u/CryptographicGenius

Hello everyone! After 9 months of hard work while staying in Canada for study purposes, I'm proud to finally introduce Companion! This is my homemade embedded PC based on the Raspberry Pi 5!

Companion is a portable cyberdeck designed to be a sleek, modern, distraction-free machine in a distinguishable yet usable form factor: you can write, program, do web browsing, 3D modelling... with this cool device!

Here are the detailed specs:

• Pi 5B, 16 GB RAM version (but will certainly work with 4/8)
• 256 GB SD card storage (because I don't need super fast SSD for 95% of the work that I'll do on it)
• MJ64 mechanical RGB keyboard with AZERTY typewriter-style caps
• 2880x864 tactile IPS ultra wide screen from BOE
• Around 20 hours of battery life (148 Wh, 4 x 3.7V Li-Po cells) - haven't had the time to properly test it yet... with a BMS + INA219 for the gauge + DC DC converter
• PCIe used for an internal USB hub to expose the Pi's ports externally
• Running a derivative of ArchLinux ARM, with a custom kernel and some manually-compiled packages, with a custom Plasma-based layout + auto tiling window plugin
• Most components screwed for the most part, AFAIK only the battery + screen are exclusively taped in

Only con is that the battery charging board is incredibly weak: 5V 1A for this kind of battery setup is painfully slow. I plan on changing that with a beefier one, and then I'll proceed on making a bill of materials :]

Not gonna lie, there were a lot of frustrating moments along the way, but holding a working product at the end makes it all worth it!

The GitLab organisation is still a work in progress, but you can already have a look here if you're curious: https://gitlab.com/companion-pc/

Happy to answer any questions!

(Also, not sure if I'm allowed to talk about this... bit of a long shot, but I'm currently looking for a job from May to August [remote-friendly, maybe longer!], mainly in game engine, network, low-level, embedded, or web development. If anyone knows of an opportunity, feel free to reach out!)

Hey :)

I'm building a privacy-first home security camera called the ROOT Observer, and today I've finished the second prototype, although it's the first one that is presentable. This is printed in PLA on a Bambu P2s, I'll soon try out SLA to see if that looks more professional.

The last few months I've spent building the open-source firmware and app to power this device. It enables end-to-end encryption, on device ML for event detection, encrypted push notifications, OTA updates, health monitoring and more.

The camera is a standalone device that connects to a dumb relay server that cannot decrypt the messages that are sent across. This way, it works right out of the box.

I'll soon (fingers-crossed) send out the first pre-production units to testers on the waitlist :)

...if you're mainly interested in the software stack and have a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, you can build your own ROOT-powered camera using this guide. The firmware is very optimized so that you can stream video and audio, record, run ML, transfer recordings etc. simultaneously without crossing max. ~60% CPU utilization.

Happy to answer any questions and feedback is more than welcome!