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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?

#61

Post by nottorp »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #55
nottorp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was it a project in a climate controlled area, like your home? Mine were in a factory, and after a while the stuff that they were supposed to connect to over USB simply vanished. A reboot (of just the Pi, not the other device) fixed it. So we just scheduled a reboot in 2 hours when the Pi started up.

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

#62

Post by fhood »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #55
nottorp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my stuff we never did a two hour reboot, but we did do a daily one. Sometimes you just run into memory leaks some of which aren't even your fault.

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

#63

Post by noonespecial »

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.

The price was the selling point. By the time you get to $20-ish, there are better choices for an SBC depending on the task you need it for. (Unless you are new to the scene and need the RasPi community to get going, which admittedly is excellent)

It looks like "$10 wifi computer" was more of an add (loss-leader) than a real product. There still seems to be a gap between ESP32/8266 wifi enabled micros and $20 linux SBC's with built-in wifi that needs filling.

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

#64

Post by b5 »

mbu wrote: post #48
Tepix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stay away from CHIP, they appear to be bankrupt and/or fraudulent, they took my money and never delivered.

Fwiw I don't think it's even possible to order anything from them at the moment. I can't figure out how to (but also have heard other stories of late or non-delivery). Seems like a cool product until you realise it doesn't exist.

They withdrew sales of the original C.H.I.P. months and months ago, without really explaining why. It's quite puzzling, because I ordered four in November 2015 and got them as promised about six months later. I guess maybe they made an initial batch, fulfilled that, then just ran out of steam and haven't made any more? It's disappointing to hear other people haven't received theirs.

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

#65

Post by stevekemp »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #50
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.

Depends. I shipped an RPi-based project a few months ago that was a one-off. Could have been done with Arduino, but it was far easier (read: less expensive to develop) on a Pi because it needed a touchscreen UI. I'm unlikely to ever build more than one more unit like it. I'm currently quoting a design I'd like to use the Pi on because it will need to be connected to WiFi or Ethernet and I doubt I will build more than…

For wifi-connected IoT thing I really like the ESP8266 chip. You can get it in a small form-factor board such as the "Wemos Mini D1" for approximately €3.0.

Programmable via the arduino-studio, widely-supported, and very reliable. I've built a bunch of projects with them, and couldn't be happier.

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

#66

Post by trumped »

nimbius wrote: post #19

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,…

For when you need it only for OBD-II, this might be a better/cheaper option: https://www.ebay.com/itm/OEM-Bluetooth-Mini-ELM327-V2-1-OBD-... (it connects to your phone via bluetooth, it needs no external power and there's a bunch of apps on the Play store that you can use).

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

#67

Post by dolessdrugs »

fhood wrote: post #26
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.)

Do they still enforce that? When I was working with Pi's a few years back I never had any trouble getting 5 or 6 at a time.

I think I've only ever bought Pi's by the handful...

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

#68

Post by nottorp »

fhood wrote: post #62
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my stuff we never did a two hour reboot, but we did do a daily one. Sometimes you just run into memory leaks some of which aren't even your fault.

I don't know if they needed a two hour reboot, but the customer wanted to be sure. For sure they stopped seeing usb devices after less than 24 hours. It helped that they were just reading and transmitting some values every 10 minutes or so, the reboot didn't hinder that.

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

#69

Post by kingosticks »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #45
mangecoeur wrote: post #22

Most of the comments so far seem to have missed the point of the RPi specifically, which is that it was always intended more as an educational tool than commercial solution. The idea of the RPi foundation is to promote experimenting and hacking by selling a board cheap enough that you don't care too much if you ruin it. This was explicitly a response to the rise of smartphones(/smart-whatevers) which turned computing…

The original point of the RPi is meaningless if the majority of the use cases are something completely different. For me, doing embedded consulting, the Pi is a cheap, simple way to get a touchscreen and/or network capability without jumping through the hoops of Arduino add-ons.

I don't think that's true when the Rpi is entirely under the control of a non-profit. They don't care how many you buy, you are only further funding their goal and so far that goal has trumped everything/anyone else. Which I think is great.

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

#70

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

nottorp wrote: post #61
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was it a project in a climate controlled area, like your home? Mine were in a factory, and after a while the stuff that they were supposed to connect to over USB simply vanished. A reboot (of just the Pi, not the other device) fixed it. So we just scheduled a reboot in 2 hours when the Pi started up.

More or less: at home, but in a basement room with temperature swings. For the application it was fine: it was going to be used in a temp controlled environment anyway. My current project I'm thinking of using BeagleBone because I trust their temperature range specs.

Is it possible your Pi was suspending USB as part of power management? I've had that problem with some other devices.

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