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It’s nice that the rpi project has been received warmly but I think it’s success has come at a price here.
If anyone remembers why the rpi started life: it was to get cheap affordable hackable “computers” in front of kids and hobbyists for programming purposes.
The affordability and ease of use has become a bar that everything else is measured by “that’s x times more expensive than a pi” is a common response when better solutions for your use-case exist.
The raspberry pi has made many compromises to be at the price it is. No dedicated Ethernet controller, no SATA bridge, no eMMC-
It’s literally the definition of suffering from success because now it seems people don’t judge it on what it was meant to do; just on what it’s possible to do with it.
It’s worth remembering that it is not meant as a one size fits all general purpose computer. It’s a hobbyist programming board.
Yes. What I love about the Pi is its versatility at a "disposable" price point. I can repurpose it for any project that takes my fancy at that moment without worrying too much if things go wrong. It's great! It might not be particularly good at any one thing but it's great for experimenting.
However if I have a specific long term purpose in mind I will look elsewhere.
"The affordability and ease of use has become a bar that everything else is measured by “that’s x times more expensive than a pi” is a common response when better solutions for your use-case exist"
Yes to a point, but then these conversations always end up recommending $100+ Nucs. If some one asks for a cheap run about, a Ferrari isn't the answer. Although I will admit people ask for cheap run abouts that do 200mph with v8 engines.
"people don’t judge it on what it was meant to do; just on what it’s possible to do with it"
Doesn't this go both ways? Its possible to use it as a desktop, which it may not be very good for. Its equally possible to use it for many 100s of things that weren't intended.
I suppose at minimum you expect it to do what it was designed to do. But it succeeds because of what its possible to do with it?
On the eMMC side the RPI compute models do support it.
Though they come with a different set of tradeoffs the devkit is reasonably priced.
Thank you for saying this. I've been pointing this out forever and it always results in a massive downvote. The educational angle of the Pi is long long gone.
And what really intrigues me is how much time people will spend trying to get this SBC to do something in a one-off project when an extra $75-$150 will get them a system that can do much much more out of the box.
Price point? It isnt cheap. Im in canada. Getting PI after tax/delivery is about 50$. Want a power supply, sd card and basic case? That will be closer to 100. My last netbook cost less than 200. My current phone 100. The PIs are not cheap. In canada, and i assume a great many other countries, they are very expensive toys.
Not all are compromise, some are strictly bad design. And, unless you get it from some discount offer, which to be fair does come frequently, it's just expensive relative to alternatives.
The Pi is _easy_
Yes, the SD card sucks massive balls, PSU issues are less of a problem now that most people have decent fastcharge USB lying about now.
The support that the PI is worth _every_ tradeoff. It is not a server, You can use it as one, but you have to spend some money, and do some work.
Yes, I'd love a pi with emmc and proper ethernet. But, I don't want to have to support it myself. Virtually all the other pi clones require significant engineering time from me, _or_ are in a black hole of support, stuck on a hacked version of ubuntu 14/16.
For a real datastore, you need a proper atx board with more than one sata port. That means paying > £200(PSU, case, ram, motherboard). I have one of these, and I don't use it for anything other than storing data(no I don't use own/next cloud. I like my stuff reasonably secure.)
The pi is great for what it is. You're trying to make it do something its not designed to do, and its fighting back.
Part of the reason that PSU issues are less of a problem now is that, to some extent, they were just cover for a couple of actual flaws in the original Raspberry Pi.
The first screw-up was that they misread the data sheet for the USB hub and Ethernet chip they used and backpowered the entire 3.3V bus from its regulator, causing it to overheat and fall over. Since this caused every method of communicating with the Pi to fail the only solution was to reboot. (Not all boards were affected, it only happened if the voltage of the internal regulator was higher than the external one and every chip had a slightly different voltage.)
The second screw-up was a USB driver bug which caused it to send commands to the USB hub at invalid times if a full-speed or low-speed USB device was connected. Basically every USB keyboard and mouse on the planet is either a full-speed or low-speed device. This caused input issues and even complete hub lockups which were blamed on the keyboards and mice drawing too much power or users connecting an underpowered PSU. In reality, the Pi as originally released was incapable of reliably supporting pretty much any USB input device.
