I have been debating a Pi400 vs a Pinebook Pro as an Xmas gift for a 10-year-old. The Pi400 looks great except that it doesn't support a webcam+microphone(+audio out?) out of the box and attempts to find an HDMI monitor with these things built in and supported by the Pi have thus far been unsuccessful. Is it odd to be considering a Lunux laptop for a 10-year old? The open source ethos of both machines, seems ideal for this use case.
I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
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Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#22> Then I accidentally yanked a cable USB-C is so outrageously bad in this regard. I have a smartphone on my desk, connected via USB3 for debugging. At some point it started reconnecting if I just slightly touch the phone or cable, which is extra fun if it happens mid-deployment.
Check for pocket lint or other debris in the socket. This exact thing was happening to me, a minute with a toothpick fixed it.
Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#23I've been looking at either the pi 400 or or one of the pi 4 starter kits. For around the same price as the 400, I can get the 8GB pi and a full kit of accessories.
But, I really like the idea of having everything just built into the keyboard.
In your experience was the 4GB of RAM on the 400 reasonable?
Ever since the 400 popped up on here i've been looking into both of them. I just worry the 400 lacks more long term versatility than a straight pi 4 with a kit.
Any thoughts on this?
Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#24I understand why the Raspberry Pi uses SD cards (cost, simplicity, ease of use) but the entire line would be so much more useful with onboard eMMC storage.
SD cards are great for keeping cost down and getting started quickly by flashing OS images from a PC. However, enthusiasts spend so much time fiddling with external storage options and cobbling together messes of powered USB hubs, cables, external enclosures, and fiddling with kernel issues (USB attached SCSI) that a Raspberry Pi with built-in eMMC would be a breath of fresh air.
They could even keep costs down by adding a connector for an eMMC submodule, similar to what ODROID has done with their boards.
Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#25> Then I accidentally yanked a cable USB-C is so outrageously bad in this regard. I have a smartphone on my desk, connected via USB3 for debugging. At some point it started reconnecting if I just slightly touch the phone or cable, which is extra fun if it happens mid-deployment.
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Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#26> Then I accidentally yanked a cable USB-C is so outrageously bad in this regard. I have a smartphone on my desk, connected via USB3 for debugging. At some point it started reconnecting if I just slightly touch the phone or cable, which is extra fun if it happens mid-deployment.
I think USB-C is designed to have the connector on the cable fail first, so maybe you can try to replace the cable?
Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#27I learnt to program on the ZXSpectrum with "Write Your Own Adventure Programs for Your Microcomputer" [0] The RPi400 with Pico-8 seems to tick the same boxes, so I got one for my 10yr old. He's loving it. Perfect use case. [0] https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Write%...
I wish there was a bare metal option that boots RPI 400 into a BASIC or Python interpreter the way the 8 bit machines used to
Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#28I got a pi 400 to replace a 2009 mac mini that was serving as the kids' computer but was struggling to play the online games they wanted (including scratch) because of missing webgl support in recent chrome updates.
Performance is roughly on par with the core 2 duo in the mini, but the graphics is more powerful and fully supported by webgl, so in practice it struggles less with the scratch environment and online games than the mini did. I would however not consider it snappy, it is quite sluggish to use chromium on it. I got both netflix and disney plus to work with minimal effort but disney plus is very slow to load, it takes almost a minute to fully pop up. It does play fine when streaming video.
The kids so far are quite happy and have been using it a lot more than they used the mac mini. It does everything they want (online educational games, some digital homework, and scratch), and they're not bothered by the sluggish loading of some sites. I think they also like the way it looks, it is a very fun looking little computer.
Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree; I think bricked is a fine word for this, even if it's reversible. Once you give up it's permanently bricked.
Whether you agree or not, it's incorrect. Common usage of "bricked" has been one thing and not the other for many years.
If you claimed to have bricked something a hundred years ago everyone would expect a wall. Meanings change.
Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions
#30I understand why the Raspberry Pi uses SD cards (cost, simplicity, ease of use) but the entire line would be so much more useful with onboard eMMC storage. SD cards are great for keeping cost down and getting started quickly by flashing OS images from a PC. However, enthusiasts spend so much time fiddling with external storage options and cobbling together messes of powered USB hubs, cables, external enclosures, and…
I browsed the datasheet [1] for the BCM2711 processor and did not see an eMMC controller on this part. Assuming the SD card is connected by SPI which would explain why it's so slow. Also rules out eMMC.
[1] https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/bcm2711/bcm2711-periphera...