Argon One

Custom PC, Issue 213

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Custom PC Issue 213In this month’s Hobby Tech column I take a look at how GL shaders can make the video output from emulators – in particular DOSBox – look an awful lot closer to how you remember the same software running on real hardware, review the Argon One M.2 case for the Raspberry Pi 4 family of single-board computers, and take a look at an unusual children’s book: Big Data Girl by Fred Wordie with illustrations by Santiago Taberna.

First, the shaders. Few would argue that the move away from bulky and power-hungry cathode-ray tube displays to modern liquid-crystal displays was a bad thing, except for possibly vintage game enthusiasts. The “pixel art” of old, you see, was never meant to show big, blocky, individual pixels: the CRT would smooth and blend things as a by-product of its relative inaccuracy, meaning when you fire up a classic like Doom or Moraff’s World and feel disappointed in its appearance it’s not entirely down to rose-tinted spectacles.

Shaders, typically but not exclusively written in GL Shader Language, can help. In the opening piece for this month’s column, I look at how these handy add-ons can turn the block output of an emulator into a surprisingly convincing simulation of a CRT – complete with curvature and overscan, if that’s your wont. The difference in appearance is little short of astounding – though it may take some customisation before you’re fully satisfied with the results.

The Argon One M.2, meanwhile, looks externally a lot like the previous entries in the Argon One case family. There’s the same metal shell, which doubles as a heatsink and means the built-in temperature-controlled fan rarely activates, the same magnetic cover hiding a colour-coded and silkscreened general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, and the same layout which puts all the Raspberry Pi’s various ports to the rear for neater cabling.

Where the new design differs is in a larger base, which hides the circuitry for converting an M.2 SATA SSD into a USB-attached storage device. Unlike the NESPi 4, reviewed back in Issue 210, this one works properly in USB Attached SCSI (UAS) mode, giving a throughput of 387/300MBps read/write on a test SSD rated at 500/320MBps.

Finally, Big Data Girl is a bit of a departure for the column, as it’s a children’s book – but one with a difference: Wordie’s crowdfunded title aims to introduce the concept of “big data,” anthropomorphised as a friendly little girl, highlighting both how useful it can be and how it can impact your privacy. It’s a smart idea, and Taberna’s illustrations are fantastic, but serves more as a conversation starter for parents already familiar with the concepts than a stand-alone guide to the subject.

Custom PC Issue 213 is available now at all good supermarkets, newsagents, digital distribution platforms, and from the official website with international delivery.

The MagPi, Issue 90

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The MagPi Issue 90This month’s MagPi, the official magazine of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, comes with a surprise bonus: a cover-mounted stand, available to download for 3D printing or laser cutting in the digital version, designed to hold up to three Raspberry Pi 4s in a vertical orientation. Naturally, it needed testing – and so you’ll find a feature comparing the stand to five commercial cases also designed to improve cooling.

My thermal testing feature in Issue 88 proved that putting the Raspberry Pi on its edge, rather than flat on a desk, could improve cooling and allow it to run faster for longer. The same test workload is repeated here on the bundled vertical stand plus cases from FLIRC, Argon40, Pimoroni, The Pi Hut, and SensorEq – and many thanks to all involved for their assistance with review samples.

Each case is installed as per the manufacturer’s instructions, then the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB inside is given a ten-minute run of a very thermally-intensive workload – an unlocked glxgears to put load on the GPU and a four-thread stress-ng FFT run for the CPU – followed by five minutes cooling. The temperature of each is graphed along with the operating speed of the CPU – which drops as the temperature rises above 80 degrees Celsius.

Finally, each case was placed underneath a thermal camera to see how effective it is at distributing the heat from the SoC. With the notable exception of one case – the case from The Pi Hut, which is constructed from light-transparent but thermally-opaque Perspex acrylic – the imagery helps to indicate whether a design has thermal headroom for longer workloads or is already working as hard as it can.

The feature is available in full in The MagPi Issue 90, which can be purchased in print from newsagents and supermarkets now or with global delivery from the Raspberry Pi Press store. It’s also available for free download under a Creative Commons licence; while the digital version doesn’t include the cover-mounted stand for obvious reasons, the design can be downloaded for home or commercial 3D printing or laser cutting from the magazine’s GitHub repository.

Custom PC, Issue 197

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Custom PC Issue 197This month’s Hobby Tech column takes a look at Argon 40’s revised Argon One – or Argon 1, depending on which bit of the packaging you’re looking at – case for the Raspberry Pi 4, the RISC-V-based Sipeed Longan Nano development board, and Toshi Omagari’s Arcade Game Typography.

First, the Argon 1 Pi 4 case. Externally, this looks a lot like the Argon One reviewed back in Issue 188; internally, though, things have been shifted around to provide support for the latest Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer – and the brown-outs caused by the smart power and cooling board drawing too much power are now a thing of the past.

As with its predecessor, the Argon 1 Pi 4 is impressively solid and does a great job at cooling the Raspberry Pi 4 by using the aluminium housing as a heatsink – even running a heavy synthetic workload, the temperature didn’t reach the minimum required to activate the built-in PWM-controlled cooling fan. It also adds some neat features, such as a labelled and colour-coded GPIO header, neater cabling through the shifting of audio and video ports to the rear, and a smart power button.

