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Raspberry Pi 4

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Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#711

Post by pagutierrezn »

atonse wrote: post #505
agumonkey wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shh don't tell all our secrets

I'm just laughing so hard at this thread. I also have a drawer, but with a bunch of Sonoff Home Automation devices. I promise I'll activate them one day! My wife doesn't have a clever name, but instead of usually rolling her eyes at yet another unfinished project, she loves this particular drawer because it's perfectly (and neatly) organized, like the best of unused item drawers.

Sonoff with Tasmota firmware let you control all your devices easily (increadibly easy). You just need a raspi or a simple(and cheaper) orange pi zero with a mosquitto mqtt server.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#712

Post by itronitron »

fpgaminer wrote: post #546
elliotpage wrote: post #185

Can't wait to buy this, boot it up, play with it for four hours, then stick it in the same desk drawer with the other Pis I have bought over the years. (The upgrades look great, just my attention span is not so great)

That's silly. RasPis are stupidly useful. I've got: * A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet. * A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network. * One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day. * One is built into an interne…

I actually came here to ask which would be a better platform for building a CNC, Raspberry Pi or Arduino. Is your cheap grbl CNC using an arduino to control the steppers?

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#713

Post by stefan_ »

stoobs wrote: post #547
stefan_ wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The KMS in this new chip is still the old VC4 HVS (high-speed video scaler). That chip can not output any 10 bit formats. (But it also wasn't capable of 4k60, so maybe there are some modifications there.)

This was mentioned in the rpi forum by staff: May I ask whether RPI supports things such as 10 bit video decoding, Dolby Vision and Atmos? Thx. HEVC hardware decode supports 4kp60, 10-bit. Audio output is pretty much unchanged, but the HDMI audio channels now support 8x192kHz bitrates.

Sure, but the video decode IP is a different piece of hardware from the video scaler/compositor. In a typical SoC, you have the GPU and the video decode engines as separate blocks that feed into the video scaler/compositor which then blends, rotates, scales, .. etc the inputs and feeds the final signal to LVDS, HDMI or whatever.

Now does it make sense to have your video decoder support 10 bit when your compositor can't handle that format? I guess you could argue that 10 bit source material will still improve the quality even if you downsample it to 8 bit for display, and I think for example DVB-T2 has standardized on 10 bit so if you can't decode that, that's a large chunk of market gone.

Ultimately, from the little we know, the compositor hardware is the same as the old Rpi, and that couldn't do 4k60 and it can't do 10 bit depths. The Raspbian image currently doesn't use the Linux kernel implementation for driving the compositor (it uses the fkms or "firmware kernel mode setting") so there might well have been hardware tweaks.

(Ok, instead of making this comment thread any longer, I simply asked and the compositor hardware in the RPi indeed has HDR support:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3020#issuecommen...

Tweaked from the old HVS in the old RPis.)

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#714

Post by fpgaminer »

jki275 wrote: post #652
archon810 wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it's cheaper than the Cloud Key.

It is, but in my experience the reliability factor is pretty ugly for the rpis. I'd rather either pay directly for the device designed for it, or just run the software on a machine already on the network. Obviously that doesn't work for everyone.

RasPi reliability is tricky, for sure. The recipe that's working for me now is brand name power supplies (RasPi foundations, CanaKit, or Adafruit) and brand name SD cards. Don't trust SD cards that come in RasPi bundles or kits, even from Adafruit; I've had those fail horribly. So far all my Samsung cards are working great. I've also been using A1 grade SanDisks, no issues so far (only been a few months) as well as using cheap SSDs for one RasPi. I highly doubt the SSD is going to run into any issues, and it works seamlessly on the new Pis with a nice boost in performance.

The RasPi itself is so cheap I think a lot of people cheap out on the power supply and such, which ends up giving them lots of problems.

Anyway, given the poor reviews I've seen on the Cloud Key regarding hardware failures, especially on the newer versions, I just went with a Pi. But yeah, if someone has a machine on their network already, that's a great option too. I just wish Ubiquiti would release an official Docker image.

