’ve done a project involving a laser-cut Pi case, people have asked me to put together an in-depth tutorial on how to design them. So I’ve prepared this tutorial using an open-sourced software package called Inkscape to do just that.
Inkscape is a free vector-based graphics editor that is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, so you can even run it on your Raspberry Pi. If you don’t have it installed already, visit their downloads page to download it for your device.
This tutorial is going to focus mainly on the design of the case, so I’m not going to go into much detail on how to use the basic functions of Inkscape. There are loads of guides and tutorials for this already, so it’ll be good to be somewhat familiar with the package to start.
Once you’ve got Inkscape installed on your device, grab your Raspberry Pi and a vernier or ruler to take measurements from it and you’re ready to start.
With the case design completed, let’s get the case components cut out and see how it looks.
I’m going to cut these on the Atomstack X20 Pro, this is a fantastic machine for cutting plywood and MDF sheets. The 20W diode is much faster than the 5W and 10W diodes and the air assist keeps the cuts really clean. I use LaserGRBL to control my diode laser machines as it’s easy to use and free.
I cut these components out using a speed of 250mm/min and the laser power at 90%.
With the components cut out, we can then glue them together. I usually use PVA wood glue and either clamp or tape the components together for an hour or two while the glue dries.
It looks like our Pi fits into our case perfectly.
So now you know how to design and build your own Pi cases using free software and a diode or CO2 laser cutter.
I hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful, please let me know if you’ve got any design questions on the tutorial in the comments section below and let me know if there are any other tutorials you’re interested in.
A couple of weeks ago I was inspired by an old LTT video to try to make my own portable Bluetooth speaker. They used some 2″ full-range Dayton Audio drivers and 1″ tweeters along with an inexpensive Bluetooth amplifier module. They set themselves a goal of beating the $180 price tag that the LG XBOOM Go PL7 carried at the time. They came up with a pretty cool design, it had some quirks but overall performed reasonably well.
They did however blow out quite spectacularly on the budget when they included their labour costs. So I thought I’d try out this type of project and see what I could come up with.
I started off by scouring the internet for hardware and some design inspiration. I settled on using some 2.5″ full-range Dayton Audio PC68-4 drivers, which would be powered by a ZK-502T Bluetooth amplifier.
I felt that the slightly larger 2.5″ drivers would provide a bit more bass than the 2″ ones they used and I didn’t want to go down the path of including tweeters and a sub as this would increase the size and cost quite substantially and would require a larger amplifier and crossovers.
I also liked that the amplifier had bass and treble controls so there was some opportunity to make adjustments to the sound to suit the final speaker enclosure design.
I primarily use a Bluetooth speaker in a fixed spot in my workshop or in my home office, so I don’t need it to be battery powered although this would be nice for portability. Rather than include a battery pack within the speaker design, I opted for a 12V inline UPS that I could use to provide portable power to the speaker if I needed it.
Designing The Bluetooth Speaker
With the hardware selected, it was time to start working on the speaker enclosure design. I start off looking at different ported speaker designs but was eventually drawn to the visual appeal and experimental nature of transmission line speakers. This was a rabbit hole if ever I’ve seen one! It turns out that the best way to design a transmission line speaker is to follow a pretty rough design guideline and then do a lot of trial and error adjustments until it sounds good.
To start you need to use your speaker’s free air resonant frequency to calculate the corresponding wavelength. My speaker’s resonant frequency is 117.1 Hz, so the corresponding wavelength is 2.929m. We then need to divide this by four to get our recommended transmission line length, which for our speaker is 732mm.
So we essentially now need to design a transmission line housing with a 732mm path from the back of the speaker to the front of the housing. The easiest way to do this is by creating a labyrinth, or a path that crosses back and fourth a number of times, within the enclosure.
So I sat down with Fusion360 and spent a few hours designing an enclosure to house the drivers, provide a 732mm path from the back of the Bluetooth speaker to the front again and house the amplifier. This is the design that I came up with.
The main internal parts of the speaker, the amplifier housing and the handle would be 3D printed and I’d then use some laser-cut acrylic panels as covers to box them up.
I liked this layout for a couple of reasons, it leaves the transmission line design visible, which I thought looked quite cool, but it also allows the sides to be opened up to add or remove damping material to get it to sound right. Another neat feature of this design is that the amplifier can be swapped out for a different model, or the speaker size can be changed without having to redesign the whole enclosure again. You can just redesign the new amplifier housing to drop in or scale the speaker enclosure to fit the new driver size.
Making Up The Speaker Components
Next came a lot of 3D printing. Each housing took around 36 hours to 3D print. I printed them using black PLA with a 20% infill.
We also had a couple of cold nights at the same time, causing the prints to fail by lifting at the corners, but I eventually got the four components made up.
I then laser-cut the side panels from 3mm clear acrylic. 3mm acrylic sheets are one of the most popular thicknesses, so you could easily replace the sides with other transparent or opaque colours or even just use matt black sheets if you don’t want them to stand out.
Assembling The Bluetooth Speaker
Now that we’ve got all of our components made up, we can now start assembling the speaker.
Preparing The 3D Printed Parts
If you’ve printed your parts the way I have then you shouldn’t have any supports to remove, but we do need to add some brass inserts to the parts before assembling them. I did this because I figured I’d be taking the side panels off quite often while experimenting with the sound and they need to be held in place quite tightly so that they don’t vibrate, which I didn’t think plain 3D printed holes would handle.
There are a number of 4mm holes around the four prints that we need to melt brass inserts into.
All of the 4mm holes in the amplifier housing – four at the top for the cover and two on each side to connect to the speaker housings (8 in total).
And then almost all of the 4mm holes in each speaker housing – four for the driver, seven on each side for the clear covers and four on the bottom for the feet (22 in total for each housing). The holes that don’t require inserts are the two on the inside bracket that connects to the amplifier housing and the three on the top for the handle – these are all clearance holes for the screws to pass through.
Lastly, all of the holes on the handle – three on each side to connected to the speaker housings (6 in total).
The inserts are just melted into place using a soldering iron that’s set above the melting temperature of the 3D printing filament. Make sure that you get them set as close to square with the print as possible, if they go in skew then try to straighten them up a bit before removing the soldering iron tip.
Preparing The Amplifier Housing
Next, let’s install our amplifier in its housing using the included standoffs. Look for the smallest M2 standoffs included with the amplifier, the ones with a short male thread on one side and a female thread on the other.
These need to be screwed into the four holes in the base of the amplifier housing. Use a small pair of needle nose pliers to do this. Alternately you can melt them into place with the soldering iron as well, but be really careful to set the correct height and ensure that they are perfectly upright.
Add the amplifier to the housing by feeding the potentiometer stems through the three holes on the front first, then gently pressing the back into position.
Secure the amplifier to the brass standoffs with the included black M2 screws.
It looks like my initial hole measurements were off for these, so my front standoffs don’t align with the holes, but the two at the back hold it in place well enough. I have corrected this in the model, so your prints should all align correctly.
Lastly, you’ll need to stick the included heatsink onto the chip in the centre of the board – the one with the shiny surface.
Assemble The Remaining Components
Before installing the drivers in the housing, I’m going to solder some two-core wire onto them to run to the amplifier. You can use speaker wire for this or any spare wire you have at home of a suitable gauge. I used some wire from an old printer power cable.
Push the drivers into the holes in the front of the housing, feeding the wire through first. The drivers are then held in place with some M3 x 8mm screws. I used black screws for all of the ones that are visible on the outside to keep with the general aesthetic.
The inner acrylic side panels can then be installed on the housings, again using some more M3 x 8mm screws.
We can then mount the amplifier housing between the two speaker housings. For this, I’m going to use slightly longer M3 x 12mm screws.
There are two holes in each speaker housing that feed through the 3D printed bracket at the bottom and through the clear acrylic cover to screw into the threaded insert in the amplifier housing.
