Novena first thoughts

I recently received my Novena desktop edition which I ordered during the crowdsupply campaign. I've been anxiously awaiting it since the beginning of February.

The box arrived in good condition with no obvious signs of being dropped or damaged. Opening it, I was greeted immediately with the schematics booklet which I proceeded to show off to my coworkers. I loved that the novena logo is everywhere on the hardware too, it looks great.

Assembly was straightforward, all that was necessary to boot was install the monitor. After reading the desktop assembly guide, I was sufficiently frightened of permanently damaging the monitor but it wasn't really all that bad. I did cause a bit of blanching due to over-tightening but it was easily corrected by loosening up the screws.

The first boot went smoothly. The setup required was minimal and fairly typical (locale, keymap, etc). I didn't have a whole lot of time to play with it that night so I got it running then put it down till the weekend.The Randomized name was a nice touch. I ended up with ‘novena-salsa-vision’ which I decided to keep for the novelty.

I booted it again this morning and had some circular artifacts and screen tearing on the LCD. My immediate first thought was that I had touched something I shouldn't have, but that wasn't the case. After running it for a while, it just stopped occurring (perhaps it was the software update, but I didn't have to reboot so I kind of doubt it). I wish I had taken a quick video of it; if it happens again I will. [1]

This computer will be my go-to project board from now on. I knew it would be from the instant I saw it. Because the novena came with a myriad RF breakout board as part of the stretch goals, the first thing I'm going to try doing with it is setup the SDR module and start scanning the airwaves. I'm new to SDR, so I'm really excited to try it out!

Overall, I'm extremely satisfied so far with my new toy. So much so that it prompted me to actually write another post which should be a testament to my excitement. Perhaps one day writing these will become easier, for now I'm just excited to get this up and running.

Thanks Bunnie and Xobs for organizing this awesome project!

[1] Update (2015-03-22): I took a video figured out the issue. It turns out the video cable runs right under the high speed expansion and that was likely causing some EMI. Moving the cable out from underneath the mainboard solved the problem :-)

dmesg: