Raspberry Pi Radio

[Zema Bus]

I'm too far away to listen the LA talk radio station I've listened to since my 20's so that just leaves listening over the Internet. I wanted something low power that could be on all day in the background, like a radio. I looked into "Internet radios", but they all looked clunky to use and the ratings weren't great for any of them. I had a few Raspberry Pi's lying around I've had for years, so I got a $35 six inch screen, hooked a Raspberry Pi up to it, and voila! A fraction of the price of one of those Internet radios and a lot easier to use

RaspberryPi_Inernetradio1.jpg (279.6 KiB) Viewed 1919 times

RaspberryPi_Inernetradio0.jpg (244.01 KiB) Viewed 1919 times

[Grogan]

That's pretty cool, and it would be good to have a little screen like that to go with a Raspberry Pi anyway.

It does look funny though, little tiny device (smaller than that screen obscuring it) with a big keyboard, mouse and speakers sticking out of it

Is that the Raspbian distro on it?

[Zema Bus]

With all the peripherals sticking out does look kind of funny It's a touch screen, but not really that useful for this.

Yeah it's the "Raspberry Pi OS", they used to call it Raspbian but renamed it at some point. I used the Raspberry Pi Imager in Arch to download the latest image and write it to the SD card. An older installation I had didn't have sound from the headphone jack, which I read was a known bug about 5 years ago but fixed since then. I was going to try a different distro but this one is working and serves the purpose so I might just leave it. Only change I made was setting it to dark mode. That's the default wallpaper they're using now.

[Grogan]

The touchscreen would be useful if you made a desktop shortcut with the direct URL to the radio station feed (or to the page where you click to start it).

OK, so I was confused about that. I'd heard of both, "Raspberry Pi OS" and Raspbian but didn't realize they were the same. I'd agree that it's best to use a distro specialized for running on the Raspberry Pi and the most mainstream one is likely the one you're going to have less trouble with. It's not the kind of device you want to tinker with software on or recompile everything

[Zema Bus]

Here's how to install Gentoo and LFS on a Raspberry Pi

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/How_to_ins ... berry_Pi_5

https://intestinate.com/pilfs/

[Grogan]

In the former case, Gentoo, you install binaries right on the device's SD card, and configure things. Looks pretty easy, actually. To me it's pointless (why Gentoo then?) but you don't have to compile anything at all on Gentoo anymore, they have complete binaries for everything.

In the latter case, LFS, you're compiling on the Raspberry Pi ("no cross compiling"). I honestly didn't expect that, I figured you'd build it on a PC and make an image to blast on. How silly

[Zema Bus]

Btop on the Raspberry Pi (via ssh):

btop_raspberrypi.jpg (140.33 KiB) Viewed 1856 times

[Grogan]

A quad core ARM processor and 8 Gb of RAM, maybe compiling wouldn't be so bad on that thing. However, big things like Firefox you'd want to install binaries (you'd need more RAM than you've got to compile that nowadays, you'd have working data in swap)

I should get one of those just for hooking up to the TV to watch shows. My nephew always brings his laptop for that.

[Zema Bus]

I recently picked up a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB RAM, I've been wanting to get one to check out and thought I'd do that before the tariffs potentially become a factor. They're said to be a huge improvement over the Pi 4's. I haven't gotten to it yet but I got it as a kit that includes a case. I'll probably connect it to the TV, I used to do that with a Pi 4 running Manjaro.

[Grogan]

Something like this, then:
https://www.amazon.ca/iRasptek-Starter- ... VVASJUHTTD

There's a bigger kit there for $200, but it's just the 8 Gb ones with 64G storage.

Or this one, a more complete kit, but it's only got 64G storage:
https://www.amazon.ca/RasTech-Raspberry ... VVASJUHTTD

[Zema Bus]

Yeah that first one is the one I got, $195 US. That 2nd one with the 64 GB SD card should be good for most uses and you could always get a bigger SD card later.

[Grogan]

That second one is a different company "RasTech" vs. iRasptek. It seems to just come with more cables (two HDMI, another USB-C) AND the Operating System: says "Windows" (but it doesn't look like it actually comes with it, or they would say that. So that's probably moot, it should be the same hardware, it's all on the SoC). So that can find a home up someone's ass.

I think I'd go with my first link, the iRasptek starter kit (especially since that's the one you got).

