(Personal opinion not based on scientific evidence.)

I would say that’s not possible for a hobbyist. The main issues with this kind of DIY phones are performance, compatibility with existing software, and most importantly battery life.

The Raspberry Pi was never designed to be used with a small battery while still staying connected to the internet to receive notifications all the time, like a smartphone. If you want to build a usable smartphone you will need an efficient co-processor to do these tasks. This could get complicated fast unless you use a CPU designed for this job.

There has been some interesting progress with desktop environments and small touch screens. Still nothing as good as Android, but nice UI is no longer the main issue imho.

As for compatibility, good luck running Signal, Matrix and Thunderbird in the background without draining the battery.

That being said, if you are just doing it as an excercise without expecting to build a device that will replace your main phone, you can definitely give it a try. Have fun and learn much!

Ah! Sorry for the textdump, and thanks for the feedback. I’ll keep it in mind in the future.

Sorry, not an answer to your exact question… Dockge might be the answer if you need a web UI to manage Docker containers.

If you need something more specific, like a button dashboard to run custom commands, perhaps you could build your own with Vite (Node.js). You will need to understand basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. (EDIT: OliveTin makes more sense.)

As for authentication, you could configure a basic authentication on your favourite reverse proxy (such as Nginx), or look for something more advanced such as OIDC/OAuth2 through Keycloak.

In that case I would say start with a Debian-based or Ubuntu-based distro of your choice. Ubuntu-based distros are also Debian-based, since Ubuntu is Debian-based. Mint is Ubuntu-based so it’s a good choice imho. Mint should work pretty well for backups and Minecraft.

As a counter-example, Mint would (probably) be a poor choice if you want to turn that PC into a router or a DNS server, but sounds like that’s not what you have in mind.

If you plan to Install more stuff in the near future, you could optionally look into containerization (Docker) which would allow you to someday swap Mint with another distro when you decide that you feel like changing. All of this, without having to reconfigure anything. Portainer might be a good soft-entry to Docker if you don’t love the terminal, it gives you a nice UI. And it’s compatible with Mint, ofc.

As for the fedi instance, it’s a good exercise, you will learn a lot about networks. Personally I tried installing a Lemmy instance too, but I ended up turning it off as I realized that it didn’t make sense for my use case. It just wasted bandwidth to stay in-sync with the rest of the fediverse.

It depends. What do you plan to use it for? Depending on the answer, perhaps Mint might not be the best option, but I can share my personal experience.

My use case is a headless server running OCI containers through rootless Podman (this is Docker’s modern equivalent). I’ve been running this on Linux Mint on a compact PC for a few years. I enabled unattended upgrades, and once in a while I VNC into it and upgrade Mint itself. I also installed a CRON job to reboot automatically every few days. So far I’ve not encountered any major issues.

Euro-Office and Office EU (office.eu) are not the same project.

How does Euro-Office compare to IONOS Workspace, office.eu, the Proton productivity suite, Nextcloud Hub or XWiki: Euro-Office is more of an integration component. It merely handles document editing itself. Storage, as well as navigation, permissions and sharing logic has to be offered by a platform it is integrated in, like Proton Docs, Nextcloud Hub or OpenProject. – https://github.com/Euro-Office/.github/blob/main/profile/README.md#faq

Link for opting out: https://github.com/settings/copilot/features

In the “Privacy” section, set “Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training” to “Disabled”.

If you are in desktop mode, there is the “System update” app preinstalled, otherwise just run topgrade from the terminal.

If you are in gaming mode, update as you would update SteamOS.

This should update all software and firmware. You will have to update your games separately, though.

As far as I understand, audio cards hold a buffer of the audio that should be played at any time. If the CPU can’t keep up producing new audio, it will loop to the beginning of the buffer. My guess is that when you suspend, the CPU stops producing new data before the audio card stops consuming it. And that’s why you hear the last part for a short instant.

It also happens on my devices, and it’s always happened on all my previous devices as far as I can remember.

Disclaimer: this is based on my understanding + a lot of suppositions. It might not be accurate.

Sure, that’s what I thought. And Ecosia doesn’t do the same?

I do have an opinion about Ecosia, but it’s just based on feelings, so it doesn’t even make sense to share it. Apologies for not answering your question.

Instead I would like to focus on this point:

Ecosia isn’t very private, since it sends data to Bing

Also DuckDuckGo does this, but they aggregate and anonymize that data before forwarding it to Bing. That’s probably the best they can do without building their own first-party infrastructure. I would imagine Ecosia does the same.