Then we can install the handle on top of the speaker to provide some additional support and a place to carry the speaker around. This is a bit tricky to get the screws into from inside the housing, but you can get a hex key into the space to tighten them. I used M3 x 8mm screws for these as well.
Now let’s hook our speaker drivers up to the speaker outputs on the amplifier. These just hook up to positive and negative in the same way they’re connected to each driver. I tinned the ends of the speaker wires first before I screwed them into the terminals.
Finally, we can close up the remaining covers with some more M3 x 8mm screws.
I really like how the engraving has come out on the amplifier’s cover.
I’m going to throw some soft fabric into the bottom of the speaker enclosures as a starting point. You need to do some experimentation with different size materials to try and eliminate as much of the higher frequencies as possible, so this will probably need to be revisited a number of times but should be fine as a starting point.
To finish it off, I’m going to screw 8 rubber feet onto it so that it doesn’t vibrate on the surface that it’s placed on. These are also held in place with some M3 x 8mm screws – don’t screw these on too tightly or you risk bursting through the inside of the speaker housing.
Then we can press the silver knobs onto the amplifier’s controls.
And that’s our speaker complete. All that’s left to do is to plug it in and try it out.
Testing Our New 3D Printed Bluetooth Speaker
I have to admit that I didn’t have particularly high hopes for this project when I started it, I’ve got very little experience with audio projects and everything I’ve done here is based on a few hours of googling, but I’m actually quite impressed with the final product. There is definitely some room for improvement and I’ll play around with different materials within the speaker as well, but I’m really happy with this as a starting point.
Have a listen to the audio at the end of my build video to hear it for yourself. It’s obviously difficult to convey the sound well through a video and audio recording, but you can get some idea of what it sounds like and what its limitations are.
To make the Bluetooth speaker portable, we just need to put the UPS in line with the power supply for an hour or so to charge and we can then unplug the power cable to use it.
The controls on the amplifier are great for tuning it to the type of music you like to listen to and your listening preference.
Final Thoughts on the Bluetooth Speaker
Taking a look at the cost, the drivers and amplifier cost me $50, the UPS was another $35 for portability and the filament, screws, inserts, feet and acrylic cost me about another $25, so all up the hardware cost of this speaker was about $110. In terms of time, it took me about 30 hours in total to research, design and build the speaker, so even at minimum wage here in Australia, that is about another $450.
So if you’ve got time on your hands, $110 for the hardware is quite good value for money, but you can definitely get something a lot better than what I’ve built if you value your time.
I’m really happy with the finished product and I’m looking forward to using it in my workshop.
Let me know what you think of my Bluetooth speaker design in the comments section below.
I feel like I might look at adding a bass driver to the void in the middle of the speaker as an optional add-on in future, so let me know if you’ve got any suggestions for that.
If you’ve tried to buy a Raspberry Pi in the past year or so then you’ve probably experienced some level of difficulty in getting one. They’re out of stock almost everywhere, there are generally purchasing limits on any that are in stock, and they’re often being sold at way over their recommended retail price.
A big part of what makes Raspberry Pi boards so attractive is that they’ve got really good documentation and support and a large online community, so you’ll easily find projects, tutorials and answers to any issues you run into along the way.
With that said, there are a large number of single-board computers available that offer similar features to Raspberry Pi’s, so I thought it would be interesting to get a few and try them out.
The Raspberry Pi 4B is one of the most popular choices for current projects, so I looked for some alternatives that offered similar specs to the 4B and were similarly priced.
I’m not looking for high-end hardware, this isn’t meant to be a benchmarking exercise, my intention is for these boards to be suitable Raspberry Pi alternatives for tinkering with electronics as well as basic web browsing and video playback. There might be more powerful or newer versions of these boards available for an increased price, but I looked at the ones that I felt provided the best value for money for use as a tinkering board. I also had a brief look at the documentation available for each before buying them to make sure that they had some basic guidelines for getting started.
Here’s my video trying out the three boards, read on for the write-up:
The Raspberry Pi Alternatives That I Choose
After sifting through pages and pages of options, these are the three boards that I settled on.
First up is the Orange Pi 3 LTS:
This board runs an Allwinner H6 Arm Cortex A53 quad-core processor running at 1.8Ghz. It’s got 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 8GB of onboard eMMC storage. It was the cheapest of the three boards at $35.
The second is the Khadas VIM2:
This board has got an 8-core Amlogic A53 SoC running at 1.5Ghz. It’s got 2GB of DDR4 RAM and 16GB of onboard eMMC storage. This was the midrange of the three at $80.
The third, and the most expensive of the three, is the ASUS Tinkerboard 2S:
This board runs a 6-core Rockchip RK3399 SoC consisting of a dual-core Arm Cortex A72 processor running at 2.0Ghz and a quad-core Arm Cortex A53 processor running at 1.5Ghz. It’s got 2GB of DDR 4 RAM and 16GB of onboard eMMC storage.
This board cost the most, at $120, which is a little more than the recommended retail price of even the 8GB Pi 4B, but it looked like it had the most comprehensive documentation. It also looked like it was the most suited for electronics projects using the GPIO pins rather than being used as a media player or home server like the other two.
This was just my first impression when looking through the documentation of all three boards, so that’s why we’re going to try them out.
For each board, we’ll take a closer look at the hardware features, then have a quick look at the operating system that it is shipped with, then try to get an LED to blink using the GPIO pins (which may require a different operating system to be loaded) and finally we’ll look at the power consumption of each.
Trying Out The Orange Pi 3
Hardware
Let’s start by taking a look at the hardware around the board, we’ve got onboard WiFi and Bluetooth, an IR receiver, 26 PIN GPIO headers, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, microphone, full-size HDMI port, power button, USB C power input and then a microSD card slot on the bottom.
The GPIO pins roughly mimic pins 1 to 26 on a Raspberry Pi, so you may be able to use some shields and adaptors that only use a few pins on the Pi, but my experience is that these are few and far between. It’s more likely that this layout will just be useful if you’re already familiar with the Pis GPIO layout.
Operating System It Ships With
The Orange Pi 3 ships out with an Android operating system image pre-installed on its eMMC storage, so let’s take a look at that first. This and the Khadas board look like they’re intended to be used primarily as media player devices – so this preloaded operating system is probably quite useful for that.
The Android operating system that it ships with is quite bare, you’ll need to install your own apps on it to get any meaningful use out of it. The pre-installed apps will just let you play content from a connected drive. So we can’t really do much without installing additional software.
Using The Orange Pi Debian Distribution
If we want to use the Orange Pi for an electronics project that makes use of the GPIO pins, we’re going to need to install Debian. They provide a Debian operating system image on their website, so let’s get that installed on a microSD card and boot it up.
For all three boards, I’m going to use Win32 Disk Imager to flash the operating image to a 32 Sandisk Ultra microSD card.
With Debian booted up, let’s try playing some video content to see how the hardware handles it. I’m going to try to play Big Buck Bunny on Youtube on each device to see how they perform with video streaming.
The Orange Pi 3 seemed to handle this first pass reasonably well, with only a few missed frames. It looked like the display was running on a low resolution though, and heading over to the settings confirmed this. So I switched over to 1080p and tried again.
This time the Orange Pi really struggled with the playback. It was noticeably stuttering and dropping frames, and it required some buffering during playback, which is not a limitation caused by my network. So you probably wouldn’t want to use this Pi running Debian for media playback, even at only 1080P.
Turning An LED On and Off Using the GPIO Pins
As far as documentation goes, the user manual covers a pretty broad range of tests to check the basic functionality of almost all of the features of the Orange Pi. It’s written reasonably well too. They have a section in the manual on using the GPIO pins, with one in particular for the control of the digital pins, so I’m going to work through that.
I ran an update, and then downloaded and compiled the wiringPi library, following the instructions.
Now let’s connect our LED to the GPIO pins. I first checked that the LED works when connected to a GND and 5V pin, so I knew that the pins are powered. I then connected it to Pin 7 to test.