I don’t understand why other boards can’t get themselves fully on the Linux mainline, that would take away at least a part of the rPi advantage. There are still a lot of limitations there relative to an x86 computer, although I’m not clear how much those are limitations of the Linux Arm ecosystem, and how much those are to do with the lack of mainline support, the need for blob drivers etc. I wanted to test out a webcam on rPi, there’s as massive difference between just being able to install VLC from repositories as you can on x86, and what you have to do on rPi, to compile a special version to work with the rPi’s proprietary graphics/video stack.
> The Pi is _easy_
The criticism of the article is not about the Pi being hard or something.
> I don't use own/next cloud. I like my stuff reasonably secure
Why is nextcloud insecure? Could you provide more information please? (I am about to set up a server for personal use)
No mention of SD card failure rates? By far one of the biggest shortcomings of pretty much every generation. I'm aware USB boot (only relatively recently) exists, but this lacks the cheerful simplicity of slotting in a ready-formatted SD card, especially for "appliance" style applications of the Pi.
If you want reliability, get an industrial grade microSD card. Here's a random option:
https://www.mouser.com/new/Swissbit/swissbit-industrial-SD-m...
From my point of view it is covered by whole section about power supplies. SD cards don't magically break because there is something wrong with RPi. They break because you loose power when writing operation is in progress.
I have 6 of RPi's and running at home without issues, no sd corruption running 24h for weeks now.
But I had a project where we used RPi as kiosk close to 10kv electric motor that was turning on and off periodically. Best power supply dedicated for RPi was not helping there because that was network fluctuation. I got loads of corrupted sd cards at that time.
This is one of the biggest issues outside of power supplies that I've had, I've got 10+ Pi's now, one of them in particular has chewed through SanDisk cards, sadly they'll not replace them under warranty unless you send them back.
The issue with that is the cards fail read-only and I won't send back cards with private data on.
I asked them if I can destroy the card first and they said no, because they have to test it in order to honour the warranty.
I moved the critical box (my home automation) to a NUC, the other Pi's are still doing fine.
It’s really not that bad if you’re using good quality cards. We’ve got a fleet of about 500 RPi based appliances in the wild, and over the course of a year will see 10 or so card failures - that’s a 2% failure rate. I’m pretty sure we could get it lower than that by doing some fairly minor tweaks to our base image such as sending logs to a tmpfs mount rather than disk.
There's also netboot. It works pretty well and means you never touch flash media at all.
Perhaps because that's not specific to the pi and the same issue is present on every SBC (unless you jump up in price dramatically, but you could argue that's the case for the network speed issue, and in fact most of the article).
Would be quite handy if there was a model with built-in SSD level flash storage (8, 16GB or something like that) and option to write the image on that storage by just connecting the device to computer USB port.
Yes, there's even an image of an SD card at the bottom?!
Nothing wrong with pointing out the Raspberry Pi’s tradeoffs. Of course someone could write an article about the tradeoffs of any single board computer. For most of them, the list would start with “More powerful but no community to support it.”
I own several Raspberry Pi’s. One of them is taking time lapse photos of a skyscraper going up two blocks away from my office. It had trouble uploading the photos every morning around 7am. It tended to catch back up at night. The problem went away once I replaced my 2amp power supply with a 2.5amp model. Day photos produce larger image files than night photos. My theory is the Raspberry pi had trouble processing and uploading the larger image files while running under voltage.
I never even knew this was a problem until just last night. I wanted to play with OpenCV and so I setup a Pi plugged into a 2.4a ps and got the undervolt icon immediately on boot.
I had always used Pi's in headless mode with first boot enabling SSH and connecting to my network so I had never seen the power/temp notifications to question anything.
Now I'm wondering the best way to validate the Power supplies and USB cords powering all my other Pi projects scattered around the house. I'm less concerned about the power supplies and more concerned about the cables.
Sounds like a cool time lapse and good use of a rpi. When will it be complete and are you going to post it somewhere? I’d like to see it!
Raspberrys are pretty fantastic.
I have a docker swarm cluster consisting of two Pis and two ODroids[1].
What HardKernel has done is quite interesting - taking the idea further. They continue to support the same pin io. However you can get boards with stronger processors, more memory and Gb lan. I would like to the the folks at to consider exploring models with different specs. I would love to see an octocore with 4GB memory and GB lan able to read MMC at +100MBps.
I have 2 odroid boards for my computing needs and a couple of raspberry pis for any DIY projects. The extra power of the odroid boards is hard not to notice.
Still no POE hat though.
Arrggghhh:
> There are other affordable alternatives out there where developers have given more consideration to those issues.
Like what?
