EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: eti on September 23, 2021, 12:15:50 am
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https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/21/raspberry-pi-gets-45m-to-meet-demand-for-low-cost-pcs-and-iot/
Great. Now they can sack their useless "team" and hire some real staff. Then, they can ditch all these toys and start making ... oh, hang on a sec, what else could they make apart from silly toys that pretend to "relive the 80s bedroom programmer years"?
Wow. I can see that money always goes to the right people then
BIG "/s"
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
There's already tons of the latter, and a great majority of people carry one with them all the time, although most people aren't aware.
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There's already tons of the latter, and a great majority of people carry one with them all the time, although most people aren't aware.
Sure, we can be pedantic and claim that just about every embedded device and its dog runs Linux, or whatever, but obviously that's not what I meant.
What Raspberry Pi (and related products) offer is an alternate desktop environment to Windows or macOS. In other words, they create direct consumer exposure to the Linux platform. The more such devices exists, the better it is for all of us. If that means making more "silly toys", as OP suggested, then so be it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having fun.
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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.
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What Raspberry Pi (and related products) offer is an alternate desktop environment to Windows or macOS. In other words, they create direct consumer exposure to the Linux platform. The more such devices exists, the better it is for all of us.
That's a matter of opinion, to which some of us would disagree. I use Linux regularly, but I've also been a long-time user of Windows, and MS-DOS before that, and recently came back to using Mac OS again. They each have their place, and given there's no cost for most versions of Linux, it's definitely carved out it's niche in that market. But if I personally could have all my software running on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, I'd absolutely have chosen Windows in the past. I use Linux when I need to, but find it overly clunky to get things done. That may be heresy to some hard-core Linux programmers, but for me, Windows just works, even with it's numerous problems, and my almost daily mumblings about how retarded some things are in Windows. Windows may be retarded, but Linux I find to be way more retarded. I have some personal reasons for having become disenchanted with Mac OS way back in about the first year or so after the Mac was first introduced (1985 or so). I refused to touch it since, but last year with the introduction of the M1, am taking a fresh look at it, and if I was more proficient with Mac OS, I might even choose it over Windows, given the same condition that all software runs on all three platforms.
Of course, all software doesn't run on all three platforms, so for some of us we need to use two or more platforms. The fact that Linux is free is great if you're making some system that needs an OS, but is very cost sensitive. For my personal computer though, or my company's computer, the $100 or so additional to pay for a computer with an OS is meaningless in my opinion. My computer gets used many hours each day. Over the life of my computer it's likely to be used upwards of 10,000 hours, which means the cost per hour for the actual OS is maybe only 1 cent. My time, and increased productivity in using Windows over Linux is worth FAR more than one cent an hour.
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If you want to scare someone away from Linux FOR LIFE, make them endure the train wreck that is the HORRIBLE, buggy, janky "Raspberry Pi OS" and use it as a Desktop - it's a TOTAL MESS. I used a Pi 400, as a seasoned Linux user of 18 years, as my main Desktop for FOUR MONTHS... ugh. It is ghastly. The completely idiotic, weak argument that "It's only thirty pounddddds!" is precisely that (and the Pi 400 has the nerve to try and convince buyers that it is capable of "replacing a PC")
They NEED to stop, take the rose tinted specs off, and realise that NORMAL PEOPLE don't understand all this bullshit, and won't tolerate it. A BBC Micro IT AINT!!
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I’m with eti here. RPi foundation are damaging morons drowning in marketing hype leveraged by some intangible link to a history of computing failures promoted at successes here in the UK. I’ve had a couple of run ins with the asshats over the years and they’re a complete joke. I’ll write up a thread with references at some point.
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They’re the testing arm for Broadcom’s new SoC products (which just happen to stop off for testing in the pi, and then move on to their intended markets) and the “customers” are the guinea pigs, plus the “foundation” (I hate saying that, it makes me feel immoral, makes me cringe) make a profit.
There’s nothing special about it except they’ve convinced the whole kidult “maker” and “tinkerer” (ARGHHHHHH!!!!!) world that they’re the bottom line, the “gold standard” - they’re the RUST STANDARD, and the usual justification is “the amazing community”
It’s an eternal cycle of self-congratulation, smugness and brainwashed fans who stop there and aspire no higher, as they have swallowed the hype and didn’t think to test it through reasoning and critical thinking. Duh.
The icing on the cake is that the SoC is proprietary and the silicon cannot be revealed - so much for learning - they’re not teaching ANYTHING specific to their crappy products, they’re just parroting half-baked Linux experience, and the “advice” on the forums is laughable, and always comes from the same cronies.
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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.
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?
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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.
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
(https://i.imgur.com/Hjhnn0q.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/GmlHqib.jpg)
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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Ok so more than double the power consumption, 3x the cost (used) and physically at least 4 times the size, none of the IO, not even in the same class of product at all, total non-starter for most of my applications and the used/refurb market would dry up instantly at a small fraction of the RPi volume. A lot of things the Pi gets used for a PC like that would be totally inappropriate, handheld video game console or the 12" tall mini arcade cabinets my friend builds with them? Not gonna happen. Wall mounted device for home automation? Not gonna happen. Robotics? I guess if your robot is big enough and you don't mind kludging the IO by adding external hardware, but that excludes a huge range of smaller robots. Autonomous drone? Good luck with that. Wearable device? Yeah right. I built a multi channel video streaming device with a stack of 6 Pi Zeros, all six of those fit in a space much smaller than a single mini PC, natively produce the required composite video and the total cost was lower as well. There is a huge gap between a fullblown mini PC and a microcontroller that you seem totally blind to because it is not a need you personally have.
