uConsole essentials and Motorola Lapdock

I'm playing around with the ClockworkPi uConsole a while now. The most annoying things are the battery life and the crappy wifi antenna.

A new antenna

At least i got the wifi problem fixed with a small 3db 4cm RP-SMA IPEX antenna - the official antenna for the Raspberry Compute Module is also a good choise. I just glued the female connector in the lid above the screen with hot glue. Even if i not connect the antenna the connection is much better than with the flat antenna that comes with the uConsole.

Battery tweaks

I also improved the battery charging time with some device rules. Here a little shell command for this:

echo 'KERNEL=="axp20x-battery",ATTR{constant_charge_current_max}="2200000",ATTR{constant_charge_current}="2000000"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-uconsole-charging.rules

If only the battery would last a little bit longer... the cm4 and the screen seem to suck a lot of power. I tried to reduce it with only enabling 2 cores or trottle the clock to 800 Mhz max. But this doesn't have much a effect.

A nice case

With the USA Gear case for a GPD Pocket i can now take the uConsole with me. At the moment i'm on the go and typing these lines in a terminal via micro on my little handheld.

Motorola Lapdock

Since the Lapdock has a quite ugly display resolution of 1366x786 and there is a bug in Raspberry Pi OS for the cm4 (and Pi 4 in general) the Lapdock doesn't work out of the box.

I found a solution on the official Raspberry bug tracker on github. Sadly with just putting a xorg config into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ i didn't have much success but with following little script i can correct the messed up screen after connecting the Lapdock:

#!/bin/bash
xrandr --newmode "Lapdock" 70.01064 1368 1414 1446 1498 768 772 776 780 +hsync -vsync
xrandr --addmode HDMI-1 Lapdock
xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode Lapdock

I put it into my ~/.lobal/bin/ and run it if needed.

Final thoughts

With this all the uConsole gets finally somewhat useable for me. I run a terminal (sakura) maximized at login, encrypted my home, sync via syncthing with my workstation - and write this little gemlog entry with micro directly on the uConsole.

I hope i find a good solution for the battery life. About 4 hours are not great for such a good portable console / handheld pc. But for the price and value if the uConsole is just awesome.

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