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Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

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Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#571

Post by samatman »

leoc wrote: post #429
sbuk wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assert that TV's are commonplace. This, just like the BBC Micro, ZX80/1 and C64, can easily be used with a TV.

The reason that the old '80s microcomputers were often plugged into TVs was that monitors were too expensive. Sharing the TV with every other device and person in the house was a necessary evil. TV-hogging is probably about as problematic now as it was then, while displays are much less expensive. So including a screen makes much more sense for a low-cost access-to-computing device these days.

Monitors last much longer than their desirability these days, there are hundreds of thousands of old clunky Dells just sitting around.

It does call for a bit of scrounging, but an acceptable used monitor should be twenty bucks or free. Including a screen is optimizing for pessimism: the best you could do is something useless for the majority, and only as good/cheap as the minority could get a new one for.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#573

Post by kllrnohj »

tomcam wrote: post #544
kllrnohj wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This RP400 is small, can be taken everywhere by kids Not usefully it can't. There's no display, so that "everywhere" is restricted to places that have an HDMI display just hanging out. Which is then a vanishingly small number of places. And since we're talking about kids - places with a front panel HDMI port, which is even rarer. Or you have to pair it with a portable monitor, in which case you spent as much as an…

> "everywhere" is restricted to places that have an HDMI display just hanging out. Which is then a vanishingly small number of places. Wait what? Doesn't virtually every TV sold in the last 10 years have an HDMI port?

Other than your own living room at home, where do you go that has a TV just hanging around free for use? Coffee shops don't. Classrooms don't (certainly not enough for every student, at least). Parks don't. Trains/busses/airplanes don't. Backseat of the parents minivan probably doesn't, either.

Like where else can you use this other than a basically permanent installation at home for this to qualify as "taken everywhere by kids"?

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#574

Post by my123 »

jeffxtreme wrote: post #515
cactus2093 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

Even for non-STEM students, the Pi setup seems fairly accessible. From a quick online search, I could find monitors for $30 - $50 and webcams $20 - $30 which is pretty price competitive with a $200 - $300 Chromebook. The Pi community would help with any driver installation issues, and the Pi setup seems powered up enough to run Zoom with no issues. Though I do see even cheaper Chromebooks in the same price range, so…

Chromebooks right now are in a quite huge shortage: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20201029PD205.html

> Component shortages continue to disrupt Acer's Chromebook shipments, which can fulfill only 30% of customer orders, with shipments for the remainders having to be deferred, according to the company.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#575

Post by kristopolous »

saagarjha wrote: post #83
kristopolous wrote: post #12

What a clean and stylish execution. I have too many pis already but I think they just sold me another. That video ad is Steve Jobs-level excellence.

If I were doing it I'd use a cleaner background, some background music, add a British voiceover, and do more continuous shots. The cut away from the wire going into the port hurt me :(

it's called glamour - you intentionally don't show everything and let the imagination fill in the gaps. It's a gorgeous advertising technique when done properly and a terribly annoying one when done poorly. I'd argue here it might have come close but obviously not for you.

Glamour is mightily hard. I don't even try it when doing products. Apple's pulled it off a few times.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#576

Post by TaylorAlexander »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #335
flyinghamster wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days, even a low-end Android phone, taken back forty years, would be a supercomputer beyond anything that existed then. Unfortunately, layer after layer of framework on abstraction on framework on abstraction sometimes means that we need a supercomputer to render a user interface, and still end up with perceptible lag. :) Regarding elsewhere where I mentioned running BOINC on a Pi 4B, I'd also note that (at lea…

microSD cards don't really cut it for a general-purpose desktop in terms of lifespan and reliability and SSD over USB is an awkward workaround at best. Hopefully the RPi 5 will have NVMe or a SATA port at least.

Integrated would be cleaner but I’ve found it to be quite simple to boot off of a USB3 drive on the Pi4.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#577

Post by Firehawke »

prox wrote: post #448
geerlingguy wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think Gordon Hollingsworth from Raspberry Pi has posted somewhere specifically how to do it (maybe in the comments on the post on the Pi website?).

Found it! Merci :) >It would be possible to do this, but you’d have to run a simple buildroot SD card which runs a suitable dwc2 OTG HID driver to pretend it is a keyboard… Otherwise, you can use the Pi 400 as a Barrier server to the other computer… See my other blog post for details! Gordon

Here's an interesting idea:

A build of KeePass that uses the OTG mode for autotype. You plug the Pi 400 into a USB port on your device (whether computer, console, or whatever) and the password file is never on the computer in the first place.

Edit to add:

Might work better with a tablet build of the Pi, though, and you'd probably still want it to sync the file to Dropbox or some other storage place for safety.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#578

Post by faceplanted »

lostlogin wrote: post #510
code4tee wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people’s TVs at this point are basically a 1080 monitor hooked up to a computer (cable box) so I don’t see this as a big challenge. If a monitor is needed they are quite inexpensive at this point compared to what they used to cost.

Is cable that common? Assuming you mean cable tv, it seems that at peak it was only just over half of all homes that subscribed and is falling. Presumably this is due to Netflix et al. However wiki numbers stop a few years back. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_Unit...

Even without cable boxes, basically every TV has an input you can plug something into, even if you've got one of the extremely old ones you can get an adapter.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#579

Post by 867-5309 »

ineedasername wrote: post #512
867-5309 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's more likely an old keyboard is lying around. a Pi4 and cheap enclosure could then be picked up for half this price

An 8 year old kid with non-technical parents is not going to have an easy time of it compared to what is essentially a plug-and-play solution. And I'm talking about households that literally do not have computers. There is no old hardware lying around, much less not just a keyboard & mouse, but the HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card, etc. Sure, search craigslist or similar, a…

> An 8 year old kid with non-technical parents is not going to have an easy time of it compared to what is essentially a plug-and-play solution.

that's an entirely different argument, which I agree with you on. the original argument was that it's more likely a spare keyboard is lying around than a comparatively expensive monitor (which is more prone to being repurposed)

> mouse, .. HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card

these would still be required anyway, they're not included in the price

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#580

Post by ponker »

cactus2093 wrote: post #409
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 e…

You're focusing on the wrong stuff like the monitor and the webcam. This is a completely open computing platform... a Chromebook is a thin client for Google services. They couldn't be more different.
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