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Raspberry Pi 4 Linux Computer Gets Twice the RAM and USB-C Power Fix (betanews.com) 97

Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: The Raspberry Pi line has provided great little Linux computers to nerds -- its low price and small size makes it ideal for tinkering and doing projects. But also, the device has proven to be a solid media device, wonderful for watching videos and emulating classic video games. In other words, it has been a very versatile computer, serving as many things to many people. With the release of the Raspberry Pi 4, however, it finally became powerful enough to serve as a true desktop computer. By installing a Linux distribution, some people can use it for day-to-day computer use, such as web browsing, playing media, and word processing. Unfortunately, the $35 base model came with a paltry 1GB of RAM. Today, this changes, as the company has dropped the price of the 2GB version to $35, effectively doubling the memory for the base model.
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Raspberry Pi 4 Linux Computer Gets Twice the RAM and USB-C Power Fix

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  • Other than compatibility, I am not sure why they are still selling the 1GB RAM model for the same price.

    • by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @10:43AM (#59773844)

      Embedded platforms primarily. There are plenty of people that have used these systems over the last decade as a cheap computer device, but upgrading the firmware may not be that easy, the latest RPi3 and 4 require a whole different kernel and the GPU and CPU are different enough that if you used to code in raw C against the libraries provided back then, it may not work on the newest chips today.

      • by dskoll ( 99328 )

        I believe OP was referring to the 1GB RPI4 vs the 2GB RPI4.

        • The answer is still approximately correct, though; the reason relates to the embedded toolchain. If you use a slightly different part, you might have to make slight changes to your tools and rebuild something, or at least override a warning. If you know you're not going to use the extra RAM you might prefer the same part number, even at the same price.

          Also in the future they might have different prices, or at large volumes.

          • That was certainly the case with the 3B and 3B+, practically the same name but utterly incompatible both backwards and forwards, you couldn't run a 3B kernel on a 3B+, it would hang on boot. Wouldn't surprise me if they tweaked various things on the 4 that caused headaches for devs.
            • That was certainly the case with the 3B and 3B+, practically the same name but utterly incompatible both backwards and forwards, you couldn't run a 3B kernel on a 3B+, it would hang on boot.

              I think you're confusing the Raspberry Pi 2 which changed chipset between revisions. Older revisions used an ARM7 chipset, newer revisions since v1.2 use basically the same 64-bit Aarch64 cpu as Raspberry Pi 3B (but without the extra wireless Wifi and Bluetooth peripherals chips).
              You can't run a 64-bit Aarch64 kernel that passes on Raspberry 2 v1.2 on the older ARM7 based.

              I have both Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+ (they have very closely related chipsets) and all mine run the exact same 64bit kernel without any co

            • If you stick with running the latest version of Raspbian those problems mostly don't come up, because they have maintained backward compatibility. But you can't run old versions of Raspbian on new versions of the Pi. That also means that there are no official 64 bit Raspbian releases because they would not be able to boot on old Pi models.
          • In addition to those things, if you change anything in a product where a Pi is used as an embedded processor you might have to go through an approval process all over again. So that type of customer wants to stick with the same product even if an improved version is available for the same price.
    • by skids ( 119237 )

      There can be subtle difference between models between chipsets. For example, IIRC only one particular model can be resoldered to do gadget-side USB because the chipset used in it supports gadget-side if you change a configuration pin. (And as far as I can google it's one of the only OTS options for doing gadget-side stuff out there).

    • by leonbev ( 111395 )

      I love the part where the CEO called the 2 GB Raspberry Pi a "no compromise" desktop PC during his interview.

      It's like a took a time warp back to 2008 hardware specs for a moment.

      • For some people that's probably more than enough. It seems like a lot of "features" that have been added since then to take advantage of the additional memory and computational power have largely been pointless bloat and something I'd prefer not to use or turn off entirely. Something like this is perfect for a lot of people, especially those who don't have hundreds of dollars to plonk down on an x86 desktop PC and who don't need to do much beyond email, casual web browsing, or some Netflix.
        • by Miamicanes ( 730264 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @12:31PM (#59774362)

          > don't need to do much beyond email, casual web browsing, or some Netflix.