Using the GPIO readall command we can see what GPIO number corresponds to physical Pin 7 in the table, so that’s GPIO118 and wPi pin 2.
If we set it as an output pin we now see that the mode has changed to out.
Then we can try setting the pin high or low using a 0 or 1, and our LED is now turning on and off.
There are also a few examples in the wiringPi library to help you get started with coding your own projects that use the GPIO pins.
So it was relatively easy to get an LED to turn on or off using the GPIO pins. They also have a dedicated forum with a reasonably active community. Most questions or issues raised get useful answers in a day or two and they cover a range of topics, from questions for beginners to troubleshooting assistance, help with drivers and even topics on various distributions – all of which seem to still be active.
Power Consumption
Taking a look at the power consumption on the Orange Pi 3, it uses around 2.3W at idle and around 4.3W when the CPU is loaded. So it’s quite an efficient board – that’s less than 1A draw at 5V, even when loaded.
So for $35, I’d be happy with the hardware and the community around the Orange Pi 3.
Trying Out the Khadas VIM2
Hardware
Taking a look at the hardware around the board, we’ve got two USB 2.0 ports (so no USB 3.0), we’ve got Gigabit Ethernet, a USB C power input, a PWM fan connector, reset, function and power buttons, an RTC header, a 40-pin GPIO header, infrared receiver, and onboard dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth. On the underside, we’ve also got a microSD card slot and then a range of pads for power input, MCU and GPIO connections which are great if you plan to use this board on an expansion module or PCB.
The VIM2 has a 40-pin GPIO header like the Raspberry Pi, but the pinout is quite different so you won’t be able to use any Raspberry Pi shields or hats on the VIM2 directly.
Operating System It Ships With
Like the Orange Pi, the VIM2 also ships out with an Android operating system pre-installed. This version of Android has a few useful apps pre-installed, including the Chrome browser, so we can actually try streaming Big Buck Bunny directly.
The VIM2 actually did a much better job at streaming this than the Orange Pi. This wasn’t really a fair test and is probably also partially to do with the ligher weight operating system. To keep it fair, we’ll also see how well it runs on the Linux-based operating system. This is also running at 4K, so it’s at a much better resolution than the Orange Pi could handle as well.
Using The Khadas Ubuntu Distribution
To be able to use the GPIO pins to turn an LED on and off, we’re going to need to install a Linux image. They provide a list of up-to-date operating system images in their product documentation, so it’s as easy as heading over to the page for your board and downloading the image that you’d like to use.
With the operating system image loaded onto our microSD card, we now need to boot the VIM2 from the microSD card rather than from the built-in eMMC storage. To do this, we need to enter Keys mode using the side buttons.
Now that we’ve got it booted, let’s try streaming on it. Before playing the video, I also checked to make sure that it is running at 1080P like the Orange Pi was.
The VIM2 also struggles a bit with streaming HD content on the Linux-based operating system, with similar issues to the Orange Pi. So if you’re going to be using your board as a media player then you’re probably much better off running an operating system that’s designed for use as a media centre like Android, Plex or Kodi.
Turning An LED On and Off Using the GPIO Pins
Next, let’s try to plug the LED into the GPIO pins and turn it on. I’m going to plug it into GPIO pin 7. I again tested that the LED works on the 5V and GND pins first, so I knew that the GPIO pins have power at least.
In the documentation, they tell you that the Amlogic chips include two GPIO ranges and they tell you to first figure out the range base for your GPIO pins using a terminal command. You can also get the pin index listed for each GPIO pin by entering another command. They provide this for both of the GPIO ranges but then there is no information on which range is used for what or how these are actually mapped to the GPIO pins.
I found it easier to just get the information using the GPIO readall function as I did previously on the Orange Pi.
If we look at the table, physical pin 7 corresponds to GPIO number 471.
So now let’s run through the process to set that pin up as an output pin and turn on the LED.
If we set it as an output in the terminal and then check its status in the table, we’ve actually now got pin 6 set as an output.
If we cycle it on and off, the LED is not doing anything and from the table it looked like it was cycling pin 6 on and off. So I moved the LED to pin 6 and tried again.
Now we can turn our led on and off.
This obviously seems like a trivial issue, but small issues like this can leave you wasting hours fault finding. If I hadn’t used the GPIO readall table, I probably wouldn’t have found this issue and I would have spent time going back through the setup and control steps trying to figure out what I had done wrong.
Other Issues With The VIM2
In using the VIM2, I also found two issues that I found to be somewhat annoying.
The first is that the USB C power port is too close to the HDMI port, so unless you’re using a low-profile cable, you land up having to wedge the two in alongside each other. You can usually just force them into place but this puts unnecessary stress on the ports and you may land up eventually damaging the smaller USB C port.
The second was that the buttons on the side were really easy to push when trying to remove cables. When trying to plug or unplug a device or cable in (made worse by the above issue), I’d often press one of the buttons by mistake when holding the board. This then caused it to turn off or reset, which was frustrating. You could simply be trying to plug in a mouse dongle and you press the reset button by mistake and then have to wait for it to boot up again (and risk corrupting the software).
Khadas also have fairly good documentation. There is a lot to work with, and they have a good spread of information on the hardware and software side, but there are some obvious omissions. They also have an online community and forum which has open topics, but the community doesn’t seem to be as active as the Orange Pi community.
Power Consumption
Taking a look at the power consumption on the Khadas VIM2, it uses around 1.5W to 2.0W at idle and about 3.5W when loaded. So it’s a bit more efficient than the Orange Pi, and I already thought that that was quite good.
For $80, I’d say that this is probably a bit better than the Orange Pi for a media centre, but it looks like it’s got a smaller online community and a bit less support. So you’d probably want to stick with the Orange Pi for electronics projects and tinkering.
Trying Out the Tinker Board 2S
Hardware
The Tinker Board 2S, although the most expensive of the three, is probably the closest to a Raspberry Pi. It’s got the same footprint and general layout as a Pi 3b, with a couple of standout differences.
It’s got three USB 3.2 Gen 1 type A ports and a single USB 3.2 Gen 1 type C port, with the ability to drive an external display hooked up to the USB type C port – so you can run dual displays although it’s only got a single HDMI port. It’s also got dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth, a DSI and CSI connector, a 5.5mm DC barrel jack for power, 2 pin fan connector, a RTC battery connector and 40 pin GPIO header, and on the back is a microSD card slot.
Another appealing feature of the Tinker Board 2S is that the GPIO layout is exactly the same as the Raspberry Pi. Since they share the same footprint as well, you should be able to use some of the same shields and hats on the Tinker Board.
Operating System It Ships With
I couldn’t find any information on whether the Tinker Board’s onboard eMMC storage was preloaded with a particular operating system, so let’s just plug it in and see whether it boots.
After a few minutes, nothing had come up. So I guess it isn’t preloaded with any operating system, which is a bit strange for a device with onboard storage. But we can now move on to loading the operating system onto the Tinker Board.
Using Tinker OS
Tinker OS is ASUS’ distribution of Debian that is designed to be run on the Tinker Board series. There are two options to boot the Tinker Board from, the first is to load the operating system image onto a microSD card and the second is to load the image onto the built-in eMMC storage. I’m going to load it onto the microSD card as that’s what I’ve done for the others.
From their website, you can download a prepared operating system image. Make sure that you select the correct version for your Tinker Board version. They also have some other operating system options available.
Now that we’ve got TinkerOS installed and booted up, let’s check that the monitor resolution is set to 1080P and then try streaming Big Buck Bunny.
Of the three boards, this one did the best by far when playing video content on Linux. There were a couple of stutters initially, but the image quality is great and the stream is actually quite usable.
Turning An LED On and Off Using the GPIO Pins
Unfortunately, the good start was short-lived. It was at this stage that I realised that the documentation was quite in-depth on the hardware side but was almost nonexistent for the software.
After about an hour of reading through forums and pages online, I found a Github repository that was linked to by a few sources as being the best way to start using the GPIO pins.
