Raspberry Pi 400 Daily Driver

I'm not sure what it is about this Pi 400 keyboard, but I end up with many typing errors I have never made on other systems. I've been struggling with this for months now, and haven't been able to track it down. It looks like it may be software lag missing inputs. I suspect this as I will actively type with extra force to ensure I pressed the key down fully. It usually doesn't bother me, but there are times where I am just not in the mood for it. I hate that I can't trust my keyboard and that doubt gets in the way all of the time. I've already made multiple typing mistakes on this log, while watching my typing. Still not sure what is causing this. It may be the nerve damage to my hands from my last job, maybe that I've been away from the keyboard for a while, might be that I just suck. I doubt it's a recent change though, as it has always been an issue. Probably a combination of software, hardware, and user error. The system is still quite usable, especially for the price. Seeing as the Pi 400 is about the only Pi you can actually get  these days, it makes an excellent Pi. I've got a few IBM Model M keyboards waiting on restoration that might eventually get an embedded Pi CM4, assuming I can actually get the modules and time to do it. For now, this will have to do.

I thoroughly despise the modern internet with its countless ads and interruptions. A little while back I installed the Firefox web browser on my Pi 400, and added the uBlockOrigin extension. Life has been so much better on the little Pi. I ended up liking it so much I installed Firefox on my Android phone and watch all my YouTube videos there. The difference is so profound that my friend saw it and wants me to get him ad free browsing and YouTube on his smart TV. Ads waste so much time and data that it should be a crime. I shouldn't have to search for the close buttons and click off ads and various requests every few seconds on a website. When I encounter that, I immediately leave the site. Firefox with uBlockOrigin is an excellent way to thin the herd of online ads, and has the benefit of reducing the Google data mining on my Pi. I watch a fair amount of YouTube videos on various topics, and the ads are horrendous. It's far better now, with no ads cutting in mid word, multiple times in a short video. I'm working on building a life that does not require internet to run, but until then, I am stuck with all the garbage being thrown at me. Thanks Mozilla for making Firefox. I rather enjoy it.

I got an email the other day that required me to sign and return a document. As I loathe the paper experience, I decided to see if I could handle this with a Raspberry Pi 400. For the most part, this was actually a very simple process. Step the first was to do a Google search for "digitally sign PDF pop os." This brought me to a Reddit post recommending Xournal. I found Xournal++ in the PopShop on Pop!_OS, installed it, and played around a bit. I set up the input stability and ended up getting my form filled out and signed in about 15 minutes. I remember struggling with this very task on Windows years ago, and gave up. I was pleasantly surprised by how well this worked, though it did take some practice to get hand written text that didn't look like it was written in crayon. I'm not sure if most people would suspect that it wasn't printed and hand written either. Overall, a very good experience that saved me a fair bit of time and hassle.

A while back, while editing a video for YouTube on the Pi 400, the audio began to cut out. This is on the headphone jack built into the Pi 400. It was so bad as to be unusable. At first I thought the software was lagging. After a while, I verified it was a hardware issue by wiggling the jack around. After opening the case up, I discovered that the solder joints on the jack had come loose, as they were very poorly soldered. I was able to bring out the Ryobi cordless soldering iron and had it resoldered in about a minute. The jack is working again, and it does not seem there is any damage to the pads on the PCB. I'm surprised this hadn't failed sooner, judging by how poorly the soldering job had been done. Luckily I have no trouble with such issues, but had this been in the hands of a non hacker type, the outcome would have likely been far more frustrating.

I discovered the dacberry 400s quite recently, and may pick one up at some point, as the audio output on the PIdock 400 is very flat and quiet, and turns off when the display goes to sleep.

So far, the system is still doing well, and I continue to use it as a daily driver for all purposes.

I ended up using this PC to convert a bunch of audio files for the Zoom F1 project, and actually forgot that I was having issues with the OS locking up. I haven't been able to narrow down the root cause yet, but the intermittent nature makes me think it might be a hardware issue. For the time being, I will assume the system is unstable and prepare accordingly. When I have some extra money, I'll order a few more SSDs and a M.2 SSD and USB 3 adapter to use for the main boot drive. For now, I will keep running on the old SSD and hope for the best.