My own sample size is small yes, but TENS OF MILLIONS have been sold and they continue to sell like hotcakes, new versions regularly sell as fast as they can pump them out. The educational market they originally targeted is a tiny portion of what they actually sell to. People clearly love these things, it isn't just me. You are the exception, not the norm and one of the few people I've heard moaning about them. If they're marketing in the space of professional computing that's news to me, everyone I know that uses them is a hobbyist. It's a $40 toy, not an enterprise grade computer, I've said that before.
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We have other boards ranging from simple STM32 to full 64 bit ARM. That’s my point as well.
They sell because of marketing, not because of merit.
It’s the wrong tool for nearly every job it’s pitched at you’ve put out.
And millions of them end up in in a drawer, shed and eventually e-waste :-//
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Frankly I don't think there's any debating with you on it, you have something in the way of a pathological hatred for the whole thing and you will never understand what makes it popular and you will never change your mind. It does a lot of things reasonably well and it's cheap. It has reached critical mass, there is no other similar platform that is even remotely as well supported in the hobbyist community, and as with anything of this sort the software availability and support will make or break it. Same reason the Arduino is a smashing success, it is not the best at nearly anything, it has plenty of flaws, but it is extremely popular and widely supported. The fact that there are no bargains to be found on used RPis does not support your assertion of millions of them ending up as waste, even used ones are still in demand, if someone offered me a pile of old RPis I would happily accept them and put them to use, but that has never happened because even the old ones are still useful and people hold onto them. Every device will of course eventually end up as waste, nothing lasts forever, but a 10 year old Pi will have retained a much greater percentage of its original cost than a 10 year old PC.
Like I said before, if there's a viable alternative I'm all ears, here are a handful of my constraints:
Price under $50 brand new
Size comparable to or smaller than the RPi
Power consumption under 10W full load, 4W idle, lower is better
Onboard ethernet and wifi
Runs a full Linux distro
Built in GPIO, including SPI, I2C and 1wire
Built in USB
Easy out of box experience, I can have a Pi up and running in <20 minutes so I want something comparable
Widespread support, either from the vendor or from the external community
As far as I can tell, there is nothing. There are a few Pi clones that come close, but they are not appreciably cheaper and they are lacking in the support.
But again, I suspect this is futile, you aren't the target market, you wouldn't understand.
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I've stated my reasons clearly. I don't think I need to go over them again. Your argument with support is flawed because they delete the negative scenarios.
But you're still missing the point.
Start with the application requirements and work back to the device.
Not start with the specification which doesn't matter initially when you start a project of any kind. I don't give a bananas what the Pi does on paper, only if it fits the requirements for the project compared to other devices.
Hell the last embedded thing I worked on an AVR was sufficient and the AVR-gcc toolchain is a lot less of a pain in the ass than even bootstrapping an STM32. But I've seen someone ram a raspberry pi in the same requirements hole and run 8 lines of python on it at the cost of a 100x fold in complexity and power requirements :-//
It's popular because it's cheap. It's not. The cost comes later.
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ebay. There's a metric shit ton of them NOS on the market thanks to the collapse of the POS market in the last couple of years.
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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.
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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.
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?
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
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Start with the application requirements and work back to the device.
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 (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 (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 (https://www.ebay.com/itm/274932788422)
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Where do you want me to send the consultancy invoice? :-DD
Only joking. Will reply when I get a few minutes.
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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
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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Where do you want me to send the consultancy invoice? :-DD
You're the one trying to sell me on an alternate platform(s), that's up to you. I'm content to just keep buying RPis, they're cheap, easy to get, and I already know they will work for me. If I can get something that is comparable but cheaper, or approximately the same price with some tangible improvement like lower power consumption, smaller size or more features I'm open to ideas.
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I've stated my reasons clearly. I don't think I need to go over them again. Your argument with support is flawed because they delete the negative scenarios.
But you're still missing the point.
Start with the application requirements and work back to the device.
Not start with the specification which doesn't matter initially when you start a project of any kind. I don't give a bananas what the Pi does on paper, only if it fits the requirements for the project compared to other devices.
Hell the last embedded thing I worked on an AVR was sufficient and the AVR-gcc toolchain is a lot less of a pain in the ass than even bootstrapping an STM32. But I've seen someone ram a raspberry pi in the same requirements hole and run 8 lines of python on it at the cost of a 100x fold in complexity and power requirements :-//
It's popular because it's cheap. It's not. The cost comes later.
I think that the approach "Now I got a new toy, what can I do with it" is common in prototyping and experimentation. For "serious" product design, its normally not a good idea. You start from what you need.
For a lot of use cases, the Raspi offers a lot more than the problem needs. Controlling your garage door with a multiuser, multitasking operating system is not only silly, but also less reliable than a more primitive but adequate solution. With the Raspis, the problem is always to switch off the thousend features you *dont* want and that could possibly interfere with your real world problem (SD card wear, restart problems, timing issues, ...). When an Arduino is prefect for the job, I would always prefer this to an OS based machine.
On the other hand, when the problem to be solved involves user interfaces, graphics, multitasking, ... an Raspi is certainly an option. Only one thing: Never try this for high-reliability apps. For cheap fun gear or prototypes - no problem. But keep it out of avionics, space, mil, power stations, autonomous driving and medicine.
For making a product, a clear perspective of hardware availability and supply is also important. What you would want is fully documented (preferable open source)hardware that is supported for foreseeable periods and that has a
supplier that never runs out of stock. For certain Raspis, this never came true.
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There's a metric shit ton of them NOS
There are a lot of second hand ones on Ebay, of varying spec. That's quite a bit different to brand new with a known price and a specific spec to order.
