Raspberry Pi 5
raspberrypi.com
raspberrypi.com
The microSD card slot is really great to have, to get up-and-running, but once it's clear which function the board will serve, being able to move over to a directly connected old NVMe would really be a benefit, also in terms of reliability. These microSD cards scare me, yet I make full use of them.
Finally having a battery backed RTC on it is really great news.
Then the ribbon cable would be braces
Only having a single lane of PCIe 2.0 is a little unfortunate. I wonder if the inevitable compute module will get more or not. It seems that their IO chip is also attached via PCIe but it provides a lot of the interfaces that you’d expect to have - so my hunch is that it’ll be included on any CM5.
Although, you'd need specific rules if you wanted to prevent someone just layering up always-on LED boards.
In theory sure, in a world with zero-inductance zero-capacitance busses and infinite-sink-current drivers. In our reality, however, you'll start having issues and start requiring stronger pullups and lower speeds long before you get to a hundred.
one can still have lots of I2C devices on one bus if they can be given unique addresses.
A 100kHz I2C with a 10kOhm pullup resistor can only take like... 1nF of capacitance before it all falls apart. (Crude napkin math for RC constant equals 10uS, I'm probably off by a magnitude but I think I'm close).
We're talking about the physical wire and physical electricity. Eventually, the capacitance on the wire grows such that its literally impossible for a 100kHz wave (let alone a 200kHz or 1MHz wave) to be placed upon the wire.
Parasitic Capacitance is real. Each item you add in parallel to a bus will increase capacitance.
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Each item you add in serial to a bus will increase resistance and inductance, which also slows down the speed of the bus. Once the speed drops below the specified protocol (ex: 100kHz or whatever you've chosen), it all goes to crap and no one can talk anymore. I don't quite remember the napkin-math formulas for LRC-circuits but... parasitics are hugely important and nH of inductance and nC of parasitic capacitance absolutely can be reached with just a few connectors.
Honestly, I think the earlier estimate of "failing by a hundred connectors" is rather optimistic still. 100kHz I2C and 10kOhm pullup would probably fail within a dozen connectors.
You can have as much addressing as you like and software going on in the background. It don't matter if your literal wires no longer work as you expect.
Unfortunately the internet wasn't available to get codes for the game genie, I'm not sure it would work anyway
Edit: yes the super game boy. Can't find any codes for the super game boy. So I assume that's prevented from the way they both work.
SNES => SNES Game Genie => Super Game Boy => Game Boy Game Genie => Game Boy Game. (Or even better, the Game Boy Camera or Printer)
So you could have your camera and printer.
Now that I think about it, Linux may be caching writes, but even then double the write speed compared to the read speed seems weird.
[1] I suppose this is the H/W equivalent of the S/W engineer's proclamation "It compiles - ship it!" And I guess this dates me since S/W is pushed rather than shipped these days.
Finally, if a network is available then network boot and use NFS or whatever.
The RTC is a cool addition and long overdue. At work I have three Pi 3s with GPS hats and aerials acting as stratum 1 ntp servers. The hats have a RTC included which is handy after a reboot. My use case is "reasonably accurate and stable time" so sub milli second is good enough, I'm not too fussed about nano seconds! I want logs to correlate and desktop clocks to be reliable.
A USB flash drive is like a dumpster. Big bandwidth when the lid is open but it’s got poor performance for fetching and storing lots of things all the time.
An SSD or NVMe is more like a rolling auto tool chest. Same big metal box, but much more performant for complex and numerous read and write loads.
Or to use a computer analogy: SSD is like a hard disk, USB flash is like a tape drive.
Those are almost certainly 8 to 32GB drives that are modified to report a higher capacity. They are scams that hope your return window expires before you try to load them up with a lot of data. Nobody can profitably manufacture flash drives for less than the wholesale price of the flash chips.
Search "SD card caught on fire"
Yeah. The Lichee Pi 4A has one of those under the board, it's really useful.
I wouldn't even blink if they completely jettisoned the MicroSD slot, these have proven to be a giant PITA over the years (slow, unreliable, etc...)
I really don't understand why they would miss that.
Edit: found it here: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
So the 4 GB model is 60$, which is 5$ more than the 4 GB model of the Raspberry 4 when that was launched: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-... . I guess that is fair, especially with inflation nowadays. So they stay true to the idea of making this available for cheap.
It's mentioned in Eben Upton's blog post (linked from the announcement):
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
https://www.engadget.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-uses-the-company...
Raspberry Pi 5 8GB - US$80.00 (EAN 5056561803326)
The accumulated inflation in the US since June 2019 is c. 17%.[1] This means US$ 55 in June 2019 is "worth" c. US$ 64.35 today. So it seems that you get a 4GB Raspi 5 for c. 7.25% less today.
The "US Real Average Hourly Earnings" have increase by ca. 22% in the same period, from US$ 27.75 to US$ 33.82.[2] So an average person needs to work c. 12% less to buy a 4GB Raspi 5 today.
However, I think the issue is more complicated: There is inherent deflation in electronics, which is included in the inflation rate. you can observe it when looking at the current price of a 4GB Raspi 4 at Amazone, which is c. US$ 67. So if the introductory price for a Rapsi 5 is really going to be US$ 60, you get something better for more than 10% less now.
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/realer_07112019.ht... and https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm
If you must use average, then you should remove the top 5% from the average.
5% is too arbitrary, just use the median.
https://openstax.org/books/statistics/pages/2-6-skewness-and...
Do you think that comparison of outliers to interquartile range is not a relatively objective method of determining outliers?
The interquartile range is a number that indicates the spread of the middle half, or the middle 50 percent of the data. It is the difference between the third quartile (Q3) and the first quartile (Q1) . . . The IQR can help to determine potential outliers. A value is suspected to be a potential outlier if it is less than 1.5 × IQR below the first quartile or more than 1.5 × IQR above the third quartile. Potential outliers always require further investigation.
https://openstax.org/books/statistics/pages/2-3-measures-of-...
Looking at wage movement as slices of where one falls gives a clearer picture.
Additionally, the reason it doesn’t make sense to remove low wage outliers while removing high wage outliers for average is because the median wage is closer to low wage outliers than it is to high wage outliers.
For example, if you take the median and then +- for your dataset (if median is 48,000, then use 0 thru 96,000), you’ll be removing more than just the top 5%, and yet, this also gives a far far far better picture of the dire economic position and what is happening with real wage movement.
But if wages are non-Gaussian, how would trimming the top and bottom 5% off of your sample be any better than using standard deviation ranges to control for outliers? The assumption that outliers are to be found on the top and bottom of your range is one that seems to apply to Gaussian distributions, and doesn't necessarily hold for others, regardless of whether you are using fixed percentage values or standard deviation thresholds. For example, in a bimodal distribution, outliers might be found in the center.
> For example, the average personal income is often given as the median—the number below which are 50% of personal incomes and above which are 50% of personal incomes—because the mean would be higher by including personal incomes from a few billionaires. For this reason, it is recommended to avoid using the word "average" when discussing measures of central tendency and specifically specify which type of measure of average is being used.
In this sense yes, median is some kind of average.
But then it is insensitive to the outliners, which is the reason it is suggested above.
> 1 a > : a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values
Average isn't well defined-- if you have to guess, people probably intend "arithmetic mean" when they say it. But if you're using it in the sense of a single number that represents the typical value of a dataset, you may want the median, mode, or midrange, or even a geometric or harmonic mean depending upon circumstance.
So it's best to use that term. And it's best to be charitable to not jump on people saying "average" when the median might be the best measure of central tendency for a task.
Hopefully no one nitpicks my use of "tangent" on a digression of an aside...
“Real”, however, refers to it being inflation adjusted, not an exclusion of high earners (who are excluded anyway because of the hourly earnings metric).
we make fun of business jargon and buzzword fads, and we do it just as much as anyone else, and it sickens me.
We make fun of business jargon because it’s an attempt to imbue authority where it isn’t due. “Enshittification” is… not that.
Take "bipping," a word I had never seen before a month ago, but that is now all over the place. (At least in some communities in the Bay Area; I guess all the car break-ins helped it's adoption).
I'm not at those extremes. I consider the origin of the word. A few years ago I started seeing "griefer," and it quickly became apparent that these people didn't know there was already a word for that: spoilsport. It's those instances that I bitch about, because it reflects ignorance and an unnecessary obfuscation of the language.
I'm down with adding words, including slang, that didn't have an equivalent. One example of foreign origin, "bokeh," really serves a purpose: to describe the aesthetic quality of blurriness. Cool.
Included in that 17% figure is the price increase for e.g. corn, rent and steaks.
Why should the change in price of either of these things be relevant to the price of a Raspberry Pi?
You can, of course, calculate the change in price over time of a specific basket of goods (rent, steaks, corn). But there’s no reason this is connected in any way to the change in price of an entirely different basket of goods (Raspberry Pi’s).
In other words, if you try to define how much the value of a dollar has changed over time, you’ll get a different answer depending on the basket of goods you choose. So the change is clearly not inherent to the dollar.
They're not as cheap any more at $15US for the Zero W. I miss the days when Microcenter had them on sale for $3.14US on Pi day. They did recently have them priced at $10 to celebrate the grand opening of a new store.
Besides, both the pi 3 and the pi 4 were $35 at launch, so they were actually beating inflation when they were launched.
It's more like they're expanding their top line.
To whoever thinks pi's are cheap, you can get more functionality out of a used laptop for less money, but probably worse specs and probably x86.
The official RPi specs intentionally overblow the power consumption in order to provide an buffer for powering whatever ridiculous stuff people may hang off the USB ports.
Then the other issue is that all RPis need somewhat tighter voltage tolerance than what is in USB specification. So it is perfectly possible that a cable between the power supply and RPi is compliant, but has too large series resistance on power lines for RPi. And well, powering RPi from random aliexpress-grade “Android chargers” is completely another bad idea.
Older boards with simpler workloads could usually manage at 1A (5W) but it was always preferred to have at least 2A (10W) to work with.
They link to multiple regional reseller sites [0], where prices are available. I see €73.90 (€60.08 pre-tax) for the 4GB version and €97.50 (€79.27 pre-tax) for 8GB in Poland.
I wanna see somebody hook up a GeForce card over to that 1x pci express. Play some Crysis using Box86.
- Octopi - PiHole - Grafana/Prometheus for my local network (I push Speedtest results, ping results, among other things to it) - home-made SNES/NES minis
I’m excited to try using the new Pi for a more comprehensive option for a retro arcade including many games that didn’t run very well for me last time I tried. (I instead used a home-built small PC)
[1] https://github.com/aaronhktan/rpi-albumart [2] https://github.com/aaronhktan/vesta
Wishlist projects: getting alerted when my home loses electric service or internet connectivity, using UPS and LTE modem. "Calendar dashboard" site that displays the household's schedule for the day on a tablet/jailbroken kindle. A lazy-loading reverse-proxy Caddy API server that will keep the connection open while it turns on my workstation in the background if it's off. Archiving tweets using mitmproxy to passively scrape Twitter's API responses while I use the official mobile client.
Basically anything that I wanted to automate and was not demanding on compute would get assigned to a Pi.
I have a pi4 running OSMC with the Plex addon attached to my television.
I've got about a half dozen Pi 0 W's with addon sensors that inform my Home Assistant of the temp, humidity, PM2.5 level, and CO2 levels in each room.
I just ordered a CM4 to run the PiKVM board for my homelab server.
I also plan to monitor and water my plants using Pi 0 W's.
I just ordered a Pi4 for running BirdNet, to identify birds in my area.
I would also like to work with ChatGPT to identify people and/or birds around my house.
I installed PiHole and noticed that every single click of my Roku remote gets sent to Roku’s servers. PiHole blocks this of course, but there was nothing I could do to disable this telemetry on the Roku device itself.
Google TV is slightly better - there’s options to adjust targeted ads, and an “app only” mode, but there’s still usage and other data sent to Google. Also you can’t use it at all if you don’t sign in with a Google account.
I haven’t used other platforms.
But I would like to see an easy to use, easy to configure, OSS streaming box. Now that this can do 4k60 and HDR, it might just work for things like Netflix, Plex, and other services.
Right now the best products on the market for high-bitrate streaming are Apple TV and Nvidia Shield Pro. I wonder if the RPi 5 can compete with that?
In terms of specs a Pi4 was already beefy enough for this use case, fwiw. But the software stack is hard just because no one seems to target the "set top box“ space quite the same way. There are client/server media platforms to compete with plex, there are single.box media platforms, there are set top boxes to compete with roku, and every possible mix in between.
I went over to a friends house last year that had a more modern Pi and they had a PiHole on their home network. It was pretty amazing being able to block ads on my phone near totally and not just in Firefox. New Pi's were completely impossible to find but my friend said give DietPi a shot. The benchmarks on my Pi after installing were complete crap, processes took minutes that took a few seconds on the more modern Pis, but AdGuard Home worked flawlessly.
It sent me down the rabbit hole of Tailscale everywhere, self hosting what I can, getting a NAS, and just opened up to me how simple it is to set up these kind of services now that are accessible everywhere.
I recently was able to get a Pi 4 (one week before the Pi 5 announcement of course) and am looking forward to a setup where I can run services that need hard drive access on my NAS and hosting the quality of life apps on the Pi.
A faster model would allow decoding at higher resolutions and frame rates, even when the codec in use doesn't have direct hardware support.
With the PCIe support in this new model, it could also make a decent home file server.
I got an RPi2 connected to a GPSDO acting as time server. Another RPi2 controls test&measurement gear via GPIB (there are GPIB hats, but I happen to have already an USB adapter from Agilent) and TTL PPS input and trigger output for synchronization. A RPi2 is plenty of computational power for those applications.
Another one runs the home automation hub (Homematic plus some addon stuff). Also very little maintenance, basically just doing backups and an update a year or so. Has been in place for several years as well. I often forget that this thing exists at all, as it just chugs along quietly, never needing reboots or anything. Even the updates are unnecessary unless I want to use some new sensor or actor that the old hub software doesn't yet know about.
And then there are two Pis connected to TVs in the living room and kitchen which run OpenELEC/Kodi for media center tasks. Started doing this when the first RPi came out and frequently used back then, these Pis are rarely used these days, as most streaming now involves commercial streaming services and is done via FireTV sticks. But I still have a private library for the occasional exception of stuff that's not offered on any commercial service, and that library is accessed via the Pis. Fortunately, aside from a reboot every few months and very rare updates, these Pis are also very low maintenance.
The cluster runs nextcloud, collabora, plex, longhorn storage, deluge, nzbget, some custom projects I built to sync my bank accounts with my finance software and to sync photos from Signal chats to my nixplay frames, backups for my NAS, Grafana/Prometheus/Loki, netdata, etc.
I also run an entertainment company and we use a Pi Zero to control our onstage LED lights via presentation remote or wifi as a fallback.
I keep thinking of other things to do with them, but this is already enough to maintain in my "spare time".
I use RPIs as "data collection" units. I have one RPi outside with a cheap SDR to pick up all the neighbor's weather stations, which I dump to a MQTT queue and use to populate weather data in my home. I use another to collect GOES satellite images.
I have 3-4 RPis that act as "Digital Ham Radio Hotspots", basically bridging my local ham radio via the internet to other stations. I use an RPi 4 as my "to-go" computer when I do ham radio in the woods. I use an iPad as a screen, and it works just as good as a laptop.
I have an RPi sitting in my garage as a second nameserver. The primary nameserver is in the house "data center".
I have an RPi plugged into my stereo receiver as a streaming device that lets me stream audio from my phone to the stereo.
I have 4 RPis connected togehter in a k3s cluster, for fun. IT doesn't work great. :)
I have two PiKVMs. They are truly awesome.
... I think that's it.
Seriously, it’s just because I may do something else on that Pi that I want it on that side of the house. It’s my only garage Pi. My main internet handoff is in the garage, but my main “datacenter” is in a basement room on the other side of the house.
It’s all for fun. :)
- One pi4 for my homemade 3D printer (a Voron)
- One pi3 for a homemade eInk clock/weather station (here I could've gotten with sth much cheaper like an ESP32, but the Pi is so convenient)
- One pi zerow 2 for a homemade eInk radio
- One pi4 I just bought for home automation (homeAssisstant)
I don’t need to transcode anything so it’s been more than sufficient for me, and if I start to run out of storage I can just hook up more drives.
It also has about a terabyte of PS2 games because a softmodded PS2 can play games off a Samba server rather than the DVD drive. Niche, but very cool imo
I'm not feeling compelled to get a more powerful pi. In fact, I'd be more inclined to buy the pi zero or several of them, but they were always impossible to find in stock when I was interested.
Deployed a Qt app to dozens of pi4-based machines for doing clock-in/out and generating various PDFs in to support the business I was working for.
I want to also possibly make it a media device? I have it physically located behind a tv, just because I already had Ethernet wired there, but it isn’t hooked up to the display yet, and I haven’t figured what to do with it if I did hook it up. Not sure if that would overstress the cpu. Can’t have my dns crashing if I’m watching a video.
And two MIPI camera ports is also really nice for this application, because the new advancement in FRC is to use April Tags included with the field for full field localization. For this purpose, I've heard you get better results with global shutter MIPI cameras than USB webcams, and having multiple cameras is good for always seeing an AprilTag.
The Photoprism instance holds about 114.000 pictures which I took over the past 10+ years and includes features like face recognition and browsing by location. I quite like it and find it super impressive that such a small device can run such a powerful application with that amount of data.
I ran a Pihole server on an ancient 1A for several years. It was considered underpowered but worked great. I’ve run Homebridge services which was a great way to integrate various IoT stuff into HomeKit that lacked native support. I’ve since moved these things onto other hardware to consolidate things (not because of anything inherently wrong with the Pi).
For about a year now I’ve been using a Pi as a BLE data collector to slurp data from a weather station I have on my deck. That being said, the onboard Bluetooth on the 3 and 4 is pretty awful in my experience. I needed to use an external dongle to make it reliable.
For over a year I used a Pi 4 to run multiple SDRs to record and rebroadcast trunked police/fire scanner traffic. I eventually had to retire it for that purpose when the trunked system changed to digital and the Pi just couldn’t keep up with the workload anymore.
Those were all applications that I ran for months/years at a time using Pi hardware. I’d consider them “serious” even though they weren’t anything impressive or enterprise-worthy.
Other things I’ve done with them are use them as emulation stations. Even older Pis are more than capable of emulating 8 and 16 bit consoles without a hitch. Their compact size makes them portable and easy to plug into a TV and work with a Bluetooth controller.
i have another running kodi so i can access jellyfin that's on my NAS
pi-hole for network wide ad blocking
currently setting up one to act as a storage location for the restic backups from my NAS instead of having to store them with some storage provider like backblaze. i will be installing tailscale on it as well so i can leave it in a friends house and hopefully be able to reconnect to it even if they move house in the future
I also use another one for retro pi, which I imagine will benefit from the increased performance..
lastly, I have a small handheld Bluetooth keyboard with a track pad I use with a pi4 with a 3.5in screen hat and battery pack. the overall size and weight is much less than any laptop I have ever come across, and I use this when I go to cons. (although I'm looking at plantecom to replace this)
The Compute Module 4 series have been able to support eMMC chips, so I don't see why they wouldn't continue with the 5 if/when it shows up
It's a fiddly FPC connector though, which isn't a great contributor to mechanical robustness.
It's not so hobbyist/tinkerer friendly, where you're likely to put a lot of cycles on the connector, bend things back and forth, and end up with an enclosure that does not protect everything as well as one would like. Indeed, you have a sibling comment talking about breaking lots of FPC going to cameras.
Mechanical/connector failure is a small but noticeable share of the SD robustness problems on SBCs. I would expect FPC to be worse.
Also, other connectors for this type have surprisingly low durability. Most M.2 slots are rated for extremely low mating cycles. Amphenonol, who I would considered to be an high quality manufacturer, rates their M.2 slots for '25-60' mating cycles total. Less than 100. Most manufacturers do not even specify the number of mating cycles.
I'm not saying they made a bad choice; they're facing a lot of constraints and have a lot of IO to get out while staying hobbyist friendly.
> Also, other connectors for this type have surprisingly low durability. Most M.2 slots are rated for extremely low mating cycles.
Sure, but I don't -need- as many mating cycles for M.2, as it'd be screwed to the board and done. Whereas if I'm dealing with a Pi stackup and coming in and out of the case, I'm likely to get through the couple dozen cycles I'm allowed with FPC. And if I'm putting it on a vibration-intensive environment like a quadcopter, I need to be pretty dang careful with mechanicals.
> Again, this sounds overblown.
Everything's a tradeoff. Flex is cheap and small and offers versatility. It's also delicate and annoying.
250 MB/s is for PCIe 1.
"One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5 feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface. Intended to support fast peripherals, it is exposed on a 16-pin, 0.5mm pitch FPC connector on the left-hand side of the board.
From early 2024, we will be offering a pair of mechanical adapter boards which convert between this connector and a subset of the M.2 standard, allowing users to attach NVMe SSDs and other M.2-format accessories."
As you keep spamming this here, did you read the HN Guidelines[0]?
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I did read that they were going to support M.2., and I have gotten around my issues with SD cards in the past using SSD-grade USB drives and NVMe adapters. My comment was about how crap SD cards are, and how this class of SBCs (including the PI 5) often use them as their default storage (as in, not needing an adapter or special firmware to boot). My final statement was my wish for a high speed durable storage standard that was better than SD cards without having to spend more money than the SBC itself on storage, although looking today on Amazon it seems that NVMe drives have gotten way cheaper, no idea of those are quality though.
Those I’ve acquired this way worked well, those I’ve brought off online stores almost always had problems or short lives (or both).
Also, those micro SD cards were always fine after a format/partition and I can still use them in other devices just fine. I've read before that the Pi has a tendency to corrupt micro SD cards through its reader, and IIRC it's related to power issues.
Combined with a portable LCD, it's a low-power dev workstation on a battery. ^_^
One is an NTP server which gets the time from GPS, although that one will probably be retired soon, internet time works fine.
I used to have one inside a MAME cabinet but I upgraded it to a "real" PC because the Pi isn't really powerful enough for modern versions of MAME.
You need a server to host the ISO (via http/ftp/tftp or whatever you prefer) and a DHCP server that will distribute the ISO URI to the client.
Configure the client to boot from the network in the bios and put it in the same LAN as the dhcp server.
That's the gist of it.
99% of the time it's the verbose logging of application servers that is the culprit of sdcard failures.
I had to do this when I was doing some long-running I/O intensive operations and it was basically killing the SD card storage.
One of the things I do is to configure hosts to use the overlayfs (read only fileystem) where appropriate and that helps to reduce wear on the SD cards.
I don't use then where I want a responsive system and use USB/SSD or NVME/SSD instead.
From the device tree [1] it looks like they've rolled their own IOMMU rather than using ARM's SMMU which is annoying.
[0] - https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/pull/5618
[1] - https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/blob/9c75e5408c01cb7c65...
