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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?

#11

Post by bjt2n3904 »

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 atmega328 into your circuit board, not glue another pcb on top. (Just remembering, there is some progress here with the pocket beagle... Though it does raise supply chain concerns.)

Also unlike the bone, the Arduino opened up a pathway for many other architectures and families of microprocessor, lowering the barrier to entry for 32 bit processors and ARM, keeping the platform relevant.

The bone CPU is getting a little long in the tooth, and there doesn't seem to be a path forward to the next generation of processors in the same SWaP C space. There are others, but the cost or power consumption tripples. The bone is at a real sweet point for price and capabilities. I'd love to see a lower power generation with some fixes to annoying problems (like the RTC).

In their defense, there are two or three orders of magnitude more complexity to an ARM SoC than an 8bit micro. The bone community really is on point with making a stable platform with regular releases, especially given the complexity of supporting a SoC+peripherals with the kernel, device tree, U-Boot, Debian, etc.

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

#12

Post by majewsky »

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…

Please avoid code snippets for blockquotes. It's very annoying to read this with the `overflow-x: scroll` that HN's CSS adds (particularly on mobile). Just put a ">" in front of the paragraph, like so:

> We expect the Raspberry Pi 4 to be based on a new Broadcom SoC based on Cortex-A55 built on < 28nm fabrication process. We can call this BCM2839 and it will feature the much alluded to VC5 GPU and a new form factor. Since that hardware is more than two years away, it is difficult to predict the direction of the industry and thus the exact specifications. We expect such a Raspberry Pi 4 board to utilize dual 32-bit LPDDR3 or LPDDR4 to cope with the bandwidth requirements of OpenCL and neural network acceleration. The exact release date for such a specimen can vary dramatically depending on Broadcom’s tapeout schedule. It should be relatively soon if the Raspberry Pi Foundation expects to release hardware in 2019.

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

#13

Post by Rjevski »

xd1936 wrote: post #5
trumped wrote: post #3

Hopefully USB3 will come to the RPi... It would make it more useful as a file server.

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.

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

#14

Post by VectorLock »

black_puppydog wrote: post #4

From the interviews I've heard with the founder, rPi set a price point first, then developed the best hackable computer they could to match it. If they keep up with that (as they have so far) then expect something more powerful and possibly smaller at the same price. Although I think the rPi zero is probably at the lower end of how small you can go without making tinkering cumbersome with all those gpio pins and such…

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.

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

#15

Post by l1k »

majewsky wrote: post #12
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…

Please avoid code snippets for blockquotes. It's very annoying to read this with the `overflow-x: scroll` that HN's CSS adds (particularly on mobile). Just put a ">" in front of the paragraph, like so: > We expect the Raspberry Pi 4 to be based on a new Broadcom SoC based on Cortex-A55 built on < 28nm fabrication process. We can call this BCM2839 and it will feature the much alluded to VC5 GPU and a new form factor.…

Ok, done.

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

#17

Post by alanfranzoni »

douglaswlance wrote: post #8

Raspberry Pi is for hacking. It's not really a commercial platform. You can technically use it as such, but it's more cost-effective to design your own boards at that point.

If you've got enough users. I argue that, for a (possibly initial) batch of less than 1000/2000 boards, a rpi (either the zerow, or the 3) are simply great.

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

#18

Post by mikece »

I think the future is only going to get brighter for Raspberry Pi because its niche is as a hacker's machine. It's so inexpensive and versatile for putting together proofs of concept and I think that's where it's real value lies. If you can show a solid working prototype of something on a Pi then the assumption is that a dedicated hardware solution will run even faster... assuming you don't just make a custom case and mounting set for your ad hoc solution and call it good. What I think would kill Raspberry Pi is trying to make it more advanced and powerful than it needs to be, trying to make it a full powered computer rather than a hacker's delight.

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

#19

Post by nimbius »

These things are a god-send for the auto industry in my opinion...specifically professional drivers.

as a lead automotive mechanic for a semi truck shop, I bought about 5 pi's for our techs. We use them for reading OBD diagnostics and doing resets or long-term vehicle observation for certain problems. Theyre cheaper than most of the commercial rent-seeking computer tools we use and if a tech accidentally crushes one, its cheaper than dirt to replace.

We even have a customer who keeps long term backups of log books and GPS data on a pi running off her cigar lighter, as well as her favorite audio books. Trucking companies dont care if you whine the most about your miles, but send them a ZIP file of 6 years of logs and the CEO himself will write you a pay raise. best of all, she tucks the pi in her shirt when she switches trucks. Try doing that with a qualcomm or a laptop!

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