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
Why do you care? They are meeting a market niche and succeeding at it.
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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.
Who is being "forced"?
There are countless companies and SBC's that are more professional, more open, cheaper, *insert your requirement here*. Always has been, always will be, why the hate for them to exist in their niche?
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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.
Who is being "forced"?
There are countless companies and SBC's that are more professional, more open, cheaper, *insert your requirement here*. Always has been, always will be, why the hate for them to exist in their niche?
Because they are APPALLING in attitude, and when you weigh that up with the fact that they sell TOYS, it comes across as a bad taste. One does not simply and foolishly IGNORE the spirit of a company, merely because they hold what one desires - supporting a company with a crappy attitude is a bad move - one cannot simply whitewash over it.
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
Why do you care? They are meeting a market niche and succeeding at it.
I was sent a Pi 400 review unit, and has SUCH a terrible time with moronic, hyper-sensitive "moderators" at their childish forum, I unplugged the piece of junk and just wanna snap it over my knee and bin it, seriously, what schmucks. They're as good at moderating and accepting critcism as they are at designing hardware. They are a sham front for Broadcom.
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
Why do you care? They are meeting a market niche and succeeding at it.
I was sent a Pi 400 review unit, and has SUCH a terrible time with moronic, hyper-sensitive "moderators" at their childish forum, I unplugged the piece of junk and just wanna snap it over my knee and bin it, seriously, what schmucks. They're as good at moderating and accepting critcism as they are at designing hardware. They are a sham front for Broadcom.
The lesson is to stay away from "fanboys" of any kind. Another good example was the Microchip vs Atmel wars (before Microchip bought them up, now its quiet).
What I try to do is choose components base on how useful they are for my purposes. Any extra emotion is a waste.
If some people start a religious attitude about their brand, product, philosophy, ... whatever, let them. Its just a marketing issue.
If Raspi creates fun and gets out some people from computer illiteracy, let them. You can still use other parts for serious purposes.
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
Why do you care? They are meeting a market niche and succeeding at it.
I was sent a Pi 400 review unit, and has SUCH a terrible time with moronic, hyper-sensitive "moderators" at their childish forum, I unplugged the piece of junk and just wanna snap it over my knee and bin it, seriously, what schmucks. They're as good at moderating and accepting critcism as they are at designing hardware. They are a sham front for Broadcom.
The lesson is to stay away from "fanboys" of any kind. Another good example was the Microchip vs Atmel wars (before Microchip bought them up, now its quiet).
What I try to do is choose components base on how useful they are for my purposes. Any extra emotion is a waste.
If some people start a religious attitude about their brand, product, philosophy, ... whatever, let them. Its just a marketing issue.
If Raspi creates fun and gets out some people from computer illiteracy, let them. You can still use other parts for serious purposes.
In my experience, old raspberries might be useful while testing PCBs that need to be connected to a pc, especially if you didn’t design them. I prefer burning an USB port of a cheap second handed raspi (or any other cheap pc) than the one of my workstation. Additionally, being small is a great advantage for placing it near the prototypes
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One thing that i'm happy with, after the RasPI was released , is pricing. ... And power usage for a little linux running
I remember the "Small" Linux dev-board prices before the RasPI ... Was easily $250+.
That has changed, and many more has begun to develop in that area,
Ie. Odroid and OrangePi, that i also like a lot.
I bought 20 x Raspi3 for £250 , and have a few in use ... A good deal from this forum ... :-+
I have had a Raspi3 in prod. as a backup DNS & DHCP server for 5 years , and it was just last rear i had to change the SD card (after a power failure).
So if you're not buying cheap SD cards, i'd say they are well behaved.
I ONLY use SanDisk Ultra or Extreme.
While i'm not impressed with some of the "Foundation" mgmt decisions or statements.
They have IMHO changed the world.
/Bingo
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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.
Who is being "forced"?
There are countless companies and SBC's that are more professional, more open, cheaper, *insert your requirement here*. Always has been, always will be, why the hate for them to exist in their niche?
Because they are APPALLING in attitude, and when you weigh that up with the fact that they sell TOYS, it comes across as a bad taste. One does not simply and foolishly IGNORE the spirit of a company, merely because they hold what one desires - supporting a company with a crappy attitude is a bad move - one cannot simply whitewash over it.
Again, who is forcing you to care about them?
If you don't like them just don't buy or use their stuff.
Others are free to buy and like their stuff if it suits their needs. Majority of users probably never interact at all with the company, they just buy the board and it does the job they need, end of story.
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I hope they succeed. The more consumer facing Linux centric hardware there is, the better.
They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
Why do you care? They are meeting a market niche and succeeding at it.
I was sent a Pi 400 review unit, and has SUCH a terrible time with moronic, hyper-sensitive "moderators" at their childish forum, I unplugged the piece of junk and just wanna snap it over my knee and bin it, seriously, what schmucks. They're as good at moderating and accepting critcism as they are at designing hardware. They are a sham front for Broadcom.
Sorry, but you are sounding just as hyper sensitive as you are claiming they are.
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They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
Yes, fools who've sold 40 million+ SBCs and completely revolutionised the industry, leading to countless "me too" single-board computers.
I remember before the Pi a typical ARM system on board like the Pi would cost hundreds, have buggy drivers and limited support and be twice the size.
They are clearly clueless idiots, not an idea.
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They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
Yes, fools who've sold 40 million+ SBCs and completely revolutionised the industry, leading to countless "me too" single-board computers.
I remember before the Pi a typical ARM system on board like the Pi would cost hundreds, have buggy drivers and limited support and be twice the size.
They are clearly clueless idiots, not an idea.