I tried this out a bunch of times in different ways and even on different versions of TinkerOS and just ran into errors – some of which said that this library could only be used on ASUS boards.
I eventually found an answer to another person’s question on a semi-unrelated topic saying that you don’t need to do the install that I had been trying to do as the libraries were already integrated into the later versions of TinkerOS.
This then lead me to the next issue. All of the examples that I could find use GPIO pin numbers like 0, 10 or 12, but don’t ever say what physical pins these correspond to. These numbers aren’t mapped out on any diagram or in a table that I could find.
I eventually figured out that pin 12 referred to in the scripts, mapped to CPU pin 146, which corresponds to physical pin 32, which was labelled GPIO4C2. Not exactly a logical sequence to follow.
So after a few more hours than I’d like to admit, I eventually got a basic python script like this to turn the LED on pin 32 on and off.
Power Consumption
In the documentation, they claim that the Tinker Board uses 3.65W at idle and 8.18W under load. My testing produced a result of about 3.3W at idle and 8.5W under load, so this lined up with their documentation reasonably well.
The Tinker Board can also handle substantially more than this through power delivery to connected USB devices and that’s why they’ve opted for the 12 to 18V barrel jack rather than a USB C power input like the other two boards.
If low power consumption is your goal then this board is obviously not as low as the previous two that we’ve tested, but it is a lot more powerful.
Final Thoughts On The Tested Pi Alternatives
So, the question I set out to answer, was whether any of these boards could be considered to be worthwhile Raspberry Pi alternatives, and would I recommend any of them?
I’d say that the Orange Pi 3 is a worthwhile option for tinkering with basic electronics projects using the GPIO pins. At $35, it’s fairly cheap and you get a good set of features for your money with a reasonably online community to help you out. You’ll probably manage with basic digital inputs and outputs just fine, but I suspect you’ll get stuck with any components that require established libraries or communication protocols to communicate with the Pi.
The Khadas VIM 2 is probably the best option of the three for a media server or TV box. It’s Android software package seemed to handle video playback well, so I suspect it’ll do a good job with other media-related operating systems as well. You’ll probably run into issues if you try to use it for electronics projects and there isn’t a whole lot of online support for it.
The Tinker Board looked like a great option on paper, and the hardware was quite impressive too, but the documentation relating to the software leaves a lot to be desired. I wasted numerous hours going down the wrong paths on the basics and while this might not happen to everyone, you’ll likely eventually stumble upon a component or piece of software that you’d like to get working and aren’t able to. At $120, I just couldn’t justify buying this over even an overpriced Pi 3 or Pi 4.
Through using these three boards, I was reminded why Raspberry Pi’s are so sought after. Their documentation, software support and online community extend far beyond the actual hardware. Anyone can copy the hardware, but it’s so much harder to build a community around the product like they’ve done around the Raspberry Pi.
I literally spent about 18 hours working on these three boards to get the basic functions I’ve shown here to work, and nothing I’ve shown is anything remotely complex. It wouldn’t have taken me more than ten minutes to get a brand new Raspberry Pi running on a new operating system installation and blinking an LED. I would have also been be able to find numerous tutorials to explain how to do so.
So if you value your time and you expect to build projects that require more complex electronics or software to function then I’d definitely still recommend spending the extra money or buying an older Raspberry Pi. You’re not just buying the hardware, you’re buying into a community, and you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration in doing so.
Last year Seeed Studios launched the reTerminal, a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 based touch display terminal with a pretty good list of features. One of the features that looked promising was their high-speed expansion interface on the back, which they said would be used to add plug-in modules to expand on the reTerminal’s functionality and IO.
At that stage, they hadn’t released any details on these expansion modules, but they reached out a few weeks ago and said that their first one has now been launched.
So here it is, the reTerminal E10-1, the first expansion module for the reTerminal.
Let’s open it up and see what it does and how it works.
Where To Buy The reTerminal E10-1
The reTerminal E10-1 is currently available through the Seeed Studio online store:
The reTerminal E10-1 is packaged quite similarly to the reTerminal, in a similarly sized box as well.
On the top, we’ve got a user manual and underneath it is the E10-1. They also include a small screwdriver and a pack of screws.
On the front of the E10-1 is the high-speed expansion port that’ll plug into the back of the reTerminal, along with a screw hole on each side to hold it in place.
On the left side, we’ve got some status LEDs, an Ethernet port and a power port.
You may be wondering why we’ve got the Ethernet and power ports, as these are both already on the reTerminal. That’s because this module allows you to power the reTerminal in a few additional ways. The Gigabit Ethernet port on the E10-1 supports power over Ethernet, so you can power your reTerminal through a PoE enabled network without having to use a separate power adaptor. If you don’t have a PoE network adaptor or aren’t using Ethernet for your project then you can use the 12V barrel jack to power the reTerminal instead of the 5V USB C input on the reTerminal. Additionally, the E10-1 also has a built-in UPS circuit that runs on two 18650 batteries. So this allows the reTerminal to function as a fully standalone wireless, battery-powered device, something that was requested quite a lot when the reTerminal was released.
On the right side are two industrial ports, a DP9 connector for the RS-232 interface and a 6-pin terminal connector for the onboard RS-485 and CAN interfaces. So you’ve now got a number of options for industrial interfaces on the reTerminal, something that’s not very common in the Raspberry Pi expansion board range.
Along the top are some rubber plugs, one of which is an antenna interface.
On the bottom are some vents to allow airflow for the internal fan and speaker.
The E10-1 is a bit thicker than the reTerminal, I guess that’s to allow enough space for the 18650 cells and the upright internal fan.
On the back we’ve just got the cover for the battery compartment. There isn’t an expansion port on the back of the E10-1 as well, so you won’t be able to stack multiple modules together as more become available, you’ll have to use them one at a time.
Let’s get the E10-1 attached to the reTerminal and try it out.
Attaching and Using the reTerminal E10-1 for the First Time
To install the E10-1 on the reTerminal, we need to first remove the rubber plugs on the back of the reTerminal to allow the E10-1 to plug into it. We can then secure it with the two included screws.
Once installed, the entire reTerminal assembly is now quite thick.
I’m also going to install two 18650 cells into it so that we can try out the UPS functionality. These just go into the battery compartment on the back of the E10-1.
With the E10-1 installed, it feels solidly built and like a good quality device, but it’s a bit too bulky to be a truly handheld device. It would be best to have it installed on a wall panel or into an electrical enclosure- which is made easy with the multitude of threaded mounting points.
Let’s plug in our ethernet and power cable and power it up. The CM4 module in the reTerminal has onboard WiFi, so you can use a wireless connection if you’d like to.
It looks like it works right away, the reTerminal powered up and has booted to the desktop.
There is a driver that they say needs to be installed to use the functions of the E10-1. The driver is installed using the following terminal commands:
$ git clone https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/seeed-linux-dtoverlays.git
$ cd seeed-linux-dtoverlays
$ sudo ./scripts/reTerminal.sh
Reboot the reTerminal and then enter the following command to complete the installation:
$ ls /boot/overlays/reTerminal-bridge.dtbo
I’m not sure what works with or without the drivers as I reloaded the operating system on my reTerminal to get Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye loaded. Part of this process is the installation of the latest reTerminal driver which appears to include the E10-1 drivers as well. I haven’t specifically installed the E10-1 driver and as far as I can tell everything I’ve tried has worked correctly, but I haven’t tested any of the industrial interfaces yet.
Testing Some of the reTerminal E10-1 Basic Functions
Inside the reTerminal E10-1 is a small cooling fan that is controlled using GPIO pin 23. This fan is off by default, so you need to turn it on through the terminal or through a script that runs in the background.
Let’s try turn it on through the terminal using the following command:
$ raspi-gpio set 23 op pn dh
You’ll then be able to hear a faint humming sound coming from the reTerminal E10-1.
