Pi "foundation" gets fatter

[djacobow]

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.

[LoveLaika]

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.

[AntiProtonBoy]

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.

[AntiProtonBoy]

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.

[Just_another_Dave]

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

[voltsandjolts]

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.

[Bassman59]

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.

[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]

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

[LoveLaika]

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.

[bd139]

You're not wrong there. It is the most ubiquitous.

The problem is fundamentally that the products are only 80% done.

[LoveLaika]

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 seems to be pretty powerful for all it claims it can do.

(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?)

[tom66]

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.

[MadScientist]

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.

[rsjsouza]

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.

[ve7xen]

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

[langwadt]

(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

[HobGoblyn]

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.

[langwadt]

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

[AntiProtonBoy]

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.

[rsjsouza]

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.

[djacobow]

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.

[bd139]

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 

This is just simply poor engineering.

[langwadt]

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

[bd139]

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.