The existence of things like the Pinecil is proof that putting computers into things that don't seem like they should have computers in them is actually cool and good and we should do it more. It's only capitalism that makes everything awful.

The Pinecil is an open source portable soldering iron with a 32 bit microprocessor. It uses the computer for all sorts of cool shit, mostly power management. It automatically tunes it's pids to keep an extremely stable temperature in a wide range of conditions that thermal mass alone can't manage. It also uses the computer to allow the display and controls to be flipped for left handed people. And a bunch of stuff like allowing you to adjust all sorts of parameters like sleep timers, power limits, etc. Being open source you can program it to do whatever you want if you know how. It also regularly gets firmware updates to add functionality.

It takes a dc jack and USB C for power input. You can plug almost any power supply into it, including phone chargers. It won't work on cheaper phone chargers because they aren't capable of delivering enough current, but it will still let you try. So in practice it is limited to "only" 9-21 volt power supplies. Anything in that range works. You can also plug drone/rc batteries into it. The chance of you ever being in a place where you need a soldering iron but can't find a power supply for it are basically zero because of this.

Oh, and because it's open source anyone can download the schematics and make them so they are like $30. Most open source hardware is like that. It's only capitalism that makes every new technology awful. Like seriously, how do they manage to make something as simple and awesome as "you can control your home ac and lights and stuff from your phone" an awful nightmare?

(I apologize for how directionless this post is.)

  • StellarTabi [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    proprietarians love gas lighting you, recently I had a conversation like:

    Me: "I wish windows didn't have such poor and anti-user design"

    Shill: "wow how could you say something so uninformed, as if there is anything wrong with windows!"

    Me: *list of like 20 big ticket items*

    Shill: "I've never heard anyone complain about any of these, you're making these up. I've never even heard of ${something with long damning Wikipedia articles about the subject}"

    Me: *evidence that things almost everyone hates about windows exists*

    Shill: "Well if you don't like windows don't use it!"

    Yeah as if Microsoft wasn't a monopoly holding the entire computer market hostage.

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          What doesn’t work in wine/proton?

          Most things I've tried.

          Most recently it was Satisfactory. I play it through Steam. Some Steam games support Linux but not this one.

          • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Oh no! I just booted up Satisfactory on Manjaro linux- it runs pretty well definitly follow wantonviolins' advice and check out protondb

            • TankieTanuki [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              I use Arch (btw) so that's a good sign. So I just need to install proton and then it should work in steam as if I were running Windows?

              Edit: 185 dependencies :kitsuragi-depress:

              In my experience, when an AUR has this many dependencies one of them is bound to be a broken AUR.

              Edit2: Looks like only two of the dependencies were other AURs, thank GOD.

              • unperson [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                You need to right click on the game on steam, go to Properties, and in the compatibility section 'Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool', and pick Proton Experimental (or try different versions).

              • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                yeah! I'm obsessed with this game- but yea you can enable proton in steam (play on linux) and I have it on proton experimental and it works great! a lot of games work pretty well out of the box with proton. theres only a few that don't and sometimes even then with tinkering you can get it to work

                I'm on the latest nvidia drivers as well if that's relevant (gtx 1080)

                • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  no wait thats "Steam Play" now I guess... then under advanced, check Enable steam play for all other titles

              • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Oh yeah and another key thing I learned the hard way is that steam on linux really prefers that you don't use NTFS for your games library- idk if that's gonna be relevant to you but once I switched over to ext that helped a lot of games

          • raven [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            It's running very well for me under whatever version of proton-ge AUR provides right now.

              • raven [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Best luck!
                There's a binary in the AUR as well if that doesn't work out.

                  • sysgen [none/use name,they/them]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    Yes, that is what they are.

                    You should also consider adjusting the makepkg config to tune to your CPU microarchitecture and to enable parallel compilation, as well as to use zstd compression if that's not default yet.