          Netflix is easy... all the heavy lifting is in the codec anyway. To the host cpu, Netflix is literally a black box with a black window.

          Web browsing is HARD. Just *try* using Amazon, Walmart, or any other DOM/Javascript/Ajax-driven website with an underpowered computer. It's like browsing the web on a Palm Pilot or Mac LC was.

          Email's difficulty hinges on #2... straight text? Trivial. Embedded HTML? See #2.

          When a computer gets so bogged down, its UI can't react *instantly* to input events... or users end up triggering them multiple times even AFTER getting positive feedback that their input was noticed... it's too damn slow.

          What really needs to die, though, is the myth that "web browsing" is in any way, shape, or present-day form a "lightweight" activity. It's about as "lightweight" as an app cobbled together from "a few lines of code" that's REALLY enabled by 5 gigabytes of Microsoft Office, VBA, and Windows itself.

          • I have yet to find a computer / browser combo than can comfortably handle the foxnews.com comments section (seriously).
            • Coded by knuckle dragging monkeys with no understanding whatsoever of the term "algorithmic complexity".

            • Comment sections in general on many sites are unusable and slow, partly because they do stupid things like throw social media gadgets (each with a veritable shit-ton of attached Javascript throwing nonstop events, making at least one http request per posting per gadget) into every single posting, all while tracking and reporting every mouse movement, serving ads from several dozen different hosts, etc.

              The best historical example to compare them with is the difference between Windows 95's Explorer, and Windo

            • I have yet to find a human who can comfortably handle the Fox News comments section.
          • Web browsing is HARD. Just *try* using Amazon, Walmart, or any other DOM/Javascript/Ajax-driven website with an underpowered computer. It's like browsing the web on a Palm Pilot or Mac LC was.

            Web browsing is time waster and you're better off doing less of it.

          • Web browsing is HARD. Just *try* using Amazon, Walmart, or any other DOM/Javascript/Ajax-driven website with an underpowered computer. {...} What really needs to die, though, is the myth that "web browsing" is in any way, shape, or present-day form a "lightweight" activity. It's about as "lightweight" as an app cobbled together from "a few lines of code" that's REALLY enabled by 5 gigabytes of Microsoft Office, VBA, and Windows itself.

            Works for me! (Pinebook Pro)

            Oh, I forgot to mention: I do run ad-blockers and privacy filters.
            (draw your own conclusions. Do you really need the equivalent of multiple time the size of Doom 1 worth of javascript bullcrap running in your browser ? I certainly cut out the metaphorical "5 GB" you mention)

            It's like browsing the web on a Palm Pilot or Mac LC was.

            PalmPilot: ...unless you use a filtering proxy that removes crap when browsing on Palm. Been there, done that.
            (on PalmOS nWeb and Opera Lite used to have their own services. When the former went belly up, I us

    • Maybe they still have inventory and they know they can shift it? Every time there's a major RPi announcement the things sell out as everyone jumps on the bandwagon and stuffs them in their closet, and then people who actually need one are forced to buy whats available.

    • Consider the situation of spares. I try to minimize the number of different platforms and devices I use at my company. It makes support so much easier and cheaper. If I have a number of 1GB RPi's in place I'm likely to buy more of them *even* if the new model is more or less identical/compatible. That way, if one dies, it's a no-brainer swap out. Although it's highly unlikely, swapping it out with a different model might introduce some subtle incompatibility that would drive you nuts trying to troubles

      • Exactly this, even if it was trivial to troubleshoot, you now have two versions to maintain. We used them a LOT at a place I used to work, and the remote site people were not technical people. Getting them to hot swap out a device was the limit of their abilities, trying to get them to identify and then hotswap multiple versions etc. would just make that a lot more difficult. Also instead of having to keep x amount as backup on site and x amount in the main warehouse you now have to deal with x and y. F
  • by mugurel ( 1424497 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @10:55AM (#59773898)
    • RasPi is also available with 4Gig of ram. Similar price range as this one.