🚨🚨 Hyperbole alert! "Revolutionised" detected 😁
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🚨🚨 Hyperbole alert! "Revolutionised" detected 😁
I stand by my statement. They revolutionised the SBC industry.
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I have never bought, and will not buy a raspi.
I dislike their marketing hype and lack of openness and their broadcom connections, which is a company very hostile to hobbyists and tinkerers.
And what does the Raspi offerer that the others don't?
If I compare it with for example Olimex. Olimex has full schematics and PCB layout made available via git repositories. It will be tough if you think you can make the olinuxino's for a lower price then they do themselves, but having the complete KiCad projects available has a great educational value for PCB design,and it is a good start and timesaver if you want to extend such a board with added custom hardware.
Olimex also sells the microprocessors and other parts for custom boards. Now go try to buy a handfull of processors used on the raspi boards.
Hardkernel is another manufacturer of small Linux boards, and they make and sell a lot of different variants with Exynoss, AMLOGIC and RockChip processors.
Friendlyarm has been manufacturing linux capable PCB's from before Raspi existed. The early beaglebones were also already there. But those were marketed at mostly industrial applications and as a test bed as pre-cursor for industrial applications.
So the only "new" thing that raspi brought to the market was a price cut, at the price of vendor lock-in, smoothed over by deceiving marketing tactics. Their first promise was a GBP25 computer (Or was it GBP20?), upon which they never delivered, but it started the hype and blind followers that are now apparently not even able to see the other boards on the market. Maybe they sold a handful of products at their promised price, but with so small memory that it could hardly run any program. It was also timed "just right" Processors had been getting more powerful and prices were ever falling, and even if raspi would never have existed, there would be a similar product for a similar price one or two years later.
Another thing I don't like about raspi is the way they further tempt customers by placing drm in the camera's they sell, so they don't work with other hardware.
Yet another reason why I don't like raspi much is because they held on to a 32 bit OS when the whole world was shifting to 64 bit. That must have resulted in countless hours of time wasted for developers in compatibility for both versions.
A lot of the other manufacturers also have on-board eMMC (or on a breakout board with a connector), while the raspi requires an additional uSD card which is not factored into the price, and this makes the price difference also less. Add to that the improved reliability and speed of eMMC and you start wondering why uSD is even used as a primary storage device for an OS.
The article linked to from the first post hints at more raspi's being used in industrial applications, while their products are probably not suitable for that. Things like extended temperature range for chips, underfill and conformal coatings to make PCB more reliable for industrial applications do cost a bit extra. Using an uSD for the OS in an industrial application? Really?
"healthy competition" should be the foundation of a free market but at the same time it's what manufacturers are afraid of, and most manurefacturers try to thwart this by building senseless walls which are only an annoying hindrance to consumers, and they don't even realize this.
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I agree with others's opinion that Pi was/is a solution looking for a problem.
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I agree with others's opinion that Pi was/is a solution looking for a problem.
Maybe, or maybe not.
But comparing RPi with other vendors makings SBCs - sure there are some that are objectively "better" than the RPi. Very few are better documented though - not that the RPi itself is well documented, but most others are not better in that regard. But anyway, they just all followed RPi. Before RPi, there just wasn't any small and cheap SBC. Small SBCs were mostly industrial stuff, pretty expensive and absolutely not hobbyist-friendly. So they at least created a market here. Following is always easier than creating a new market.
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I agree with others's opinion that Pi was/is a solution looking for a problem.
Maybe, or maybe not.
But comparing RPi with other vendors makings SBCs - sure there are some that are objectively "better" than the RPi. Very few are better documented though - not that the RPi itself is well documented, but most others are not better in that regard. But anyway, they just all followed RPi. Before RPi, there just wasn't any small and cheap SBC. Small SBCs were mostly industrial stuff, pretty expensive and absolutely not hobbyist-friendly. So they at least created a market here. Following is always easier than creating a new market.
Its always the same misunderstanding: Mistake a fun and educational tool for a stable industrial solution. Raspi was never meant for that, and (to what I know) they never claimed to be suited for "serious" apps with reliability constraints. It a cheap toy with a very competitive price - nothing wrong with that. The problem are people who want to pay Raspi prices and get industrial strength stuff.
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I agree with others's opinion that Pi was/is a solution looking for a problem.
Maybe, or maybe not.
But comparing RPi with other vendors makings SBCs - sure there are some that are objectively "better" than the RPi. Very few are better documented though - not that the RPi itself is well documented, but most others are not better in that regard. But anyway, they just all followed RPi. Before RPi, there just wasn't any small and cheap SBC. Small SBCs were mostly industrial stuff, pretty expensive and absolutely not hobbyist-friendly. So they at least created a market here. Following is always easier than creating a new market.
Its always the same misunderstanding: Mistake a fun and educational tool for a stable industrial solution. Raspi was never meant for that, and (to what I know) they never claimed to be suited for "serious" apps with reliability constraints. It a cheap toy with a very competitive price - nothing wrong with that. The problem are people who want to pay Raspi prices and get industrial strength stuff.
For educational purposes I think it is a good platform for introducing young students to Linux and computer programming. Raspbian might not be the most polished distro, but if you make a huge mess rewriting an SD card is quite fast. That makes it a good platform for schools as it is relatively easy to maintain (when I was at school half of the available computers never worked because of terrible mess-ups involving erased operating system files in windows)
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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.
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.
low ball POS ARM board
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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I have never bought, and will not buy a raspi.
I dislike their marketing hype and lack of openness and their broadcom connections, which is a company very hostile to hobbyists and tinkerers.
Are people forgetting that the RPi was designed for the educational market by a charity organisation?
It was never meant to be an industrial or hobbyist SBC.
