Pi 4 + Argon One M.2 = Awesome

[Strider]

On 10/25/2021 at 2:21 AM, john_e79 said:

I have to ask what are the downsides on that one that prompted you to get an Argon case, or was it just that you wanted M.2? It would be really nice to be able to have the cooler tower with copper heat sinks and the M.2 at the same time with a case enclosure around that has good airflow.

I had no problems with it at all, it works perfectly, and it's a huge overkill for the Pi. Meaning I can push it and not worry about it. I mainly use it now for testing/overclocking Pi's outside of a case, just for fun.

I just wanted the Argon. To use a Pi 4 as a PC, SD access is simply far too slow for me, I knew I was going to use an SSD, and I liked the Argon case design the most. Compact and convenient.

I had also looked at the Retroflag NESPi 4 SSD and Geekworm X-825 cases, but it was the Argon that won for it's compact design, full size HDMI, and all rear I/O. I also already had a NESPi Case with a 3B+ in it, and this Pi 4 was not going to be a RetroPie box, and didn't want another one.

?

 

[TomXP411]

On 10/25/2021 at 8:42 AM, Strider said:

I had no problems with it at all, it works perfectly, and it's a huge overkill for the Pi. Meaning I can push it and not worry about it. I mainly use it now for testing/overclocking Pi's outside of a case, just for fun.



I just wanted the Argon. To use a Pi 4 as a PC, SD access is simply far too slow for me, I knew I was going to use an SSD, and I liked the Argon case design the most. Compact and convenient.



I had also looked at the Retroflag NESPi 4 SSD and Geekworm X-825 cases, but it was the Argon that won for it's compact design, full size HDMI, and all rear I/O. I also already had a NESPi Case with a 3B+ in it, and this Pi 4 was not going to be a RetroPie box, and didn't want another one.



?

Personally, I feel like the more robust SSD (compared to a micro-SD card) and the PC-like soft power down were the best reason to get the Argon One... although right now, I don't have a Pi in my ArgonOne case.

I picked up a 10" LCD panel, and I put my 8GB Pi in the back of that. I also picked up a RasPad for a specific project (camera controller for a video production suite), and I'm looking forward to rolling some Python code for that. 

[TomXP411]

On 10/25/2021 at 12:21 AM, john_e79 said:

I have to ask what are the downsides on that one that prompted you to get an Argon case, or was it just that you wanted M.2? It would be really nice to be able to have the cooler tower with copper heat sinks and the M.2 at the same time with a case enclosure around that has good airflow.

Personally, I wanted a "desktop" style case for my Pi. I strongly dislike the fact that cables come out two different sides of the Pi, and most cases make it difficult to put the Pi somewhere accessible and route the cables back, out of the way. The Pi 4 complicates this with the addition of the micro-HDMI ports, so...

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  Better cable management
  


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  Active Cooling (PWM controlled, so it keeps the fan fairly quiet)
  


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  Built-in HDMI adapter board, routes video, audio, and power-in to the back
  


• 
  Soft-off. Shutting down Linux will also physically power off the system.
  


• 
  The integrated SSD gives you access to more storage. I currently have a 256GB drive installed.
  

It's also worth noting that the Pi 4 can boot off of USB (although you may need to update the firmware), so you don't need a micro-SD card for day to day use in the ArgonOne case.

There are other devices that give most of these features:

• 
  The GeeekPi Acrylic Raspberry Pi Set-top Box Kit 
  
  
  
  
  • 
    HDMI adapter board 
    
  
  
  • 
    Active cooling
    
  
  
  • 
    Adds a front-facing USB port (uses the Pi's USB C port.)
    
  
  
  • 
    No SSD - but you could mount a 2.5" drive on top with a USB/SATA bridge
    
  
  
  
  


• 
  The Pi 400 has
  
  
  
  • 
    soft-power
    
  
  
  • 
    all rear-facing ports
    
  
  
  • 
    built-in keyboard
    
  
  
  
  

Argon also has a DAC case, which adds a stereo RCA output, for hi-fi systems. This is useful enough that someone is even marketing a professional MIDI sound module, using the Pi and the ArgonOne case. 

https://dynasample.com/downloads/DynaSample_XO-mini_Presale.pdf

So this hardware is a good base for small network devices, media players, and emulation machines. I'd much rather have something sleek like this sitting near my TV than the typical Raspberry Pi case, with stuff sticking out of every side.

 

[john_e79]

On 10/26/2021 at 11:01 AM, TomXP411 said:

There are other devices that give most of these features:

• 
  The GeeekPi Acrylic Raspberry Pi Set-top Box Kit 
  
  
  
  
  • 
    HDMI adapter board 
    
  
  
  • 
    Active cooling
    
  
  
  • 
    Adds a front-facing USB port (uses the Pi's USB C port.)
    
  
  
  • 
    No SSD - but you could mount a 2.5" drive on top with a USB/SATA bridge
    
  
  
  
  

I ended up getting the Acrylic Set-top Box Kit for RPi4 tonight over at Microcenter, and it seems like the best option for me. It comes in at about the size of my Intel NUCs.