      • by HighOrbit ( 631451 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @01:31PM (#59774632)
        I have the 4GB Pi 4. If you are running Raspbian, you may be OK, but support/performance has been spotty with other OSes. I'm running (or trying to run) Ubuntu with an arm64 kernel because I'm working on a ROS robot. I bought the Pi 4 specifically for the USB-3 ports so that I would be able to (hopefully) put a kinect on the robot for depth/3d vision. I went with Ubuntu because ROS (my primary app) is best developed and supported on Ubuntu and has binaries available through apt-get. I went with Arm64 because I bought the 4 GB version (more is better, right) and 32-bit OSes have practical limits that prevent addressing the entire 4GB. Well.... its been crazy. Everything works well for about 2 minutes and then the kernel and USB ports freak out over setting the CPU frequency. After working well for about 2 minutes, the USB port loses connection to the kinect, kernel errors flood syslog, and the whole things slows to a such a crawl that using the mouse becomes impossible. Prior to January, the Ubuntu team acknowledged that they didn't fully support USB on the 4GB model with the recommended work around being to set the kernel memory limit to 3GB. They recently released a new kernel that they think resolved the situation and supports the full 4GB. I'm running the new kernel, but still having problems. I'm getting ready to send a bug report to the Ubuntu arm64 list.

        My point here is ... if your use-case supports Raspbian, then you are probably OK. But if your use-case requires another distribution, be prepared for a trip back to the fiddly-bit days of the mid-1990s and trying to making linux run on unsupported hardware.
        • Sounds like you have explored the depths of this behavior, but as due diligence, have you verified your power supply? I've seen behavior similar to your report when using underpowered supply or poor-quality cord. Also, assume you are using a powered USB3 hub, right? You're not powering those external devices off the rPI USB bus, are you?
          • The data (USB-3 plug) is plugged directly into the Pi, but the Kinect has a separate 12v power supply (wall-wart), so I would not expect it to be pulling power off the USB port, but I'll check out using a hub just in case.
            • by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @04:02PM (#59775216) Homepage Journal
              I hope that does the trick for you..

              I had an ongoing insanity of my resolv.conf file getting spontaneously rewritten on a BeagleBone running Arch Linux. Culprit turned out to be power draw.

              Once you've got that USB powered hub set up, make sure everything goes through that. Don't even let a mouse draw power from the rPI USB bus. See if the problem persists.
            • by scdeimos ( 632778 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @04:52PM (#59775342)

              ... so I would not expect it to be pulling power off the USB port ...

              Don't make that assumption. In my experience all sorts of powered USB appliances are still connected to the USB VBUS/VCC line, like little parasites sucking power from the host. Powered USB hubs are the worst for this - you'd expect them to disconnect from the host's VBUS/VCC when connected to a wall wort, but that's rarely the case.

    • by leonbev ( 111395 )

      The Pine64 team Linux distribution support doesn't seem to be as good what we get from the Raspberry Pi team. You're probably going to have a better working software selection if you stick with the Pi boards.

      • I don't have experience with the Pi boards, but I'm running Debian 10 (from armbian) with mainline kernel 5.4 on a RockPro64 and it works great.
      • Could be true, but Pine64 is way ahead of Raspberry Pi in areas like power management. You can actually turn a a Pine64 board off in software, and then restart it with a soft button. This is extremely useful for embedded situations where you want the Pine64 be off some of the time and boot up on command from a secondary atmel processor. And it has a built in battery management system. The Pi requires a battery hat to do that.

        I was way more impressed with the Pine64 boards than I thought I would be.

        For th

    • by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @11:08AM (#59773968)

      Thanks for the heads up. The HardROCK64 looks interesting, and having 16 gigs of eMMC flash means a decent spot for tucking the OS away and having the rest of the stuff on a MicroSD card. Won't be out until April, but it would be some good competition.

      I wish these boards would come with a SATA slot or two, though. Having that would mean having reliable I/O and not worrying about burning out the onboard eMMC pages or the rather low write count on MicroSD cards. At worst, one can use a SATA flash drive (they exist, but tend to be for embedded applications) which would allow for a lot of I/O in a small package, which would be ideal for a NVR or other task.