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I agree with others's opinion that Pi was/is a solution looking for a problem.
Maybe, or maybe not.
But comparing RPi with other vendors makings SBCs - sure there are some that are objectively "better" than the RPi. Very few are better documented though - not that the RPi itself is well documented, but most others are not better in that regard. But anyway, they just all followed RPi. Before RPi, there just wasn't any small and cheap SBC. Small SBCs were mostly industrial stuff, pretty expensive and absolutely not hobbyist-friendly. So they at least created a market here. Following is always easier than creating a new market.
Its always the same misunderstanding: Mistake a fun and educational tool for a stable industrial solution.
Who said such a thing?
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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.
I've used various RPi's since the beginning in all manner of projects, and I even sell some RPi "shields". I generally like the platform for anything with network + io twiddling, but bd139 is absolutely right about storage and reliability. The platform has been just atrocious for eating sdcards. For personal use, that alone has driven me off the platform.
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bd139 is absolutely right about storage and reliability. The platform has been just atrocious for eating sdcards. For personal use, that alone has driven me off the platform.
Regarding the SD card problem, well, the issue predominantly lies with the actual SD card in the first place. Most of them are just trash, have no wear levering and are not designed for the purpose of hosting an OS environment. So your mileage will vary depending on how much you cheaped out on your storage. Invest in a better SD card, you get better performance and lifetime.
I always choose cards from SanDisk High Endurance product line, as they are designed for lots of write operations like dashcam usage. I had a 32 GB SD card in a Pi torrent server/seeder, which was running 24/7 for at least 2 years now, and had no issues with reliability. I recently upgraded it to 256 GB.
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Two years is not that much time. And, yes, most SD cards are garbage and many SD cards that are expensive and promise better life are also, unfortunate, garbage. In fact, it's very difficult to ascertain whether you have actually gotten the card you paid for. All good reasons not to build your storage system around it.
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Wow. Who knew there was so much hate for the Pi.
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.
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Two years is not that much time. And, yes, most SD cards are garbage and many SD cards that are expensive and promise better life are also, unfortunate, garbage.
Keep in mind, we're talking about continued read/write operations, running 24/7, with torrents filled to capacity. This far exceeds a typical desktop usage workload. I had crappy SD cards die just a few months in when used in such manner.
In fact, it's very difficult to ascertain whether you have actually gotten the card you paid for. All good reasons not to build your storage system around it.
It certainly is a calculated risk. Buy reputable brands from reputable sources, you are more likely to actually get what you paid for.
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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.
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.
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bd139 is absolutely right about storage and reliability. The platform has been just atrocious for eating sdcards. For personal use, that alone has driven me off the platform.
Regarding the SD card problem, well, the issue predominantly lies with the actual SD card in the first place. Most of them are just trash, have no wear levering and are not designed for the purpose of hosting an OS environment. So your mileage will vary depending on how much you cheaped out on your storage. Invest in a better SD card, you get better performance and lifetime.
I always choose cards from SanDisk High Endurance product line, as they are designed for lots of write operations like dashcam usage. I had a 32 GB SD card in a Pi torrent server/seeder, which was running 24/7 for at least 2 years now, and had no issues with reliability. I recently upgraded it to 256 GB.
If I remember well, there was a project for allowing to boot it from an external HDD or SSD
Edit: You can find a guide on how to achieve that here: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb (https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb)
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Wow. Who knew there was so much hate for the Pi.
Is there? I would say most contributors in this thread are indifferent or positive.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
low ball POS ARM board
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.
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
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Wow. Who knew there was so much hate for the Pi.
Is there? I would say most contributors in this thread are indifferent or positive.
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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You're not wrong there. It is the most ubiquitous.
The problem is fundamentally that the products are only 80% done.
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And if you want 100%, you'd be using something else that's more expensive.
In a nutshell, from what I've read (feel free to correct me), the problems with Pi seems to be with either OS, power, or the fact that high-performance computing just can't run off of a micro-SD card. But last I checked, the Pi 4 (https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/) seems to be pretty powerful for all it claims it can do.
(Anyone ever used the off-brand Pi clones like the Banana Pi (https://www.banana-pi.org/) or Orange Pi (http://www.orangepi.org/Orange%20Pi%204B/)? They seemed kind of laughable when I saw them a long time ago, but now, they look rather surprising. Or maybe, in light of this thread, what's the sketchiest Pi-like board?)
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I've used various RPi's since the beginning in all manner of projects, and I even sell some RPi "shields". I generally like the platform for anything with network + io twiddling, but bd139 is absolutely right about storage and reliability. The platform has been just atrocious for eating sdcards. For personal use, that alone has driven me off the platform.
I've had Pi systems run for years on the SD card.
But in any case, you can boot a Pi 4 from a USB stick or the network now. And on older Pi's that's still possible although you do still need the SD card. The SD card boots the system, but that can be a very minimal system that straps the USB stick and boots the rest from there.
Besides, buying half-decent SD cards is not exactly difficult - I've a 64GB card in my dashcam that I estimate has gone through almost 500 E/W cycles (across the whole device) without any obvious problems. It would have cost under £20 so not exactly expensive. A Pi will never reach so many cycles in any typical application.
I replaced a NAS system - which consisted of a ~4GB NAND flash plus 2 x 2TB SATA disks, with a Pi 4 and some USB3 to SATA adapters. The old system with its 400MHz Samsung ARM chip was capable of ca. 10MB/s read/write rates - although not much more than the 10/100 ethernet port limited it to. The replacement Pi 4 is capable of over 110MB/s even using software RAID. Over the Gigabit ethernet interface with SMB server I still get ca. 80MB/s. It can also play 4K video H265 and so on. And it cost £50. No competition! The NAND flash in the NAS also had some bad blocks which was causing random kernel panics... that's allegedly "industrial" flash memory.