Single thread SHA256 performance is 64 MB/s using crypto/sha256 (64 MB/s using minio/sha256-simd). Hashing performance is 56.63 MB/s
Thats on Raspberry Pi 400.
This is a nearly 10 year old manufacturing process and it’s silly to compare the performance per watt to any Intel or Arm chip on the market today. On such an old node, it’s not surprising that the power draw is so high. Of course an M2 would smoke a RP5 at a much lower power. But the RP5 is 60 bucks!
8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.
A lot more computing power than the Pi 4 and older home server it replaced. The M.2 slot was an absolute game changer. Real onboard storage is a must.
It runs a few low resource VMs in the garage and I almost completely forget it exists.
arm64 has come a long way for that use case.
It's been solid as the VM host so far. I wrote an Armbian SD card and it just worked. Once a VM is booted though, many things become irrelevant outside of arm64 support.
I haven't tried again since February, so there's a decent chance my issues are fixed, but ZFS wouldn't build and VLAN support was disabled for the NIC. Not blockers, but it did make me rethink some ideas I had.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/ says "LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM (4GB and 8GB SKUs available at launch)" so maybe the cheaper ones will be coming at a later date?
Unrelated to that, the addition of a power button seems like a significant improvement over previous models.
FWIW, the Pi 4 and Pi Zero W are both fairly available these days. The Zero 2 W is still in short supply, but aside from that, the shortage is basically over.
even if you run the sbc headless and never touch the gpu, you risk starving the threads for things where it would be an upgrade over the previous models.
Are there any fully open (in terms of schematics, firmware) RISCV rpi-"compatibles" out there? I'd be happy to pay triple the price of this thing for a power-efficient linux-capable sbc that is open.
"Does Raspberry Pi 5 need active cooling?
"Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis, and like most general-purpose computers, it will perform best with active cooling. The Raspberry Pi Case for Raspberry Pi 5, with its integrated fan, is one way to provide this."
They pose a question themselves, and don't even answer it. Of course something will perform best with active cooling. Does it need it?
I don't need this wishy-washy marketing language from Raspberry Pi.
An MPU designer expects to see something like "200mA draw from the 1.2V power-domain when running at 400 MHz" or "10mA draw from the 1.2V power-domain when in first level of sleep". (Maybe not this small since Rasp. Pi is a more powerful chip, but... you know... actual specifics).
"Will my Raspberry Pi 4 power supply work with Raspberry Pi 5?
"Raspberry Pi 5 is a higher-performance computer than Raspberry Pi 4, and you may have problems using an under-powered supply. We recommend a high-quality 5W 5A USB-C power supply, such as the new Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C Power Supply."
The question asks about power requirements, but the answer is about performance?
The first time I read that I thought the 5 needs more power than the 4, not less.
Ermmm, what?
But then you get 5V 5A ... 27W that is clearly incorrect too. So my guess is nobody is proofreading the technical specifications, and everybody that cares was kept away from that page.
Also, that 92% efficiency, is believable, but a bit high for a 5V 5A PSU (this is a difficult combination). I would expect any such unity to be marketed as high-efficiency.
If you frequently work it really hard, it'll have larger temperature swings and may fail earlier, but it'll still probably last quite awhile. The failure is not likely to be catching on fire.
The actual info I'd rely upon at this point:
https://www.phoronix.com/benchmark/result/raspberry-pi-5-coo...
pi5 with active cooler is about 1.2-1.5x faster than pi5 without cooler for most workloads that care than without.
Pi5 with active cooler is about 2-2.5x faster than Pi4. So Pi5 without cooler is probably about 1.5x faster than pi4, depending upon workload. (And more than this for quick bursts where thermal mass wins).
But it makes wonder how much more phone manufacturers could squeeze out of their phones, although Apple are definately overclocking the 15.
"The combination of a newer core, a higher clock speed, and a smaller process geometry yields a much faster Raspberry Pi, and one that consumes much less power for a given workload."
A beefy heatsink case should be able to handle that.
I'm pretty sure what it means is that kids who use the pi on their desk don't need to spend on a cooler. It will probably throttle and run slower.
Meanwhile an adult using the pi could put on a cooler and wring lots of performance out of it.
> "Raspberry Pi 5 has been designed to handle typical client workloads, uncased, with no active cooling".
IMHO, uncased means you're doing maintenance or it's a toy, but it's not a 'production' configuration.
The uncased requirement is exactly what I'd expect to see there. Other than that, only if they decide to get really technical (they should) and tell you dissipating power / °C and temperature limits.
If your goal is to get the highest score on every benchmark, then yeah, you need active cooling. That has been true on every Raspberry Pi, I think. (I don't remember if the 1 needed active cooling. I did not have any. I also remember it taking over a day to recompile Linux! Still faster than setting up a cross compiler at the time ;)
Here’s my proposed edit:
Q: "Does Raspberry Pi 5 need active cooling?
Original A: "Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis…”
Better A: "For modest workloads, no. For heavier workloads, you will get better performance with active cooling. Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis…”
I don't find it hard to understand what this means: the soc limits it's core performance based on thermal conditions and will throttle when hitting limit temperature. That's standard behavior on every computer or smartphone or GPU out there.
Make temperature lower and it will clock and run at higher speeds without throttling.
The "most open" are MPU chips and their associated "System on Module" boards. This isn't quite a SBC, but its easier to use than a BGA. These SoMs are very poor from price/performance perspectives, but instead serve as reference designs and/or prototypes to the $8 or $9 chips. The overall expectation is that you're "supposed" to be building your own PCBs eventually, so the SoM are kind of just a prototyping aid.
Most SoM provide 100+ pins from the chip as well, meaning you absolutely have to build a PCB to use them. However, 2-layer boards solder very easily to a SoM with castilliated edges (even with a hand-soldering iron)... albeit with a bit of flux and technique and practice. Its just the easiest way to deliver the most-pins of customization in the smallest space. So a relative beginer should be able to boot an SoM. The most difficult routing and Power-Delivery-Network details are already solved on an SoM, you just gotta apply power and build out the final interfaces / connectors.
Take the ATSAMA5D27-SOM1, 104-pins in a 40x40mm form factor. $50 from Mouser for 500Mhz and 128MB RAM (though fully open source and fully documented at linux4sam, and processor manual, U-boot process and everything). But the underlying SiP (MPU + DDR2 RAM) is like $15... while the MPU alone is like $8 and 128MB of DDR2 RAM is only like $3.50 in practice. Since in mass-production, you'd probably have a custom PCB anyway, that's the most expected use case. https://www.linux4sam.org/bin/view/Linux4SAM . I'd say that Microchip / Atmel's MPUs seem to be the best documented that I've found, but are unfortunately the lowest specs. Still, they also have some of the lowest power-consumption (like 200 mW or something), so really they're in a low-power class of their own. Still Linux though.
------------
STM32MP1 is the MPU from ST Micro. Like the Microchip SAM-MPU series, the STM32MP1 is available in SOM, SiP, and "raw" MPU form. Except the SOMs are like $100+, the SiP is like $50+, while MPU is $10ish.
-------------
I know NXP has a huge line of MPUs. I haven't researched them yet though.
---------------
I think all the hardware designers at this level just "assume" that their customers, if they care about "open source", are probably making their own PCBs.
If someone "just" wants a SBC (like the Rasp. Pi), there's not much point in publishing a ton of documents. People can just boot the Rasp. Pi and start messing with Linux.
-------
I got no experience with this yet. I'm just curious and am thinking of a simple MPU layout project ever since I discovered that OSHPark has 6-layer boards and KiCAD supports BGAs in practice. Overall, these lower-power lower-end MPUs fill a different niche than a Rasp. Pi ever would. But I feel like there's enough overlap that these might scratch your "open source" and "fully documented" itches.
the beaglebone pru is cool too.
But all of that pales in comparison to the huge mindshare the pi has, which makes all the difference.
RP4 doesn't have LoRA like the Beaglebone Play. 3mile / 5km radios can do many things that RP can never do.
[1] Youtube Video on the RPi 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_QPM9xV_sw
[1]: https://cdn.geekbench.com/Geekbench-6.2.0-LinuxARMPreview.ta...
748 single / 1507 multi
Most of the tech world announces products, executes a marketing strategy and then releases stock into the market.
You make it sound like someone left you standing at the altar. You didn't know it existed an hour ago. If you were on a long vacation, it might have released before your return. Why get angry?
Why do you assume this specific announcement is what upset me? Why do you assume this has anything to do with their product marketing strategy? Why do you assume I wouldn't have gotten angry even after they released the product?
Especially their VisionFive 2 board. I've even downloaded a schematic for it (although older revision than actual board I have). And they're pretty good about upstreaming drivers.
That said: what you probably care about is documentation for integrated peripherals (esp. GPU), and existence of open source, mature drivers for those.
RPi is very good in this regard. Afaik the only binary blobs there is some GPU/SoC firmware, and (maybe) some boot code.
RPi's in general are very well supported & documented, and its software ecosystem is very mature compared to anything RISC-V based.
Could you pinpoint what you think is lacking there?
Other ARM based boards may offer more bang/$. Likely at the cost of documentation or driver support (Beagleboard being an exception).
Is there any reasonable option with software support that comes even close to what RPI offers? I don't want an SBC where I have to use some strange back ported, super old, kernel with little to no chance of getting updates.
Maybe I should just go for an X86 board? Lattepanda Delta, or Khadas Mind whenever that's released. Not even that more expensive.
[1]: https://frame.work/marketplace/mainboards [2]: https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...
I have no idea what kind of USB-C PSU one can call "normal", but allowing higher voltages would be really good.
12V @ 2.25A would have been much more sensible: With a 100mΩ cable you'd lose 1.8% instead of 10%
Using 5V 5A means you have to essentially use the official power brick, because very few third-party chargers support it. It really sucks.
aarch64-wise, not quite yet I think, but I have hope for the RK3588. https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...
> Maybe I should just go for an X86 board? Lattepanda Delta, or Khadas Mind whenever that's released. Not even that more expensive.
Yeah, x86-64 would certainly be a safe choice if you have the budget for it. I'd add ODROID-H3/ODROID-H3+ to this list.
For cost-saving reasons, the I/O is located in the RP1 Southbridge (which has a larger process size) instead of the SoC. I had the opportunity to preview the Pi5 and have provided a detailed breakdown of the RP1's components [1]. In summary, what I/O functionalities does the RP1 manage? Essentially, it handles almost all of them.
The four was great until I realized that they hung all sorts of stuff off the same bottlenecked USB controller.
I’d think moving them to PCIe would net much more than 2-3x real world improvement.
https://x.com/alexellisuk/status/1707296079849365650?s=20
This is so much quicker for clusters, servers and headless use, that I don't think I'd consider buying any more RPi4s myself.
[1] https://nitter.net/alexellisuk/status/1707296079849365650
I'll wait for a CM module before I consider to replace my CM4 fleet, but for now I am happy with my CM4 as it is. Although I admit the ability for native NVMe is attractive. Better I/O as well!
Also, the RPi5 needs a better PSU so that is one thing to take into account.
For people for whom a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is good enough, they should opt for that instead. They're widely available and no longer ridiculous prices.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding by the hardware designers of what Raspberry pi is.
Raspberry Pi has jumped the shark.
There are loads of cool projects for the Pi (synths etc) which chuck out audio and sound good enough through the built-in jack.
if it's a trade between a built-in audio jack or a built-in RTC, i'll take the RTC 100% of the time.
