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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

#131

Post by MarkusWandel »

anderspitman wrote: post #95

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

The Pi 400 is new enough to have USB boot already in it. At least mine did; the boot loader version was considerably newer than what is needed. Just dump the OS image onto a USB stick or an external hard disk, it'll boot.

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

#132

Post by akiselev »

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…

PinePhone even has a great solution for the eMMC ease of use problem. The bootloader loads from eMMC by default (and I believe comes preloaded with a distro based on what version you bought) unless there is a bootable (micro)SD card inserted. There's a popular bootable SD card image for the PinePhone that exposes the eMMC over USB allowing flashing using `dd` or similar, which makes the whole process rather painless compared to the mess that is raspberry pi.

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

#133

Post by MarkusWandel »

grawprog wrote: post #23

I'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…

Is 4GB of RAM reasonable? Of course not. We all need to have six hundred browser tabs open and the browser weighing in at 20GB+. Just kidding. For the sort of browsing you'll do on a Raspi 400, 4GB is plenty at least in my experience.

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

#134

Post by MarkusWandel »

tpmx wrote: post #18

I also got one. Really like the physical form factor and the keyboard. I don't think something like this is ideal for running a full-blown Linux/Chromium/Firefox desktop environment though - it's just too slow for the bloated web sites of today. And using a mouse isn't exactly "sit-in-front-of-the-tv" friendly. I like the idea of running something like BMC64 ("a bare metal C64 emulator for the Raspberry Pi with true…

You can get relatively inexpensive wireless keyboard/trackpad combos. Generally they come with a receiver piece that ties up a USB port.

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

#135

Post by anderspitman »

ptx wrote: post #125
anderspitman wrote: post #95

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

I think all I had to do to get it working, now that the USB boot feature is out of beta, was to boot Raspberry Pi OS from an SD card and do a normal "apt upgrade". This automatically downloads and updates the firmware[1]. After that (and possibly rebooting?) I could run raspi-config and enable USB boot[2] there. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... [2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/docume…

But that still requires an SD card to bootstrap the process...

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

#136

Post by ajb »

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.

That's true, I remember reading that somewhere too.

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

#137

Post by magicalhippo »

anderspitman wrote: post #121
magicalhippo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the EEPROM settings.

But once I figure out how to properly flash it, I should be able to boot from a freshly created USB drive, without having to clone from SD?

Yes exactly, the EEPROM stores the settings rather than the config.txt file on the SD Card as with earlier Pi's.

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

#138

Post by charwalker »

anandology wrote: post #75

I have been playing with a Raspberry 400 for couple of days now. I thought of recommend it for my nephew, but couldn't do it because of the following drawbacks. 1. Lack of 3.5mm audio jack or built-in microphone/speakers 2. Unable to run Zoom reliably Given that schools are closed (at least in India) and classes are happening over zoom, these two drawbacks makes it a no-go for my use case.

Would you be able to output audio or have a audio/headphone/headset jack via a monitor over HDMI? Bluetooth is also an option but would require a headset and setup to work well I think.

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

#139

Post by wjdp »

iddqd wrote: post #34
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 agree. I have run quite a few Raspberry Pi over the years and so many of them died because of SD card corruption. Eventually I got a NanoPC T4 with built in eMMC and it’s been tugging along for a good 2 years with zero issues.

Had similar and switched to a cheap used desktop. I was running Home Assistant [1] and my guess is the constant writing of state history into the database slowly killed the card.

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/

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

#140

Post by justincredible »

npongratz wrote: post #91
interestica wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> kindhearted pedantry

lol. You can be as kindhearted as humanly possible and some people will still get pissed.

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