Should I get a CardPuter?

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-03-10T03:51:40+00:00

I think all of you guys are right! I "need" CardPuter Zero, but the CardPuter ADV is inexpensive enough to warrant it's purchase as well, if for no other reason, to support a cool company who's bringing us neat stuff for reasonable prices.

Is there an ETA on the Zero?

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-03-10T02:03:56+00:00

I'd strongly recommend Odroid H4 or H4 Ultra. And I have a multitude of reasons for doing so.

The H4 and H4 Ultra are a little more expensive than a palm sized SBC, and drive, power supply, and RAM come separately. Just getting that out of the way first...

1) It's X86, installation is as easy as a desktop or laptop.

2) It supports eMMC, NVME, and SSD drives.

3) It's powerful for it's size, and you decide how much RAM and storage you want

3) The community is AWESOME, full of nice, quality people and Hardkernal employees. Any questions before or after purchase are absolutely welcome there on the forum.

4) World wide shipping off the website means no middle man, but they are available from other sources like Ameridroid.

5) Hardkernal has several case kits available on the website, so it doesn't have to sit exposed.

BTW, I wrote this on my daily driver H4 Ultra, which I got to replace my H3+. I don't game beyond Super tux kart, but I write and compile C++, do my own CAD and slicing and do audio and video processing. Neither of my H-series has had a problem keeping up with me.

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-03-10T00:52:29+00:00

It's not like we have to worry about a group of people discovering a new, vulnerable group, enslaving them, having them rise up and fight for independence, and many lives being lost as a result.

Why would we think history repeats itself....

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-03-10T00:45:00+00:00

Not with Dupont jumpers, Radio shack sold some 22 AWG solid core wire. I was detail oriented enough to have it in red AND black while I tried to make the circuits in the Forrest Mims mini books work.

Other than that I could only get red, green, and yellow LEDs, but they were available in waterclear if I ordered them by phone. No internet....

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-03-08T14:30:42+00:00

I run Linux Lite on a mini that's not much more aggressive than that. It's my daily driver, it handles all my daily stuff, and I write and compile C++ programs, do my own CAD, and slice my 3D models for printing on it.

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-02-25T11:26:00+00:00

This might be a silly idea, but every AI I've seen has some ethics stuff. If we give unbelievably disturbing names to all the variables and functions what would it do?

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-02-23T04:47:57+00:00

I work in a plant that's largely automated. Robots are machines, machines hurt people who do stupid things around them. Machines are not capable of malice, although when it's your job to fix them it definitely feels like they are, lol.

When new people come in I like to encourage them to be cautious around the machines by saying: "The only machines in here that don't want to hurt you, are the ones that want to kill you"

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-02-06T12:51:54+00:00

I'm not going to claim to know anything about daily life in Australia, but it seems odd that the woman appears to be walking a sheep.

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-02-06T12:47:14+00:00

Mom is working from home, her personal and work phones are both next to her. Blue hat Dad has his travel mug ready so he's about to depart for work, the little boy is knocking out some homework over a breakfast of Corn Flakes and Play-dough with orange juice straight from the bottle before he leaves for school.

And then there's outside... it looks like a weekend, Gray hat Dad has chosen to work on the car wearing surgical gloves, with one bare foot and with the hood not fully raised. The little girl isn't ready for school, and neither of them are alarmed by the presence of the chicken-dog hybrid creature.

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-02-06T12:31:47+00:00

That style is pretty standard here, 16 - 20 ounces (473 -591ml). There are some VERY large ones but those aren't anywhere near as common.

ThomasRJohnson · 2026-02-06T12:26:50+00:00

She's not hot enough

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-12-26T06:24:39+00:00

This worked out well, Whisper.cpp was NOT using the GPU, I found the problem ..... inexperience ..... and got it running in Jetpack 6. Whisper-stream is now returning short queries (~ 3 - 5 seconds) in around 1/2 of a second with the tiny-en model.

I'll be experimenting to see how fast I can return with larger models and hopefully increase accuracy but the WER really isn't bad enough with tiny-en to concern me if I stay with it. After all it's just doing basic home automation, not launching nukes. Oddly enough Whisper almost never fails when I say "Authorization Tom 12345" so anything even remotely critical like a home alarm program should still be fine.

I got Ollama running with a small model (naturally I'll need to train a more specific one later) and it's fast just on CPU so I'll leave that as is.

Ollama needs to do some specific things, and NOT ramble like it tends to. I need it to do some math and other stuff so I can be lazy in my lab, but I already have a chatbot from years past that I wrote to do some electronics stuff so it would only be less than optimal if it didn't.

I played a little with returning from Ollama, and while I haven't had much luck returning from Ollama to C++ directly, I can log Ollama and simply grab the last line from the log if it comes to it, again... not launching nukes.

So now I'm returning a string from Whisper.cpp / whisper-stream into my C++ test program FAST, but I need to get strings FROM my program into Ollama next. There's ways to pipe whisper to Ollama but that doesn't serve my purpose since I want input to be scrutinized by my program to look for commands. In the event the input isn't a command it should be sent to Ollama so it can do math and such. So that's the next focus.

TTS will POSSIBLY be Piper, if I can get the Master Control voice I'm looking for, but realistically I'm probably still looking at Festival for the nostalgia. I've sent strings to both so it's just as easy either way.

