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Pi "foundation" gets fatter
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voltsandjolts:

--- Quote from: LoveLaika on September 27, 2021, 02:09:36 am ---Wow. Who knew there was so much hate for the Pi.

--- End quote ---

Is there? I would say most contributors in this thread are indifferent or positive.
Bassman59:

--- Quote from: AntiProtonBoy on September 27, 2021, 04:48:23 am ---
--- Quote from: LoveLaika on September 27, 2021, 02:09:36 am ---So, what do you guys like to use in place of the Pi for what people use it for? UDOO? Pine? Beaglebone? Wandboard? (or the even more popular Banana Pi?) For me, Pi Zero is hard to beat in terms of its size.

--- End quote ---
Ignore the haters. Just use the Pi, unless you have something very specific in mind. It's dirt cheap and have nothing much to lose.

--- End quote ---

I have a Pi 4B that runs Octoprint, and that works well. Plug and play.

I have another Pi 4B that runs Home Assistant. While Home Assistant is "interesting," once it's set up it just works.

So for these specific little tasks that one can afford to dedicate an $80 thing, the Pi is fine.

Would I use it as a desktop Linux machine -- seriously, there are people asking if Kicad will run on a Pi -- well, of course not, that's silly.
djacobow:
My longest running pi project is an alarm clock with a real chime that gets its schedule from Google calendar.

I know it's old because I wrote it in Perl. I originally implemented with an RPi 1 in late 2012. It ran for several years without problems(*) on an SD card (not uSD, as that's what the 1 had) until the Pi died -- it would not boot anymore, even with a new card. I replaced it with a Pi2 (maybe 2015-6) and that hardware continues to run, but in the intervening time I think the card has gone into stuck RO mode twice, so I'm on the third.

Actually, it probably would be best to just set the whole thing up to mount the card in RO mode, but it's harder than it looks. I wish it were just some kind of standard config option one could set with raspi-config.

Anyway, it's 2021 now so I've had that alarm clock for almost 10 years.

I have a few other projects that have eaten cards for no obvious good reason. I have a homebrew irrigation controller based on a zero W that's been through a couple in a few years, but that device also locks up, so I wonder if inductive spikes from the solenoids are to blame. (Though they are controlled through opto-triacs so I'm not sure how they get in.)

I've also got a remote access device from my HF ham rig that has killed a few cards, and I just have no idea what's going on there.

(*) Google has changed their Calendar API and auth regime more than once, and I have had to make multiple changes to deal with that, but that has nothing to do with the Pi.

bd139:

--- Quote from: AntiProtonBoy on September 27, 2021, 12:45:38 am ---
--- Quote from: bd139 on September 23, 2021, 04:27:53 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---


Righto, but how often do you see "linux running on junk" promoted in the mainstream media? Never. The detail you actually miss here is marketing and exposure. If you care about promoting alternative an OS for people to experiment with (like I do), offering a shiny, compact product like a Pi is infinitely more appealing than getting people to bin dive for a filthy beige PC, and then convince them spending countless of frustrating hours trying to find and install a suitable distro on an obsolete system with a buggy BIOS.

I'm 100% on board with any scheme that encourages people off proprietary operating systems and onto open source platforms and hardware. And if there is a profitable way to do that for a company THAT'S EVEN BETTER! System founded on open source principles and actually makes money... think about it... it's literally the best of both worlds.


--- Quote ---low ball POS ARM board
--- End quote ---

Absolute nonsense. It's an awesome low power device. I use a single Pi as a server, which runs Docker with containers such as Apache, PiHole, Deluge + WireGuard, Samba,  Grafana, Prometheus, etc. It doesn't even break a sweat, and is great for saving on electricity because of its awesome performance/watt characteristics.

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This is quite funny because I run 20-odd production prometheus clusters on docker/kubernetes and there's one thing prometheus needs absolutely and that is IOPS and reliable storage. Putting it on a Pi is a stupid idea. It looks like it will work but it's going to burn fairly quickly. Also when it runs out of RAM, which it will (our proms are on 64Gb nodes), it goes down hard and will not start up again until you feed it much more RAM than the quiescent amount as it needs 2x more of it on startup than usual runtime to recover the data segments from the disk.

Ramming all that stuff into a Pi to save electricity will result in a miserable day where you lose all your stuff. I guarantee it. My day job is doing this stuff professionally and I know how it works and where it will fail and how sad people are going to be. My sample size is huge compared to personal experiences on this matter.

Regarding running stuff on junk, you can buy ready turd polished junk on ebay for virtually nothing. I've been supplying those things to people for at least two decades to keep them going for low cost. And usually these days the machine comes with a Windows 10 license. Prior to her dropping dead I bought my mother a nice i7 desktop with 16Gb of RAM and a 256Gb SSD with a Windows 10 license on the case for £139. That's 1000x time better ROI even if the outlay is higher and the electricity difference is ~£20 a year.

it is not worth costing yourself 10x the effort to save £20 a year

Dave pointed out that the Pi was aimed at the education market earlier, which is correct. This is my main objection. If you've ever spoken to anyone who had to run the piles of excrement in a school environment, you will understand why this fails. Also why there's a large box of broken ones at my daughter's school which are scrapped.

The expensive thing is time and pissing out 20 minutes per student per lesson trying to get the damn thing working reliably, dealing with flakey connectors, power supplies, SD cards and crashes is not a good education experience. It's a 10x sunk cost already the moment you pay for it. They now have windows desktops running python and visual studio code on windows.

I will say this and I don't care but Liz and Ben though marketing hype have actually damaged people's education. All they did is blow people's time away and put a lot of people off entering the industry by presenting them with a wall of problems to solve before they could even begin their education
LoveLaika:

--- Quote from: voltsandjolts on September 27, 2021, 09:23:22 am ---
--- Quote from: LoveLaika on September 27, 2021, 02:09:36 am ---Wow. Who knew there was so much hate for the Pi.

--- End quote ---

Is there? I would say most contributors in this thread are indifferent or positive.

--- End quote ---

Based on the initial comments that people had working with the thing (power, SD issues, etc.) and the Pi OS, they all felt kind of negative to me. Then again, I don't really know of another board that is ubiquitous as the Pi that can be thought of as "...it's the Raspberry Pi, but better". There's some niche boards, but I don't recall them being widespread.
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