      • Alright it seems time to repeat this. The Raspberry Pi's primary goal is low cost. Say it again with me. The primary goal is low cost. It was meant to be the cheapest solution for schools and students to learn with. If you need more CPU or SATA ports then there are plenty of other boards out there for your needs. Hell they publish the schematics and board layout. You could easily modify it for your needs.

        • It is understandable to have a price point, and the Raspberry Pi makers have done an awesome job at keeping things reasonable... but it would be nice if Rpi or another SBC maker had some options for added stuff that would allow ease of use turning the SBC into a decent NAS. You can do it with a Pi, but USB isn't exactly designed for a stable disk protocol.

          • by BRTB ( 30272 )

            ...it would be nice if Rpi or another SBC maker had some options for added stuff that would allow ease of use turning the SBC into a decent NAS.

            I haven't used these personally, but been hearing good things about the ODroid line: https://www.hardkernel.com/sho... [hardkernel.com]

            A few of them (like the one I linked) are specifically built for NAS use, others are more traditional SBC form factor but still have SATA ports on some models.

          • by DrYak ( 748999 )

            but it would be nice if Rpi or another SBC maker had some options for added stuff that would allow ease of use turning the SBC into a decent NAS.

            - the Helios series by Kobol is litteraly that: SBCs that has specially been selected for numerous SATA ports.

            - some offering by Pine64 and similar offer PCIe lanes either as slots PCIe slots or as M.2 slots.
            That would enable you to roll your own.

            You can do it with a Pi, but USB isn't exactly designed for a stable disk protocol.

            Been doing that for a couple of years. You have to be careful and test the USB-to-mSATA/etc. adapter you chose to use, though, because they can vary a lot in quality and feature support.
            The addition of USB3 onto RPi4 is a big improvement speedwise for that type of

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot&worf,net> on Thursday February 27, 2020 @02:23PM (#59774898)

          Alright it seems time to repeat this. The Raspberry Pi's primary goal is low cost. Say it again with me. The primary goal is low cost. It was meant to be the cheapest solution for schools and students to learn with. If you need more CPU or SATA ports then there are plenty of other boards out there for your needs. Hell they publish the schematics and board layout. You could easily modify it for your needs.

          No, there are plenty of boards more powerful or more featureful at the same price as a Pi. That's been true for a long while now.

          I said plenty of boards - because there have been dozens or hundreds of SBCs like this. But we've all forgotten about them, because the R.Pi has something none of those competitors ever had - a community.

          This community keeps the Pi going far longer. Any idiot can make an SBC and sell it for cheap. The real trick is to keep it supported for years on end, something the competitors fail to do. They release a board, release the software, then go on to bigger and better things, not realizing the Pi is far more than a piece of hardware.

          Most competitors release a version of Linux and maybe an Android release, and that's it. The Pi community has done that and more which results in far longer support life than would be expected.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @11:37AM (#59774120)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • What is the advantage of SATA versus the available 2 USB 3 ports? Other than that it's less versatile? Btw I love the Pinebook idea, may want to get one just to have one... And now also this board, should be really cool with the ir receiver.
        • What is the advantage of SATA versus the available 2 USB 3 ports?

          SATA (or M.2 PCIe) would allow to straight plug the flash in, without much hardware in it.

          With USB3 your have:

          - RPi4's SoC talking over PCIe to the onboard USB3 hub
          - the USB3 hub talking over USB2 or USB3 to a USB-to-mSATA/SATA adapter chip on the daugther board.
          - the adapter chip talking SATA to the flash.

          It's a been longer stack which is slightly more prone to troubles.
          By now, the onboard USB3 hub's problem have been solved by a firmware upgrade from RPi foundation.
          But the adapter chip on daughter board c

          • Thank you for the info. Makes sense to give preference to the shorter path. On the other hand, if it works fine, it may be good enough.
            • On the other hand, if it works fine, it may be good enough.

              My current setup (X850 v3.0 USB3 by Suptronics) is still a bit short of the good enough:
              - Still missing support for forwarding TRIM request.
              - Although it's able to forward SMART request, the spurious controller resets prevent a full long test to run.

              (though I'm running BTRFS and its scrubs at least correctly exercice the portion of the SSD that currently holds actual data)

      • I wish these boards would come with a SATA slot or two, though. Having that would mean having reliable I/O and not worrying about burning out the onboard eMMC pages or the rather low write count on MicroSD cards.