ROCK64. Same form factor, up to 4GB of LPDDR3, USB 3.0, GbE, eMMC, SPI flash, mainline support (except GPU, but Lima sort of can display a Weston desktop already).
NanoPi is a good replacement, they provide distros, have all infos in the wiki and their libraries are open source on Github. You can order directly from friendlyarm https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/category...
If you want to run something heavier, like Nextcloud it’s a good idea to consider an Atom board. It comes real SATA connectors and USB3 and you can get them for 70-80€.
If heard good things about the Beaglebones, but never used them myself.
I‘m not a fan of the Odroid board, because they require custom Linux or Android and at some point those are not updated any more.
Another unfortunate issue is the DRM infection of the camera.
The Pi camera communicates with the GPU through a standard MIPI connector, but it is equipped with a DRM chip and will reportedly refuse to work with boards that are not equipped accordingly, with the proper secrets.
https://hackaday.io/project/19480-raspberry-pi-camera-v21-re...
We are developing an add on for the Raspberry Pi (tujasdr.com) and I spent some time looking at alternatives particularly because the Rbpi lacks OpenGL 3 support, which would have been nice.
There are a lot of boards with stronger hardware which are maybe great for general use, but they very often lack good drivers, for example many support I2S out but very few support I2S in.
Also the community support for the Rbpi is great.
What are the best options for a device that doesn’t cut as many corners? Say I’m spending thousands on som home automation gear, and many hundred hours on configuring e.g home assistant - then I don’t care whether the controller costs $39 or $299.
Are there similar projects with good high quality enclosures, dedicated power supplies? Are there any that support some kind of atx-like shutdown signals (requires quite a bit of hacking to do that for an R-pi)
Do I need to go to a “real computer” such as a NUC to get this, or is there something in between? I like the simplicity of single board with everything on board including the possibility to run of a memory card - but I’d like something I can trust will run for years without a failing power supply preferably without having to spend a grand.
If anyone is interested, I updated the script (linked in this article) to check if your Raspberry pi power supply and cable are good enough:
https://bia.is/2019/02/02/raspberry-pi-check-your-power-supp...
It really is time for a RISC-V based Raspberry Pi, with as much open peripherals as possible. That would be a fantastic platform. Mediatek might have something in the works already.
I see a lot of folk mentioning SD card failures, but truth be told that I've yet to have a corrupted card since the Pi 2 and the move to microSD (or if I did, I forgot about it). Even considering I've run a cluster of the things and have three running 24/7 for well over a year...
Love the pi but lack of sleep mode makes it inadequate for off-grid IoT. No dual sta/ap mode also a problem. Over/under voltage indication cannot be relied on. All in all great for hobbiest grade, should not be used beyond.
For easier technical comparisons of what is out there: https://www.hackerboards.com/home.php
Other than being worried about open source os, that shouldn't be where to stop. What about the hardware? Open source SoC specs are starting around 100k afaik (example: sifive)
Many thanks to the author for this very informative write-up. We are putting our open source deep learning codebase to run on raspberry with good performances for us, near 3fps for image object detection but we had little insights on how things truly worked internally to the pi. Again, very interesting, thanks.
Excerpt: "The GPU cores run a real time operating system called ThreadX. This operating system is closed source and rules the system without the open source Linux Kernel being aware of it."
My favorite is the pi zero .. too bad the W version is twice the price. It's tiny, cute and capable enough as a fat microcontroller.
I love my pi! Today I took the 5 mins to install PiHole and it's great! No more ads on any device on my home network. Lovely! :)
One thing I don't understand is why there's no added arduino on the board as an option. The a la mode isn't the same form factor - and an arduino chip would be cheap to add and provide so much embedded options like adc and much more pwm. Every project I've done included an arduino and it's a pain that they don't sell a combo in one board.
O
tl;dr “the Pi is no good as a NAS”.
Pi wasn’t meant to be a DIY NAS, so use something else. No HN post required about this really.
Keeping in mind what the Pi is aimed at, including the price point, it actually has more features and power that one could have dreamt of.
When people say it is "lacking" something it should really be interpreted as them saying that it is not a good match for their project.
What I dislike about Raspberry Pi is that it gives people the wrong idea of embedded programming. It led to a profusion of these tutorials and articles where someone is booting up an entire operating system and coding in Python just to make an LED light up. It would be much better if there were some kind of equally popular open source platform that focused on actual microcontrollers, with the associated focus on efficiency and performance.