Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC • Hacker News Board

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#401

Post by Chris2048 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

minerjoe wrote: post #171

brainless wrote: post #119

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…

> They might take a bit more electricity to run

But how much more? Just "a bit" or a significant amount?

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#402

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #384

rbanffy wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern is that almost anything that fits in a C64 will run out of the L1 cache in most modern CPUs and yield very unrealistic results compared to reasonable modern workloads.

I think that's a valid result in its own way, though. It's not the poor C64's fault that we insist on chewing through megabytes and gigabytes just to run a chat app.

> It's not the poor C64's fault that we insist on chewing through megabytes and gigabytes just to run a chat app.

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#403

Post by ldiracdelta » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #81

qz2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools don't want to be debugging microSD and USB issues.

Except these problems don't occur for most people, as evidenced by the fact that the current system works fine. Complaints like yours are relatively rare.

This spring, I deployed 20 PI's at work for a project and they are used every day, many many times a day. I've had 2 corrupt SD card failures so far. It's hard to know for certain what the cause is. We have spare SD cards to swap in for this application. For my application, having a spare SD image isn't a problem and I don't need five 9's of uptime, but the SD cards seem to be a point of fragility. Ultimately we're very happy with the system, but the SD cards are a point of failure that just need to be mitigated.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#404

Post by C1sc0cat » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

qz2 wrote: post #187

C1sc0cat wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably as the pi was designed for 6th formers to use - letting 8-10 year olds lose on them :-)

No all GCSE so 14+ students. The issue is usually that they freeze or crash under "desktop use" all the time and people pull the power out and back in again to reset them. This flexes the HDMI and USB connectors which eventually break or the cables give out. During the reboot cycle is when the SD card gets borked, or randomly suddenly. It's really a terrible computing experience compared to using a simple off the she…

Maybe you should do what our CCNA instructor did - if you brick one of the routers you have to fix it yourself.

Is it such a terrible "learning" Experience that yanking the power cable out is a bad idea as others have said the pi's should have better power supplies.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#405

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

Sunspark wrote: post #383

rbanffy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the reasons the Apple II was so popular with schools. It was built like a tank.

The Bell & Howell version came in Darth Vader black too: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/appleII-bell-and...

Interesting it was painted and not a differently colored plastic.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#406

Post by leoc » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #273

tyingq wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the keyboard? It looks, uh, cheap, so I'm curious if typing on it is an ok experience.

Apple made the chiclet keyboard cool again. It might be OK. Gen-x who remember the TRS80 MC10 and its keyboard remember chiclet keyboards as not much better than membrane keyboards (Consider the ZX81 Spectrum) But decades later Apple started shipping chiclet-appearing keyboards that actually worked, so the style has been somewhat revitalized. That said, yeah they could be shipping a 1980s quality chiclet keyboard or…

The modern Apple "chiclets" seem to be really just low-travel scissor keys. "Real" chiclet keys as seen on the ZX Spectrum or the original PCjr keyboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5yIg5wmf6I were something else again. (The ZX81 was a separate, earlier computer, with a very different and even worse keyboard.)

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#407

Post by puzzlingcaptcha » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #201

wott wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I am concerned, I consider SD cards the equivalent of a floppy disk. The equivalent of a hard drive would then be a CF card (unfortunately much less common than SD cards these days). Or of course any USB drive if we give up on the card format/connection style.

Modern day CF replacement is CFexpress. PCIe 3.0 x1 NVMe, forward compatible with XQD.

Yeah but RPi SoC is apparently lacking in PCIe lanes. I think they need a different SoC so they can finally have ethernet/storage/usb controller on the PCIe bus.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#408

Post by egypturnash » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

Oh damn, this really feels like it is nailing exactly the gap that the Pi was kinda designed to fill in the first place, IIRC: the small, cheap computer that a kid can dive into, and which a few future titans of the industry will fondly look back on as what got them started.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#409

Post by cactus2093 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #265

This blows my mind. I know, it's much more incremental than it is revolutionary, but I think the form factor achieves a much greater degree of access for many people than a typical Pi whose bare hardware may be a lot more intimidating. Now, it's "just" a computer, which happens to expose a 40-pin connector for the standard Pi hardware fun. And unlike other options you might find, this has the massive built-in communi…

> The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book.

How many households in this situation have an extra monitor lying around to plug this into, or even a proper desk to have a desktop computer set up on? Plus they'll need a separate webcam (and I'm guessing finding one that just works out of the box on Raspbian without fiddling around with drivers and such could be non-trivial). This new Pi form factor is kinda clever but surely a $200-$300 chromebook or tablet is still significantly more accessible.

And how does a desktop enable more advanced STEM learning than a laptop?

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#410

Post by cpascal » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

geerlingguy wrote: post #13

I was lucky to get a pre-release version to test, and I decided to tear it down before I started trying it out. I posted this blog post with detailed pictures of the insides, and some more details and performance benchmarks: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-400-tear... There are also a couple videos linked in the post, if you're more visually-inclined. Fun fact: the Pi 400 (and Compute Module 4) bo…

Just wanted to say that I've been watching your Pi videos on YouTube over the last few months and I really enjoy them. Your video about trying to get a GPU working with a Raspberry Pi was particularly fascinating. Keep up the great work.