Tonight I decided to do something fairly simple: plug my Pi 400 into a secondary monitor in the form of an old LCD TV I have mounted on the wall. I even mounted my sound bar above it and mounted a swivel mount platform for the laptop to sit on. I fired up the Pi and the dual monitor setup works fine. Too bad the wifi is useless. Oh well, I can deal with that for now. I confirmed it's a signal problem. Nothing I can do about it now. I went to go set up audio and make sure the "Dummy Output" device problem wasn't back. It sure was. Awesome. So no audio at all. All I wanted was to listen to some music while I do some chores. Not an option. Fine, screw it, I'll just do a fresh install of Pop!_OS on the SSD and be done with it, as I know it's likely an update that kills audio device support. Fresh install, can select which audio device just fine. Open file viewer to load music off an external drive, locks the entire system up. Awesome. Restart, try to open file viewer again, locks the entire system up again. Sweet. Gave up, cloning my known working flash drive over to the SSD for probably the 10th time. I'm getting so sick of this and just want a reliable evey day PC to work with. I have a software project I want to start on, but I can't even get the Pi to stay running long enough. My old laptop won't boot anymore and has a broken screen, so I doubt I'll be able to get it working anytime soon,so I can't even go back to that. The most frustrating part is that the hardware seems to be fine and all my problems come from software. I can't stand Raspberry Pi OS as a daily driver, Pop won't run properly and just randomly destroys itself, and nothing else seems to boot on my Pi 400. I'm getting incredibly tired of this and about to go buy another PC and be done with this all. I love Pop on the Pi, but it's painfully slow from a flash drive or SD card, and is unreliable on the SSD. I know I should just throw more money at this problem and get a new SSD and such, but that's not an option right now. Even when I've built new PCs for people, wasted so much time troubleshooting software issues that it makes me sick. Nothing is simple and reliable anymore. Everything is geared towards consumers, which is an incredibly insulting term that no one seems to notice, and is just dumbed down or has every feature you could ever imagine. Raspberry Pi OS seems dumbed down to me, but for a good reason. It's reliable, but it gets in my way constantly. Pop is the most comfortable OS I have every used, but the experience on the Pi 400 is very disappointing. 

Today's rant brought to you by me. 

While I wait for the latest Jeff Geerling video to load on YouTube, I figured this would be a good time to post an update regarding the current state of the Pi.

I haven't had a single lockup since upgrading all the software, despite trying to get it to do so. It runs at a an average temperature of about 60C with an overclock of 2.2GHz, and the SSD sits around 44C. It would run a little cooler if I didn't have it sitting on my lap in bed, blocking all the bottom vents, but this is a realistic use case, and I like being comfortable. So far, so good. It seems updating has resolved the major issues. I still have working audio. Speaking of audio, I ran into a strange issue where the audio completely cut out every time the screen went to sleep. I was trying to sleep with headphones in, so I simply disabled the screen timeout at the time. I later woke up and realized that the audio is split from the HDMI signal by the LCD driver board in the Pidock. No HDMI signal, no audio. It's rather annoying, but I am grateful to have audio at all, considering the Pi 400 has no headphone jack. This leads me to another thought. I had considered making a HAT for the Pi 400 that includes audio output, a nice display and media controls so one could simply have a tiny tv handy while working on a Pi 400. This would make perfect sense for me, as I always have something playing. I hate bluetooth, so that's not a valid option. I'd like to let the display go to sleep and have music or tv continue to play and have access to it while the lid is closed. I might just get the PirateAudio bonnet thing from Pimoroni and be done with it.

I decided to find a dedicated music player instead of fiddling with VLC Media Player, and decided on Lollypop in the Pop_Shop. I try to stick with things from the Pop_Shop as i can be fairly certain they will actually work. Lollypop works just fine, though I am having trouble finding a few features, and don't like the lack of "currently playing" section. I enjoy it for the most part. I like to practice singing and having it pull up the lyrics is helpful for songs I can't understand or that are in foreign languages.

YouTube playback is better than ever using Firefox. Chromium wouldn't install last time I tried, and I am trying to get away from Google where I can, so Firefox it is. Updated Pop!_OS has given me the best out off box YouTube experience on the Pi so far. Everything else is pretty well unwatchable to me. I'm on very slow and spotty wifi, so I am sticking with 720p for now. I have been able to play 1080p as well.

Overall, the system is working well, and the new SSD has made a massive improvement. It went from "Usable" to "pleasant".

Ok, my video should be loaded by now, so I will end this entry here.

After the short lived success of the SSD last night, I’ve returned to figure out why the entire system would hang up in excess of 10 seconds, quite often. I suspected heat was the issue, with the SSD getting too hot outside of its metal case. I noted, however, that the chips on the board were not making contact with the metal case of the SSD(which I removed), leading me to believe that it was not being used as a heat sink. My next thought, after remembering what I read on the label of my Intel SSD is that it’s drawing too much power and causing power drop outs. The 120GB Intel SSD claims a power consumption of 0.7 amps. That is a fair bit of power from a Pi USB port. The 256GB SSD might draw even more. The Pi is currently being powered from the Pidock 400, which is plugged into a cheap old 12 volt power supply I had laying around. The power supply got very hot last night, and may be causing problems. Saving progress on the log, shutting down, testing again with the SSD. Currently booting off of the Samsung Bar 32GB drive.

