Live data from Hacker News

Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

raspberrypi.org

671–680 of 776 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#671

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…

I wonder if they’ll come out with a tablet or laptop form factor. Remember OLPC? It was painfully slow, but that was more than 10 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO

> I wonder if they’ll come out with a tablet or laptop form factor.

Seems like you could just repurpose a cheap android tablet...

> Remember OLPC? It was painfully slow, but that was more than 10 years ago.

OLPC may not have been a hit itself, but it seemed to usher in an era of inexpensive low-powered-but-still-useful PCs.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#672
post #284

The original vision of the rPi was to stimulate education in the way that the original 8-bit microcomputers did. Those machines were pretty much this exact form-factor, a keyboard with a computer stuck underneath. I really like how this is the same thing, and cheaper than the ZX Spectrum ever was.

It really has instant appeal to me as an adult, but I'm not so sure about target market any more. Kids these days are all glued to their mobile phones, it seems if you want to blow a kid's mind, something that turns their phone into a magic box they can tinker with would be so much better. Something maybe like a combo keyboard with IO breakout ports funnelled over bluetooth, and some matching software development env…

The thing that made old 80s computers so compelling for kids was the simplicity: fewer choices for peripherals, less things to connect, cartridge system for easy launching, easy to restore to a known state if you mess something up (typically just power cycle). What made a particular platform successful was the games available. There were many platforms out there, but kids wanted systems that played the best games. Being able to tinker and poke around, while learning something in the process was a happy side effect. Kids have no shortage of systems for gaming these days, but I'm thinking about getting one of these for my 11yo kid. I like the idea of gentle, friendly introduction to technology, just for tinkering and gaming without the distraction that comes from a multiuse (eg school) machine. Although, I don't want it to become yet another YouTube client, so I'll have to curate the content and supervise him.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#674
post #89

How do I play sounds with this? I see no jack for speakers or headphones. I assume one could have sound over HDMI but monitors with built-in speakers are not very common.

RPi4 has BT.

There are Bluetooth "DACs" that have tube-based amplifiers so you can really go nuts with a DAC that costs like 5 times the cost of the RPi 400.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#675
This computer-in-a-keyboard is very cool!

I think that in the future, we might be comfortable bringing around our tablets and connecting them wirelessly(or wired) to monitors at our home, office or PC cafe, and do presentations, code, etc.

This is almost possible today with tablets.

This keyboard almost achieves this vision, but it doesn't provide you with a screen, so it's not possible to show anything while you're on the go... Though I wonder if someone could do some work with keyboard-and-headphones only?

EDIT: Carry an android tablet, and this keyboard, with a battery pack, and you can show the keyboard's view onto the android tablet: https://youtu.be/PZLEUOG9k4Y . It might be nice

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#676

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…

Thank you geerlingguy for your ansible repositories!!

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#677
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.

I thought new trend is getting rid of TV's until so many visitors asked us "where's your tv!?".

Broadcast TV-watching may be going down to a large extent (and even Cable TV), but even some of the poorer families can get their hands on an old Wii, Xbox 360, or the like from a Goodwill.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#678

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.

Agree; from my experience with Pi SD cards, it’s straight-up irresponsible to recommend that anyone use an SD card with the Pi for their main computer.

Every Pi SD card has ended in irreparable disk corruption. The SD hardware’s wear-leveling and delayed allocation is fundamentally incompatible with any device without a battery, especially with frequent writes.

The “official” solution for the Pi is to use read-only SD cards with overlayfs. That’s not the default and it’s not how entry-level users will use this.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

#680
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and it is british. anecdotally in terms of longevity and development i have seen they do the best job.

As a British person we tend to tell everyone we do that and people believe it. However it’s not necessarily true. We produced a ridiculously large amount of crap to the point we nearly killed our manufacturing industry. If there’s anything to aspire to its Hewlett Packard’s test and measurement and computing offerings between 1960 and 1990.

My mom had an MGB in the late 60/early 70s. While she loved that car she didn’t love it’s reliability.

Those Brompton folding bikes are pretty well made, though pricey even with the deflated pound.

Post reply on HN