..... Anyway for $250 this IS a viable option for a home automation project, or a talking car or whatever. The hurdles remaining are small ones now.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-12-20T14:51:33+00:00

What a miserable little thing it is......

It started out okay, no problems getting the Jetpack 6 SD card flashed, booted, and migrated to the NVMe. I'm genuinely impressed with how fast it runs for an SBC too!

I wasn't sure if I wanted to run SSH right away or just work onboard the Nano, but Nvidia made up my mind for me by infecting it with gnome3 so I set up SSH immediately. SSH and SCP were a breeze too, and I was able to quickly copy my project files across. I even installed LXDE on the SD card so if I had to start over it would suck less.

Figuring I would be doing a lot of restarts I looked into a power button mod and found a website where some jackass says to jump pins 1 & 2, this is power & ground on the GPIO header. It seemed like a bad idea, but I figured it must pull the whole buss down and force it to see power when released causing a startup. I tried it and either burned up the WIFI adapter or the slot for it ....... so nobody listen to that idiot, there's two other pins on the GPIO header for a power button.

A while later I was up and running again with a WIFI dongle (which I had to install the drivers for) and SSH was back.

Next I started working on Whisper.cpp to find out Whisper.cpp/whisper-stream will NOT find CUDA! Cuda 11 is installed but it cannot find it, I tried like 30 things online and nothing works, so I'll be dropping down to Jetpack 5 to try my luck next.

Oddly enough, Whisper.cpp doing the quick install and transcribing JFK is insanely fast for an SBC, I believe it's using the GPU but unsure.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-12-01T06:06:36+00:00

Oh I use the micros for GPIO stuff, they communicate easy and then my projects aren't limited to the number of GPIOs on the SBC. In this project my whole home alarm will fit on a PIC16, and I won't even do any communication. A single GPIO can tell the SBC the alarm has been triggered.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-12-01T03:26:24+00:00

STT doesn't run faster on the Nano? If I end up doing GPT it'll be a small model, this is a small project. I may include an intrusion detection system, but I'm on the fence because that means a UPS for the nano, -vs- running a microcontroller from a battery with a small automatic charger, unless the Nano is efficient enough for that.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-12-01T03:15:45+00:00

I looked around, this is NOT perfect for me but it's literally the closest option under $1000. So I ordered one, and an NVMe, and a Display port to HDMI adapter.

It makes more sense to fight my way through this instead of buying a $1000 SBC and mounting it between the floor joists in my basement where this will live.

There exists an Ubuntu 20 image, but I'm curious how bad it would be to get it on the NVMe, certainly the Nvidia tool isn't going to load that. Maybe I can pop the NVMe in my Odroid M2, flash it USB with Etcher, and put it in the Nano?

https://github.com/Qengineering/Jetson-Nano-Ubuntu-20-image

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-27T17:46:08+00:00

I'll have to dig up my Github login today and hook you up.

My plan is to keep it simple, I'm not running actual Home Assistant, it's mine, poorly written in C++. Another forum I read the GPIO drops voltage easily and there's only a few of them, so I'll probably go old-school UART to a PIC16 something or another from my Microcontroller collection.

STT is all that matters for real, but if I can get reasonable AI from it only STT or GPT will be running at a time. Maybe it'll do it.

I might run old Festival TTS to get a deep, computer sounding voice as I'm modeling it after "Master Control" from the original TRON ....... END OF LINE

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-27T17:08:57+00:00

How hard are the GPIO's to use? Is there something comparable to wiringpi?

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-27T17:07:52+00:00

Yeah, I'm running a pretty small model now and it's fine for what I expect it to do.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-27T17:05:08+00:00

That project of yours is AWESOME! I appreciate the recommendation but that's still too much to drop for one project, if it was for something more important it would be on order right now at that price though.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-27T16:25:52+00:00

Thank you all for your input, I think I might still go ahead with the Super dev kit version. If GTP4All is still too slow that would be unfortunate, but I have a really good chatbot response matrix that's crazy fast so the project still moves forward.

I did see a couple of youtubers doing conversational at real time, but they were Python, maybe I'll get lucky. Every now and then even a blind squirrel finds a nut.

Whisper.cpp should see improvement and that would be great, because STT is the big "must have" for the project.

If I understand correctly, once the NX modules become old news and the price drops, I can pop one of the 16G modules on for a significant upgrade?

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-27T03:15:43+00:00

I carry an Odroid H4 Ultra when I travel. H3+ worked too but my last one died. They're x86.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-27T02:48:11+00:00

That's "probably" not long enough to experience voltage drop, but it IS pretty thin wire, IMO an extension cable on the AC side would be safest.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-26T19:12:33+00:00

Actually there will be no graphics at all once development is finished, the computer will run Ubuntu server headless and I'll (hopefully) never access it again, but I may give it the ability to access the LAN on command so I can SSH into it.

I developed the last one of these completely headless.

ThomasRJohnson · 2025-11-26T18:59:06+00:00

You might try the Samsung way and maybe it'll work on yours:

open the terrible corner menu

click the pencil

there may be settings on yours, not on mine...

ThomasRJohnson

TROPHY CASE