I haven't tested the OTG yet but it looks like it does split out into a USB-C power and gives another USB female connector, it's not tapping into the 5V pins like the Argon did, which took away OTG capability for me. I'll try it out soon and see if I can still use it to emulate a keyboard/mouse to another device from the enclosure.

Also I got a separate USB-C M.2 enclosure that does M.2 SATA and NVMe as I have two older SATA M.2s I haven't been able to read with my NVMe enclosure. Am I right in what I've seen from pictures that the Argon M.2 is basically a USB to USB bridge that will bottleneck to USB 3.1 speeds?

[TomXP411]

On 10/29/2021 at 9:41 PM, john_e79 said:

Am I right in what I've seen from pictures that the Argon M.2 is basically a USB to USB bridge that will bottleneck to USB 3.1 speeds?

Yes, it’s USB. There is no PCI Express connector on the Pi, so storage is going to be limited to the USB port’s speed. Not that this is a huge problem: while programs do load faster on the ArgonOne SSD than on my Pis that run on SD cards, I suspect the CPU still isn't fast enough to saturate faster storage interfaces. I suspect even USB 3 is faster than the Pi’s CPU can really take advantage of. 

[Strider]

On 10/29/2021 at 11:41 PM, john_e79 said:

Am I right in what I've seen from pictures that the Argon M.2 is basically a USB to USB bridge that will bottleneck to USB 3.1 speeds?

Yep, pretty much what Tom said.

Also, using an SSD over USB 3 is still considerably faster than using any SD card or flash drive, especially when it comes to writes. So while the bottleneck is there, it's still the fastest option open to the Pi 4. At least the bottleneck is with the bus the data is going over and not the media being used.

[john_e79]

Good point on microSD/flash speeds. I’ve got a 3B+ that I put a Bind DNS and Dhcpd server on. I put a 4TB USB 3.0 backup on the 4B for a NAS. I’m copying over my 860 Evo 1TB to it right now so I can reformat the Evo and then put it on my Intel NUC i5 since it has PCIe. I’ll probably use the NUC for the X16 emu on that TV since it wasn’t quite 60fps on the 4B. Have an extra 3B that I wanted to use for a NAS but it’s only USB 2.0 I think. The X16 emu was really the deciding factor b/c I want to develop on the laptop and send to the TV seamlessly.

Having big video issues with the 4B though on that 65” 4K it wants to display with a font that you have to squint to read with glasses on. I set hdmi_group and mode in config.txt to boot 720p and it boots fine but then goes to 2160p after a few seconds during boot before it goes to emulationstation.

I was also thinking I could maybe set up the 4B maybe for a telnet/SSH BBS with Tradewars 2002 and other door games. I’ve got Dosbox set up on it and could put oBV/2 or PCBoard on it. I had DOS as a teenager I was an Ansi artist way back when and just now getting into Commodore and X16 don’t know what was good for BBS software on the C64.

[Scott Robison]

On 10/31/2021 at 12:00 AM, john_e79 said:

PCBoard

I worked there! Use PCBoard. ?

[john_e79]

On 10/31/2021 at 1:31 AM, Scott Robison said:

I worked there! Use PCBoard. ?

Hah, believe it or not I've modded setups for Renegade, oBV/2, Impulse, Iniquity, and Mystic BBS, but never got a chance to set up a PCBoard setup, although I did help someone with some testing on a board that ran PCB. So, PCB it is this go round. ?

My RPi4B is back to being a paperweight for right now, it took 2 days to copy what should be about 350GB from a M.2 Sata SSD to a backup USB 3.0 4TB, but exFat I guess was set up by the manufacturer with big cluster sizes because it wants to report half of the disk space is gone. Plus the case fan was way noisy compared to my i5 NUC and also bright so I'll have to fix those things. Originally my RPi4B was going to be an emulation machine, but it does good only up through about PSP level, doesn't do quite 60fps for X16 unless maybe you overclock it, which, I don't hate my machines, so I try to take care of them... then it was going to be an OTG HID keyboard/mouse, but ConfigFS doesn't work quite so well on some hardware devices I use... then it was going to be a NAS, but, that didn't turn out so well. Maybe it could just be a BBS I don't know, but it seems like it wants to be more, I just don't know what exactly. ?

I've got Ubuntu running on the Intel NUC i5 and it's working as good as Linux works anyway, given all the configurations I have to do, but I've got RetroPie set up on it, although it isn't showing Dosbox in EmulationStation. It runs Matt Heffernan's tile demo fine, but it's having sound issues on the YM2151 music, it's some kind of pulseaudio/alsa configurtion muckery that you have to mess with on Linux systems I guess. ? Probably would have made more sense to put Windows on it, but I want something more lightweight for it than Windows 10.

It would be neat for there to be a version of DOS with PEEK/POKE like the C64 that is also 64-bit with ARM support, has NTFS, has TCP and utilities, has some of the things of Linux like multiple ttys, but is a lot more like DOS. I checked out FreeDOS but it doesn't do all the things. ?

[Scott Robison]

I would like to create a native Commodore like environment for the RPi as an alternative.

My biggest project for PCBoard was the scripting language PPL. It had peek and poke! ?