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You're not wrong there. It is the most ubiquitous.
The problem is fundamentally that the products are only 80% done.
The point is the intended market “ doesn’t care “. Pis are not aimed at professional applications, , they are teaching aids, hobby tools , experimenters bits. The Pi foundation was spot on in its targeting. ( as was Arduino )
Microsoft made billions out of half baked software , what they did right was identify a need and fill it.
It doesn’t really matter if the Pi has a string of faults , it’s not what it’s intended buyers care about.
That’s why it’s successful.
The 2040 for instance is clearly designed as a teaching system , it’s not a standard featured microcontroller etc.
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 school arena is probably one area where Pis flopped , not really due to the Pi , but largely because schools don’t have the technical expertise to handle a low level device, they have been much better utilised in third level applications where more expertise was available
The hobbyist /maker market is what gave then their success.
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They’re fools. They need to hand the reigns over to someone competent, or just dump the whole thing.
Yes, fools who've sold 40 million+ SBCs and completely revolutionised the industry, leading to countless "me too" single-board computers.
I remember before the Pi a typical ARM system on board like the Pi would cost hundreds, have buggy drivers and limited support and be twice the size.
Bullshit. The BeagleBoard started a few years prior and was the first board that provided Cortex A8 for the masses, with actual complete technical documentation and true open source drivers and distro. Sure, it indeed cost $150 on its introductory pricing, but later the BeagleBone was dropped to $79 and it had the same level of support and even more distros. When Raspberry Pi was released at the fictitious price of $35 (heavily subsidized), just a few months later the BeagleBone Black was released costing just $10 more with the same level of support of the prior Beagles. All of that was readily available to be assembled and purchased through the distribution.
I don't dislike the contributions of Raspberry PI to the toys and other curious folks, but I dislike the rewriting of history that follows along such heavy marketing-based companies.
I have never bought, and will not buy a raspi.
I dislike their marketing hype and lack of openness and their broadcom connections, which is a company very hostile to hobbyists and tinkerers.
Are people forgetting that the RPi was designed for the educational market by a charity organisation?
It was never meant to be an industrial or hobbyist SBC.
Don't forget that the Raspberry Foundation was run by the Director of Marketing of BCM. They had severe ties to their main supplier that, even still, were unable to break through their own datasheets, binary blobs and supply chain to enable others to manufacture or create their own boards.
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Don't forget that the Raspberry Foundation was run by the Director of Marketing of BCM. They had severe ties to their main supplier that, even still, were unable to break through their own datasheets, binary blobs and supply chain to enable others to manufacture or create their own boards.
From the beginning it's always felt to me like the RPi foundation was just a vehicle for BCM to stretch the profitability of some of its older process nodes / designs. They probably get some kind of charitable tax cuts for it too. It's a slimy arrangement.
Nobody serious about designing an open platform would ever even consider BCM, and here we are several generations later when they have the volume to get competitive pricing on more open options without the 'friend price' connections, and they are still using opaque and closed ICs. At least they don't really sell it as 'open'. But however they spin it, it seems much more like the PR arm of Broadcom to me than any legitimately-charitable, independent enterprise.
(Anyone ever used the off-brand Pi clones like the Banana Pi or Orange Pi? They seemed kind of laughable when I saw them a long time ago, but now, they look rather surprising. Or maybe, in light of this thread, what's the sketchiest Pi-like board?)
I have a few of them. Not sure what kind of report you're looking for, they work as they're supposed to for me. Mainline kernel support is pretty good these days https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
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(Anyone ever used the off-brand Pi clones like the Banana Pi or Orange Pi? They seemed kind of laughable when I saw them a long time ago, but now, they look rather surprising. Or maybe, in light of this thread, what's the sketchiest Pi-like board?)
I have a few of them. Not sure what kind of report you're looking for, they work as they're supposed to for me. Mainline kernel support is pretty good these days https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
so just like raspberry-pi, but since they are not made by $bigcorp it's ok
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Like Bassman59 I have a pi inside my 3D printer running Octoprint.
For the price, and the fact the nice people looking after Octoprint have already made the free software, nothing else comes close. A complete no brainier.
I bought the pi for that use and couldn’t be happier.
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Two years is not that much time. And, yes, most SD cards are garbage and many SD cards that are expensive and promise better life are also, unfortunate, garbage. In fact, it's very difficult to ascertain whether you have actually gotten the card you paid for. All good reasons not to build your storage system around it.
you can stick an emmc on an sdcard adapter
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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.
You chose a setup that meets your environment's demand and requirements. That's perfectly sensible and fine. Obviously your use case is different to mine.
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.
In my use case, I don't really care about any of that stuff. The Pi server does nothing mission critical other than running DNS server, being a seed box, and doing some other convenience networking stuff. If it dies, it dies. Fixing it would amount to nothing more than re-imaging a fresh SD card from backups. My primary goal was to run a seed box on the smell of an oil rag, that's about it, really. If I needed a production server, I'd probably use something else.
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.
I do IT admin as a side gig, I managed to pick up a few HP ProDesk 600s for nothing. I re-purposed them for Linux workstations and to give some away. They are great machines, but still, none of them detracts the value of getting a Raspberry Pi for the purpose of playing around.
it is not worth costing yourself 10x the effort to save £20 a year
Where did you get that 10x effort from? Pi is pretty much plug and play.
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
Opinion.
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Don't forget that the Raspberry Foundation was run by the Director of Marketing of BCM. They had severe ties to their main supplier that, even still, were unable to break through their own datasheets, binary blobs and supply chain to enable others to manufacture or create their own boards.