I’m going to turn it off again as we probably don’t need it if we’re not using an SSD or something generating a lot of heat within the enclosure. This can be done with the following command:
$ raspi-gpio set 23 op pn dl
Now let’s see if it stays on when I remove the power supply. My batteries were partially charged before I put them into the reTerminal, so it shouldn’t need much time to charge first.
That looks like it has worked. It’s still running with the power cable removed.
The indicator LEDs on the side show when it’s receiving external power and when the internal batteries are charging.
I also wasn’t sure if the Ethernet port on the reTerminal is disabled when the E10-1 is plugged in, so I tried that out. Both ports worked equally well, so it looks like you can use either port if you’re not using PoE.
Opening Up the reTerminal E10-1
The reTerminal E10-1 is not just limited to external features, it’s also got a host of internal interfaces to allow for expandability. Let’s remove it from the reTerminal, then open it up and take a look at what’s inside it.
The main internal interfaces are the mini-PCIe connector, that allows you to add a 4G, LTE or LoRa module, and the M.2 B Key connector which allows you to add an SSD, or USB 3.0 ports or a 4G or 5G wireless module.
Seeed have provided a list of devices that they’ve tested with the reTerminal on their product Wiki. I’m going to try one or two of them out in a future video.
We’ve also got a sim card slot for the wireless modules, dual microphones and a speaker along the top and the PoE adaptor for the Ethernet port.
Final Thoughts on the reTerminal E10-1
I think the reTerminal E10-1 and even the reTerminal itself are geared more heavily towards mild industrial applications than home use, but could certainly be useful in certain home applications.
The touch interface on the reTerminal along with the UPS and industrial interfaces that the E10-1 add make this a great device for building industrial system HMI’s to interact with machines, systems and sensors. It’s even great for creating home automation dashboards through applications like Home Assistant, which will now be battery backed. With the addition of a wireless 4G or 5G module you can be notified of power outages and even run some security routines and still have some level of control when your home’s power is disabled or interrupted.
With the batteries and fan in the enclosure, the reTerminal E10-1 is quite a bulky add-on, but since it’s designed to be wall or panel mounted rather than handheld, this probably won’t affect most use cases.
Let me know what you think of the reTerminal E10-1 in the comments section below and let me know what kind of devices you’d like to see me test on it.
A while ago I did a bit of an experiment to compare the sound level between TMC2208 and A4988 stepper motor drivers. At the time, A4988 drivers were more commonly used on 3D printers and other hobby CNC devices. Since then, most 3D printer and CNC laser manufacturers have moved towards replacing at least the X and Y axis motors with the silent TMC2208 stepper motor driver or some other variant of silent motor driver. A question that has come up quite a lot in the video’s comments was how these drivers manage to drive the motors with such a significant sound reduction and if there was any trade-off.
So rather than just show you some diagrams, I thought I’d set the motor and drivers up again and try to show you through actual measurements.
Here’s my video of the test – read on for the write-up, although the video is the best way to hear the sound difference for yourself.
What You Need To Set Your Own Test Up
To set up your own test like I’ve done, you’ll need a few basic components:
I’m going to be using a Pokit multimeter to take current measurements using the oscilloscope function. You don’t need one of these if you just want to hear the sound difference or tinker with controlling the motors.
Understanding How Stepper Motors Work
There are some really good resources online to explain how stepper motors work, so I’m not going to go into too much detail. The simple explanation is that stepper motors have a number of poles and the driver energises the coils in the motor to align the rotor with these poles in a sequence to rotate it.
The simplest way to do this is to turn one pole on and the other off, causing the rotor to jump from one pole to another. This is simple to do electrically but causes the most noise as it induces a lot of vibration within the motor.
We can reduce the noise by rather slowly energising the one coil while de-energising the second coil so that we gently pass the rotor from one step to the next. The most optimal way to do this without producing any vibration is by producing a sinusoidal wave.
The better the stepper motor driver can replicate a sinusoidal waveform, the quieter it’s going to be able to run the motor. But replicating a sine wave perfectly requires more expensive electronics, so there is a bit of a tradeoff.
There are a few other sources of noise or humming in a stepper motor caused by things like magnetic fields, current ripple and chopper frequency. But their contribution is generally significantly less than this is.
So let’s have a look at the current waveform that the two drivers produce.
The TMC2208 Driver Test Setup and Code
I’ve got a similar setup to the last test with the two drivers hooked up in the same way to an Arduino.
The drivers are both connected to digital outputs 3 and 4 on the Arduino for step and direction control respectively. So we just need to plug our motor into the one we want to test. I’ve also added a 10K potentiometer, connected to analogue pin A0, to adjust the time delay between step pulses, which in turn will control the motor speed.
The Arduino sketch is very basic, just assigning the pin modes in the setup function and then looping through reading in the potentiometer position and stepping the motor with the measured time delay.
//The DIY Life
//Michael Klements
//30 April 2020
int stepPin = 3; //Define travel stepper motor step pin
int dirPin = 4; //Define travel stepper motor direction pin
int motSpeed = 5; //Initial motor speed (delay between pules, so a smaller delay is faster)
void setup()
{
pinMode(stepPin, OUTPUT); //Define pins and set direction
pinMode(dirPin, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(dirPin, HIGH);
}
void loop()
{
motSpeed = map(analogRead(A0),0,1023,50,1); //Read in potentiometer value from A0, map to a delay between 1 and 50 milliseconds
digitalWrite(stepPin, HIGH); //Step the motor with the set delay
delay(motSpeed);
digitalWrite(stepPin, LOW);
delay(motSpeed);
}
Testing the Waveforms from the A4988 and TMC2208 Stepper Motor Drivers
We’re going to start with the A4988 driver by first taking a look at the sound level at different speeds.
The sound level throughout the range of speeds was an average of around 50-60dB. The sound was obviously being amplified by the wooden desk and wouldn’t be that loud with a proper vibration damping mount, but this way you get a good idea of the improvement.
To measure the waveform I’m going to use this Pokit multimeter and oscilloscope and I’m going to connect it in series with one of the motor coils to measure the current flowing through the motor coil.
In the video, you may notice that the motor sounds a bit weird when it’s connected and the oscilloscope isn’t measuring anything. This is because the oscilloscope opens the circuit when it isn’t taking readings. So the motor effectively only has one coil connected to the drive. You’ll see the shaft isn’t turning any more and is just sort of jumping in the same spot. So we’re only interested in the sound the motor makes during readings after I’ve pushed the red record button.
A4988 in Full Step Mode
With the A4988 driver running in standard full-step mode, you can quite clearly see that the driver is producing a very square wave.
It also doesn’t matter if we increase the motor speed, we still get a similar square wave that just repeats more often in the same timeframe. So this waveform is obviously quite far from a sine wave and therefore produces the most vibration within the motor, leading to the most noise being generated.
That’s not the end of the road for the A4988 driver, it can actually produce somewhat of a sine wave through microstepping.
Microstepping is essentially the ability for the driver to partially energise the coils to position the rotor in positions between the two poles, and it does so in a way that resembles a sine wave. So the most positions (microsteps) you can do between each pole, the better your sine wave is going to look.
The A4988 can do half, quarter, eighth or sixteenth step microstepping by pulling a combination of three pins high. So let’s see what those look like – we’ll start with half step mode.
A4988 in Half Step Mode
With the A4988 driver running in half step mode, we now got something that is starting to look a bit like a sine wave – but there is obviously still a lot of room for improvement.
The motor also sounded like it was running a little smoother than in full step mode. Looking at the waveform produced, you can clearly see two steps on our sine wave above and below 0.
A4988 in Eighth Step Mode
Now let’s try and improve upon our results with eighth step mode. So in this test, we should now have eight increments between the zero and the maximum on our sine wave.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the sine wave doesn’t fit into our timeframe anymore. That’s because the driver now only moves 1 micro step for each pulse, so our motor is effectively moving 8 times slower than it was in full step mode. So, for example, a motor with 200 steps per revolution running in eighth step mode will now have 1600 steps per revolution.