        - Some of the high range offerings from Pine64 expose the PCIe lane either as a PCIe slot or as a M.2 slot.

        - On the Raspberry Pi 4, the chipset's sole PCIe lane is busy by the USB3 hub, but you can find lots of USB3-to-SATA and mSATA adapter that can fit the bill.
        Note that there is variable quality and vairable tolerance to power issue. Always try to have an external power supplying your adapter when possible.

    • If you want this to be a desktop not just a hobby board made from scrounged parts, You have to add $30+ to a raspi for a new power supply, case, fan, and 32GB card. The add on a new keyboard, and a new video display and voila you have spent more than an inexpensive laptop and gotten less.

      The virtue of a Raspi is when you use it for anything else other than a desktop computer. Embedded board, a controller board, a hobby set up where you can recycle old screens, power supplies, etc form your junk drawer.

      • The virtue of a Raspi is when you use it for anything else other than a desktop computer. Embedded board, a controller board, a hobby set up where you can recycle old screens, power supplies, etc form your junk drawer.

        And small workload servers, hobby and non-hobby. Note: mount NAS for the "real" storage.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @04:06PM (#59775222) Homepage Journal

          I use mine for a GPS disciplined NTP server, a VPN server, PiHole DNS as blocker, weather station data logger and development environment.

          I'm looking at adding wireless sensor logging. Security sensors for Windows and doors, as well as environmental stuff like temperature and humidity, often use 433mhz and you can read them with and RTL SDR or a 433mhz low cost receiver.

          • ... and development environment.

            I should have mentioned that too. :-) Yesterday after reaching a milestone on a Linux based project I ran all the test suites prior to merging the branch with the main line code. After verifying all is well I thought to be thorough I should test under 32-bit. My PCs and VMs are all 64-bit so I fired up a 4GB RPi4. All was well there too.

            RPi is just a great little all around Linux box.

      • by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @12:55PM (#59774474)

        The Raspberry Pi excels as being an embedded system. Add a Zymbit HAT, and a good SSD, and you have a cheap HSM for GPG keysigning. Add some GPIO items, and you have a real time monitoring system. Add a GPS, and you have a low strata NTP server. Lots of cool stuff you can do with the devices that you don't really want to throw an actual computer at.

        • Hmm would not a dual frequency galileo receiver be better as they even filters out atmospheric delay, and tge on bord galileo clocks are allso supposed to keep time better than most on the gps clocks? But ok this might be more precision than ntp can offer, and yea you are right the ntp server on the pi would be stratum 1 and that us as low as you can get.
      • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

        --True, but you only have to buy those extras once for each intended RPi user. Buy a wireless keyboard and then you can have several RPis using the same user inputs and display. And you can get away with a 16GB card.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        OTOH, you'll have a full sized keyboard and a larger display and if something fails, you will be able to quickly replace just the part that failed.

        It becomes an even better proposition if like many here, you actually have some of those parts already. Even the common home user needing to replace an old desktop probably has an existing display and keyboard.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @01:19PM (#59774584) Homepage Journal

      You can easily get more power for your money than a Raspberry Pi, but you miss out on the community support the Pi gets (lots of distros tested and ready to go, every issue you might ever encounter already understood and solved) and the number of accessories available (cases, add-on boards etc.)

      Say you want to build a GPS disciplined NTP server so all your clocks are always within microseconds of UTC. You can get a Pi, other people have already figured out how to connect the GPS and how to set up the software. You can even get an add-on board that just plugs in and works. If you have issues then there are many people on the forums and mailing lists ready to help with the same or very similar setup.

      So you can go your own way, I did, but sometimes it's worth paying for the support.

  • USB-C Fix (Score:5, Informative)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday February 27, 2020 @10:56AM (#59773904) Homepage Journal

    From the link in the link in the link:

    The issue arose with the change to a USB Type-C connector for powering the device. An error in detection circuitry on the Pi side caused some power adapters to mistake the computer for an audio device, and therefore not shove the expected power down the line. The Raspberry Pi Foundation's own USB power supply (yours for £8) was fine, other cables (marked with an "e") were less so.

    Noted to be fixed by community members.

  • Power consumption (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @11:17AM (#59773996) Journal

    The power consumption has been shooting upwards as well with each model. I can totally understand the maximum consumption increasing with faster CPU speed and the addition of more hardware like wireless networking. However, the *idle* consumption of a Pi 4 is greater than the maximum consumption of a Pi 2 at 100% CPU with a USB WiFi device attached. That is harming its use for truly embedded purposes like remote sensing and the like powered by solar and battery. They are using ARM SOCs designed for mobile use, so I'm not sure why the idle power consumption has gotten so high.

    • I wonder if they should make a model focused on low power consumption, something more capable than the Rpi Zero W, but with four cores, and such. Not intended to be a barnburner, and designed to be able to run without heat sinks. I wonder if it has to do with moving to ARM64.

      • I wonder if they should make a model focused on low power consumption, something more capable than the Rpi Zero W, but with four cores, and such. Not intended to be a barnburner, and designed to be able to run without heat sinks.

        Would you consider the 3A+ [raspberrypi.org]? I have one hooked up to the TV in my bedroom. It's mostly the same SOC as the 3B+, just with half the RAM (and no ethernet, one USB port). A quick Google [raspi.tv] tells me the 3A+ uses less power, it's nearly on par with the 2B. Runs Kodi/RetroPie like a champ. I

    • The power consumption has been shooting upwards as well with each model. I can totally understand the maximum consumption increasing with faster CPU speed and the addition of more hardware like wireless networking. However, the *idle* consumption of a Pi 4 is greater than the maximum consumption of a Pi 2 at 100% CPU with a USB WiFi device attached. That is harming its use for truly embedded purposes like remote sensing and the like powered by solar and battery. They are using ARM SOCs designed for mobile use, so I'm not sure why the idle power consumption has gotten so high.

      You don't need all that power and RAM for remote sensing. That's why they still offer the Zero. Bonus: it's smaller, too.

      • Sure, the Zero is there, and it's a perfect fit for so many applications. However, that's not really the point. Is the CPU inherently more inefficient at "idle", is Raspbian just burning too much power when not running applications, or is it something else?

        • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

          Sure, the Zero is there, and it's a perfect fit for so many applications. However, that's not really the point. Is the CPU inherently more inefficient at "idle", is Raspbian just burning too much power when not running applications, or is it something else?

          The accessory chips don't run on a zero power budget. Add Bluetooth, 802.11ac wireless, gigabit ethernet, and USB 3 host controller, and even more RAM and you're going to consume more power than a board with 100Mbit ethernet, USB2 host controller, 1 GB

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by sad_ ( 7868 )

      maybe underclocking it will help?

  • Raspberry Pi 4 Base Model Gets More Ram + USB-C Fix!
    • Definitely more specific. Just because you don't run a Linux distro on it doesn't make the upgrades go away.

  • Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)

    by javipas ( 1086007 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @11:26AM (#59774062)
    It's not getting twice the RAM. There were three models (1 GB -> $35, 2 GB -> $45, 4 GB -> $55). The 2 GB version has just become cheaper and it's now at the same price as the 1 GB version that will still be available for "industrial clients". The USB-C fix was discovered (not clearly announced) a few weeks earlier [reddit.com], and I guess there will still be 2 GB RPis without the fix on sale for some time. The 1.2 revision [raspberrypi.org] fixes the problem and you can check that out with a simple 'cat /proc/cpuinfo', as explained on CNX Software [cnx-software.com]. Anyway, both are greathttps://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/02/27/1520258/raspberry-pi-4-linux-computer-gets-twice-the-ram-and-usb-c-power-fix?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=twitter# news for the RPi community, that's for sure.
  • Unless I was building something to a price, I would want the 4GB model. From an Arduino person's standpoint, the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins are crap.
    • by dacut ( 243842 )
      From someone who's been away for a few too many years, what are the issues with the RPi's GPIO pins compared to Arduino? I've only used Arduino for anything GPIO timing sensitive, and that was years ago, and even then not all that "sensitive" (sloppiness of a few ms amongst friends, and nobody would've noticed).
      • From someone who's been away for a few too many years, what are the issues with the RPi's GPIO pins compared to Arduino?