From the beginning it's always felt to me like the RPi foundation was just a vehicle for BCM to stretch the profitability of some of its older process nodes / designs. They probably get some kind of charitable tax cuts for it too. It's a slimy arrangement.
I share the same sentiment, although I can only speculate. The BCM device was an ARM11 that was well on its way out of the mobile communications market (Cortex A was all the rage) and the Pi was an interesting way to offset the losses of these devices.
Nobody serious about designing an open platform would ever even consider BCM, and here we are several generations later when they have the volume to get competitive pricing on more open options without the 'friend price' connections, and they are still using opaque and closed ICs. At least they don't really sell it as 'open'. But however they spin it, it seems much more like the PR arm of Broadcom to me than any legitimately-charitable, independent enterprise.
Any analysis of cost of the RPis at the time evidenced a heavy subsidy going on. Although I don't follow modern instances of it, I imagine the same still goes.
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I've had Pi systems run for years on the SD card.
So, every time someone brings up the issues of Pi's an SD corruption, someone says this. You do see that this proves nothing, right? I've had a LOT of failures. I've got a jar here of at least a dozen dead SD cards from Pi's. I've also run a LOT of pi's. I've had cluster of of them, I've deployed them in monitoring stations by the dozen. It just so happens that the compelling use-case for most Pi projects do not lend themselves to net booting.
Could that corruption be my fault? Sure! Brownouts, bad power, lightning, WTF knows? I don't really care very much. SD cards make for shitty OS disk. They fail. A lot. And when they do, it is not something that fsck can help with. The card is just toast.
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Oh it's even worse than that. Seeing as this is an engineering forum, lets do a top down on their PMC situation.
There is literally a single NCP1117 between 5V0 USB input and 3V3. If you've got your usual wall wart with added inductor then any current dips can sink that below the dropout voltage of the regulator which means your 3V3 rail bombs. I've actually seen this on a scope on an RPi2 and it's the same circuit AFAIK now. That drives all the other LDOs and the BCM core as well which all lose regulation. This causes the BCM core to BOD and reboot outside of OS control.
How can you do that? Well use a 1m long USB cable adapter and hot plug something on USB a few times. You can watch it floating around 4.2 volts under load as well as even the best of those supplies are pretty dire and there is I2R loss on the cable. This is pretty normal activity and pushing those LDOs close to the dropout voltage.
What's the outcome? There the kernel and filesystem relies on two guarantees which are not met: firstly that the filesystem driver honours sync (it pretends it does here - another BCM turd) and that when it does a sync that all the data is persisted (it isn't due to SD - hence bad filesystem choice).
Better hope it's not writing to disk when you're near it :-DD
This is just simply poor engineering.
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Oh it's even worse than that. Seeing as this is an engineering forum, lets do a top down on their PMC situation.
There is literally a single NCP1117 between 5V0 USB input and 3V3. If you've got your usual wall wart with added inductor then any current dips can sink that below the dropout voltage of the regulator which means your 3V3 rail bombs. I've actually seen this on a scope on an RPi2 and it's the same circuit AFAIK now. That drives all the other LDOs and the BCM core as well which all lose regulation. This causes the BCM core to BOD and reboot outside of OS control.
which version is that? afaict everything except a ~10yo schematic shows a switcher
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See RPi2 in the message. This was an issue I raised on the forum, which was of course deleted like my other post...
You can't evaluate the new ones as the public schematics are incomplete.
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See RPi2 in the message. This was an issue I raised on the forum, which was of course deleted like my other post...
You can't evaluate the new ones as the public schematics are incomplete.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/blob/develop/documentation/asciidoc/computers/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-schematics.adoc
only switchers ...
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Wow. Who knew there was so much hate for the Pi.
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.
"Hate"? 😏🤦
Merely because not every single thread response is from someone gushing and extolling the myriad, implied INFINITE "virtues" of the silly little toy board that isn't designed, marketed or supported in a professional manner?
To a fervent apologist, the antithesis of his world view is always "haters". How tedious, such a thundering bore.
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... NCP1117 .... same circuit AFAIK now ...
Not for many, many years, and all the relevant details are on the (heavily redacted, yes) schematic which is available.
If you're going to rant and whinge, at least be right.
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To a fervent apologist, the antithesis of his world view is always "haters"
There is that. But just as not everyone concerned with climate change is a rabid eco-warrior, not everyone that isn't wound up mightily by the Pi is a 'fervent apologist'.
OTOH, I think it's pretty clear from this thread that you really and truly hate the Pi and anything connected to it. It's not enough for you to make sure you don't sully your hands, you need to stop anyone else doing so as well.
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There is literally a single NCP1117 between 5V0 USB input and 3V3. If you've got your usual wall wart with added inductor then any current dips can sink that below the dropout voltage of the regulator which means your 3V3 rail bombs. I've actually seen this on a scope on an RPi2 and it's the same circuit AFAIK now. That drives all the other LDOs and the BCM core as well which all lose regulation. This causes the BCM core to BOD and reboot outside of OS control.
Only the Pi 1 used the NCP1117.
Pi 2 used an off-the-shelf ONSemi part if I recall correctly.
Pi 3 onwards have used a semi-customised Diodes Inc. part (I believe the voltages are set in the factory; the part is standard.)
Also, the BCM core on Pi 1 was powered by the 5V0 rail, not 3V3. The BCM2835 had an onboard switchmode converter to provide the 1V0. Remember these chips were made for low cost consumer apps, so that is a key seller. They dropped that on Pi 2 and moved to an external buck converter but still powered from 5V0. This converter is sensitive to xenon flashes - dig up Dave's video on this if interested - as it's just a flip-chip silicon device.