[Grogan]

I've been thinking, if I do get one of these, I wouldn't be happy with the OS and I'd need to put something better on there. Arch has an aarch64 port, but as far as I can see it doesn't support Raspberry Pi 5. Apparently the bootloader they use on ARM is incompatible (because the ARM64 Cortex A76 can't boot in 32 bit mode). You have to use a different boot loader AND drop in a kernel that supports the hardware. It can be done with some finagling, but it doesn't look like fun to get Arch going on a Pi 5.

See, those debian OSes are a pain in the ass for my methods. I'd have to install the dev environment and all the corresponding -dev packages for everything I need to compile against. I would need to at least compile Mesa (need video codecs that debianal distros wouldn't provide anymore), ffmpeg, mpv etc. for it to be viable for a movie watching device, for me. On Arch I wouldn't have to compile much of anything (though it provides the environment out of the box if I do), except that I would try my hand at building a kernel on ARM.

[Zema Bus]

I'm not familiar with it but RaspArch might be a possibility until vanilla Arch has better support. I noticed they mention EndeavourOS, that one I used to run the X86_64 version of, it was pretty close to vanilla Arch with a couple additional repositories.

[Grogan]

Now that looks really good, I could get along with LxQT preinstalled. I'd have access to arch's aarch64 stuff that way too.

Now I want to do this! (but shouldn't spend the money at this time... like that ever stops me, though)

[Zema Bus]

I wasn't sure what I'd want to use for my Pi 5 but I think I'll go with that as well

[Grogan]

I pulled the trigger on this:
https://www.amazon.ca/iRasptek-Starter- ... VVASJUHTTD

With Prime discounts it came to $279.99 + tax = $316.39 CAD

I should have it on Wednesday

[Zema Bus]

Awesome!

[Grogan]

.. and got it, t showed up at 12:30. I haven't opened the box yet though, I have to get that Crux setup in order before I start screwing around with this project.

[Grogan]

I decided to save this project for Saturday, as my nephew would be interested in this (and muggins here isn't so good with fiddly little screws and shit)

I'm not even going to open the box until I get there. I'll bring tools and thermal paste and shit (I presume we'll have to mount the cooler) and that stupid logitech cordless keyboard and mouse with new batteries. They are awful on AA cells, especially the mouse (every 2 to 3 weeks it uses one AA battery). The keyboard uses 2 cells and probably lasts a few months. That will be a good use of them, as the devices will be turned off most of the time used for the Raspberry pi, unlike my main rig.

[Zema Bus]

I'm going to work on mine Saturday as well, not enough time during the week, or energy after a long workday.

[Grogan]

I was busy working on Crux, but I could have done it today. I kind of had it in the back of my mind that I'd like to do it with my nephew, if I could wait that long. I don't imagine it will be that much work to assemble the kit but such things can't be done in a rush.

[Grogan]

We got it assembled and working (my nephew did most of the work) but never got past the Rasperry Pi OS configuration wizard. Prompted for country, language time zone etc. On the first boot it showed wifi networks but it didn't seem to connect. The Skip button for updates was greyed out and Next just led to no UI loading, just the background image. ctrl-alt-del and reboot, and this time the wifi showed no networks, the skip button was greyed out and it just gyrated.

It seems like it's the wifi causing the wizard to go blub blub. I'm guessing that if I hook it up to ethernet and let it get its updates it would get a kernel update and the wifi may work, but I'm not going to waste my time on that poo. I'll just get going with a better OS. I'm having second thoughts about RaspArch though, it seems like it's going to be old out of the box (dec. 2024). Also, I have to take the SD card out of the box, which I don't want to do, put it in a card reader and use some fucking stupid windows program to write the image to the SD card. I'd rather run something that boots the device and installs. I don't know if I can write the image with dd or not, and in any case, I don't have SD card support in my kernels (I hate those things... I don't even like handling them. I never plug them in right) and I'm not keen on adding Memory Technology Devices support to my kernel.

I could easily go upstairs with the card in the reader and use a Windows computer, but that Rufus program has a 7 Gb limit, it can't see more storage than that. They say "if you don't think that's enough storage" (what do you mean "if"!), boot with Linux and use gparted to resize the partition and claim the space after. That doesn't sound very polished or professional and it's giving me the pox...

P.S. Hmm... I think because I have a USB SD card reader (came with the kit) I should just need regular USB Storage and it should be /dev/sda. I still don't know if I can write it with dd though.

Damnit, the USB card reader that came with it is USB type C and I don't have that on any computer in this fucking house (only phones), so I'm dead in the water until Monday when I can go buy something (and I don't have time on Monday, I have to take my Dad somewhere). I hate stupid gadgets like this. I'm starting to feel sorry that I bought this.