A battery-powered RTC means that any logs from the device aren't inherently untrustworthy.
https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy3_audio.html
The trick there is twofold: one, if you're doing traditional digital audio, this output has a very 'old school sampler' sound that takes well to further processing. It's a really primitive output with a lot of character that sits well in a mix or performance: no trouble building an entire mix around sounds coming off this output.
Two, because it's directly built into the Teensy and doesn't have as many intrinsic assumptions about what digital audio is, you can overclock it to sample rates as high as a megahertz or so, while still running the same audio library. That means if you're just putting out a square wave, the ONLY limitation on your quality is aliasing, as bit depth no longer matters. If you're doing multiple square waves you still don't need full use of the 12 bit analog output to do it. And if you're at 1mHz aliasing is next to nothing, so all of a sudden your cheesey 'bad' output is in fact shockingly good. Even waves which do require the 12 bit resolution are a lot better with no significant aliasing. I run four-note chords with two oscs per note, portamento, and additional waveforms, on a single Teensy, at upwards of 300kHz.
From what I can see, no audio hat does this. They're all mediocre CD quality. I'm sure you could build a ladder DAC out of raw digital outputs on a more modern Teensy and do just as well, especially if you ran even lower bit than 12 bit. Teensy3 has that analog pin just right there, though. Lovely :)
Arduino on the other hand, and them open sourcing the hardware means very cheap but less powerful SBCs from companies in China (and elsewhere). I hope to see something in a similar vein from them as they have the ecosystem and resources to mass produce very cheap boards, but the Pi itself is prohibitively expensive, and it looks like they cater to companies first and prioritise making a profit.
> Arduino on the other hand, and them open sourcing the hardware means very cheap but less powerful SBCs from companies in China.
You probably don't know that the Raspberry Pi Pico is now also produced in Africa (I only learned last week). It offers better value for money compared to the ATMEGA328P. Additionally, Raspberry Pi is actively supporting the development of hardware manufacturing skills in Africa.
in the past, what would have been the prices in South Africa in your experience? for me, usually the final price would have been a 50% mark up minimum.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
On pre-ordering:
> We’re also giving every print subscriber to The MagPi and HackSpace magazines a single-use code, giving them priority access to Raspberry Pi 5 hardware.
A subscription is US$43 and up, and gets you a priority code to use at PiShop or The Pi Hut. You pay full price for the RPi 5, but it ships to you first.
The Lichee Module 4A is a CM-style board, though not compatible with CM4, and is generally a bit faster than a Pi 4.
That's the fastest RISC-V you can get right now (but you can get 64 of those > Pi4 cores in one chip!). Chip and boards in RK3588 class coming next year, so that's ~Pi5.
This could make it appealing for a low-power server, like a home NAS. In previous models, disk I/O had to be over USB, which imposes more CPU load than native SATA, along with various unpleasant quirks typical of USB-to-SATA bridges.
Too bad it's only one lane (assuming that's what they mean by x1), but I think that's almost enough to saturate a SATA bus, so it should nevertheless be useful where NVMe speeds aren't needed. I hope it's implemented well.
Not bad for a simple setup, though, especially one aimed at conserving power. (Although this board's idle power draw remains to be seen.)
I know there are plenty DIY projects for this (and the cyberdeck scene is a rabbit hole that I do not dare to go down), but it would be nice something more easily available.
It really is a BBC B modern equivalent.
I'd buy one. Probably more.
Currently got two A500 and one A500+, and feel like I could use more ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
It will probably work fine but it's something you notice just like how Dell put the heatsink on the IDRAC card in the R420 the wrong way, which would have significant impacts on airflow and cooling.
__|||||||___(fan)____
Then they would have to CNC the edges off to create the mounting ears anyway and cut the slots in the fins. I suppose they could just make the gaps larger but this is probably getting into the details...
I started with Pi-Hole a few years back but ended up with a commercial paid DNS resolver. The timeline usually goes like this -- will stumble on another interesting video of Jeff Geerling, then spend the weekend tinkering with the Pi, keeps running, forget about it, found it to be not needed, plugs off and is lying around.
[Tsundoku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku) (Japanese: 積ん読) is the art of buying books and never reading them.
I have always bought 2 new raspberry pies with every release. I’ve used some and forgotten, unplugged some, given away some, broke some, and now they’re all used in some way.
I bought them because I knew I’ll use them. I didn’t buy any other random toys or mini computing devices (even though they were alluring) because I knew I wouldn’t use them.
There should be a name for the art of making every thing that randomly happens to some people into a phenomenon.
I do recognize GP, though. In college, I was obsessed with Linux. Nowadays I have a Macbook, and like you, have an Intel NUC (running Windows). I really don't need a Raspberry. But boy, do I need to resist the urge to get one.
A book, like any media, fulfilled its initial purpose after it has been "consumed" - anything else (looks nice, feels nice, smells nice) are physical, subjective qualities attached to it. You might even buy it solely for these physical qualities, but that's besides the point.
A machine has its purpose in its usage, and that usage requires known resources that should not be carelessly wasted. I personally buy them to enable a utility for myself and have fun discovering it. It fulfilled its initial purpose even if it was powered on just once.
Even those single-board computers that were put to "good use", as building blocks for new devices (eg. [0]), are still not in use the whole time.
[0]: https://www.creativeapplications.net/objects/paragraphica-co...
I have a few orange pi boards in a drawer that would disagree with you.
Examples: I also use one with OpenWrt (though I'd prefer OPNsense on it), and I use one as PiKVM. I use one with a portable HackRF (3D printed case), batteries included. I use two with Pimoroni Enviro+, and I have a fun Turing Pi 2 homelab/miniNAS with 3 CM4s (one Jetson Orin Nano). I got two RPi4's one at my mother in law, one at my mother, allowing a VPN connection for tech support and also running Jellyfin with old content for them.
Personally, I still enjoy my Pi's (and no not all of them are on and used 24/7) however I also very much enjoy Proxmox and VMs. But the Proxmox machine is a Xeon... (HP MicroServer 10 Gen 10) the fan is loud af and difficult to replace with say a Noctua due to HP ingeniousness.
Of course, that begs the question "how did that ecosystem develop in the first place?", but I can't answer that.
It's a very clean language.
Mounted at the back of an LCD screen could make a nice wireless setup with the other peripherals.
I got one and I don’t touch it. I do also have an orange pi 5 and khandas edge 2 pro. Both are miles ahead of the rpi4 and based on specs they are miles ahead of the rpi5.
I use them for development. One has ubuntu installed and the other Fedora.
https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Computer-Frequency-Android/...
Unfortunately, it is too slow to even smoothly power a desktop environment.
The overall performance still wasn't great.
Would not do heavy computing on it though, eslint alone for my use cases already kills my 8 core 7700x
Just sold my Pi 400 after the announcement of the Pi 5, deciding the Pi 5 will be my primary desktop PC. (Also ordered a Pi 4 because I have some other plans for it, but don’t want it built into a keyboard).
Falling back onto my Pi 3 I never really used before — it’s surprisingly capable. Not as a general desktop but gets my programming done fine. Its bottleneck seems to be I/O and limited RAM.
I was thinking about getting a wireless keyboard+mice and attach RPi at the back of my monitor to have a clean and very low-power setup.
At this point the hobbyist community has moved on to other things (shout out to odroids). I don't think raspberry pi is going anywhere, but they do have a very different market and customer base than they did five years ago.
Also as a company their social media people really are assholes, which doesn't help at all.
FWIW the communities I participate in are still RPI focused and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone using an odroid.
> Also as a company their social media people really are assholes, which doesn't help at all.
This is something I’m somehow unaware of (I avoid general social media); what do you mean?
Some small fraction of one percent of "the hobbyist community" has done as you've suggested. You're in some kind of odroid bubble.
> I'm pretty sure the other brands saw a big uptick in sales
They probably had massive upticks in sales, which for them might have been quite significant but relative to the total Pi user base, not at all.
I have a N100, and some rp2040s for GPIO.
I have a project coming up that needs to drive a small screen, the raspberry pi is totally the platform I'm going for. There is no comparison for hardware and software options.
Which is 100% the correct thing to do. They said they were especially prioritising smaller companies that relied on Raspberry Pis, where otherwise those companies would collapse or need to lay people off, and also kept some aside for educational establishments.
Sorry to say this, but your home assistant plant waterer robot dog feeder is less important, especially since hobbyists can just go to another product much easier than a small business can.
Name three, please, with emphasis on the "considerably more powerful" part.
The Pi5 is slower than a Core i3 6100, does not support upgradable ram, does not support Pci Gen 3 let alone Gen 3 x16, no actual Sata 6, no upgradable sockets, etc. There are a TON of uses cases for a Pi 5...but only really if power consumption and size is critical for the application. Almost anyone doing a Pihole, Home assistant, or the like is better served by a used miniPc.
The RPi itself is still going strong.
Reasons to prefer a pi over a mini PC - easy access to GPIO pins; small(er) form factor; power efficiency; lower weight; still cost if you can work with zeros.
Reasons to prefer a mini PC over a Pi - price to performance ratio is often far, far better; size is "good enough" for people just after a small computer (rather than an electronics project, POC, etc); you are, in fact, reducing ewaste.
In short, if you just need something to run Home Assistant or Plex on ProxMox or similar, you would find more reward in a mini PC than a Pi, particularly in performance.
The bias at play is that people see "old" and equate it with "bad performance". That heuristic only works when comparing like for like - yesterday's mini-PC to today's mini-PC.
I might be hopelessly biased since you would regard me as someone who keeps using computers when they are "past the point of uselessness," which is not a phrase I'd actually use.
A lot of the stuff I do to keep computers running after a long period of ownership does not even apply to the Pi, which is nice. I won't ever have to replace the fans on one of my Pis (the case design of the prototype Pi 5s we've seen notwithstanding), but that's a standard thing on PCs. There's maybe one capacitor on a Pi's board? I've never needed to think about it. I've guiltily thrown away and replaced soft power supplies on PCs, even though I had a friend once who knew how to fix them and I should really learn to do the same, but there's considerably less guilt when it's a USB wall wart. I've pitched a few SD cards belonging to Pis over the years (never the proper SSDs, though) but that has never been nearly as painful as a drive failure in a PC.
So I guess I'm saying I would factor in the maintenance burden.
> The bias at play is that people see "old" and equate it with "bad performance".
I see "used electronics" and "eBay" and think of "wasted time," "frustration," "incompetence," "shamelessness," and "fraud."
The other thing I would factor in is that my time is worth something and eBay's main goal, when it comes to used electronics, is to waste it.
> In short, if you just need something to run Home Assistant or Plex on ProxMox or similar, you would find more reward in a mini PC than a Pi, particularly in performance.
I'd split the difference here and say I'd be happy to run Home Assistant on a Pi and Plex, quite possibly, on a PC (but I'd want to at least test on a Pi). I'd be happy to buy a new PC for the purpose from a trusted retailer, or build it myself.
Let's put it this way: you pop in your SD card, set up a username/password, a few other settings, and you end up with a system that already has Geany and Thonny installed. Go to Help -> Bookshelf and find all the issues of MagPi and Hackspace for inspiration and learning, and a couple dozen books like "Essentials - Code Music with Sonic Pi" or "Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico". Search "Raspberry Pi Hats" and get a lifetime worth of reading and learning there, hitting just about any domain you could care about.
The vision of the Raspberry Pi wasn't to create a cheap, tiny PC, it was to create a learning platform, of which the cheap, tiny PC is the basis. More than any other computing device I've seen, it really lives up to that vision.
Little 1-liter office PCs from HP/Dell/etc. have MSRP closer to $1000 when new, meaning a correspondingly larger BOM cost, and are built to last until obsolete by PC OEMs who have years of experience doing that. Even well used units have better prospects for durability and longevity than new Raspberry Pi boards.
The idea that a machine becomes more reliable as the number of parts increases and the cost increases is an interesting one, though.
Sorry, I stand by my opinion that Pis are hobbyist playthings. I'm sure they were reliable for you but you probably weren't trying to do anything serious with them either.
> I'm sure they were reliable for you but you probably weren't trying to do anything serious with them either.
Of course it was serious. I was frowning the entire time.
> secondhand mini PCs for embedded systems development and testing professionally
I feel like I'm missing some key piece of context when people mention the humble dumpster origins of the PCs that keep coming up when comparisons with Pi are made. Like "we were trapped on an island the entire time," or "our company operates out of South Sudan, the poorest nation in the world," or something like that.
But either way, I think your seriously conflating a lot of variables. Things like power draw are not really comparable unless you pick a workload and measure the perf/power, as just clamping the max frequency down, or putting less ram in it can constrain actual power draw, while still possibly being as performant as the rpi.
I don't see pricing for the case + fan + power supply on the rpi, but the 8G model is $80 for the board. So you have to find at a minimum a battery for the RTC, a case, fan, powersupply, and 128G SD for $30. But then SD isn't in the same ballpark as even the cheapest SSD with respect to longevity or at $10 likely perf either. Plus, your shit out of luck if you need 16G of ram on the rpi vs paying an extra $18 on the beelink.
In the end, the rpi is going to be a fun hack device, while the beelink is going to just work with a wide variety of software (windows anyone?) and Jeff G won't have to complain about his m.2->pcie->graphics card not working out of the box either. OTOH, if you actually need to design a HAT/whatever for some special purpose it might be easier than designing a m.2 PCIe device, or it might not be. The GPIO on the rpi might be very handy if it happens to work better than a ESP/whatever attached to the beelinks USB port driving GPIO pins.
Much of this is going to come down to how much one values their time for one off devices, and for larger production runs the fact that the beelink is just one of hundreds (likely thousands) of similar devices that can be drop in replaced when beelink has a supply issue. Particularly because there are devices that are just a $100 more with multiple 2.5G links, sata ports, whatever.
What suggestions do you have for this?
I’m sure some people can find these, but every time I see comments like these (or ones that actually give specifics), it’s always used ones on eBay that aren’t actually better and are in unknown condition.
I’m not doubting that some people come out ahead, but for me, being able to get* the same hardware each time, new, has value. Also, a huge draw for RPIs for me are the GPIO pins.
* Yes, the past few years were hard, but not impossible.
It seems like it's about on par with the RPi 5 in terms of power. The OS support is lacking, but the M.2 and +4 "Little" cores make it pretty compelling regardless.
Edit: just saw the pi 5 has PCIe :0
Since replacing an old workstation for secondary/media computer in my office, and my laptop with Apple Silicon systems, I've been incredibly pleased with the efficiency one can get from heterogeneous core layouts in traditional compute devices. Not to mention the drop in thermals in my office. The summer I swapped out that secondary/media machine for the Mac Mini, the temperature in my office dropped 5 degrees Fahrenheit, while being just as capable for the things I used that machine for.
I'd like to do the same for my compute nodes in the house, which power my homelab for various workloads. Apple hardware's value retention doesn't make sense to pick up, even used, especially when I would have to trust an Asahi-flavored distro to make that work, so the platform stability isn't there. I don't need GPIO, so most SBC offerings just don't make sense. The only thing that comes close is the LattePanda Sigma, which would get me an Intel platform with efficiency cores. A SBC or even a NUC-like platform with a higher core count, at the $3-500 price point, would honestly be great! It just doesn't seem to be a market yet, and I don't imagine it will be until we see more penetration with ARM as a desktop compute platform.
Apologies if it wasn't clear, my original comment was a joke. It's becoming a pet peeve that comments about used computers, presumably from users in the third- or even the fourth-world (?) where money is really tight, dumb down just about every thread related to Raspberry Pi.
A used nuc or dumpster dived computer doesn't have two magazines, a couple dozen books, official support and documentation and guides, and an entire world-wide community dedicated to teaching and inspiring me.
Of the dozen or so friends of mine with them, only one really uses the rpi for anything "serious" after having played with it, hit some roadblock and tossed it in the drawer. Many of them have soured on it due to something not working right, spending a lot of time debugging it and being stymied by the fact that the docs need to fix some of the problems weren't open, or simply by the fact that it seems every single one is sold as "desktop class" and it turns out they are worse than 10 year old desktops for even basic things like say... playing youtube videos.
So there is a lot of negativity built up around them by people who got frustrated by the previous versions.
Granted, the situation has improved slightly over the past few months. But you will still find Pi 4s out of stock more often than not.
The CEO said last year not to expect a Pi 5 in 2023, because they wanted to take the time to recover. Why the u-turn?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/21/23520400/raspberry-pi-5-...
When they have parts, they'd like to catch up with the backlog faster. Because the 5 doesn't rely on the robots that place through-hole components, its production can to a degree "overlap" with the Pi 4, basically increasing the total number of boards created per hour.
Having two SoCs that don't require the same machines also helps ease a bottleneck there.
With the Raspberry Pi 5 out in two weeks, all the held-back inventory of older models will be dumped, prices will plummet, availability will become a non-issue.
In that sense it's a wise move.
I guess you haven't been looking recently? I can go to a local store and pick one up. It looks easy to pick up one online too.
Note I'm not disagreeing, just saying in some cases, the ones in-store are kits.
For a hobbyist / individual, is that really a big deal? I mean, how many do you need at one time?
Anyway, the claim all along has been that supplies would be "back to normal" by the end of this year, and so far things seem to be tracking that way. If you look at rpilocator.com now, the entire first two pages are full of green lines, which is a DRASTIC improvement compared to just 6 months ago. And some of the major distributors are getting in shipments of 5,000, 6,000 at a time of some models and having them in stock for weeks on end. So one can clearly see that the situation is improving rapidly.
That said, I will make no claim one way or the other with regards to the question of whether or not shipping a Pi 5 is a "good idea" or not.
Interestingly Digikey has over 2000 left. I wonder if they are limiting quantities.
Having trusted local resellers is a much more scalable way to sell to local markets.
I also expect that using resellers ensures better odds of protecting the brand/project goodwill. Resellers deal with problems like "I paid a ton of cash for a board and it arrived late and/or broken". Support alone is a nightmare, and I recall that raspberry Pi struggled with PR when they started out. I vaguely recall Liz Upton being behind some ill-advised episodes that didn't improved Raspberry Pi's image and would get anyone other PR person sacked.
Raspberry Pi are used installed as components into third party engineered products, and Raspberry Pi brand holds no value to potential industrial customers if new products did not technologically exchange with existing such products. That is to say the exact mounting details, electrical compatibility, software compatibility, DO provide the value the "Raspberry Pi" brand offers if its competitors offered it.
What I'm saying is, if Espressif brought that new ESP-branded 32bit thing in the Pi 3 mounting dimensions and onboard eMMC and 1/5th performance at $35+9%, that kind of thing could outsell Pi 5 at this rate, and I wouldn't mind watching that happening.
https://rpilocator.com/?country=US&cat=PIZERO2
(Btw I misspoke and said nano when I meant zero)
The Raspberry Pi Pico has a fascinating peripheral known as the “Programmable Input/Output” (PIO). This device allows us to write very simple assembly programs to emulate a number of different peripherals and communication protocols.
https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/projects/raspberry-pi-pico-...
RP1 is our I/O controller for Raspberry Pi 5, designed by the same team at Raspberry Pi that delivered the RP2040 microcontroller, and implemented, like RP2040, on TSMC’s mature 40LP process.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
My little pi CEO anecdote: Eben Upton visited local hackerspace many years ago, someone asked about Pi2 (or maybe 3) potential release date and should he wait or buy now, Eben answered they arent even planning next version. A week later Pi2 was announced.
Interesting to see the emergence of a southbridge chip in SBC land. RPI4 using a Via USB3 controller and a dedicated Broadcom ethernet chip is somewhat against the grain of most embedded chips, which tend to have all this io on package. Here Broadcom now has a single chip that bundles a bunch of the io needs together, and takes back the business from Via, which is a tailored step forward to combine functions. But it's still a secondary chip, which is fairly unusual.
On the upside, it means less pins on the main core. And it physically helps fan out the io, can be placed closer to io connectors. I went looking for a chip identification for RPI4, but didn't find it; I'm curious whether old chips had discrete PHY or whether they were builtin, and what the situation is with the new southbridge.
Part of the reason for the separate IO chip is that it can use an older silicon process (40nm) than the main chip (16nm) which makes it easier to have robust GPIO pins.
I know lots of people use their pi's for retro gaming but I'd really like to see some new games made for the hardware.
Does anyone know if there's a group working on this or would be interested in creating one?
What would be more interesting is an open source micro-kernel and gaming SDK targeting Raspberry Pi.
1. See https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Linux_ARM_games
Also what exactly would a micro-kernel entail? I'm much more familiar with game development than os development.
Weird that it doesn't have the full OpenGL, even if it was through Zink.
Faster cpu enables 'heavier' applications, some of which also involves more graphics work. And there's also gpu compute (tbh, dunno if that's even a thing on RPi's?).
A useful general-purpose computing device has a practical ratio for cpu, ram, graphics & storage options. Gpu is definitely the part that's lagging on latest RPi iterations.
Aside from that, it'd suffer from all the same problems as PC gaming does; different monitors to account for, no standard input method, varying specs between models, etc...
I could see it working, it's just got more issues to account for than other fantasy consoles
For it to work and avoid the issues with PCs it'd need a unified controller, sdk, and a single model that games would be made for.
You're a 100% corect though it'd be a lot harder to make games for compared to fantasy consoles.
Custom cron job that uses:
- One early RPi I bought when RPi was very new to the market. I played around with it for a while and then I put it in a drawer.
- Months later I pulled it out of the drawer and started hosting my website on it for a while. I have since moved on from using RPi at home for hosting any of my sites. Might do again at some point in time.
- I use an SBC as one of the pieces of electronics that I use for controlling over 9000 LED pixels on a sculpture for which I created the light setup and programming. The LED strips we bought are from China and were supposed to be IP65 but even so we now have a bunch of the pixels showing only red, which is bad. No fault of the SBC. Also the SBC in this installation is not an RPi. But relevant nonetheless.
- I hooked up an image sensor with a lens to an RPi and put it in a surveillance camera housing, and added PoE to it. Currently not in use but would like to deploy somewhere in the future if given the chance to do so.
- I have an RPi that I have connected a 5TB drive to in an enclosure I bought from AliExpress. This RPi I both ssh into from my phone to download things for the future, and I also run a squid proxy on it via which one of my laptops connect.
Yup. That’s actually what I did :)
And then the reason I stopped hosting my site on my RPi was because I felt like, well if I depend on Cloudflare anyways, I might as well just use a VPS, or GitHub pages, or Cloudflare Pages :p
But there is something appealing in hosting things from home still. And doubly so when doing it without relying on Cloudflare etc
What I will do however, is that next time I set up some internet reachable hosting of content at home I will maintain one version of it that is directly served from the machine at home itself, and then I will keep an up to date copy of it on one of my externally hosted servers.
Connectivity can tilt towards RPi, you can do vpn, ipv6, mobile data (if you use a usb stick), ethernet etc.
Funny thing is that modern 3G/4G/5G modems are full System-On-Chip computers themselves supporting virtualization. The Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8916 is a popular SoC used for LTE dongles that runs the modem Baseband Real-time OS and Debian/Android OS on the same CPU.
If you mean a Raspberry Pi 1, try RISC OS.
Very un-Unix-like, predates Linux by nearly a decade. Single-core and goes very fast on a Pi 1.
Is that much processing power necessary? Not even a little, but hey now it hosts its own web UI (local network only).
Firmware (Elixir, nerves): https://github.com/benwilson512/coffee_time/blob/a49814e5d8a...
And last but not least just a Linux machine to ssh into to play around with.
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/january-2023-update-ne...
I have another PI in a drawer as backup. I replaced all of them with Odroid since it became nearly impossible to buy Pis. I wonder if they'll start to make them available again to normal people but I don't know if I'm trusting the company anyway.
- One for hosting low usage applications at home network (Unifi controller and some more).
- Octoprint (https://octoprint.org) connected to the 3d-printer.
- One on my desk for hardware hacking – mostly as just a PC with GPIO.
- Some wireless Raspberry Pi Zeros as security cameras.
A Rpi3 as an octoprint server for my 3D oeubter, including canera feed.
A friend uses his as a HomeAssistant server to monitor and manage his home lights, temperature and garden watering needs.
And I have one as a nifty remote KVM (TinyPilot) that we also use for work. Connect it to the Internet and a PC and you can control that machine remotely.
Also use it as a Windows RDP thinclient.
And to tinker on electronic projects.
- VPN server (Wireguard)
- Network ad blocking (Pihole)
- DNS resolver (unbound)
- DynamicDNS client
All running in Docker containers.
- Home Assistant for home automation.
Previously I've also used the RPi 3 running AirPlay and hooked up to external speakers as a poor man's Sonos.
I use a USB 3.0 Ethernet cable for the second port. It can keep up just fine.
Thank you for the laugh.
* Squeezebox music system
* Plex video library
* Homeassistant home automation
* Retropie gaming
* PiHole ad blocker (I have a second older pi running just this for redundancy)
* Running a couple of minor web services and scripts on cron jobs.
I also wired up my garage remote to it, so I can hit a web page to open up my garage.
* Download agent (i.e. torrent, JDownloader, ARIA)
* Tailscale exit node
* Endlessh tarpit
* Sadly more reliable than my Mac Mini when running server workloads (lots of open SMB files crash MacOS)
And all of this at quite a low power dissipation, which is the primary expense in running a home server.
I don't do these things, but could:
* PiHole
* Kodi or Plex STB
* Add a hat and have an indoor air quality monitor or similar
One for Stratum 0 NTP server (using GSP module with PPS)
One for Home Assistant
One for monitoring the solar power at my cabin, using a 4G USB device to send data home.
The Home Assistant runs on a 4B, the others are using 3B's and a clone (NanoPi Zero).
Got some Pi 4's that I use for various Linux experimentation and such. Sometimes I find it easier to get a Pi 4 up and running than a VM, and other times I need the GPIOs.
- nextcloud
- django test environment
- pihole
- simple NAS
1. Mox mail server at home (PTR record set up with ISP) - https://github.com/mjl-/mox.
2. Web server (no external hosting hurray); TLS set up via LetsEncrypt.
3. Navidrome for streaming my music collection to my phone/computers. I ripped my thousands of CDs to MP3. I use subtracks on my phone for listening to it, and sonixd on my computers (Mac/PC). https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
4. mpd for driving some speakers via a USB audio interface so I can use some speakers plugged into the Pi for listening to music in the same room as the Pi (practicing guitar). I control this via the Supersonic app on my phone.
5. Wireguard VPN so I can connect home.
6. PiHole for my network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it means my phone is permanently connected to my home network and gets ad-blocking and stops apps dialing home. I use DroidHole on my phone to see what's going on.
7. xrdp server running, so a usable desktop is always available.
8. miniDLNA running connected to a NAS box so that I can watch all my DVDs easily on my TV downstairs (I spent weeks ripping them).
9. Tuya IoT API for turning some smart plugs in the house on/off via cronjob; I do this instead of using the timer in their app because it means my phone can be off the network/abroad and these plugs/lights still turn on/off.
10. linx-server (https://github.com/andreimarcu/linx-server) for sharing files so that I don't have to use Google Drive and share with people that way.
11. Peer Calls (https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls) so I can video conference in decent quality without having to use Google Meet / Teams etc. I also host a STUN and TURN server on the Pi so that Peer Calls works behind NAT.
12. Runs CUPS so that my very cheap Samsung wireless laser printer actually shows up as an AirPrint printer for my wife's iPad/iPhone and shows up in Android printing. (The printer does not natively have AirPrint capability but CUPS means I can provide it to users on the network).
It fetches time over NTP on a cron job. It also blocks various ASNs and IPs by country on a cron job to stop annoying remote pests and cloud providers. It also runs Monitorix so I can see system load, and goaccess on a cron job so that I can see who's hitting my website without having to resort to analytics nonsense.
It boots from USB3 (it has a NVMe in an IcyBox caddy).
Incredibly useful device.
At home I've got one for Home Assistant, one as a TV box because Netflix's sharing blocking check is only on smart TV apps. I've also got multiple as 3D printer controllers (klipper/octoprint).
[0] https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-cameras-nvrs/pro...
I will explore a way to use a RP4 or now RP5 for a local NAS that would be extensible and that could run more services and yool that my current QNAP TS-28A but I'm not very confident I will follow
* 1 CM4 for a PiKVM on my desktop (my main home server uses a proprietary iLO).
* 1 CM4 as router running OpenWrt, to replace my ER-Lite.
* 3 CM4s in a Turing Pi 2, one Jetson Orin for ML. This is my homelab. The CM4 are running Dietpi.
* 2 RPi4 as remote VPN (Wireguard) endpoints to do tech support for my mother-in-law and mother. Also serves as Jellyfin server containing old movies, and jumphost for NAS backup.
* 2 RPi0 2 W with Enviro+. One indoor, one outdoor (with different, custom 3D printed casings). Runs Raspbian, will switch these to Dietpi.
* 1 RPi3 for with my portable HackRF (with custom 3D printed case). Batteries included!
* 1 RPi0 W for Pwnagotchi. Not really used anymore but too cute to break.
* 1 RPi0 W for Pimoroni grow to track water management in plants (with 3D printed case). Need to get that project moving, it is for my mother.
All my Docker containers run on my main server but I'm considering to switch to my Turing Pi 2. I got solar, so the Xeon is OK for now, but still...
Then I got: 1 RPi3B+, 1 CM4, 1 RPi2B, 1 RPi0 W. I should sell as they're right now 'Raspberry Piles'. Won't use them. To be frank I'd like to upgrade the RPi3 with the portable HackRF at some point, and once I get a 3D printer I might need Octoprint so I suppose I could use one of these machines for that.
CM is the computer module, right? what kind of "board" do you use the CM4 with to use it as a router?
Right now it is hooked up on my switch. I intend to put it between my desktop and my switch and run some iperf3. Because I'll get fiber soon, and I'd like to be able to saturate that.
Pi4 for SSH server and general arm64 playground.
Pair of Pi4 running Ardupilot and OpenHD, one on my quadcopter, one driving the base station monitor and antenna tracker.
I have a raspberry pi running a spotify connect implementation outputting audio to the amp via usb. It sits there and silently (or, well, not so silently) works; it's great!
There's some mucking with alsa to get it set up, but under 90 minutes.
Btw am I the only one who hates to buy their power supply because the USB-C cable is not removable?
Probably that no one can blame them for burning or low power with third party cables.
In fact, all of our USB-C power supplies around the house are Apple - Chromebooks, Thinkpads, etc. They don't break and the cables are detachable; whenever the junk that originally came with the device breaks, the Apple ones we have laying around are there to just work.
The small ones don't even have an Apple logo that you can see when plugged in, so if the idea of using Apple products bother you then go ahead and paint it, plug it in, and forget about it for a decade.
All of my USB-C Chargers has 5V/3A only.
Chargers that would do 5V/5A probably do PD 20V/5A as well, = 100W. Or it'll be a non-conforming special Pi PSU of sorts.
If you buy a charger advertised to support "PPS" at 65W or so or more, you are more likely to get one that does this, though not all will actually do it.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
> When using a standard 5V, 3A (15W) USB-C power adapter with Raspberry Pi 5, by default we must limit downstream USB current to 600mA to ensure that we have sufficient margin to support these workloads.
Therefore 5V/3A can still boot RPi5, but it cannot provide enough power to its USB-A port. Therefore it cannot use something like 12V/2A, since RPi5 doesn't have transformer circuit on its board.
Been looking at some compact/silent replacement for my aging home-server and NAS boxes were at the top of the list but the CPUs were crap or prices high, and everyone was shipping their own weird linux-based distros. Knowing that it'll be likely that software will work on a Raspberry and these hardware specs then it looks like a contender now.
They like to use JS benchmarking to do this. I forgot which exact benchmark they usesed (sorry)! The RPI4 was benchmarking ~50, the PI5 was scoring about ~130. They were saying the RPI5 was scoring equivalent to a 2015 MacBook Air.
Don't worry, software developers are on it. Soon the Pi 5 will also be on the cusp of being usable as a main computer.
I use a Pi 400 (running Debian) as my primary dev box and access terminal to the Internet. ^_^
It definitely works for me, but I fear that you will next tell us that you need to run software that isn't compiled for ARM (e.g. Adobe graphics suite) or to connect some specific hardware, such as a centrifuge that works only with Windows drivers.
Cheers!
* Zigbee2MQTT in a closet in the middle of the house
* FullPageOS [1] dashboards on the bedroom TV, living room TV, and a screen in my office
* RetroPie running emulators and video screensaver on an old CRT TV in my workshop
It would be nice to make all of these a little bit faster.
I say this because I love the idea of a full linux computer without a fan. I'm loving the Apple silicon machines at the moment for this. Perfect silent computing.
I wish it came as well in a larger board, with proper HDMI ports. There is a market for silent linux machines, I think!
What would be your dream linux fan-less setup?
I am quite satisfied using the Pi 400, a portable LCD display, and a wireless backlit keyboard.
I do like the Pi 400 and would be happy to see one configured with 8GB. Lovely little machine.
This would let you run things that need real time GPIO access and real time interrupt handlings on the Arduino, and would also give you DAC and ADC.
There are a good few nuggets of gold from Raspberry Pi engineers in the comments on the announcement blog post
But tech progresses on... never say never.
This is game changer as TV box.
That said, LibreElec has been beta testing the RPi5 and will support it. Dev images are ready: https://libreelec.tv/2023/09/28/rpi5-support/
With Raspberry Pi's specifically, although I have used the headphones jack to connect speakers, I generally use either HDMI audio, or else I just don't have any audio connected.
Rasperry Pi 5 Specs and Images Leaked from Element14? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37685073 - Sept 2023 (70 comments)
A long time ago I saw this appear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26495719
And it seemed to sort of work but not quite enough. There were stutters in the content streamed and strange clicks in the audio. Will this new one be enough? Was that even the likely limiting factor?
Not sure what file format your Raspberry Pi is trying to transcode from though.
I might be wrong but buying a used mini pc like Nuc or SFF PCs seems to be more reasonable than buying a 80$ SBC + Case and adapter costs.
>Will my Raspberry Pi 5 fit my Raspberry Pi 4 case?
>Raspberry Pi 5 won't fit the Raspberry Pi 4 Case. We recommend the Raspberry Pi Case for Raspberry Pi 5, designed to help you get the most out of our newest computer.
The Pi 5 will end up replacing my first gaming spec'd E-Machine.
Considering the wide variety of use cases I got out of both of those computers growing up, it takes very little imagination imo to figure out what to do with them.
Even on e I get around to actually getting an x64 server spec'd machine for actually doing grunt work, I figure these little Pi's will be perfect for little oneoffs like mirroring repos I care about. Constrained dev boxes, network jiggery pokery boxes. Hell, might even get around to trying a non traditional form factor builds one of these days
One was immediately wiped and I installed Debian 12. The other was wiped and I installed Windows 10 Pro. Both seemed to just work.
Hard to beat for less than $200 CAD.
Not sure about the <=G3 and >=G7, but the G4 and G5 have the issue. The G6 seems to have the fan attached more firmly, but I've never tested one in a quiet room.
Lenovo has M700, M75q (AMD) and a bunch others ranging from thin client to workstation performance.
Generally new ones are awesome at about $700 but older ones are absolutely capable for upgrading ram, disk, wifi whatever. there are modules for up to 10g and other things too. Servethehome on YouTube has a bunch of guides.
Of course if you deck out a Pi 4 with a SSD and a fan, it'll come much closer to the G3 Mini in terms of power consumption.
When you throw in m.2, lots of ram, all that IO eats power. So the minimum idle power creeps up. Arm boards too.
And they advertise up to 3 monitors support.
If you can get friendly with local electronics recyclers or auction buyers you might do way better.
Unless you need the GPIO or have a pi-specific purpose, used thin clients or tiny PCs make more sense for a home server now IMO.
true, there are cases, but "well known" and "well supported" is the point i tried to make in favor of enterprise thin-clients and the like as they are pc's and run most commodity operating systems and applications.
> hobby 3D printer community uses them extensively
i'm sure they are (literally)
rpi as a compute/media node has always sort of been secondary compared to the software/hat ecosystem -- there have essentially always been better SBC choices for those workloads/media-center-ing.
personally if I wanted a media-center/nas/small-server i'd go with one of the dozens of SBCs that have onboard sata and save myself the hassle of doing it all over an overloaded usb hub.
So far from the ones I've worked only the Pi and a patched Rockpro64 allows you to boot some generic USB installer from UEFI and have the system your way with mainline kernel support.
I would like to have a quiet and reasonably performant ARM aarch64 box at this price point, but only if it supports UEFI without needing to resort to silly EFI system partition tricks (which the Pi 4 required, last I knew).
Definitely the RasPi 4 having the ability to run UEFI, even in this way, is good. But what I'm looking for specifically is having UEFI just like every other UEFI-enabled PC and server does it, where I don't need a disk to boot to UEFI.
I used several while rpi supplies slowed and scalping had prices where it was the better option. Around $200-250 USD or so. But comes with memory, storage, case and power supply.
https://store.minisforum.com/collections/amd-%C2%AE-ryzen-%C...
https://store.minisforum.com/collections/amd-%C2%AE-ryzen-%C...
I do think these make more sense for most people. But I'll for sure be getting a Pi 5. I sold all my Pi 3 and 4 during the pandemic since I wasn't using them.
Higher wattage PD chargers and powerbanks that I have here all work with voltages of 9/12/15 at 3A and 20V at up to 5A
A quick Google search suggests they aren't hard to find:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Type-C-Such-Phones-Charger-Charge...
> Output voltage (four charging modes): PDO DC5.0V-3.0A or 9.0V-2.77A PPS 3.3-5.9V-3A or 3.3-11.0V-2.24A
5V output at 5A is pretty unusual.
The PD specs require a 25W device to operate at 9V 2.8A. A 25W charger is still allowed to offer 5V 5A and a 25W device is still allowed to prefer it when offered, but it is not allowed to require it.
To make it even worse: at no wattage are chargers required to offer 5V 5A. Even a 100W one (which is required to offer 20V 5A) does not need to offer it, and it is 100% PD compliant if it only offers [5V 3A, 9V 3A, 15V 3A, 20V 5A].
however, this offering is not really aligned with the foundation started out with imo. their decisions with the changes does not seem to satisfy the answer to "how will this promote computer science among kids?" for the most part.
i feel like the original mission is now relegated to the pi zero w, but it requires soldering for working with gpio so it leaves a lot of room for the hardware side of tinkering.
i am also curious about the m.2 hat and whether it can work with old sata ssd that match the format? otherwise old external hard drives might be a good alternative for relatively reliable long-term operation for now.
It's a bit of a shame. What are the alternatives for someone who needs a computer connected to an old CRT TV? Are there other boards with composite video or does one need to get a HDMI->composite converter?
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
But I guess this PCIe connection is at least officially accessible rather than being used up by internal adapters?
> LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM (4GB and 8GB SKUs available at launch)
This implies there will be either smaller or bigger SKUs at a later date. The 8 GB SKU of the Pi 4 wasn't available at launch, either.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/cdn/shop/files/PI_5_TOP_1500x1500....
Now I want to see what they do with the RPi Zero.
Though it is a massive improvement over the Zero.
I would have guessed that as they move up the performance + power curve, such a long production commitment is less interesting for most users, but maybe I’m wrong.
I wanted to also include their “increased release cadence” - but apparently it’s been 4+ years since the Pi 4 was released, it just doesn’t feel like it to me due to the chip shortage and pandemic…
I kind of wonder how the new PI would work in that scenario.
I used it with SSD drive, by USB.
The competition has always been the Jetson Nano.
Vision Five 2 is now my favourite passively coolable SBC.
https://www.scorpia.co.uk/2019/06/28/pi4-not-working-with-so...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-10-million-rp...
> The chip also features a new Broadcom Videocore-VII graphics processor running at up to 800MHz, and is linked to the buyer's choice of 4GB or 8GB of LPDDR4x memory.
https://www.hackster.io/news/raspberry-pi-5-review-hands-on-...
I’d love to find something low power that can be a nice little home server to host various projects. Mac Minis might be the best perf/watt but they’re still coming in pretty expensive in comparison.
> A newer, better Raspberry Pi OS
> [...] This is based on the most recent release of Debian (and its derivative Raspbian), codenamed “Bookworm”, and incorporates numerous enhancements, notably the transition from X11 to the Wayfire Wayland compositor on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5.
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
I'm kinda tired on not being able to buy a PI because the production is so limited...
I loved the 3, but the 4 overheated even after patching it and using a dissipator for basically every workload...
Bummer. That just killed my need for a new one.
Also, if those are micro-USB ports then they have ignored everything that happened since 2020.
Id like a low power model too please. Also a m.2 slot, even sata would be much better than the sd cards.
"Raspberry Pi 5 will remain in production until at least January 2035"
LOL
It only feels like recently that you can pick up a RPi 4 used for the price they should've been new. Otherwise, scalped listings on eBay or Amazon have took over. I still want my first RPi but I already have associated them with being hard to buy and way more expensive than makes sense.
To me the charm of the raspi ecosystem was always in giving you a very low power, "always on, almost no power draw" linux environment. Oh well, I guess there's always the older versions or the zero for that.
Jetson boards are much more expensive. We do plan on making a computer vision add on for our robot which uses the Orin or similar to process images, but I find the raspberry pi perfect for sort of stitching the whole system together.
"Raspberry Pi 5 consumes significantly less power, and runs significantly cooler, than Raspberry Pi 4 when running an identical workload. However, the much higher performance ceiling means that for the most intensive workloads, and in particular for pathological “power virus” workloads, peak power consumption increases to around 12W, versus 8W for Raspberry Pi 4."
The real unanswered question is, does it finally have a damn sleep mode so it can save power when idle.
Based on my experience with previous Pis, I bet you’ll be able to drop that even further by turning off unused board components at boot time.
# Disable Power LED after boot
dtparam=pwr_led_activelow=off
# Disable SD card activity led
dtparam=act_led_trigger=none
dtparam=act_led_activelow=off
# Disable the ethernet LEDs - these are Pi4 specific values.
# Look in the docs for the values for other Pi boards.
dtparam=eth_led0=4
dtparam=eth_led1=4
It appears to depend on firmware or kernel but for recent kernels (recent 6.1 or 6.2) activelow is no longer necessary [1]. It seems to work on CM4.
PS: my bad I disabled the LEDs via /sys not /proc previously:
> # for i in /sys/class/leds/*; do echo 0 > "$i/brightness"; done
The required lines were different between the Pi 2 and Pi 4 I was using at the time, and the documentation was not updated (or I'd found old docs).
An exercise in trial and error.
The same likely can be built on top of an RPi, using, say, wake-on-LAN signaling, or some GPIO as an interrupt source. You'll have to suspend your OS while idle for a prolonged time though.
My reading of that was:
"soft" = trigger an orderly OS shutdown, the same as if you executed `shutdown now` on the command line.
"hard" = cut power immediately, as if you just unplugged the power cable.
I dream of DIY'ing a laptop, and RPi looks like a great platform for prototyping that... until you realize there's just no sensible way to put it to sleep. Hibernate + aggressive boot time optimization?
Eventually though it didn't turn out to be much of an issue, SSDs boot real fast these days anyway and I can just do a full power cycle.
Jeff Geerling on YT has a great in-depth review of these options in his latest video.
And that's with a real SSD.
Either way, this is all history. Raspberry Pi boards do not cost hundreds of dollars as claimed.
Before that there was no need for a locator, just buy from whatever eshop, everyone had it in stock and at MSRP.
you not checking the site != people not being able to buy them
I'm not saying that it was easy, or anything like business as usual. They've done interviews where they talked about the difficult decision to prioritize companies that would go under without new stock over casual hobbyists. It's one of those unenviable situations where there's no good outcome, just a possibly less-bad one.
Not only are they expensive and relatively large, machines that have had previous owners often have mystery issues which make them great for home tinkering projects, less so for something that can get you in trouble if it breaks down.
There's a reason companies buy new parts instead of employing teams to scour Craigslist for deals.
https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Intel-N100-Computer-Desktop-D...
Faster processor, 16GB RAM, 500GB NVME SSD, with case. $165! That’s damn impressive, considering the RPi5 with 8GB RAM is suggested to sell for $80 (good luck getting it for that little). And Amazon can get it to me in two days.
Yeah it’s definitely bigger, but I wasn’t expecting these systems to be so cheap.
There was also the UP Board which was an Atom SOC with PI compatible GPIO. I believe that's still in production?!
https://up-shop.org/up-board-series.html
Then again that is severely dated, the Atom was a very capable processor... when it launched, almost a decade ago.
There are other cheaper boards for USB to GPIO out here as well.
Eventually those boards run into limitations and then you have to just opt to go with serial to a microcontroller which misses the entire point of having a SBC.
If you want a small PC for media/homelab server/cheap desktop, they don't make any real sense anymore.
Especially now that the RPI kind of need a fan and you need to buy the power supply, the storage and the case. Well the RPI has GPIO but for small home server use case nobody cares...
GPIO can be added via tons of USB to GPIO boards out there.
But I agree - lot of people tend to buy the Raspberry Pis for home servers instead of just opting for used mini-PCs from secondary markets. Even a 7-8 year old Intel CPU in those mini PCs will vastly outperform a Raspberry pi. Even the Raspberry 5. Plus, better I/O options and storage with mini PC.
Depends on the use case. USB adds a few orders of magnitude more latency and jitter versus what's probably just APB.
Most of the stuff just flashes LEDs or reads a switch. Doesn't matter for that. And for more intelligent stuff there's i2c or api which have their own interface boards.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/TRIGKEY-Mini-PC-Desktop-Computer/dp...
I have the above, it's max powerdraw is <5 watts, even at 50% cpu its <3watts. That comes with ram, SSD, case and motherboard. so to get the pi5 to the same state would need an SD card (boo hiss poor speed.)
From what I've seen the pi5 is 1/3rd faster than the intel j5005. (in pybench at least.)
but comparing to a real intel NUC, of course its going to be faster, the NUC costs an entire order of magnitude more.
But that's all kind of crazy when cheaper, faster SBCs commonly simply boot to reliable, on-board, eMMC.
Difference is they're more optimised for random writes than large files like most SD cards, but you can get such SD cards too ("High Endurance" models)
I have had several SDs fail sooner or later since rpi1 though which is why I personally won't be using them any further.
The Pi 5 looks to be $112.
By the time I buy a PSU, SD card, case, RTC battery, etc, I'm definitely not saving money buying a Pi.
Disclaimer: Canadian dollars.
Jeff Geerling measured 11W peak board power running benchmarks. Idle power was measured at 1.8W.
They claim it will draw less power than the Pi4 for the same workloads.
Difference being if your workload now demands it, the increased power rating allows faster race to idle, and overall gain in power efficiency.
None of your 100W Anker or Apple power bricks will supply this. They'll do 12V3A, 12V5A, 20V5A, but not 5V5A.
Yet another piece of nonstandard USB-C equipment.
This is also very uncool, since powering it through the GPIO header with a capable PSU won't trigger the PD signal and makes it impossible to draw any meaningful current through USB? I hope this blockade can be worked around in the boot config.
In practice I doubt it would be a real problem since you'd need to max out both the USB draw and CPU load at the exact same time to get the full draw.
On page 805 you find Table 10-2 SPR Normative Voltages and Minimum Currents, which specifies that a USB PD source with a rating of 15 < x ≤ 27 watts *shall* support 3A at 5V, however it *May* advertise up to RoundUp (PDP/Voltage) to the nearest 10mA. Requires a 5A cable if over 3A is advertised. 27W/5 rounded to the nearest 10mA comes to 5.4A
[1]: https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-power-delivery
If a device needs 25W it is required to accept 9V 2.8A, if it wants to be PD compliant. This is precisely because 5V 5A is optional for a 25W source, so a device cannot rely on it being present.
I wish they had an auxilary DC power connector of some sort though that could just power the Pi on straight up + and - from a DC power supply. Ideally anywhere from 5-12V.
- a power button
- a real time clock
Crazy it took this long but finally, seriously.
Downsides here are that it might need more active cooling whereas previous generations worked without it.
Also, ugh:
> Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT)
isn't this just like the 4?
I'm happy with a separate accessory, but wish they could've kept compatibility with the previous versions.
Anyway, I have been wondering whether a headless-oriented SKU wouldn't make sense. Pay for the PoE BOM by jettisoning the video output.
"Wireless" speakers (they'd be networks speakers then) / home assistant devices / media players and whatever else should always be attached with a network cable, so just power them over PoE. I'm still annoying that the AppleTV isn't PoE enabled. That's not a device I'd use over WiFi anyway.
You could always use PLC to use your eletrical network as a data network. I use that for IP cameras. Unfortunately, I still haven't found a PCL adapter providing PoE power.
I've used "informal" poe where you have a cheap injector/splitter that puts a nonstandard lower voltage over the ethernet.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NRHNPUA
but real poe is getting more popular, poe switches are becoming available and maybe the hat is worth it.
There are also middle-of-the-road solutions:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TJ3ZNJ4
basically poe splitter that has a usb-c power out for the pi
I'd be surprised if the majority of RPi's userbase didn't used PoE. Having to cart around a power supply isn't a very attractive option when all you have to do to power the device is simply plugging in a yank-proof RJ45 cable. It's also cheaper as you don't have to buy a charger.
I actually though it was the other way around. Having the PI powers other devices like IP cameras.
I won't do PoE without reliable official hardware.
The RTC is a huge deal to the people who care about it.
How many applications would you have where timing is critical but you won’t have an external time reference that would be still viable without a guaranteed power backup?
Here's the deal: RPi<5 runs at the speed of the voltage coming in. The OS creates a fake software clock that assumes it's a perfect 5v, but in reality not only does voltage fluctuate, it drops over the length of a cable run. If you have, I dunno, 70 Pis connected, the 5v on the first one is very different than the 5v on the last one, no matter how frequently you ask NTP to broadcast.
The first thing we did was deliver 12V down the wire with a high quality power supply. Then we used UBEC buck converter modules (intended for RC quadcopters) to deliver power directly into the Pi via its pins.
However, even now you're just chasing physics. There's no way to send a command to all of the Pis to do something right now. Instead, we tell all of them to do something at a very precise moment in about three seconds. In our case, this meant writing a very low-level C program to listen for raw UDP messages and trigger the camera module at the hardware register level.
The only way to verify that it was working as well as we believed it did was to create a reference clock. We had a friend build a 20 LED timer that would count 10ms and 1ms increments.
We achieved < 1ms syncronization across 70 Pis in this manner.
We needed it to be small, low power, low heat, provide hardware level access to a camera module, be ethernet accessible. Oh, and under $100 including a fixed M-mount lens.
At the time, it didn't seem like rolling our own hardware would have been faster.
I would argue - given we succeeded at sub 1ms syncronization - that the Pi was close to the perfect tool.
It just would have been even more perfect if it had an RTC.
For my Pi's I buy a separate RTC (uses GPIO pins). There's various available, the DS3231 is the most expensive but also the best. If you buy it in bulk (70+) I suppose you could shave some money off. If you're OK with a cheaper one (less than half the price) which functions less well (but still does the job) then PCF8523. I got mine from a local Adafruit reseller.
We couldn't justify adding ~$2500 to the bottom line, but you can be confident that we sure did argue about it.
I'd say 50/50 that I didn't know what I2C was in 2014.
Still, if we had gone and designed our own RTC daughterboard, it would have replaced the UBEC in our architecture diagram. We were buying those for $3-4 in 1000 unit quantities.
So, had you been on hand a decade ago, you might have won the argument although if I put on my board member hat, fabbing our own PCB sounds a lot scarier than buying boxes of buck converters.
It's hard to express how wild it is that they just pop right on and guarantee close to perfect voltage to each device.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/UBEC-5V-3A-5A-7A-15A_...
From your URL, the second part made me wonder if the statement is correct: "UBEC 5V 3A/5A/7A/15A BEC 2-12S Lipo Step-down Module External Power Supply Full Shielding Antijamming For FPV Airplane" would this actually work?
And now, you too can share in the late night cackling joy we experienced so many years ago.
Those three pin headers on the UBEC just glide right into place on the +5/GND pins at the top of GPIO row.
Note that the graphic animation also explains that this UBEC is certified unisex... so make of that what you will.
Still, I would politely suggest that you're underestimating the part where we needed low level access to a camera module that came with the RPi.
Even if the ESP32 had been out, we didn't have anyone handy to spend six months reverse engineering CMOS registers.
Everything is super easy a) in hindsight and b) when you're commenting on Hacker News and not actually doing it.
(And I would politely ask that you don't make assumptions about what I might or might not have actually accomplished in similar spheres, you have zero idea.)
Happy to answer any further questions you might have to the degree that I'm able.
You can attach a function to a pin, and CPU force-jump into a preprogrammed address for a handler routine, which leads into your code, then return(return(return())) back to where it came from. The trigger can be delivered by, say, a Xenon flash pointed at the ceiling and a light sensor, or a dedicated pair of wires from a master Arduino, or a intentional glitch in power line, a drone receiver per each pi all on a same channel, etc.
> fixed M-mount lens
I assume this is meant to say metric threaded C/CS mount for surveillance cameras, as M-mount is boutique full-frame Leica mount.
The RP2 was indeed low powered compared to the Intel/AMD powered systems we were otherwise familiar with.
Outside of the bubble of people with EE skills, however big the bubble is, stopping to learn expert-level mcu programming from scratch is rarely the way things work in a software startup. Despite the obvious focus of this thread, the hardware we assembled and configured was all in support of our software.
On the contrary, I've had a number of solid back-and-forths with folks about GPS, GPIO and homebrew RTC daughterboards that we could likely find success with today - almost a decade after we built what we built.
I'm honestly not sure what else you expect from me. Should I apologize for our relative ignorance at the time? Are you upset that I'm proud we managed to succeed despite doing things differently than others might have?
However, if you have more specific technical questions, I'll try to do my best.
Each clock is monotonically increasing, with its individual drift. NTP will pretty soon find out exactly what the right polling interval is. Even if you run it in broadcast mode (why would you though, with only 70 devices).
Everything you said is totally legit unless you're addressing devices with software clocks that are running at speeds dictated by subtly shifting voltage.
Remember, according to the Pi itself, it's 100% in sync. No problem hereeeeeeee (robot voice as voltage dips to 4.9887 volts).
How cheap is cheap?
It depends. Hence my previous comment.
> How cheap is cheap?
Google says unit retail price for module with PPS output can be under $5.
However, if we could have used GPS at a marginal cost of $5 at the time, it's very likely we would have been excited to hear about this.
Thanks for the lightbulb moment.
The internal "clock" time would start to drift immediately after it was set.
Can we mutually agree that in a year of not-dumb people trying everything we could manage to achieve the best outcome, we tried a lot of things and we often didn't know what we didn't know?
If I was going to do it all over again with the decade of engineering skills I've learned, I would look towards fabbing our own RTC I2C daughterboards and trying some GPIO-based approaches to triggering.
However, given our constraints, the solution I've described above worked incredibly well. I wouldn't be embarrassed to do it again.
Mine does after I got an active antenna for it.
> How cheap is cheap?
I got a u-blox NEO-6m module for a few bucks, add another few bucks for the active antenna. The newer GPS modules are much better (more satellites, faster lock etc) but this is sufficient for me.
And no, you really wouldn’t want a lowest common denominator build anyways. That would leave a lot on the table.
The "firmware" is the now-Microsoft-owned, proprietary, ThreadX RTOS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX
The Arm doesn't start the computer and you can't run any firmware on the Arm that will change this.
raspberrypi is about value engineering. Making stuff fast and cheap enough so that you can do useful work, but not worry too much if you break it (on the one hand) Or give access to someone who's never had a programmable computer for a price that's cheaper than most mid range lego sets.
peak power usage also raised to 25W, as now a 5W/5A psu is required.
But in the end... features require power, we can't really complain much.
Sincerely, it seems a very bad idea from their part.
Where are you? Chicago, PiShop, and Digikey have Pi4's at MSRP right now in the US, and have had them for most of the last 6 weeks. Availability in Europe looks even better...
Pi Zero 2W and CM4 are more problematic, but not in the category of "wait a year."
So you’ve got a company that is taking advantage of OSS ecosystem’s reputation but returning nothing back.
Treat it like any other company and I’m fine with it. Happy to buy their computers. Just like I’m fine with OpenAI admitting they’re anything but “Open”. Just be honest ffs.
People seem to think it does, and want it, but I don't see that claim (or even the words "open source") on either the trading company or the charity About Us pages. Plenty of companies use OSS, nothing wrong with that. The idea they've returned nothing back is misplaced.
I am surprised they still haven't figured out how to accept USB power with higher voltage than 5V. It'll thus continue to be a pain to power.
Apparently it isn't all that efficient anymore as evident from their active cooler add-on.
It looks like the performance will be similar to the incoming (was meant for release this summer but seems to be late) new SiFive RISC-V development board with P550 CPU.
If you're in the industry and not using RISC-V, you're already late relative to your peers.
And you will be left behind should you drag.
We will sadly have to watch it happen to Raspberry Pi 5.