I’ve gotten the system running off the SSD once again, using the Vilros power supply the Pidock came with. It seems to be a high quality supply, with a UL rating, and output of 12 volts at 3 amps. It seems to be working so far, but the lock ups were seemingly random, so we shall see. In order to know exactly when a lockup occurs, I am leaving the system monitor running off to the side so I can watch the CPU graph. So far it has been a few minutes of typing with the monitor running and Firefox sitting idle on the other side of the screen. If the issue is one of power supply, the problem should go away. If it’s an issue of heat, it should come back when the system heats up. I’ve turned off all overclocking since this problem occurred, and I can feel the difference in every day use.

After much tinkering, it would seem that I have sorted it out. I can no longer replicate the problem, which was important in testing this. I still do not trust it yet. I booted from my original drive and used the Gnome Disks application to check and repair the file system on the SSD, which it did find errors on. I would normally use the command line utility, but I am trying to use the tools that would be available to the average user, and non Linux users or general power users. This is important to me as I am trying to help the Pi 400 gain popularity with normal PC users. The dirty bit was set, indicating the drive was unmounted improperly. This tends to happen when you pull power from the system multiple times after a crash. Even after the repair, the problem persisted. I noticed a pattern, which is always critical in problem solving. I noticed that the system seemed to be working in the background, but all video output was frozen. As this drive was cloned from a known working drive, there shouldn’t have been any changes in software, but there was a hardware change that could have caused corruption when the data was cloned and the partition resized to fill the larger drive. After finally getting the temperature display software installed and working, I watched the temps of the CPU and SSD. Neither were getting hot enough to cause problems, as far as I could tell. It seemed to lock up when inputting from the keyboard into system utilities such as the terminal and the Pop Shop. Between this, the file system errors, and the previous problems with display lock up and video playback issues, I guessed it was possibly just a software problem at this point. Normally I would keep a system up to date, especially with the exciting new features that come out regularly for the Pi. I have been holding back updates on Pop!_OS since the beginning due to an unknown update breaking audio on the Pi 400 through HDMI. Deciding this new problem was far worse, and having a back up drive to work with, I decided to update the entire system. It froze up during the update, and I had to remove power once more. After using <sudo apt –configuure -a> to resume the upgrade process, I was able to finish it and reboot. The audio still works, which suggests that System76 have already addressed the issue. I now have an up to date system with working audio.

To really test the new found stability, I tried recreating the freezing issue. I opened the Pop Shop and started typing “temperature” which froze the system every time previously. It did not freeze this time, and I have been unable to cause further lock ups. I have converted the problem video file to a YouTube format with Handbrake, watching the temps, and have been writing this log up in LibreOffice Writer. The autosave feature saved my previous thoughts and recovered this document successfully. I am quite grateful for such features, despite the larger program that takes longer to open. Running from this SSD makes that far less of an issue though.
The next test is to try and play some video files, including the known problem file from previous tests. I’ll assume it will crash the system and save my log file before hand. I will open the system resource monitor first then try to play the file, with audio. The video playback test was a success for the new YouTube friendly file. It would appear that an update has gotten hardware acceleration working as the CPU usage averaged around 60% on all cores, instead of the usual 100% on all 4 cores. Trying the known problem file which uses the x264 codec and is known to max out the CPU and crash the system: The test was a partial success, with the video starting to play, then freezing on a single frame. CPU usage was about the same as with the new file, which is a marked improvement over previous tests. I was unable to actually watch the video, but it did not cripple or crash the system. I can work around this by either rendering from Kdenlive in a more reasonable format, or just immediately encoding with Handbrake after rendering to x264. I would prefer to render a video that can be reviewed immediately and uploaded if ready. Even if that is not an option, this process does work and would be reasonable for the occasional video production task. This entire system is not well suitable for full time production, but is viable for hobby use.

