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                     JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 22ND AUGUST, 2021
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SUBJECT: Raspberry Pi 4 upgrades & items usable again
   DATE: Mon 23 Aug 02:32:02 BST 2021

I finally got around to sorting out the fan on my Raspberry Pi 4. The FanSHIM
I had been using was very unreliable. Don’t know if it’s the way the contacts
with the GPIO pins are made or something else. I do know most of the time it
just didn’t work :(

This time I went for one of the official Raspberry Pi case fans. An odd choice
as I don’t have an official case — I keep my Pi in a Pibow Coupé 4, I like
that the ports are sandwiched between the acrylic layers giving them a little
more protection from cables being inserted and removed. I chose the official
fan as I liked the simple builtin temperature control and for £4.50 it was
worth a punt. Having said that I simply had the fan, in its holder, sit on top
of the Pibow… erm, held in place with a nice thick rubber band :P The fan is
whisper quiet with this setup. I even applied the nice short heatsink that
came with the fan. It all looks something like this: ./pi4-rig.jpg

With an ambient temperature of 26°C the Pi idles around 45-50°C. I Tested the
fan by building Go 1.17 from source. The CPU didn’t go over 55.5°C with the
fan kicking in and out as needed. Nice :)

I also upgraded the storage on the Pi. Before now it was using an SDCard. Now
it has a 240Gb WD Green SSD on a SATA to USB3 adapter. The adapter uses an
ASMedia ASM1153E and works for booting from the SSD and will do UASP but not
Trim :( Using hdparm direct the SSD read speed is about 300Mb/sec. The WD
Green isn’t the fastest SSD, but it’s limited by USB3 speeds and has quite low
power requirements: average 80mW and a maximum of 2.2W (about 0.5A @ 5V).

I might need to put some spacers between the SSD and the PiBow case as I think
the SSD is raising the temperature of the Pi a bit.

In other news, Debian released bullseye and the Go team released Go 1.17.

A few updates have also been pushed to the public experiment branch.

Body, Holdable, Wearable and Wieldable fields are now unmarshaled from zone
files. The commands HOLD, WEAR, WIELD and REMOVE have been added. Players now
have bodies. Together these additions to the experiment let items be held,
worn and wielded again. Merkle will be happy :) It’s also possible to identify
mobiles/NPCs as those items with bodies defined that are not players.

The INVENTORY command has been updated to show how items are being used. The
DROP, PUT and JUNK command won’t accidentally get rid of items that are
currently being used.

As in the mainline code most items can be held by default in one hand. This
can be overridden by defining alternate holdable body slots. Holding an item
can also be vetoed to prevent it from being held at all.

--
Diddymus


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