If we adjust the time scale, we can see our full sine wave and we’ll also notice that our motor is again moving smoother, and slower than it was when in half step mode.
A4988 in Sixteenth Step Mode
Lastly lets try sixteenth step mode, which is the most that this A4988 driver can do.
You’ll again notice that the motor is moving half as fast as eight step mode and we’re getting a wave that’s now looking a lot like a sine wave.
That’s now the end of the road for our A4988 driver. The micro stepping has made it run much smoother and a bit quieter, but it’s still quite noisy. So let’s swap over to our TMC2208 driver now.
TMC2208 Running In Legacy Mode
For compatibility with the A4988 driver’s code, we’re going to be running the TMC2208 driver in Legacy Mode. This mode essentially allows the driver to act as a drop-in replacement for the A4988 driver.
If you watched the video, at this stage you probably hadn’t noticed that the motor was running. That’s obviously a significant improvement over the A4988 drivers that produced around 50-60dB. The TMC2208 driver operates nearly silently, even when you change the speed.
A big part of how it does this is that the TMC drivers produce 256 microsteps, so sixteen times more than what the A4988 drivers do.
Let’s now hook up the oscilloscope and see what the waveform look like.
As with the previous test, the motor makes a bit of noise when the oscilloscope isn’t taking measurements as its only got a single pole connected, so it’s jumping back and fourth around the same pole. It does however go silent again when the oscilloscope is running.
As with the A4988 driver, if we change up the speed we still get the same smooth sine wave, it just repeats more often in the same time interval.
So you can see that’s a significantly improved sine wave over even the best one that the A4988 driver was able to produce.
Finals Thoughts on the TMC2208 Motor Driver Test
So now you have a basic understanding of what the TMC2208 drivers do differently to run almost silently.
As for any drawbacks. There are two primary ones.
One is a slight reduction in incremental torque, which is not usually an issue unless you’re operating near the motors torque limitations.
The second is not so much to do with the motor but to do with the microcontroller telling the driver what to do. As I’ve mentioned earlier, microstepping requires more pulses from the microcontroller to move the motor a full step. So, running in sixteenth step mode requires your microcontroller to output 16 times more pulses than it would need to in full-step mode. If you’re doing this across multiple motors or while doing other tasks, your controller quickly gets bogged down just keeping the motors running and may not be able to keep up.
Out of interest, during the tests, I was running the drivers with a 12V supply to the motor.
That’s it for today, I hope you’ve learned something and found this explanation useful. Let me know in the comments section what you’ve used these drivers for and check out some of my other projects for ideas.
I’ve been slowly adding more and more devices and sensors to my home automation setup and it’s gotten to a stage where I now have a pretty significant number of apps to control them on my phone and iPad. I’ve also wanted to set up automations and routines between devices, but the interfacing across platforms and between brands isn’t usually available or is buggy at best.
If you’ve done anything home automation related on a Raspberry Pi then you’ve probably heard of Home Assistant. It a free and open-source software package that is designed to be a central hub or control system for all of your smart home devices and it’s got a pretty substantial online community working on integration. So, for example, it allows you to do things you wouldn’t normally be able to do like use an Ikea motion sensor to turn on a Philips hue light. Something that isn’t supported by either ecosystem individually.
So today I’m going to be installing Home Assistant onto a Raspberry Pi and I’m going to use a new laser cutter, the Atomstack X20 Pro, to laser cut a housing for it so that I can put it somewhere convenient in my house without it looking like a jumble of wires, dongles and PCBs.
Here’s my video of the build, read on for the full write-up:
What You Need to Build Your Own Home Assistant Hub
The X20 Pro is a new diode laser engraving and cutting machine from Atomstack that uses a clever quad diode laser module to deliver 20W of optical power. The laser is so powerful that they claim that it can even cut 0.05mm sheet metal, which as far as I can tell is a first for consumer-level diode lasers. They also say that I can cut up to 12mm sheets of wood in a single pass and up to 8mm sheets of opaque acrylic.
The 20W laser module is quite a bit stockier than the one on the X7.
The control PCB and cooling fan are built into the metal housing and an air port on the top feeds down to a nozzle around the lens for the included air assist system. I really like how well the air assist system is integrated into the design of the module and doesn’t look like an afterthought.
The included air assist is their own branded system. I’ve used an industrial aquarium air pump previously on my K40 laser cutter, so I was expecting this to be something along those lines, but it’s actually a lot better. The unit apparently uses a two-cylinder compressor to deliver 10-25L/min of air to improve cutting and and engraving quality and speed, we’ll see how it works in a bit.
At a little over $1,000, it has a hefty price tag, so I’m hoping that this machine can do some cutting that’s at least equivalent to most entry-level 40W CO2 lasers.
So let’s get it assembled.
As with the X7 model, the X20 Pro comes largely preassembled, so assembly is pretty straight forward.
There are a couple of pages for assembly in the manual and the components are labelled for each step, so they’ve made it really easy.
The gantry is all pre-assembled so you mainly need to assemble the four-sided frame and then mount the gantry and belts onto it along with the laser module. The only fiddly job is feeding the belts through the gantry wheels and toothed pulley on either side.
It took me about 20 minutes to assemble the X20 Pro and to adjust the legs so that it sat perfectly flat on my desk.
Test Cut and Engraving on The X20 Pro
I then tried turning it on, particularly to try the air assist pump to see how loud it would be. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. The industrial aquarium pump that I’ve used in the past is basically as loud as a standard workshop compressor. This system is substantially quieter in comparison.
It makes quite a noise if you turn the power all the way up, but you probably don’t need to use it at more than half power for most applications. You can feel a decent amount of air coming out of the nozzle at half speed, and you’ll then hardly hear it over the fan on the actual laser module (which is quite loud for a laser module). Even at full speed its quiet enough to comfortably talk over and you don’t feel like you need hearing protection when its running. It’s not something that you’re going to want to leave running unnecessarily but it’s definitely bearable for a small workshop.
If we plug in the included MicroSD card, there are two test files ready to go, one to cut and one to engrave.
So let’s try those out first, I’m going to get it moved to my workshop so I don’t burn a hole in my desk.
The first file is a dog that was labelled to be used on 2mm plywood. I’ve only got 3mm plywood so I thought I might need to do a second pass to cut all the way through. I used the offline controller to position the laser and run the test cutting file and I used the included distance tool to set the focus distance between the laser and the wood.
The laser seemed to cope just fine with the 3mm plywood and made quick work of the dog, cutting through the sheet in a single pass.
I then tried the engraving and that too produced a great quality finish with the air assist on about 30% power. There is some debate as to whether air assist is required when engraving as it tends to blow the smoke back onto the piece. I still prefer using some masking tape over the wood that I peel off after engraving – this produces flawless results every time.
It looks like the X20 Pro is ready to take on a project, so we need to design the housing to hold the Raspberry Pi.
Designing The Home Assistant Hub Housing
I’ve sketched up a cubic style housing with some feet to lift the Pi off the shelf or desk and a fan on the top for cooling.
I wanted to integrate the Home Assistant logo into the design in some way, so I initially planned on engraving it. That made the housing look a bit too much like an ordinary box, so I decided to rather laser cut the logo out on each side.
I can then glue some clear acrylic or clear plastic sheets onto the inside of the case to keep the dust out. The RGB lighting on the fan should light up the inside of the case just enough to give the logo a bit of a glow – which will hopefully look quite good.
Let’s get the components cut on the Atomstack X20 Pro. I’m going to be cutting the components from the same sheet of 3mm plywood. I’m cutting at 300mm/min and 90% power. I’ve prepared the files in laserGRBL and I’m going to again use the microSD card and offline controller to do the actual cutting. I find this easier than having to set up a laptop near the laser.
The first piece came out perfectly and you can really see how the air assist has helped to keep the smoke away from the plywood. I started without it for the first USB C port cutout and you can see it’s surrounded by smoke stains. I then turned the air assist on to about 30% power and the rest of the cuts are really clean on the surface.
