A probably not so small rant about the Raspberry Pi

[dan.soethe]

Well, back with 8-bit micros. We got familiar with registers and interrupts a clock cycles.

If you wanted something to show up on the screen You had to poke it or print it or use assembly language.

Now it all automatic, unless one learns more about the device...

But kids nowadays are more interested in social media than how they could write there own.


Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk

[eugenenine]

You have to buy an SD card

Why is that a bad thing?

Because it is no longer a "$35 computer" in any realistic sense, it just becomes a disappointing marketing slogan.

I paid $29.99 and used the 16G MicroSD that was in my phone when I replaced it with a 32G MicroSD.  I used the old phone charger from the phone my son lost so Mine cost $29.99 total.

[jeremy]

I don't get much of the criticism. I do agree that it's overrated in some aspects. But it is a cheap affordable single board computer with plenty of support. Certainly more support than CHIP you mentioned.

I use an rPi A as a 3D octoprint server and it works amazingly well. It's been running for 2 years now. Can't think of a better cheaper or smaller solution I could have used instead. I have a friend who uses a solar powered Pi for a wireless camera gate system, and it works great. I can't think of a competing product that could have done it easier than Pi.

It is not ideal for electronics. It can sort of do it, but that's not what its real primary focus is. You have a slew of microcontroller dev boards for that stuff like Arduino, Teensy or any other eval boards from big MCU companies. Also if you decide to produce the solution you can actually buy those chips, which is the biggest problem I have with Pi (you can't buy Broadcom chips).

Pi Zero is awesome. $5 single board computer that runs a full Linux stack? Are you kidding me. That stuff is amazing. You're not meant to use it as a computer. You're not meant to have a keyboard and mouse connected to it permanently. It is supposed to be used as a module in a design.

And ultimately Pi as its name implies is meant to provide a single board computer with some GPIO you can program in Python. That's its primary purpose. And nothing on the market does it better.

It obviously isn't going to be well suited for embedded applications like a flight controller on a drone. It's supposed to bridge the gap between real time applications where RTOS and embedded code thrive and a traditional POSIX OS with support for full featured frameworks and scripting languages, traditionally run on much bigger wintel machines.

Have you actually used the CHIP in order to draw these conclusions? I only got one less than a month ago, and I was one of the first backers. Literally everything worked straight away, connecting to a WPA2 network was a single command, and didn't involve kernel panics (which is definitely not the experience I had with the raspberry pi, even years after it was released).

You can program the GPIO in python too if that really is a big deal... it just uses the kernel gpio interface like every other SoC running linux.

But really, I've got nothing invested in CHIP, whether they succeed or fail is no big deal to me.

[jeremy]

You have to buy an SD card

Why is that a bad thing?

Because it is no longer a "$35 computer" in any realistic sense, it just becomes a disappointing marketing slogan.

I paid $29.99 and used the 16G MicroSD that was in my phone when I replaced it with a 32G MicroSD.  I used the old phone charger from the phone my son lost so Mine cost $29.99 total.

Please, don't be like that. The full paragraph is: "Because it is no longer a "$35 computer" in any realistic sense, it just becomes a disappointing marketing slogan. While one could argue forever about the relative merits of on-board vs removable storage, the truth is that if you wanted to fill a classroom with them (which I thought was the original goal of the device), it's still 20-50% extra."

[Muxr]

Has CHIP even shipped to all its backers? I don't understand how support and ecosystem is even debatable.

[jeremy]

Well, back with 8-bit micros. We got familiar with registers and interrupts a clock cycles.

If you wanted something to show up on the screen You had to poke it or print it or use assembly language.

Now it all automatic, unless one learns more about the device...

But kids nowadays are more interested in social media than how they could write there own.


Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk

I am not sure if you are aware, but there are still many undocumented features like the CSI and DSI interfaces. And the raspberry pi folks have openly stated that they are not planning to document them or provide details on their workings.

[jeremy]

Has CHIP even shipped to all its backers? I don't understand how support and ecosystem is even debatable.

I guess my statement is more like "Even when the raspberry pi was much more mature than the CHIP, I was still having issues with the raspberry pi that I have not had with the CHIP". If by "support" you mean stuff works and there are people to help you, then I really don't see too much of a difference between early rpi and CHIP.

OT: CHIP is a terrible name

[dan.soethe]

Well, back with 8-bit micros. We got familiar with registers and interrupts a clock cycles.

If you wanted something to show up on the screen You had to poke it or print it or use assembly language.

Now it all automatic, unless one learns more about the device...

But kids nowadays are more interested in social media than how they could write there own.


Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk

I am not sure if you are aware, but there are still many undocumented features like the CSI and DSI interfaces. And the raspberry pi folks have openly stated that they are not planning to document them or provide details on their workings.

Yes, I know about that, but it's broadcom that is the stickler.
But some smart person is bound to reverse engineer it then wiki-pedia will disclose it to the world...

Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk