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Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

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Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#51

Post by jdietrich »

The rPI mostly failed in its original mission as an educational tool. In practice, it proved too complex and fragile to use as a microcontroller but not powerful enough to substitute for a desktop PC. A lot of important lessons were learned and put into practice in the BBC Micro:Bit project. For teaching basic programming and electronics, a dinky little Cortex M0+ with a few LEDs and IO pins makes far more sense than a repurposed mobile phone chipset.

http://microbit.org/

rPI has spawned a whole ecosystem of hacker-friendly hardware. Like Arduino, it generated demand for a particular form-factor - a lot of people bought rPIs simply because they were cool and cheap, then figured out how they could be useful.

The rPI has clearly moved towards being more powerful and power-hungry, with the latest model drawing about twice the power under load than the original. Documentation and kernel support remain a sticking point, especially for the off-brand PIalikes with Chinese chipsets.

The development of these boards is really dictated by the rest of the market. Nobody is spinning silicon specifically for dev boards, so they'll continue to use whatever cheap chips are on the market. A lot will depend on how well the foundries cope with <14nm process nodes.

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#52

Post by franciscop »

Rjevski wrote: post #13
xd1936 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And get the USB and Ethernet onto separate buses

Maybe just add USB-C with PCI-Express lanes in there. This would allow Ethernet or anything else to be plugged into that should it be needed.

I wanted this as well; from what I read from the forums, the chip does not support it so it'd need to either switch the chip or add another one, going way beyond the price point. Hopefully the integration for new chips becomes better and there's more demand so that it becomes a reality.

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#54

Post by alanfranzoni »

chrisshroba wrote: post #21
VectorLock wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PiZeroW is hits such an amazing triple point of price/functionality/size that although I love the Tinker Pro for coming close in size/price and the ease of Arduino programming for simple things the PiZeroW just gives you SO MUCH functionality.

Slightly off topic - The one-per-customer policy on the PiZero and PiZeroW seems very limiting to me for someone who would like to develop more than one pi-based hobbyist project (or multi-pi projects like a cheap kubernetes cluster to play around with that stack). Does anyone know if there are plans to drop this restriction anytime soon, or do hobbyists just need to accept that to do multiple projects they need to b…

You can buy as many pizerow as you like if you buy a bundle that includes the official case. That raises the price to around 18 usd.

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#55

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

nottorp wrote: post #30
fhood wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. That is true if you are selling thousands or more of an item, but for small companies, custom boards can be a nightmare. I worked for a company once that put literally two full weeks of debugging into a problem caused by a flaky diode batch.

I'll raise you two full weeks of debugging and then the project got canceled because redesigning the board was needed and it was too expensive ;) I'm doing quite a few of low volume (mostly bussiness/industrial helpers) arm linux projects on Pis now. Some of them stay on Pis, if rebooting the board every 2 hours is feasible, some move to custom boards after the prototyping is done. Still, it's very nice to have an of…

What issues have you seen that require a 2-hour reboot?

Stability was one of my concerns with my last Pi project, so during development I basically never powered it off or rebooted (except to test power-up behavior) so I could see if I encountered any problems. No problems came up, but others' experiences are always good to learn from.

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#56

Post by alanfranzoni »

noonespecial wrote: post #20

"MAX PER CUSTOMER: 1" It really doesn't matter where else they "go" until they fix that right there. (Why? Because on my workbench right now is the pi, instead of a pi; and that makes all the difference.)

Only for bare pizerow. Buy it along with official case, you can order as many as you like. Price raises to 18 usd per unit.

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#57

Post by alanfranzoni »

StavrosK wrote: post #47
noonespecial wrote: post #20

"MAX PER CUSTOMER: 1" It really doesn't matter where else they "go" until they fix that right there. (Why? Because on my workbench right now is the pi, instead of a pi; and that makes all the difference.)

That's exactly my problem as well. I wanted to hack a Pi Zero W into a presentation machine (for giving talks) and I didn't want to ruin my only Pi Zero W on account of how expensive it would be to replace (with shipping etc, it comes out to 30 euros or so).

Only for bare pizerow. Buy it along with official case, you can order as many as you like. Price raises to 18 usd per unit.

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#58

Post by StavrosK »

alanfranzoni wrote: post #57
StavrosK wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my problem as well. I wanted to hack a Pi Zero W into a presentation machine (for giving talks) and I didn't want to ruin my only Pi Zero W on account of how expensive it would be to replace (with shipping etc, it comes out to 30 euros or so).

Only for bare pizerow. Buy it along with official case, you can order as many as you like. Price raises to 18 usd per unit.

Yeah, I wish they would just charge me the real price of the Pi, and let me buy as many as I want. No need to buy a case with it.

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#59

Post by kingosticks »

l1k wrote: post #9

Their competitor, Libre Computer, has mused that given their investment in the graphics stack, they might be headed in the GPGPU / AI direction. Think Raspberry Pis that you can cluster together for deep learning, or individual boards that kids can tinker with to learn about AI. The blog post also predicted the 3B+ fairly exactly: https://libre.computer/2017/12/06/raspberry-pi-3x-raspberry-... Money quote: > We expec…

Let me get this straight, they think the Raspberry Pi - a primarily low-cost device aimed at teaching kids the fundamentals of computers/computing - is going to ship something more expensive (it will be) to better support AI? Upton has repeatedly made it clear that keeping the price low is key and anything that threatens that needs to add substantial value for Foundation's teaching goals. I think it's fair to say that OpenCL and neural networks are well beyond that.

I'm curious, which part of their 3B+ prediction was accurate? It all seems totally wrong and looks like they forgot why the thing exists in the first place. The VC4 doesn't even have hardware support for H.265 decode (I assume they mean decode). You can do it in software with a much faster clocked ARM but that's not what they are saying and you won't get 4k. Why RPF would even care about 4k support I have no idea. I'm also not sure where they got the idea that power consumption is important either. 2GB of RAM is a fantasy considering the substantial cost brings little gain. Making these sort of predictions is so difficult but they really were way off.

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#60

Post by bduhan »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #11

I'm more of a Beagle Bone person, so I hope you don't mind me answering the question from that standpoint. The sadness I have about the bone is that it is a means to an end. Purchase bone, insert into host board. Voila, IoT. It gets you to an MVP really fast, but limits your design to that form factor. Migrating away is difficult. The Arduino, at least, served as training wheels. The end goal was to design an atmega3…

You mentioned Pocket Beagle, but did you know the OSD335x[1] is readily available on Mouser and DigiKey? I certainly would have specified one instead of a BBB if it was available during our product development cycle.

[1] https://octavosystems.com/

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