It appears that System76 have been busy upgrading Pop!_OS for the Raspberry Pi 4 and Pi 400, as the upgrades have improved performance and fixed crippling bugs. I will keep testing, and if I find no more bugs, I will clone this drive and continue testing. This OS is far too slow when run from something averaging less than 70MB/s, but is quite usable from an SSD averaging over 300MB/s. I still plan to upload the results from my tests, but wanted to get the SSD working first so I had a more usable system to work from. It is well worth the cost and effort to upgrade the boot drive from SD or flash drive to an SSD. One of the big advantages most people may not be aware of is that of drive heat. When a drive gets hot, it slows down. The Pi 4 and 400 dissipate enormous amounts of heat through the ports, including USB. The all metal Samsung Bar Plus flash drive, while excellent, gets too hot to handle while in use and runs unusually slow. One solution might be to use a USB 3.0 extension cable to get the drive away from the system, but the copper wires will still conduct heat. I may test this in the future. The bare SSD with the Sabrent adapter fits nicely into the Pidock 400 and sits over air vents in the bottom of the case. I am working on an idea to make an active cooling system for the Pi 400 that plugs into the ports on the back, adding a massive heat sink, and passing the ports through. Between port connectors, material cost for the heat sink(I’d go for solid copper) design time, and machining costs, this could be a very expensive undertaking. I feel such a thing is worthwhile, considering just how capable the Pi 400 is turning out to be. A massive heat sink with fans could really open it up to things like background video rendering, higher end games and emulation, or even industrial applications. The cooling is already reasonably good, but could be far better.

On the subject of cooling: The Pi 400, inside the Pidock 400, at stock speeds is sitting idle at 45C. I have seen it stay under 60C while rendering. I will do some thermal testing with overclocking and see how fast the Pi can run without throttling inside the Pidock. I am finding it incredibly difficult to find any info on the Pidock 400, so I might as well test it. Even at stock speeds, this Pi is fast enough for general use.

Check back later for test results. I will likely combine the thermal and drive speed tests into one log. I will also test drive speeds after they have had a chance to heat up during stress testing and see how performance changes. I need to figure out how to make nice looking graphs, so this is a perfect excuse. I’ve never actually needed to make graphs or presentations, come to think of it. Outside of school, that is. Time to learn a new skill.

For whatever reason, the entire system is now so unstable as to be unusable. It will quite regularly freeze for over 10 seconds. The kind of freezing where the mouse cursor doesn't even move. It happens so often that it's not worth using. With my other laptop dying today, I'm in no mood to deal with this tonight. I'm getting very frustrated with the fact that I don't own a single reliable computer that doesn't need to be tinkered with constantly. I love the Pi, but this is getting ridiculous. 

I turned off the overclocking and am just going to let it cool overnight after converting the problematic video file that it just wouldn't play before. It plays now that it's in a more standard format. Too bad the entire OS locks up. 

I suspect it's heat related. Possibly the SSD overheating. Will deal with it later. Really frustrated and tired. Had to listen to a barking dog all day while I was trying to take a nap after working out for the first time in about a year. Just a rough day. 

Today my Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA adapter came in and I finally got to boot my Pi 400 from an SSD for the first time. First time I've ever booted a Pi from anything other than a flash drive or SD card. I got sick of the flash drive being so slow that it nearly made the OS unusable. I chose the adapter based on a brand I recognize and the fact that it's the smallest I could find. I was able to cram it, a case-free SSD board, and most of it's extra cable neatly inside the Pidock 400 case. The Pi sits up just a little bit higher than it used to, but I should be able to correct that. It doesn't interfere with typing, so I don't mind.

The speed difference was immediately apparent when I started using the OS to do some bench marking of the various drives I have. I will post the results in the next log. The old 256GB Samsung SSD I'm currently running from beat out my old boot flash drive by quite a lot. It's about 4.8 times faster on the read, which makes an incredible difference. I will eventually get a larger capacity and faster drive, but I suspect I will eventually reach the limits of the Pi at some point.

Initial impressions tell me that this was well worth the $12 or so I spent on the adapter. I love Pop!_OS on the Pi 400, but it was incredibly slow. Even running from my fastest USB 3.0 flash drive. I have to give credit to Raspberry Pi OS for running far faster from an even slower micro SD card. Pop is just a far slower OS on this machine. However, booting from an SSD has made it plenty fast enough for daily use. The SSD and adapter are inside the dock, and out of the way. It almost looks like it's meant to be there. The blower fan I bought won't fit into the dock, but the SSD and adapter do, which is more important to me anyway. I used to dread having to open new programs on here, but no longer.I highly recommend this upgrade for anyone looking to use a Pi 40 or Pi 400 as a daily driver. USB flash drives just can't compete, overheat faster, and end up being far more expensive. Even the oldest, slowest SSD is likely to be faster than the fastest flash drive.

I have benchmark results from all of the drives I have boot from since starting this project and will try to post a detailed report of my findings tomorrow. This Pi 400 laptop I'm building has quickly become my favorite PC of all time, and I doubt I'll ever get rid of it. I'd love to buy a second one, but can't justify that, and things are out of stock for the most part. I will continue my quest to make the best Pi 400 daily driver I can with renewed haste and vigor.