The Hoof & Paw
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Part 1 - Hardware

Here in Part One, We talk about the hardware →→→
  • In Part Two, We will burn Ubuntu on your MicroSD card.
  • In Part Three We get everything set up to my personal liking, but ymmv.
  • In Part Four We get CoreDNS built
  • In Part Five We deploy and configure CoreDNS
  • In Part Six We add a few odds & ends to make the host more durable
  • And in Part Seven We add the bits for the eInk display

Part One: The Hardware involved

What follows is some specific bits about the hardware in use here.

I’ll include links to any of the stuff we’re using on Amazon.

If you buy products through Amazon with these links, I may recieve compensation… …or I may not

Necessary Hardware

  • A Pi 4

These are hard to come by these days, and are stupidly overpriced (( thanks Covid )). So I’m not gonna include a link.

SD Card of non-suckage™

You’re likely to want a Micro SD Card that doesn’t suck.
The cards that I’ve been using with reasonable success and good speeds are

SanDisk Extreme Pro MicroSDXC


Additional hardware that makes life more awesome™

Micro HDMI to HDMI adapter


Keyboard


WaveShare 2.13 inch ePaper Hat

You could use a larger one too. This just happens to be what I have lying around.

Waveshare’s got their new v3 version:

This is what I had lying around.

Rpi Name [Pin]Eink Hat PinFunction
3.3v [1,17]1 RedVCC
GND [39,20]2 BlackGND
GPIO10 [19]3 BlueDIN
GPIO11 [23]4 YellowCLK
GPIO 8 [24]5 OrangeCS
GPIO25 [22]6 GreenDC
GPIO17 [11]7 WhiteRST
GPIO24 [18]8 BrownBusy
Waveshare-gpio

PoE Hat

The PoE Hats I’ve tried out caused some weird artifacts on the eInk displays…

I found that using Power/Ground from the PoE Hat was problematic. I was getting a LOT more noise and artifacts when using those pins.

Using the power and ground direct from the RPi solved the problems I was experiencing. YMMV.

I’ve tried a few PoE Hats with varying degrees of success.

The version I have isn’t for sale any longer, but this is the next generation of it:

The version I got from this vendor seem to work just fine on a Pi4.

Good To Know
The main caveat I’ve found is these will ONLY work when receiving power from an 802.3af compatible PoE source.