251–260 of 776 posts
This is so good, I work from home and I've been eyeballing products like this for a while but until now its all been 3rd party. What would really take the cake for me is if they made a version of this but with a battery and wireless charging, then this really would be an exceptional portable desktop pc.
One missed opportunity regarding the educational value is that it is a shame they used some BGA chips instead of more soldering friendly package. People then could learn how to mod these by swapping RAM or other components or training repairs. Sure you can do BGA as well, but it may be too intimidating for a beginner and may require special equipment.
As an engineer/founder from India who dreams of access to the Internet for everyone on this planet, these are the efforts that make me smile. I am in the process of sorting out my financial situation - tough founder luck. But I am happy to order a few of these (and monitors) and rent a small garage to give local kids a free computer lab to learn. (Kolkata, India)
E-waste is a massive problem nowadays. Why not assemble the lab out of "old" computers? They might take a bit more electricity to run, but, at least in the US, you can get truckloads of computers that were destined for the scrapyard, for free. One local school here threw away 50+ small dell quad-core i5's in their quest to make sure they spend their money wisely. I've assembled a small lab, with many computers, laser…
It's a pretty sweet machine too, an HP Elite 8300MT from about 2012 or so. It has one of those side panels that can be removed by working a latch with your hand -- no screws necessary. I'm making it into a build server.
First impression: yes, this looks beautiful, reminiscent of the microcomputer revolution, and of course I wish I could get one. What would I change? It's a pity that the keyboard is connected using a flip-up ribbon, rather than internal USB. Although I can see why the target market (education) just prefers an all-in-one computer, this also means that the RPi 400 can't be used as a keyboard for other computers. Theref…
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Just watched a few videos on your channel and love it. Really great stuff. I love this Pi 400 and think in the new year I will pick one up for my son. We have a Pi 4 that we use a lot and he loves but like you say in your video it is a bit annoying with this little box off the side with a bunch of cables coming out of it. Not terrible by any means just annoying so I really love the form factor of it all being in the…
>simple RPi branded monitor with a Pi built in Oh, I'd definitely be up for that!!
If your VESA mounts are close enough together, you can just drill holes directly in the RPi case and mount it to the back of the monitor. If they're too far apart, use the mounts to put in a plastic or wood bar, then drill holes through the RPi case and the bar (while not attached to the monitor), then mount the case to the bar and the bar to the monitor.
I've looked at doing similar in the past, but I wanted to make the mounting block along the bottom of the monitor with the SD card exposed. That way I can set up a series of SD cards to test with. Want to test something on Ubuntu 18.04? Cool, switch monitor 2 to input 2 (the RPi) and then swap the SD card out to the Ubuntu 18.04 one and you're ready to rock. It's not as easy as a Docker container, but I'm often using the GPIO pins and I don't have the desire to try to make GPIO pins work in Docker. It might not even be that hard, I just don't feel like adding another step to my troubleshooting.
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The RPi 4 has USB 3 + UAS which is actually quite decent. I use it for Aarch64 development[1]. It boots and runs entirely off the SSD, and the performance is not spectacular but perfectly usable, and being it's a regular SSD it should be at least as reliable as a laptop. It also has a firmware bug where it cannot boot unless there is an (empty, unused) SD card in the slot, which is annoying! [1] https://rwmj.wordpres…
Sounds like they fixed (read: worked-around) that issue in https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.17
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Sounds like you're not the target audience for a RPi. They are meant to be cheap computers for "the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools and in developing countries"[0]. Adding NVMe support would increase the price. There are alternatives to RPi that do what you want, odroid-h2plus for example. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
The RPi4 SoC already has PCIe support; it's used for the USB controller, but it wouldn't be impossible to have a version that has an M.2 PCIe slot. It could be used for NVMe, WWAN or faster Ethernet. USB could remain available through USB OTG and it would sit in the middle between the RPi4 and the Compute Module 4. Using the USB power socket for OTG is doable already on the Pi4, but to do it in a fully supported way…
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E-waste is a massive problem nowadays. Why not assemble the lab out of "old" computers? They might take a bit more electricity to run, but, at least in the US, you can get truckloads of computers that were destined for the scrapyard, for free. One local school here threw away 50+ small dell quad-core i5's in their quest to make sure they spend their money wisely. I've assembled a small lab, with many computers, laser…
> One local school here threw away 50+ small dell quad-core i5's in their quest to make sure they spend their money wisely. I think broad computer illiteracy in the general population has convinced people that you "need" a new, powerful computer. In reality, 95% of the population can get away with any decent computer from the last 10 years. Grandma isn't training a neural net, she's checking Facebook. I continue to u…
My primary laptop is a newer T25 because I couldn't resist the keyboard, but my primary desktop is still a 9-year old AMD FX8350; with 32GB of RAM and SATA SSD, I game, Lightroom, Photoshop, VMWare Workstation, and anything else I need easily enough.
Truly amazing how the Raspberry Pi team keeps innovating. As far as I know, they're not a billion dollar company yet they keep innovating by making better Pi's and continuously upgrading the builder/user experience. Congratulations to Upton and team!
You're right. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is an educational charity. We're funded, in the main, by the sales of Raspberry Pi hardware. That the hardware and software engineers at Raspberry Pi Trading can keep innovating and producing such amazing products, astounds me.
For educational purposes, the same problem exist today: however, kids will not have a space HDMI screen with a micro HDMI cable.
The replacement screen that most people have is different: it's a smartphone, as there are more smartphones than TVs.
So a "notch" or receptacle on top on the keyboard, to secure a smartphone into place, would be helpful: the use case would be powering the 400 from the smartphone AC adapter (kids may not have a spare adapter matching the pi4 power requirements), plugging the phone into the 400 using a USB cable to keep the phone charged, use the phone as the screen - without it falling out and breaking, or hanging by a cable.
Android being finicky, you may not be able to have autodetection/USB gadget mode, but a remote desktop solution would go a long way.
It is not possible at the moment, given the 400 power requirements, but newer/more powerful AC adapters will eventually be more common.
This leaves the notch, which you may want to consider in the next revision