EDIT: I'm not necessarily arguing that people use RasPis for UniFi controllers, or that you personally should. I just thought your comment was a good opportunity to discuss RasPi reliability, because I know a lot of people have trouble with that.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#715

Post by mtw »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #708
mtw wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Raspberry Pi 3 media center Just read theverge review on how the Pi struggles to play a video full screen, even if resolution is 480p. How are then people using it as a media center?

Can you link it? Was the video streaming or playing from disk? Perhaps it was an unsupported video codec? There are certain circumstances where the pi may struggle to play video, but I think for common formats they graphics driver has hardware level support for decoding. If the video format was weird and it had to decode with the CPU it could see problems. Another issue is the power supply. If you do not use a qualit…

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/24/18715211/r...

they write "It reportedly struggles with full screen video playback from YouTube for example, even if you turn down the resolution to 480p."

I was surprised by this review too. Not sure where they get that from

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#716

Post by bduerst »

fpgaminer wrote: post #546
elliotpage wrote: post #185

Can't wait to buy this, boot it up, play with it for four hours, then stick it in the same desk drawer with the other Pis I have bought over the years. (The upgrades look great, just my attention span is not so great)

That's silly. RasPis are stupidly useful. I've got: * A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet. * A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network. * One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day. * One is built into an interne…

>* One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day.

Do you even need a RPI for this? Some of these seem overengineered.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#717

Post by fpgaminer »

itronitron wrote: post #712
fpgaminer wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly. RasPis are stupidly useful. I've got: * A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet. * A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network. * One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day. * One is built into an interne…

I actually came here to ask which would be a better platform for building a CNC, Raspberry Pi or Arduino. Is your cheap grbl CNC using an arduino to control the steppers?

Yeah it's the cheap 3018 Pro from Sainsmart. An Arduino runs GRBL to control the steppers. I tacked on a RasPi 3B+ running CNCjs so the CNC could be operated headlessly.

Normally you need a laptop or something hooked into it over USB to feed it your G code, or do manual control. But I didn't want my laptop in the shop getting dusty while the CNC runs, and I also didn't want to risk the cheap CNC failing and throwing a voltage spike into my laptop.

So I opted to use the RasPi. Also makes it nice to have a web interface, and you can add lots of stuff to it (e.g. camera).

(Sainsmart sells an offline controller attachment, which allows manual control with buttons and feeding gcode off an sd card. But the RasPi is only a little more money and you get the web interface, etc)

P.S. I should tack on the usual warning about hooking up a life threatening device like a CNC to the network. I use an SSH tunnel to keep mine secure, instead of exposing CNCjs directly.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#718

Post by atonse »

pagutierrezn wrote: post #711
atonse wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just laughing so hard at this thread. I also have a drawer, but with a bunch of Sonoff Home Automation devices. I promise I'll activate them one day! My wife doesn't have a clever name, but instead of usually rolling her eyes at yet another unfinished project, she loves this particular drawer because it's perfectly (and neatly) organized, like the best of unused item drawers.

Sonoff with Tasmota firmware let you control all your devices easily (increadibly easy). You just need a raspi or a simple(and cheaper) orange pi zero with a mosquitto mqtt server.

This is exactly what I wanted to do. Flash them with Tasmota and have them be HomeKit devices.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#719

Post by fpgaminer »

bduerst wrote: post #716
fpgaminer wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly. RasPis are stupidly useful. I've got: * A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet. * A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network. * One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day. * One is built into an interne…

>* One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day. Do you even need a RPI for this? Some of these seem overengineered.

> Some of these seem overengineered.

Oh for sure. Normally I'd throw the Hue automation software on my home server, but it's busy with other stuff.

Other than that, for the other stuff I listed, I would have said the same a few years ago and opted for ESPs, Arduinos, STM32s, or some other "lightweight" solutions. But the Pi has gotten to this nice sweet spot now that they've got WiFi built-in and most of the rough edges are gone. They can do almost everything the other solutions can do, and for the things they can't you can buy HATs that fill in the gaps. So it's just nice to have one big, universal hammer that I can pull out for my crazy projects.

Most importantly, I don't like wasting time any more, and I'm willing to spend a couple tens of bucks on RasPis that might be overkill, rather than save X dollars making the best, slimmest, most engineered solution around the perfect STM32 chip.

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