The underside gets marked from some of the reflected laser’s light, so I’ll probably look at adding a honeycomb bed at some stage. I also noticed that the localised heat from the laser caused pretty significant warping on the metal sheet once all of the pieces had been cut.
One thing that is a bit of an issue with all of these diode lasers is that there is no smoke extraction system, and cutting wood produces a lot of smoke. So you need to work in a well ventilated area.
Just as a test, I tried a piece of 6mm plywood that I had lying around. I set the laser to 200mm/min and 100% power and it had no problem cutting this out in a single pass either.
Assembling & Painting The Hub Housing
Now that we’ve got the pieces cut out, lets glue them together and give the housing a light sand.
I’m just going to use regular PVA wood glue to glue it together and then I’ll leave it to dry for a few hours before sanding it.
I used a couple of strips of masking tape to hold the sides together while the glue dried.
I’m going to paint the housing with two coats of a white universal undercoat and then two colour coats. I couldn’t find the exact colour of the Home Assistant logo, but this colour (called Fish Pond for some reason) is about as close as I could find – so I’m going to try it out and see what it looks like.
Once the glue was dry I gave the corners, edges and faces a light sand with 240 grit sandpaper.
I then painted the housing with the two coats of undercoat and two coats of enamel paint, allowing each coat to try for about half an hour before applying the next one.
After a second colour coat, it’s starting to look pretty good. I just want to fill in the edges a little more and it’ll then be done.
Engraving the Lid Using the X20 Pro’s App
Atomstack have also added an app on the software side that allows you to quickly import and engrave or cut shapes, sketches and images wirelessly, which is great to improve your workflows.
So I’m going to try and use the app to add some text to the lid of the housing. I’m going to quickly sketch my name in the app’s freehand editor and then engrave it onto the lid.
The app definitely has its limitations, but it’s a great way to quickly add details to pieces where accuracy isn’t particularly important. For anything important, I’d probably still resort to using my computer or the offline controller to control the laser more accurately.
Installing The Home Assistant Hub Electronics
Now let’s get our Pi and fan installed in the housing. I’ve intentionally left a bit of headroom in the top so that there’s space to add shields, adaptors or devices onto the GPIO pins in future as I need them.
The Pi is held in place with some M2.5 brass standoffs that are secured through the base of the housing with a nut each on the bottom.
The Pi is then secured to them with an M2.5 screw into each. You can use additional brass standoffs if you want to mount a hat or shield onto your Pi as well.
A small aluminium heatsink on the Pi will provide adequate cooling as the CPU isn’t going to be under much load during normal operation.
For the fan, I’m going to use a 40mm RGB fan to light up the inside of the case and I’m also going to use a small black dust screen between it and the plywood.
Like I’ve done previously, I’m going to press an M3 nut into each pocket in the fan to screw into. This is easiest done by putting the nuts on a desk or flat surface and pressing the fan pocket down onto them one by one.
The fan and dust screen are then held on the lid with four M3x8mm screws.
I’m going to flash the home assistant image onto a 32GB Sandisk Ultra microSD card, which we can plug in through the slot on the back of the housing. You’ll probably need to use some tweezers or needle-nose pliers to reach the card slot.
To finish the housing off, I’m going to stick some clear acrylic panels onto the inside behind each logo so that dust cant get in around the logo cutouts. These will also provide a bit of support to the thin branches on the logos so that they’re less likely to get damaged or break off.
If you don’t have acrylic you can also use some clear plastic sheets or even old containers with clear flat sides.
I’m gluing the acrylic in place with hot melt glue in four spots along the edges.
Now we just need to plug the fan into the 5V and GND GPIO pins and we can close up the housing. You can also plug the fan into one of the 3.3V pins if you’d like it to run at a reduced speed and be a bit quiter.
Adding a Zigbee Gateway to the Hub
There are two main low-power communication protocols used by smart home devices – Zigbee and Zwave.
They’re both mesh networks, meaning that every device on the network connects to every other device in range of it and they then dynamically co-operate with each other to send data between nodes through the most efficient route.
I don’t really have a preference between the two, but most of the devices I’ve got so far operate on the Zigbee standard. So, rather than have my Home Assistant hub have to talk to the hub from each manufacturer in order to communicate with its devices and sensors.
I’m going to add a Zigbee gateway to the Home Assistant hub so that it can communicate with them directly.
This will also allow me to use 3rd party Zigbee devices and sensors that don’t have hubs or aren’t part of other ecosystems – so they’re generally cheaper.
The Gateway I’m going to be using is this little USB adaptor called the ConBee II as it seems to be the most well supported by Home Assistant.
Ideally I’d like to use one that uses the GPIO pins on my Pi so that I can keep it within the housing, so if you know of any that use the Pi’s GPIO pins and work well with Home Assistant please let me know in the comments section at the end of the post.
That’s basically it, we’re now ready to start using our new Home Assistant hub to control our smart home devices, let’s get it booted up.
Using the Home Assistant Smart Home Hub
Once set up, you can scan your network to find all of your compatible smart home devices and then start building dashboards, automations and routine to control them.
You can access your dashboards through any web browser on your network so you can take control of your home through your laptop, tablet and mobile phone, or even build your own dedicated dashboards with another Raspberry Pi and a touch display.
Check out Smart Home Solver’s channel for some great ideas for home automation routines and automations – he’s got some really creative and unique ideas using a range of sensors and devices.
Using Home Assistant I’ve now got the motion sensor on my driveway camera to brighten my porch light for a minute when its on during the evening and it’ll even turn it on for a minute during the night if its off.
Next I’m going to be setting up some motion sensors or magnetic switches to turn on my pantry and closet lights when the doors are open.
Final Thoughts on the Atomstack X20 Pro
The Atomstack X20 Pro is without a doubt the best diode laser machine I’ve personally used. The powerful laser allows you to work with thicker materials and is now actually quite useful for thinner ones as well. I’m able to cut 3mm plywood three to four times faster than I could with a 5W laser. So it’s actually becoming a worthwhile alternative to my CO2 laser at this point.
The air assist works really well to get cleaner cuts and engravings and won’t leave your eardrums ringing after you’ve used it. And finally, the inclusion of WiFi and a phone app means that you’ve got another way to easily use the X20 Pro, streamlining your workflow.
I’ll definitely be looking to add a honeycomb mesh bed to the X20 Pro and I need to design an enclosure for it so that I can contain and direct the smoke out of my workshop.
Let me know what you think of the Atomstack X20 Pro in the comments section below. Also let me know if you’ve used Home Assistant in your home and what interesting devices and automations you’ve set up.
I’ve been using my Raspberry Pi in this case that I 3D printed almost two years ago. It’s been a great way to protect and cool my Pi and I’ve even made up a few other varients for UPS and SSD shields.
I printed these cases on my original Ender-3 Pro, so when Pergear reached out and said that they’d like me to try out the new Creality Ender-3 S1 Pro, I thought this would be a great opportunity to give my case a refresh.
The Creality Ender series has been my go-to 3D printer for the past three years, I started with an Ender 3 Pro, then got the Ender 3 V2 and then added a second Ender 3 V2. These three printers run for about 10 hours a day and have been doing so for two years now without giving me any significant problems.
I’ve kept them stock for the most part and have found that a well setup Ender-3 prints as capably as other printers that are 3-5 times more expensive. They also have a large online community, a range of upgrades and easily accessible spare parts. So I’m excited to see how the Ender S1 Pro stacks up, as it’s got a number of upgrades and improvements over the original.
Here’s my video of the build, read on for the full write-up:
Let’s start out by getting the new case designed so that we’ve got something to print. I’m going to use Fusion360 this time around for a more refined finish.
The previous case had a solid body with two clear sides, so I want to mix that up by now having a wrap-around clear panel from the side to the front. A small 45-degree section adds a bit of character to the design and will make the acrylic bends a bit more gradual, rather than a sharp 90-degree.