You must have spent a lot of time into this, thank you so very much 🙏

With a bit of persuasion I managed to disassemble it without breaking it. I desoldered U1 and I can confirm that pin 2 is GND. Also, here are better pictures taken with a magnifying glass. Note that pin 1 and 3 were shorted to pin 2, but it didn’t make sense to me, so I assumed they bridged due to the thermal shock when the component burned, so I scraped around them.

And here’s a link to AliExpress.

I guess there is no easy way to bypass it then, it would probably cheaper to buy a new device than to buy a replacement IC. Also, I guess now I will have to upload a clean version of the corrected schematic, I owe this to you and the other great people that replied.

EDIT: I could probably bypass it entirely, I just need to inject 5V. Here’s the updated schematic.

Fair point. There were no such instructions.

I tried desoldering U1, disconnecting the piezo, and powering it with 3V from the batteries side. It blinks rhythmically, so I assume the MCU (or ASIC) is fine. But if I connect the piezo, power consumption drops to < 1mA and nothing else happens. So yeah, that component’s purpose is probably not to charge the batteries.

I will try to read the markings again with a magnifying glass later today. Unless you or someone else have better suggestions.

If not, why does your device have two power sources and one is not rechargeable.

That’s a good question, and that’s also something else I didn’t think about. I just checked the instructions and it’s not clear. Perhaps it’s an alternative way to power it. I’ll be honest, this is a cheap device. I don’t want to fix it because it’s expensive, I want to fix it because I literally didn’t turn it on even once before blowing.

I drew it as a battery, but that’s actually USB power (5V). That was probably a poor choice from me.

try image search

Oh. My. God! It worked! How on earth could it know that this specific PCB is what it is? That’s black magic! It didn’t find this specific one, but it correctly classified it and it also found similar designs. Seems like that blown component actually is part of the charging circuit, since other similar designs seem to omit it. I’ll try desoldering it and see if the rest still works. Thank you very much for this suggestion, that blew my mind!

Sorry about the pictures, that’s the best I could do with my phone camera. I took some more, they are not much clearer, but there are more angles at least, link to pictures. It certainly is a 6-pin package.

It didn’t occur to me that it could be part of the battery charging circuit, that would be nice as honestly I don’t care about using it as a battery charger (it takes two AA). I am a bit worried about plugging batteries again, as I am afraid I might damage it further. Assuming pins on the left to be 1, 2, 3 from the top and pins on the right to be 4, 5, 6 from the bottom: pin 1, 2, 5 and 6 seem to be shorted, pins 3 and 4 give me 90k resistance.

I didn’t try image search, do you mean on Google Image Search?

Yeah these pictures are not the best, are they? 😬 I took some more, they might be a tiny bit clearer, but I’m afraid that’s the best I can do with my camera, link to pictures. Seems to be AL322 or maybe AL022? Neither of the two returns any results for me, though.

R4 leads to somewhere for sure, but it’s hidden below the IC, so I can’t follow it. To disasemble it any further I would need to break it entirely. I guess that’s an option. I checked the middle right pin again, it only seems to go to C3 as far as I can tell. Pin 1 of U1 doesn’t seem to be marked, at least not anymore, but perhaps it might be guessable from the direction of the text?

I don’t get it 😅

I think the idea is that the cost of producing standardized hardware is lower than the cost of producing a custom version without that codec just for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Raspberry Pi Foundation was not interested in that codec, so they didn’t buy a license. Separately, as a special agreement, they then allowed the few interested users to get a personal license directly from the IP owner. Sounds like a great solution to me.

Not sure if the same reasoning applies to BMW, though.

I just shared my opinion. I didn’t need those keys because I was not interested in using their proprietary codecs.

For what it matters, if Broadcom decided to license the IP for some hardware accelerator I don’t have anything against it. As long as they don’t make me pay for it when I don’t need it.

Dedicating a small portion of the silicon to optional features is cheaper than designing two separate silicons one with and one without such features.

This was actually probably an efuse, so not really just firmware, but hardware. In any case we are not talking about a software/firmware feature to decode videos, we are talking a section in the silicon that stays dormant unless you activate it with a valid license key.

Imho it makes sense from an economical perspective: they develop, test and fabricate a single silicon that does everything, then they allow you to specialize it on demand for a fee.

In any case, we can agree to disagree.