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"Hate"? 😏🤦
Merely because not every single thread response is from someone gushing and extolling the myriad, implied INFINITE "virtues" of the silly little toy board that isn't designed, marketed or supported in a professional manner?
To a fervent apologist, the antithesis of his world view is always "haters". How tedious, such a thundering bore.
Dunno man, you seem to be quite emotionally invested about this whole thing. So much resentment over nothing.
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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.
Odroid C4 (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/). Much, much better mainline/vanilla kernel support (Quad-core Cortex-A55 with Mali G31 GPU, in an Amlogic S905X3 system-on-chip, with 4 GiB of RAM) -- basically all non-vendor-tied Linux ARM distributions will work --; at least as much computational power as RPi 4; and even lower power consumption. The only issue is the price; currently $54 USD and up. 128 GiB eMMC module does add USD $45 to the price, too.
Most importantly, Amlogic (Meson (http://linux-meson.com/doku.php)), Samsung, and Rockchip SOCs do not have the hardware issues with silently dropped USB packets that all Raspberry Pi hardware suffers from (albeit semi-successfully worked around in their software).
While the forums (https://forum.odroid.com/) aren't as active as Raspberry Pis, they're helpful, and especially do warmly welcome any open-source information (and even ask permission, then include in their guides and documentation -- have personal experience on this) if useful for other users too.
I don't own a C4 yet myself, but do have a C1+ and HC1 (NAS version of XU4), and at least had a C2 but it might have gotten lost at some point (plus half a dozen of other SBCs, like one La Frite; can't even remember all of them right now), but it is at the top of my list of desirable SBCs I'd like to buy and develop on. Rockchip RK3328 from Olimex (https://www.olimex.com/Products/SOM/RK3328/) is near the top, too; with Sinovoip Banana Pi R64 (http://www.banana-pi.com/eacp_view.asp?id=129) at the top of my Linux-SBC-router list, right now. (My current router project uses Mikrotik RBM33G (https://mikrotik.com/product/rbm33g) using OpenWRT toolchain and kernels.) I included this so that you can see the sector/direction of my interests, and base your estimate on how useful my opinion might be for you, based on these; others' valid opinions do vary a lot here.
Edited: I do think the RPi foundation made a huge difference in the Linux SBC market, especially pricing-wise: they brought SBCs to hobbyist price ranges. SBCs existed well before, especially in the automotive environment (anyone else remember when PicoPSU with its ATX power connector came to market? To be used with micro-ATX automotive PCs?). The camera interface was a stroke of genius on the original RPi, too; that's what got me to buy one. I just think their community is toxic, leadership is evil (especially towards the open source projects their products rely on), and advanced users should migrate to more reliable, better supported hardware, that is not dependent on a single vendor or vendor-provided software at all.
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I also use Odroid U3,C1 & C2 , but have avoided the C4 because of the FAN (before the large heatsink came out).
But my goto linux SBC is the OrangePi Zero (OPIZ), that 3..4 years ago could be had for less than $10.
I have used OPIZ for mega simple stuff that an Arduino Nano could have done , but i needed Cabled ethernet.
The OPIZ was cheaper than a Nano + ether adapter , and doesn't take up much more space. OPIZ onboard WiFi is bad though.
I have one in the summerhouse that has run 24/7 x 365 x 3
My OPI's all run Armbian.
So there are others that are as good/better , but the PI created the market.
/Bingo
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"Hate"? 😏🤦
Merely because not every single thread response is from someone gushing and extolling the myriad, implied INFINITE "virtues" of the silly little toy board that isn't designed, marketed or supported in a professional manner?
To a fervent apologist, the antithesis of his world view is always "haters". How tedious, such a thundering bore.
Dunno man, you seem to be quite emotionally invested about this whole thing. So much resentment over nothing.
"Dunno" being the operative word - you don't know, nor could you, how I am feeling. The rationale of a complete stranger online, knowing my emotions, is a little erroneous.
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But my goto linux SBC is the OrangePi Zero (OPIZ), that 3..4 years ago could be had for less than $10.
Yup, I've got one of those (with 512 MiB RAM), too. I too was disappointed by the onboard WiFi on the OPIZ, probably why I forgot to mention it...
AIUI, the Zero 2 support in vanilla kernels (especially Device Tree) is better than for the original OrangePi Zero.
So there are others that are as good/better , but the PI created the market.
I fully agree.
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"Dunno" being the operative word - you don't know, nor could you, how I am feeling. The rationale of a complete stranger online, knowing my emotions, is a little erroneous.
What?
a set of reasons or a logical basis for a course of action or a particular belief.
"he explained the rationale behind the change"
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Just had a look at OPIZ prices at Aliexpress
Well the OPIZ was my goto SBC - WHAT happened with the price of that one :palm:
The 512MB is now around $25 (H2+ ver) :wtf: - I' got mine for $11..12.
Is it Chipsgate / Popularity or greediness |O
Is VAT included in the "List price" (would explain 25% of the rise) or is that added on cleckout ?
At that price i would look around for a new "favorite" (must have Cabled Ethernet)
Well i still have ~20 Raspi3's in the drawer
/Bingo
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Is VAT included in the "List price" (would explain 25% of the rise) or is that added on cleckout ?
It's now added on checkout, AIUI. Certainly is for the UK, and I think the VAT situation changed similarly for the EU.
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Most of the time they show prices including VAT to me, both in search results and individual item pages. Search results sometimes also show prices including shipping, but not always.
Like everything on AliE, it's quite random and changes every other day for no apparent reason.
When the price includes tax or shipping, there is normally a small note underneath informing about it.