| General > General Technical Chat |
| Raspberry pi forums "banned" me again - <LOL - facepalmed hard> |
| << < (5/9) > >> |
| Karel:
I have only experience with the RPI2, RPI3b and the RPI4. The RPI3 I use every day as a Kodi multimedia center connected to my TV. I never had a negative experience with them. I used the forums but only in read mode because all the questions I had were already asked by others and I was able to find the answers and information I needed, just using DDG. Also, I never had problems with corrupted filesystems or broken sd-cards. Probably because I always try to avoid a sudden power interrupt and I always shut down nicely and give the system time to close the filesystem. (and use a quality sd-card!). In fact, for the RPI I use for Kodi has a bi-stable relay where one coil is connnected to a gpio pin so that when I use the remote control (I use a TSOP38238 connected to another gpio pin with LIRC) to switch-off Kodi, the last cpu instruction will be to toggle that pin connected to the relay and switches off the power. My first experience with the RPI was at work, when I had to debug and refactor a custom SPI driver for the TI - ADS1298 development board. Because of timing issues, I couldn't use the kernels' SPI framework and I had to write a bare metal SPI driver using the registers of the Broadcom chip directly. I don't remember any particular issues with the documentation. So, long story short, during all these years I had only positive experiences with the Raspberry Pi's. Do, I say that they are perfect? Absolutely not. But they do give the best bang for buck and it is my experience that, by using Debian (Raspbian), the system is rock stable (yeah, you need to use the official 5.1 Volt PSU!). |
| bd139:
--- Quote from: james_s on September 04, 2021, 03:57:16 am --- --- Quote from: bd139 on September 03, 2021, 09:40:03 pm ---Decided never to buy any more amateur crap like that when you can get a second hand Lenovo mini PC and an arduino and slave the damn thing off it if you want a proper computer with digital IO. --- End quote --- How much power does that mini-PC burn? One of the main benefits of the RPi and various similar devices is that it draws only 2-5 watts or so depending on the version. The lowest power mini-PCs I've measured draw around 20W. --- End quote --- Lenovo M600 tiny. About 6W idle and 15W under full load. The killer on power was using mechanical disks. There isn’t enough room for one in the M600 as it’s fanless passively cooled so you have to use an M2 SATA disk. This is a massive advantage over the cruddy storage on a Pi. I had four of them at one point. One as a Kodi media centre, two as a kubernetes cluster and one running my eBay scraper. Eventually I switched to using VMs on my desktop for kubernetes, USB sticks for the TV and running my scraper on Linode though because it was less crap lying around. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: james_s on September 03, 2021, 05:40:47 pm ---The RPi itself is fantastic --- End quote --- The fact that its hardware sometimes drops USB packets on the floor, even though partially worked around in the software, is a dealbreaker for me. Although the various Odroids (Amlogic and Samsung SoCs) cost more, at least they don't have unfixable hardware issues papered over in software. (I bet you've been bitten by that too, but have just considered it a Linux or software bug (often a system crash of some sort), and either ignored it or attributed it to something else than what it is, a hardware bug. Almost all 'Pi users experience this, and yet behave in this oblivious way. It angers me, because it blames the innocent for the issues.) --- Quote from: Halcyon on September 04, 2021, 01:10:57 am ---Oh well, at least you have the EEVblog forum, where just about anything goes. --- End quote --- To me, something else is even more important: that the (very few) rules here apply to moderators also, unlike elsewhere. That makes a damn big difference to me. "Fairness" is not just a human concept. It is something very, very deep in the psychology of social apes and monkeys, not just in humans. Using bans (social exclusion) to control the topics discussed leads to pack mentality, where staying in line is more important than contributing or development. You see this enforcement model used in several human religious movements, too. This is why one should not treat the Raspberry Pi forums as a community: because it isn't, it is a pack, or a sect. You could treat them as a vendor forum, except that because of the Foundation non-profit status, they prefer to pose as in their endless grace providing a favour to their users, instead of treating them as paying customers. It is friggin' sleazy, if you ask me. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on September 04, 2021, 11:56:07 am ---The fact that its hardware sometimes drops USB packets on the floor, even though partially worked around in the software, is a dealbreaker for me. Although the various Odroids (Amlogic and Samsung SoCs) cost more, at least they don't have unfixable hardware issues papered over in software. (I bet you've been bitten by that too, but have just considered it a Linux or software bug (often a system crash of some sort), and either ignored it or attributed it to something else than what it is, a hardware bug. Almost all 'Pi users experience this, and yet behave in this oblivious way. It angers me, because it blames the innocent for the issues.) --- End quote --- Can't say that I've ever noticed it. Most of my RPis have nothing plugged into the USB, there is one I use as a fileserver/webserver and a few other tasks just sits there and works, about a year ago I finally replaced the original Pi I got way back when they first came out with a model 4 which was a huge performance upgrade. I have a Jupyter Notebook server running on that and it was a bit sluggish on the old Pi but other than that it has been brilliant, I've had uptimes of more than a year a few times. Another Pi is running my Home Assistant automation system, it's another one I don't really think about, it just works. Another is mounted in the housing of a gutted mini settop box and connected to my TV, it runs a Plex client and mostly just works, I've had to reboot it a few times but I don't know if that's the fault of the Pi or something else. Another runs Weewx and interfaces my weather station console to the net. All of these things pretty much just work, I'm not saying your problems are not real, but they are not problems that have impacted me. Oh I did have one SD card fail on the original Pi server, it died after about 5 years. I don't know whether the SD card failed or if it just got corrupted, it was not on a UPS at the time so it would occasionally get rebooted by a power glitch or in one case the power adapter failed. The rest are all running on the original SD cards I put in when I set them up. I do try to buy high quality SD cards though, not random counterfeit junk. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: james_s on September 04, 2021, 05:44:39 pm ---Another [Pi] is mounted in the housing of a gutted mini settop box and connected to my TV, it runs a Plex client and mostly just works, I've had to reboot it a few times but I don't know if that's the fault of the Pi or something else. --- End quote --- That's exactly my point: you don't know. Most users, if you go by what you see on the web, assume it's a Linux bug. Usually it isn't, exactly because most of the peripherals on the Pi core are connected via USB in the first place. The nature of USB bus is such that packets are not supposed to be lost (or rather, acknowledged as received but dropped on the floor anyway), and some drivers just cannot recover gracefully from such losses. The common end result is a completely locked up kernel, requiring a power reset. It irks me, because it diverts blame to those who are not to blame. You describe failures that would be unacceptable to me, yet you describe your Pi experience as "fantastic". I wonder what words you'd use if you were using actual known working hardware, whose support is in upstream vanilla kernels? (Most people tend to completely forget about it: when something works perfectly, it becomes invisible. I've maintained servers whose users completely forgot they existed, even though accessing them daily.) So, I'm not sore about Pi –– it is what it is, and even I have some due to the price point and camera module availability ––, but about how their users don't know nor care if the issues they live with are due to hardware or software. How do you feel when your inane coworkers failures are routinely attributed to the entire team? Not very happy, I'd imagine. In this case, the stink follows everywhere, and switching jobs won't change anything. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |