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Pi "foundation" gets fatter

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thm_w:
No one is forcing you to run a raspi from a cheap SD card.
Either buy a quality high endurance/SLC SD card or run it off USB SATA adapter.

If you ran a full PC from a cheap microSD card the same problems would occur.

Just_another_Dave:

--- Quote from: rstofer on September 23, 2021, 03:21:30 pm ---
--- 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?

--- End quote ---

A company called Adapteva had an interesting board (parallella) that included an FPGA and a RISC processor with 16 cores (not the most impressing one that Adapteva was able to manufacture according to their website). Unluckily they didn’t release any improved version of that computer

james_s:

--- Quote from: bd139 on September 23, 2021, 06:40:31 pm ---Start with the application requirements and work back to the device.

--- End quote ---

Ok here's an application I used them for. 6 channel "cable headend in a box" for simulating old style TV channels on vintage TV sets. Requirement is 6 composite video streams, priced at <$30/channel including storage. Low power is very important, as there's 6 of them, very small size also important, they need to fit in a rack of mini RF modulators. Must have readily available free software that will do what I want to do, I'm not a software developer and didn't want to waste time developing something. Low cost is the absolute top priority after being capable of doing the basic job.

Here's another application, Plex media streaming client, max cost $50, must fit inside an existing ~6"x4" enclosure from an obsolete streaming device. Onboard network, WiFi and HDMI a must, as is availability of a SPDIF output device for audio and ability to connect IR remote, max average power consumption 5W, must be silent and fanless, and again I don't want to develop any software, I just want to throw something together and have it work.

Another one: Mini desktop arcade game cabinet, must be able to run MAME and interface to small TFT or OLED display, max power consumption ~5W, "off the shelf" FOSS, I don't want to mess around with trying to develop software for it.

Home Assistant server, max cost $75 all in, including memory, storage and zigbee, average power consumption 5W max. Silent and fanless.

Interface between Davis weather station and internet, max cost $50, must have WiFi and run Weewx or other off the shelf FOSS, USB required for interface to weather console. (I'm using a Pi Zero W)

Connect to internet and parse RSS streams, displaying them on scrolling LED message board, off the shelf commodity hardware, mostly off the shelf free software, compact enough to fit behind the LED panels. Ability to either SSH or web interface to configure the device and update software remotely.

These are all real world applications either I or a personal friend are using RPis for, if you think you can come up with a solution for each of these that is equal or cheaper in cost, power consumption, physical space than a RPi then please clue us in. You might notice that in all of these applications, cost is the absolute #1 priority (these are all hobby projects), followed by power consumption and physical size. The Pi's have been at least as reliable for me as any other computing devices I own so that's total a non issue. The fact that you've seen someone use a RPi for something an AVR could do is irrelelvant, I've seen someone hammer in a nail with a pair of pliers, that doesn't mean pliers are useless junk. You're not going to stream MPG video on an AVR, and I think you'd be hard pressed to do any of these applications I've mentioned on any microcontroller without spending a great deal more time and or money and for what reason? A religious aversion to the RPi? To avoid imagined problems? How many RPis have you actually personally used that have had SD card failures? You seem to be really fixated on industrial/embedded/enterprise stuff where reliability is paramount, cost is no object and support is expensive and not grasp that there are millions of applications with different priorities. Decent quality SD cards work just fine as mass storage, I've had enough of them doing just that for long enough that it is a significant enough sample size for me.

Please do point me to all these bargain priced RPis flooding ebay because I can't find them, all I see is stuff like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/313677239921 which is an old model that is selling for more than the price of a brand new one, probably because the Pi3 has some advantages like lower power consumption.

Or this one https://www.ebay.com/itm/324799462677 that's what I'd consider a bargain at that price but it has 6 days left, it will go for more.

Model 2 is a bit cheaper, but this is like 8 years old. https://www.ebay.com/itm/274932788422

bd139:
Where do you want me to send the consultancy invoice?  :-DD

Only joking. Will reply when I get a few minutes.

rstofer:

--- Quote from: Just_another_Dave on September 23, 2021, 08:47:39 pm ---A company called Adapteva had an interesting board (parallella) that included an FPGA and a RISC processor with 16 cores (not the most impressing one that Adapteva was able to manufacture according to their website). Unluckily they didn’t release any improved version of that computer

--- End quote ---
If they can actually do 1000 Tflops, they blow the doors off the NVIDIA RTX3090 which can only do about 35.6 Tflops of 32 bit floating point or 147 Tflops of 16 bit floating point.  With that much horsepower, I wonder just how long it would take to factor a large number.  A thousand or so cards working together might make it a lot faster than advertised.

I tried the store but the web site is dead in the water.

We got to the Moon with machines capable of a couple of mega flops.  Of course, the CDC 6400 (and its cousins) had a 60 bit word size.

10,490 CUDA Cores in the RTX3090 will still make an impression when training a neural network.  I'm not up to speed with what to do with 328 Tensor Cores.

Next time I have $1500 to blow on a graphics card...

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