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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

#151

Post by boogies »

mlyle wrote: post #145
abraxas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not bare metal, but Python on Pi400 is great for kids. Especially with side-by-side with a Minecraft window and the Minecraft Pi Edition python integration. Also, there's a whole lot of little boards that support Micropython, and boot straight to it, including ESP32 etc. I use them in the classes I teach.

Wasn’t Minecraft Pi Edition discontinued years ago? Minetest on the other hand might be a great intro to programming with its Lua script mods, and also has always been designed for modest hardware.

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

#152

Post by sbassi »

reaperducer wrote: post #60
kencausey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From recent usage of the term 'bricked' here on HN I think those of us who consider bricking to at least require use of JTAG to alleviate to have lost the battle.

I suspect few people on HN have truly experienced a "bricked" device in their lifetime. To you and me: Static electricity from the carpet discharging into the joystick port of a Commodore 64? Bricked. Yanked a cable from my Raspberry Pi and had to reboot in an unconventional manner? Not bricked.

"Static electricity from the carpet discharging into the joystick port of a Commodore 64" Changing the CIA chip will fix the machine.

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

#153

Post by cyberbanjo »

boogies wrote: post #151
mlyle wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bare metal, but Python on Pi400 is great for kids. Especially with side-by-side with a Minecraft window and the Minecraft Pi Edition python integration. Also, there's a whole lot of little boards that support Micropython, and boot straight to it, including ESP32 etc. I use them in the classes I teach.

Wasn’t Minecraft Pi Edition discontinued years ago? Minetest on the other hand might be a great intro to programming with its Lua script mods, and also has always been designed for modest hardware.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi

Appears to still be available

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

#154

Post by boogies »

cyberbanjo wrote: post #153
boogies wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t Minecraft Pi Edition discontinued years ago? Minetest on the other hand might be a great intro to programming with its Lua script mods, and also has always been designed for modest hardware.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi Appears to still be available

But not updated in ~7 years since v0.1.1

https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Pi_Edition

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

#155

Post by mlyle »

boogies wrote: post #154
cyberbanjo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi Appears to still be available

But not updated in ~7 years since v0.1.1 https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Pi_Edition

Yah, it's discontinued, but it works fine and is still distributed. It's a fine path to write some code and interact with a working game world.

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

#156

Post by thetinguy »

webmobdev wrote: post #43
umvi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't know eMMC is basically an SD card that is soldered to the board

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

Drop the e and you have an MMC card.

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

#157

Post by thetinguy »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #84
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…

SD cards are getting nvme in the future with 7.0 specification. I wonder how that will affect performance. https://www.slrlounge.com/sd-express-memory-cards-pcle-nvme/

They could implement UFS 2 if they wanted higher speed.

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

#158

Post by dijit »

musicale wrote: post #141

One thing I discovered using the Raspberry Pi is that Linux is constantly writing to the SD card, and it's very hard to stop this behavior, even if you turn off file system timestamps, disable logging, etc.. Cutting the power or resetting the Pi seems to result in relatively frequent data corruption, and I've also ended up with several unusable SD cards. However, switching to a read-only SD card and a RAM file system…

This is going to sound like a meme, but seriously: install gentoo.

“Linux” doesn’t write anything to the filesystem, but various helper utilities do, and this has become more true with systemd-journald.

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

#159

Post by smileybarry »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #116
m-p-3 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I wish they'd add an m2 slot and scrap the SD card. It really is the bottleneck of the whole system. But they walk a fine balance with PCB space, backward compatibility, performance, cost and user-friendliness.

The speed would be much better than an SD card, but nowhere near the peak M.2 performance we've come to love. The SoC they use only has a single lane of PCIe Gen 2. So 500 MB/s peak (MB, not MiB) with large transfers. Throw in a PCIe switch or something so you can still attach a USB 3 controller and now you've doubled the price and power consumption.

They could add a SATA M.2 slot, then it's equivalent to using a 2.5" SATA SSD but in a neater form factor.

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

#160

Post by gbraad »

ekianjo wrote: post #146
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.

> is to have a device that a kid can accidentally nuke To be honest the large majority of RPi users I have ever met are only adults. Are there a lot of kids who are using it out there?

We would like the RPi more for education, but the cost is still a factor. Due to cost, the school need to buy these, as by itself the RPi is useless; It needed a keyboard, mouse, screen, etc.

Students bring their own SD card, since else they are easily misplaced (stolen). This also means boards can be used by any student.

A lot of effort and cost, so we went with the microbit. The kids can easily own them, use a tablet to program them, and for the kids that are older, they can go for the rPi to expand this setup and learn more advanced stuff. By we do not use this as an entry. Kids that do robotics have a better time with them.

So yes, maybe mostly used by adults. The idea of SD cards was a good one. But several flaws held it back; like the non-5v tolerant GPIO. Lost several boards due to misuse... And they ain't cheap if they need to be replaced often.

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