[Zema Bus]

The WIFI connection worked for me but I also had it connected via Ethernet, I wasn't going to bother with the WIFI since I was just testing it but it prompted for it and I thought might as well test that too. I have a few things to say about this 3rd party kit, particularly the case, I'll get to that in a bit.

For the other Raspberry Pi (RP4) I used 'Raspberry Pi Imager' to write an image to the SD card. I got it from the Arch AUR and it worked quite well, so no need for Windows. And I used a cheap USB SD card reader/writer from Amazon.

The instructions that came with this kit aren't great, nothing like the official instructions. They fail to mention an important step when installing the heatsink - there is a plastic film on the thermal pads that should be peeled off before installing. I knew to look for that as these types of things always ship with a plastic film to protect it until installed but the instructions say nothing about it so probably a lot of users are using this kit with the film still in place. With that plastic film left in place it won't transfer heat as well (it's not critical on a Raspberry Pi, unlike a regular desktop computer they'll run just fine without any type of cooling but like any computer they do generate heat). The other problem is the case. They show installing the screws to secure the Pi in place, as well as one screw to secure the top of the case, but there's nothing for the screws to screw into. Maybe I just got a defective case, I don't know. Also it came with a couple of tiny clear plastic pieces with no indication of what they are for. I think I figured out that one of them fits into a tiny opening on the case which is right above the drive activity light, so that you can see the drive activity. But it just loosely fits in there, there's nothing to keep it in-place. I think I'm going to just get an official Raspberry Pi 5 case for it. I've used their official cases more than the 3rd party ones, they're plastic but they've always just worked. The only positive thing I can say about this 3rd party case is that it is metal and looks nice.

The EndeavorOS Raspberry Pi image is another option, it should have more up-to-date images.

[Grogan]

Yes, we peeled the stickers from the thermal pads (thermal pads always have stickers on them).

My nephew is the one that did up the screws, he didn't complain that they didn't tighten. He did seem to fuss a bit to get the holes lined up though. I guess I'll check them.

The clear plastic pieces (one is a spare?) is for the power button. We were all WTF about that at first too. If you didn't put it in, the board has to come out of the enclosure again to do it (and you have to kind of slide the board back in place so it lines up)

[Zema Bus]

I'll play around with the screws again and see if I can get them to screw in, and if I succeed I'll install the power button

[Grogan]

I booted up the Raspberry Pi image and this time it didn't hang the setup wizard. I plugged in Ethernet, but the latch isn't working on the cable and it slid out by the time I got everything else hooked up, so I had no network. However, the wifi networks showed up and let me click Next (I didn't try connecting). I pushed the cable in and rebooted and I'm at the desktop now with that nice blue wallpaper of that image of China with the skiff and those rock pillars. The Wired network is connected. I think I'll update it and then try the Wifi.

I'm going to go and get a USB micro SD card reader next week. Or maybe I could go to Walmart tomorrow, they'd probably have one (though that will make me feel dirty... I hate Walmart)

[Grogan]

First thing I did was unlock the root account..."sudo passwd root".

So since it didn't pop up an update wizard of any kind, I'm doing

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

If not dist-upgrade, I don't get the kernel update (Linux 6.12.abunchofshit) as its in a list of held back packages if I do just apt-get upgrade. I'm getting 248 updates now.

This OS won't do, but I might as well have something on it to play with until I can get a card reader to write an image with.

[Grogan]

... and the WiFi works. I'm posting here with it with Firefox now

Firefox has Ublock Origin installed right out of the box, that's a nice touch.

[Grogan]

That fucking raspberry pi imager program needs Qt6 now... fugheddabowtit. You can't just have a nice little program without a bunch of complex dependency bloat.

It's actually an Arch package now (in Extra, not just AUR), this is the list of dependencies:

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/rpi-imager/

Dependencies (15)

curl
gcc-libs
glibc
gnutls
hicolor-icon-theme
libarchive
qt6-base
qt6-declarative
xz
dosfstools (optional) - SD card bootloader support
udisks2 (optional) - Needed if you want to be able to run rpi-imager as a regular user
cmake (make)
git (make)
qt6-svg (make)
qt6-tools (make)

I sure don't want udisks2 on my system, I hate poxy things like that polling devices. I've got everything else but those two things already and udisks2 is optional, but the show stopper is QT6 for me. I've got QT5 for a few applications only and I've been careful not to want anything needing QT6.

You probably have all of those deps. Maybe not dosfstools, but you should, at least for dosfsck (fsck.msdos) for your EFI partition.