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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

#91

Post by npongratz »

interestica wrote: post #59
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me the word has a clear sense of permanence built into it. The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. A device is said to be bricked when it is no more useful than a brick. If you drop your smartphone into water, and it shows no signs of life even after a couple of weeks of drying, you've bricked it. The average user is not competent at repair, as that's a spe…

> The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. I've got a dictionary full of terms for you that arose from one concept to mean something else. Literally. Also figuratively.

Just because people can, or have, redefined things illogically doesn't mean they should.

I fully support efforts to gently nudge deviations of the vernacular toward reason and rationality, especially before it it crystallizes into some abomination like "literally" has become. That way lies muddy thinking, and madness.

The price of language-reality congruence is eternal vigilance and kindhearted pedantry.

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#92

Post by tantalor »

ohazi wrote: post #57
webmobdev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then do we have "eMMC" equivalent quality SD cards that lasts just as long?

Yes, they're marketed as "industrial grade MicroSD cards" and are available via electronics component distributors like Digi-Key. e.g. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/swissbit/SFSD032G...

That costs more than the rpi itself!

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#93

Post by rmu09 »

ajb wrote: post #71
snapetom wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. The underlying storage tech between is the same, but eMMCs have a controller that handles the actual layout of the data. In a removable SD card setup, this is handled by the CPU, which of course has many other things to worry about. Having its own controller makes eMMCs more reliable.

"eMMCs have a controller that handles the actual layout of the data" Maybe there is some part that eMMCs have that SD cards don't, but SD cards absolutely do have a controller that does layout (wear levelling). It doesn't do the filesystem layer, but IIRC eMMC's don't either. AFAIK the only reason SDs are less reliable, is because they're cheap and the socket can be loose, causing corruption during a write (or wear l…

SD cards used to be optimized for usage patterns typical in a video or foto camera (big files, written at once). eMMCs are better adapted to serve as a traditional filesystems for e.g. phones.

Don't find source now though, so maybe I'm completely wrong.

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#94

Post by wongarsu »

tantalor wrote: post #92
ohazi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they're marketed as "industrial grade MicroSD cards" and are available via electronics component distributors like Digi-Key. e.g. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/swissbit/SFSD032G...

That costs more than the rpi itself!

is there anything marketed as "industrial grade X" that costs less than a rpi?

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#95

Post by anderspitman »

I just spent a few hours fiddling with my new pi4 yesterday. Is it possible to get them to boot from USB without first setting it up to boot from SD and then cloning the disk? I'm guessing not since I think it has to flash some settings to the EEPROM, not just make changes to /boot.

I was following this guide and couldn't even get these steps to work: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#96

Post by anderspitman »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #24

I 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 think the key advantage of SD cards is they're easy to understand and use (once flashed). Conceptually it's simple to explain that the software lives on that little card. Want to change the OS? Swap the card. Plus it makes it easy for people who aren't comfortable flashing to buy a card with their OS of choice installed and ready to go.

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#97

Post by laurencerowe »

mjayhn wrote: post #42
TonyTrapp wrote: post #19

> 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'm burning through something like 10-20 usbc cords a year. It's outrageous. I'm buying Ankers and "good" brands too. My car has ubsc to usbc and android auto and it used to be a pain (usba to usbc slowed it down) so I'm diligent about fast/good cables. I have no working usbc-usbc cables right now. It's wild how quickly mine go bad and most of the time they're just plugged into a phone once a day (driving), if that.…

You may be able to get the Anker cables replaced for free, some have a lifetime guarantee.

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#98

Post by chias »

Joeri wrote: post #28

I 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 game…

How did you get Netflix to work with minimal effort? The 400 is still an ARM chipset, right? I know the "rip-arm-widevine-out-of-chrome-os" trick will work, though afaik the only automated way to accomplish this is via Kodi + the Kodi app at https://github.com/CastagnaIT/plugin.video.netflix

But I'd hardly consider that "minimal effort" in the general case. Did you find a better way?

Edit: also, Chrome itself. How did you manage that?

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#99

Post by hobby-coder-guy »

rmu09 wrote: post #93
ajb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"eMMCs have a controller that handles the actual layout of the data" Maybe there is some part that eMMCs have that SD cards don't, but SD cards absolutely do have a controller that does layout (wear levelling). It doesn't do the filesystem layer, but IIRC eMMC's don't either. AFAIK the only reason SDs are less reliable, is because they're cheap and the socket can be loose, causing corruption during a write (or wear l…

SD cards used to be optimized for usage patterns typical in a video or foto camera (big files, written at once). eMMCs are better adapted to serve as a traditional filesystems for e.g. phones. Don't find source now though, so maybe I'm completely wrong.

Foto?

Re: I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

#100

Post by stan_rogers »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #90
stan_rogers wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default intent, and thus the default configuration, is to have a device that a kid can accidentally nuke without any lasting consequences. That's the whole founding principle of the thing. Lose that and you've lost the Raspberry Pi as a concept.

eMMC isn't mutually exclusive with having an SD card slot. Even if they removed the SD slot, you would still reflash the board over USB. That's how it's done with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. With some software development it could be even easier than fiddling with SD cards. In education environments, microSD cards tend to disappear a lot. Having one less moving piece to lose would be a win.

And having flashed cards ready to hand over is a win. "Factory reset" in the time it takes to swap a card. Your point? The Pi (apart from the CM) is for kids. It happens to be useful to other people as well, but that is not, was not, and never will be the aim of the Foundation.
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