The universe has conspired and I have had to leave the house.
The universe has conspired and I have had to leave the house or my 2024 travel development setup.
The last month or so my office at home has been getting very cold and I have been pushing off my Wife's comments of "work in the warm bit" with the response that "I need the cables from my laptop to the computer to do development". Having been made to leave the house this excuse is going to fall apart and I will have to stop pretending I'm some rugedd person out in the wilds.
To continue hacking on wifi I needed to make my setup portable, the Morefine M6 (the worst best computer) , is incredibly small and quite perfect for this.
Here is my full development setup:
The setup is composed of:
- Framework 13 with a 12th Generation Intel Processor and just not enough storage
- Morefine M6 N200 Intel mini pc
- GL.inet Beryl AX travel router
- Anker Prime Charger Power Supply
- Openterface KVM
- A random anker USB-C hub with ethernet
- A random no name USB-C hub with ethernet, PD pass through and a detachable cable with hates my monitor at home
- 2015 rad1o badge (its basically a hackrf)
- A pencil case full of cables
- The nice silicone Ethernet cables that came with my EEROs, but were too short to use.
Framework 13
The Framework 13 has been my main development machine since I joined The FreeBSD Foundation last year. It runs FreeBSD well and the processor does this amazing thing where it can build FreeBSD in the same time as my testbed build machines. Battery life sucks, WiFi is available, but there is no suspend.
I now mostly use it docked and I have a wonderful user experience of it as a computer that does what I want. Using the framework as a laptop again has been really nice. They have done a good job with these things.
I have been trying to streamline development as much as I can. Right now I do everything on my laptop and I have a script that handles deploying a kernel or userspace binaries, rebooting and running tests. The M6 fits into this as well as other hardware does.
Morefine M6
The linked blog post has more about the M6, the key part is that it has become my main development target for the last few months. Some kernel hackers are happy to work in the same VM they test on, but I like there to be a lot of separation between the computer I type into and the computer that kernel panics constantly. Maybe they write fewer kernel panics.
From sheer luck the M6 has the right WiFi I need to work and it has done a great job as a hypervisor running a single VM. Only very occasionally have I upset the wifi card enough to require a full host power cycle.
The downside of the M6 is the fan. I won't be able to use it in the quiet carriage of the ICE, but I'm now starting to target the WiFi in the framework for further testing so the timing of things worked out well.
GL.INET Beryl AX
For WiFi development I needed a test router as a target. I have been using USB WiFi dongles, but as rates go up there are a few downsides. FreeBSD support is good, but not great, generally they are limited on the bands they can support and they don't act as an independent test target.
When debugging things it is good to be able to rule out FreeBSDisms and the Gl.Inet was heavily discounted for Jeff's birthday party.
It is just OpenWRT with an extra UI layer, the extra UI can be turned off which I think will happen soon as I need a more useful machine for development than most people need for exceeding device limits on hotel WiFi.
The main thing for the GL.iNet so far is that it is a reasonably representative access point and it seems to be. Once we start pushing into ac and ax speeds it'll be great to have a good reference device.
Anker Prime Charger
All of these things need power and the idea of taking 5 USB-C power bricks with me on the road is quite upsetting. At my desk so far I have been using the Pine64 PinePower, but there are reports of it killing attached devices, the lcd screen makes audio output unusable with my laptop and there are occasional bugs.
The Prime Charger is a 250W power supply, it can spread this over a number of devices with 2 ports being high power, 2 lower power and 2 USB-A ports. I have wanted to replace the Pine Power for a while and a brand name GAN device with 4 USB-C ports and 2 USB-A ports was very tempting. Discounts for Geoff's birthday sealed the deal.
I am seriously underwhelmed.
The Morefine M6 is a 12V 3A USB-C device, which while not in spec, isn't too rare. The GL.inet is a 5V 3A device. My framework laptop will charge at whatever.
What I need from this power supply for travel is 3 consistent ports that will be on when they should be.
The Prime is completely unwilling to offer 12V to the M6. I was sure from reading the tiny spec block on the Geogs-books.com webpage that it could offer 12V 3A, but it turns out that is only offered on the USB-A ports and it is picky.
The supply offers multiple power zones which are shared across ports. This is super confusing and the UI is frankly terrible. The Pine Power just has 4 separate supplies.
I want to host computers from this supply, but it won't give me 12V so the M6 is on a different power brick (the one that came with the OpenWRT ONE - a toy for next year). While working I charged my headphones, lightning on USB2. When I unplugged the headphones my laptop got a full power cycle and reconnect. A terrifying thought it I were doing something useful on a computer running from the supply.
Other things
The Openterface (worst product name) arrived just before leaving and I threw it in my bag in case I needed to figure out what is going on with the M6. The KVM side requires software that depends on KDE Plasma 6 which isn't packaged yet on FreeBSD. The video part of the KVM is just a MACRO SILICON HDMI capture device which I have (and got for a tenner). This works without the KVM software so I took a keyboard with me to handle the host control part if needed.
I have a large collection of cables, I'm leaning towards taking silicone cables now and have USB-C and Ethernet ones. They are nice to hold and the flexibility makes them much less annoying to use on a desk with a lot of stuff. They don't pick things up as easily as PVC copper cables do.
I have a pencil case for most cables that I got in a street market in Berlin last summer. It was a nice find.
For my winter pause project I wanted to do something with radios. I chickened out travelling with the Flipper Zero, it is too expensive to risk being stolen by a security guard in an airport. Instead I took the rad1o badge with its battery removed. I'm going to write more about that project if it gets anywhere. If it gets going to be serious type 3 fun.
For power I have a Shargeek 140, its nice enough and a good form factor. It looks really cool. The final interesting thing I took with me (and isn't pictured) is a half frame 35mm camera. This will get a write up once I get the first films back. No point talking about it if it doesn't work.