I’ve also put the USB and Ethernet ports on the back and left some headroom to add an Ice Cube cooler and fan. On the other side, we’ve got the power, HDMI and audio ports and I’ve added some vents above them for the exhaust air.
You can download the design from my Etsy store to 3D print your own case or alternately buy a kit that includes the case, bent acrylic side panel and screws so it’s ready to be assembled.
Now, let’s export the parts and get them printed on the Ender 3 S1 Pro. First, we need to get it unboxed and assembled.
Unboxing & Assembling The Ender-3 S1 Pro
Like with all my Enders, the Ender-3 S1 Pro comes well packaged and protected in a sturdy box with foam inserts.
Within the box, the Ender-3 S1 Pro is a lot more pre-assembled than the original. The whole gantry is ready to be mounted onto the base and you then just need to mount the extruder, add the display and add the filament holder.
The base is quite a bit bigger than the original Ender-3 and Ender-3 V2, so keep that in mind if you have limited desk space.
Assembly took around 15 minutes and is really simple with the included step-by-step instructions and tools.
The general shape and layout is similar to the original Ender-3 series, but they’ve made a number of quite significant upgrades with the S1 Pro.
The extruder is now a direct drive, full metal, dual gear design with a hot end that can reach 300C. This opens up the possibility to print with a wider range of filaments, including flexible and high-strength materials.
They’ve also added a filament runout sensor that’ll automatically pause the print if your filament runs out mid-print.
The display has been upgraded to a full-colour touch display, allowing them to do away with the rotary pushbutton on the older models.
They’ve also done away with a vertical axis limit switch, and have added their own CR Touch automatic bed levelling sensor to compensate for any print bed height differences. They also include a limit switch and cable as an option to add on if you don’t want to use the CR Touch sensor.
A new overhead LED light bar is a great addition for overnight prints and for keeping an eye on your prints remotely using a camera in a dark environment.
The print bed is now equipt with a spring steel magnetic build plate, and it’s got dual z-axis motors on the back, something that was a common first upgrade on the original ender.
Those are the main upgrades made to the original Ender-3 and Ender-3 V2, it also got a number of now fairly standard features like silent stepper motor drivers, a 32-bit control board and adjustable belt tensioners.
The Ender-3 S1 Pro currently retails for $499 on Pergear’s Amazon store or $480 on their web store. This is quite a bit more than the standard Ender-3 series, but you’re also getting a number of upgrades and features that are typically only available on higher ender printers.
Once assembled, I used the automatic bed levelling, set the nozzle offset and then set the printer to work on the rabbit test print with the included filament.
The results were really good – keep in mind that is a print straight out of the box without any adjustments or tinkering with the printer. I didn’t even touch the bed levelling adjustment knobs, I just let the automatic bed levelling take care of it.
Making Up The Case Components
For my case print, I’m going to use black PLA for the print and I’ll use 100% infill as the walls are already quite thin. I used 0.2mm layer height, a wall thickness of 0.8mm and a top and bottom thickness of 1.2mm.
I’m going to print the two parts separately rather than print them at the same time so that there aren’t any imperfections or seams caused when moving between the two parts.
While the 3D print is being printed, let’s make up the acrylic side panel.
I’m cutting this panel from 2mm clear acrylic and I’ll then use a bending tool to heat up the two edges where we need to make the 45-degree bends. I’ve added a cutout for the fan and some guides for the two bend lines.
Let’s get the panel cut out on my laser cutter.
These prints came out really well for one of the first prints I’ve done on the Ender-3 S1 Pro. I’m impressed by the quality of the prints and how smooth the layer lines are, they look quite professional.
Now that the two halves are printed, we need to clean up the 3D printed parts by removing the print supports.
Next let’s bend the acrylic panel to fit the case. You’ll see the small laser-cut notches along the edges that I’m going to use as guides for my bend lines – so I just need to put the bending tool between these two points and allow it to soften the acrylic.
Once the first bend has been heated, I can bend it into place to follow the profile of the case, which I’ll do with the front edge.
Now let’s do the second bend in the same way. This one I’ll need to do in place as I can’t follow the front edge again or it’ll be too big.
I’ve designed guides along the edges to hold the acrylic, so I’ll use those guides to get the final shape right.
I think that’s come out quite nicely and it looks like the acrylic follows the profile of the case quite well.
Installing The Pi And Cooler Into The Case
For cooling, I’m going to use an Ice Cube cooler by Sunfounder. This cooler is an improvement over the Ice Tower I used previously as the base has now been designed to cover the CPU, RAM, Ethernet and USB controller chips rather than just the CPU – so this should provide better cooling to the whole board.
As with my previous design, I’m going to remove the fan from the Ice Cube and move it onto the acrylic side panel rather so that it draws cool air in from outside the case.
I’m going to be installing my 8GB, Rasberry Pi 4b, running from a 32GB Sandisk Extreme microSD card with Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye flashed.
To install the Pi into the case, we need to first secure the brass standoffs in the base of the case. These protrude through the printed standoffs and are held in place with an M2.5 nut on the bottom.
Next we can position our Raspberry Pi on the standoffs and then add a second standoff onto each to hold it in place.
Lastly, we can install the Ice Cube cooler on the Pi. Remember to add the cooling pads to the heat sink before you install it.
Now we just use the included M2.5 screws to hold the cooler in place.
With the acrylic’s shape already formed, let’s mount our fan onto it using four M3x8mm button head screws and nuts. As I’ve done previously, I’m going to press the nuts into the pockets in the fan to screw into. This is easiest done by putting the nut on a flat surface and pressing the fan pocket down onto it.
I’ve also got this carbon fibre fan grill I found online that I’m going to install over the fan. You can skip this if you want to see the RGB fan more clearly.
We can then peel off the rest of the protective film and install the clear side panel.
The fan is plugged into the 5V and GND GPIO pins.
Source: RaspberryPi.org
You can also use on of the 3.3V pins if you’d like the fan to run a bit quieter, but it’ll lose a bit of performance too.
Finally, the lid of the case is held in place with three more M3x8mm screws.
And that’s it, our case is now complete. So let’s boot it up and run a test to see how the Ice Cube cooler handles a full load.
Stress Testing The Raspberry Pi & Cooler
The stress test I’m going to use is called CPU burn. It’s one that I’ve used previously for a couple of thermal tests as it seems to generate the most heat out of the tests I’ve tried.
To download it on your Raspberry Pi, open a new terminal window and enter the following commands:
Then CPU Burn can be run using the following command:
while true; do vcgencmd measure_clock arm; vcgencmd measure_temp; sleep 10; done& ./cpuburn-a53
So running at full load on all four cores pushed the temperature up quite quickly from 23 degrees to 26 degrees, and it seems to have stabilised there, which is not much of an increase at all.
Without a cooler, the Pi thermal throttles in a few seconds with this test, so these large coolers work really well.
So at 2Ghz it still stabilises at around 35 degrees, so there is probably room to overclock it a bit further if you’d like to try that. But for now, I’m really happy with the results and with how the case has turned out.
Final Thoughts on the Creality Ender-3 S1 Pro
Overall I’m really impressed with the print quality from the Ender-3 S1 Pro and I’m looking forward to trying out some more challenging materials. I’d like to try to print this case in a matt carbon fibre filament to see how that turns out.
I also like that Creality have paid attention to the community’s requests with this design, particularly in addressing the common issues that have been reported on the older models like the dual z-axis and automatic bed levelling. Even relatively minor issues like making the filament roller an actual roller has been taken care of.
As with any 3D printer, I’m sure this one with have a weakness or two and I’ll post some updates here after I’ve used it for a few months. I’m interested in seeing how the fan angled towards the print bed holds up with pulling in strands of filament and dust etc..
Check out Pergear’s Amazon store or their web store to get your own Ender-3 S1 Pro and visit my Etsy store to get your case kit to assemble your own Pi Desktop Case
Let me know what you think of the Creality Ender-3 S1 Pro in the comments section below and let me know what you think of my new case design.