        The Raspberry Pi tend to run a soft-realtime multitasking kernel (Linux most of the time).
        Thus you don't have cycle-precise control on the PINs.

        That's great for protocols that already automatically handled by the chipset (Serial, I2C, I2S, etc.)
        that's also great for simple hardware (button, turning led on/off).

        That's not great for protocols where you need to bit bang the protocol yourself (some single wire push-register RGB Leds).

        I've only used Arduino for anything GPIO timing sensitive, and that was years ago, and even then not all that "sensitive" (sloppiness of a few ms amongst friends, and nobody would've noticed).

        If the sloppiness couldn't be tolerated, the RPi would NOT work for you.

        TL;DR:

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          Of course, the RPI isn't billed as a microcontroller either. For that, you can go old school AVR or PIC or something with ARM M0 or M4 running bare metal or perhaps with FreeRTOS.

          The GPIO on an RPI is nice to have and adequate to a number of less demanding tasks. Perhaps a bit better than the old days when people would use an ISA parallel port as GPIO.

    • From an Arduino person's standpoint, the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins are crap.

      Connect an Arduino to your Pi and get the best of both worlds.

  • by ccham ( 162985 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @01:38PM (#59774660)

    Over the years the amount of moronic attempts at USB implementation by the 'company' (mostly a jobs for friends program), the fact the community fixes most of their problems, lack of complete drivers and real broadcom support, the joke of a GPIO connector, and the weird exclusive relationships and undeserved press that started it all, I still can't believe they don't have a real competitor.

    • by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @02:02PM (#59774774)
      Are you asking why a nonprofit that designed a low cost computer development kit for teaching/training purposes didn’t design a “real” computer? That’s simple. The Pi was never designed for what you want. It is highly customizable though and others have used it in all sorts of functions like game consoles. If you want to extend the functionality of it, have you considered donating your time and money to do so?
      • I think he is asking why a Nonprofit charges more for the device than any for-profit company would, even when the for-profit companies have higher marketing and maintaining expenses?

        • No I’m pointing out that as a nonprofit they designed the Pi for a specific purpose which was teaching/training. The design choices would reflect this purpose as opposed to a more commercial purpose. Also as a non profit they have fewer resources. His critique is that a nonprofit with 135 total people can do everything he wants them to do as if they were a multi-billion dollar company. My suggestion is he should donate his time and money to correct what he says are EE flaws perhaps with his EE experie
    • I still can't believe they don't have a real competitor.

      They do, Intel. You can get REAL, fan-less quad-core Atom mini-PCs that run on 5W of power for under $100, including the case, power supply, eMMC storage, hdmi cables, dual video outputs, 3 real USB ports, everything (those are all extra cost with a Pi).

      You can get this box for $110 on Amazon (non-affiliate link) [amazon.com] with 4GB RAM, 64GB 100MB/s eMMC, dual output (vga & hdmi) 4K graphics. That'll do almost everything people want a Pi for, and more. L

    • The reason there isn't a real competitor is because they undercut the price of most other pi-like boards. Of course, other than "Maker" products and projects, you will probably not find any Raspberry Pi boards in real honest-to-goodness products because of the reasons you mention about the problems with the platform as it is.

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      And yet they remain a highly viable option. Between them and Arduino, even the more "professional" options have been forced to be more open and more willing to deal with small customers.

  • Its amazing they could get something so tiny to be a replacement for full desktop it would be better if Raspberry Pi's got back to focusing on cheaper prices rather than greater performance. Very few people are going to use an RP4 for a desktop due to much better alternatives being available for not too much money. Arduino fills the gaps for microcontroller. RPs sweet spot would be a full fledged linux desktop (i.e. access to massive existing code base) --- but for less than half the current price. Althou
  • How do you tell the difference between a Pi with the USB-C fault and the new revision? Also, have they done anything regarding heat?
  • Just need a switch to connect them together!

  • Is almost something.

    Luckily the device costs less than dinner for two.

"For the love of phlegm...a stupid wall of death rays. How tacky can ya get?" - Post Brothers comics

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