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.)

  • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]
    ·
    2 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

    • wantonviolins [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Linux in general does not get along with NTFS. The most common NTFS driver is an old, slow, and buggy FUSE driver that I've had endless issues with.

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Naw it's all good unless you're doing something crazy like RAID 56.

          https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status

          I love my snapshots.

          • wantonviolins [they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I've been using RAID-Z1 on a four-disk ZFS array on my fileserver and it's been great. ext4 on my boot disks, though.