Shortly after the review was completed, but thankfully before the magazine went to press, the power board on the Argon 1 Pi 4 died – thankfully without taking the Raspberry Pi 4 with it. The review was updated accordingly, and since then Argon 40 has been stellar in attempting to resolve the problem – paying to have the faulty board returned for analysis and replacing both the faulty board and the entire unit in order to get things back up and running. While it will be a short while before it’s clear whether the failure was a one-off or not, it’s certainly impossible to fault the company’s customer service ethos.

The Sipeed Longan Nano, supplied by Seeed Studio, is an interesting beast: costing less than $5, the board is based on a low-power RISC-V microcontroller with a breadboard-friendly board design and a built-in low-resolution colour LCD display. For the money, the hardware is absolutely incredible – especially as Seeed has even designed a rough but serviceable acrylic case for the board, bundled at no additional cost.

The software and documentation, however, is definitely an issue. The libraries provided failed in a variety of ways – including an inability to use printf() or open a serial port – and the English documentation is extremely sparse. Particularly lacking is anything to demonstrate the use of the LCD – bar a single example program documented using Chinese in-line comments.

Finally, Arcade Game Typography. I’ve reviewed a lot of retro-computing coffee-table books over the years, but Omagari’s book is the first to concentrate solely on fonts and typography as used in classic arcade games – and given Omagari’s work as a designer for Monotype UK, it’s fair to say he knows his stuff. The result is a fascinating book, and one which is currently available in a limited 1,000-copy hardback print run from Read-Only Memory if the standard paperback isn’t shiny enough for you.

Custom PC Issue 197 is available on supermarket and newsagent shelves now, or can be ordered for global delivery from the official website.

Custom PC, Issue 188

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Custom PC Issue 188This month’s Hobby Tech, my regular five-page column for Custom PC Magazine, takes a look at the Argon One aluminium case for the Raspberry Pi, the now Flash-free Scratch 3 visual programming environment, and Sean McManus’ Mission Python.

First, the case. Created as a single piece of aluminium with a plastic base-plate, the Argon One is more than just a means of protecting a Raspberry Pi: it includes a daughterboard that pulls the HDMI and analogue AV ports to the rear for neater cabling, another that adds a fan for active cooling and a smart power button while also bringing the GPIO header out with colour coding and silk-screened pin references on the case itself, and a magnetic cover to hide said GPIO port when it’s not in use.

More importantly, though, it’s one of only a few cases that actually improves the thermal performance of the Raspberry Pi when installed. Even ignoring the fan, which makes little practical difference to operating temperatures, the difference between uncased and cased is an impressive 24°C thanks to the use of the upper half of the case as a giant heatsink. The only real problem, and it’s one creator Argon Forty claims to be working to resolve, is the hefty voltage drop from the fan-and-power daughterboard: unless you’re using the Argon One 5.25V Power Supply or a similar compatible, expect to see frequent undervoltage throttling.

Scratch 3, meanwhile, has proven itself a worthy upgrade for the popular block-based visual programming environment first created at MIT. While switching the stage and script area around and shuffling a few of the block colours is unnecessary and potentially confusing, new features including integration with translation and text-to-speech APIs and an easy extension manager are definitely welcome – as is the departure from relying on Adobe’s Flash technology. Sadly, though, at the time of writing Scratch 3 still did not support the Raspberry Pi, though work is in progress on that front.

Finally, Mission Python: as the author of a few books myself I know only too well how tricky it is to walk the line between introducing concepts in a friendly and approachable manner and being patronising, as well as trying to aim a publication at a broad age range. Sean McManus, who is no stranger to bookstore shelves, proves it can be done with Mission Python as he walks the reader through creating a game in Python using the Pygame Zero wrapper around the Pygame library. The result is colourful and fun without being in any way condescending, and a definite recommendation for anyone interested in flexing their Python skills.

All this, and the usual selection of articles not written by me, can be found on the shelves of your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or digitally via Zinio and similar services.

The MagPi, Issue 79

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The MagPi Issue 79In this month’s issue of The MagPi Magazine you’ll find my review of the Argon One, a clever case for the Raspberry Pi that if creator Argon Forty’s name is anything to go by will be followed up by 39 successive designs.

Raspberry Pi cases are ten a penny, but the crowdfunded Argon One stands out for one very heavy reason: the majority of the case, bar a plastic base, is made from a single piece of aluminium. It gives the case heft, but serves a real purpose too: the Raspberry Pi’s system-on-chip (SoC) is connected to the body of the case via a pillar of aluminium – turning the entire case into a giant heatsink.

It’s a great idea, and definitely works, but means the case has restricted compatibility: only the Rasbperry Pi 3 Model B and Model B+ will fit, with other models having their SoCs in a different position. If your Pi does fit, you’ll find the Argon One works a charm – though a built-in fan appears to make little practical difference to temperature levels.

The only real fly in the ointment, though, is that a daughterboard which provides a smart power button on the rear and power for the fan – joined by a second that moves the analogue AV and HDMI ports to the rear with the others – causes enough voltage drop to trigger ‘undervolt’ warnings and throttling on most power supplies. Only Argon Forty’s own 5.25V/3A supply, or an equivalent, avoids this – information that came too late for backers of the original Kickstarter campaign.

The full review, and a lot more beside, is available at your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or for free download under a Creative Commons licence from the official website.