$5 rebirth.
Monday, February 24th, 2020
I’ve been spending a lot of this evening repairing the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero W computer I use to put standard definition images up on an old Sony Trinitron monitor in my office. Why? Because (besides the cool factor) I want to remember what standard definition—the old television, before everything went 16×9 and HD—felt like.
And did I mention this was a $5 computer?
Which is all well and good until I make a minor mistake, or the internet makes a tiny mistake, or the Raspberry Pi’s operating system makes a tiny mistake, usually in the midst of backing up or restoring zillions of tiny Linux packages—chunks of code—that make this 2.59 inch x 1.2 inch circuit board do its magic.
And then, it’s dead. Nothing happens. No lights on the circuit board. But I don’t despair, I plow through a convoluted multistep recipe that involves scrolling through screen after screen of stuff that looks like this:
Get:34 http://mirror.pit.teraswitch.com/raspbian/raspbian buster/main armhf libmbim-proxy armhf 1.18.0-1 [70.7 kB]
Get:40 http://mirror.pit.teraswitch.com/raspbian/raspbian buster/main armhf libposix-strptime-perl armhf 0.13-1+b4 [8856 B]
Get:41 http://mirror.pit.teraswitch.com/raspbian/raspbian buster/main armhf libqmi-glib5 armhf 1.22.0-1.2 [443 kB]
Get:44 http://mirror.pit.teraswitch.com/raspbian/raspbian buster/main armhf libunicode-linebreak-perl armhf 0.0.20190101-1 [98.3 kB]
Get:45 http://mirror.pit.teraswitch.com/raspbian/raspbian buster/main armhf libva-wayland2 armhf 2.4.0-1 [17.4 kB]
Get:46 http://mirror.pit.teraswitch.com/raspbian/raspbian buster/main armhf modemmanager armhf 1.10.0-1 [1363 kB]
Get:47 http://mirror.pit.teraswitch.com/raspbian/raspbian buster/main armhf mpv armhf 0.29.1-1 [831 kB]
.
..and after a great deal of holding-one’s-mouth-correctly, it comes back to life, as if nothing has happened.
This time.
Did I mention it’s a $5 computer?
