General > General Technical Chat
Pi "foundation" gets fatter
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rstofer:

--- Quote from: james_s on September 23, 2021, 05:53:23 am ---And it's such an incredibly useful and versatile little machine. If someone can find me a similarly powerful micro PC that runs a full fledged *nix OS, has a full development environment, consumes under 5W idle with a similar level of hobbyist support at a similar price point I'm all ears. Despite its warts I love the RPi and have used a pile of them in various projects, they've proven themselves to be exceptionally reliable, the very first original generation 128MB RPi I bought back when they first came out was still working when I finally upgraded it to a Pi4 about 6 months ago. They aren't perfect, but I haven't found anything similar that works any better. The RPi has hit critical mass so it's going to be hard for anything else to touch the amount of software support it has.

--- End quote ---

Absolutely!  I have a bunch of PIs of various generations and 3 Pi 400s.  I like them all and, at the moment, one of the 400s is being used as a desktop.  It's nowhere close in speed to my tower or even my laptop but how much do I need for browsing and tinkering?  It's about the IO header!  There is no reasonable way to get at hardware IO on my tower or my laptop.  Any attempt at external IO will involve more hardware than there is on the PI, in total.

If I want to play with machine vision on a movable robot, the tower is pretty useless.  I have seen people use a laptop for this application but that was years ago, pre-PI.

Another SBC that is interesting is the NVIDIA Jetson Nano.  What these folks are doing with the CUDA units is amazing.  One of these days I'm going to buy one of their high end graphics cards just for the CUDA and Tensor units.

For those who are down on Raspberry PIs, why not just use the competitor's products?  Why all the whining and sniveling?
bd139:
I started a technical thread on their forum regarding the power issues and SD reliability issues early on in their product cycle. I kept it nice suggesting fixes. This was met with denial and questioning my credentials.   I suggested that I would not use their products in future because of these problems. After a couple of days all my posts were deleted and my account on the forum deleted. I continue not to use these products because they are denialists and censor criticism and technical issues. I have seen several people reporting this.

That’s reason enough to be bitter and explicitly warn people away from their products.

I have other reasons as well related to the relationship between Cambridge university, the raspberry pi foundation and Broadcom as well which is a corrupt little circle of hell. (Have also had to deal with BCM professionally before).  There is a lot of preferential treatment and cronyism in the group. First and second hand experience there for ref.

Also it’s STB junk. I need reliable storage for any computers and SD cards or USB mass storage is not it. Minimum SATA or NVMe.

The applications I used the Pi for were better serviced with embedded PC platforms and repurposed Lenovo Tiny desktops. Any IO can be hooked on slave processors (arduino for example).

Really the Pi sits in a grey area between embedded and proper computers. It’s better to push the problem to either side than take on the compromises it forces upon you.

Edit: don't get me started on the "makers" bollocks either. Their marketers worked out how to hook into "identity marketing" only. First you create a group of people, name it and try and make it an intentionally naive movement. Then you start hard selling to their identity, not to their needs. This itself is a disease of society which needs to be cured as soon as possible. It disempowers people and no one benefits educationally in the end.
bd139:

--- Quote from: AntiProtonBoy on September 23, 2021, 03:02:01 am ---I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.

--- End quote ---

Got to be honest here this is a stupid comment.

There are literally skip fulls of consumer centric Linux hardware everywhere. Every damn computer shop is full of it. Gumtree, ebay, garages eveywhere. Computers are ubiquitous junk these days and Linux mostly works on all them them 100% better than it does on some low ball POS ARM board.

If they cared about access to computing they would be selling recycled guaranteed PCs with an easy to use Linux distribution. No they are selling BCM SoCs stuffed on the lowest part count board they could get away with and Liz is drinking a lot of wine.
james_s:
You seem exceptionally bitter about this thing, for what I suspect are political (in one sense or another) reasons. My experience with the product does not reflect yours at all, I have had a grand total of *one* SD card fail in what, 10 years? This is 24/7 service of a handful of RPis. I've had a few power supplies fail but that isn't the fault of the pi. It isn't enterprise grade gear but for a <$50 computer these things are fantastic, there's nothing else like them on the market, it seems perfectly natural to me that they've been a smashing success and sold hundreds of millions of units and I think any one of us would love to be able to say we had delivered a product that reached an order of magnitude less success. Yes there are loads of other Linux devices out there but there is absolutely nothing I can think of that has put Linux in the hands of so many end users, in a tangible form rather than hidden away in the core of some consumer device. If it doesn't meet your needs there are other choices, but the RPi is a fantastic product in my mind and despite what I may think about the company itself I wish them continued success and I will continue to buy their products as long as they continue to deliver something that I want.

Recycled PCs are worthless to me for any of the things I use a RPi for. The power consumption is far too high, replacing an old PC with a similarly powerful RPi will pay for itself in short order on energy savings alone. For embedded applications a proper industrial embedded platform costs an order of magnitude more and makes no sense at all for a hobbyist project.
bd139:

--- Quote from: james_s on September 23, 2021, 04:57:37 pm ---You seem exceptionally bitter about this thing, for what I suspect are political (in one sense or another) reasons. My experience with the product does not reflect yours at all, I have had a grand total of *one* SD card fail in what, 10 years? This is 24/7 service of a handful of RPis. I've had a few power supplies fail but that isn't the fault of the pi. It isn't enterprise grade gear but for a <$50 computer these things are fantastic, there's nothing else like them on the market, it seems perfectly natural to me that they've been a smashing success and sold hundreds of millions of units and I think any one of us would love to be able to say we had delivered a product that reached an order of magnitude less success. Yes there are loads of other Linux devices out there but there is absolutely nothing I can think of that has put Linux in the hands of so many end users, in a tangible form rather than hidden away in the core of some consumer device. If it doesn't meet your needs there are other choices, but the RPi is a fantastic product in my mind and despite what I may think about the company itself I wish them continued success and I will continue to buy their products as long as they continue to deliver something that I want.

--- End quote ---

This is a lot of turd blessing I hear.

Sample size one for you. That's not reality.

This is heavily marketed as an educational tool. My daughter's school bought 50 which ended up in a big cardboard box because the two hour lesson slot was debugging raspberry pi problems. Broken connectors, complete failures, SD corruption, boot problems.

It's terrible terrible terrible. Unless you like meddling with shit and fix it all the time which is not an education.


--- Quote from: james_s on September 23, 2021, 04:57:37 pm ---Recycled PCs are worthless to me for any of the things I use a RPi for. The power consumption is far too high, replacing an old PC with a similarly powerful RPi will pay for itself in short order on energy savings alone. For embedded applications a proper industrial embedded platform costs an order of magnitude more and makes no sense at all for a hobbyist project.

--- End quote ---

Nope.

Lenovo M600 Tiny. Runs x86-64 Linux. 2 passively cooled Celeron cores. Upgradeable RAM 4-8Gb. SATA M2 SSD port. 2x displayport connectors. 6x USB connectors. Runs of 19V DC. Built in WiFi, serial, parallel. Comes with its own enclosure. 6 watts idle. 12 watts under load which it can sustain 24/7/365. will last 5-8 years. Has been able to render 4k video longer than the Pi has  :-DD.

Costs ~£109 a go with an actual real RAM (4Gb) and a proper SSD in it (120gb) and it works reliably out of the box every time running headless debian.





I had a whole kubernetes cluster running on 4x of them  :-//

That whole cluster cost me £24 to run on electricity for an entire year...

Or buy an arduino.

The problem here is they are marketing it into the space of professional computing and the outcome is dissapointing as hell.
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