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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

#161

Post by gbraad »

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.

Misplaced cards happen, but it does allow easier sharing of the boards.

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

#162

Post by incanus77 »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #131
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.

Awesome, confirmed! I've had mine for a week and didn't think to try this.

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

#163

Post by mlyle »

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.

Yah, but let's leave some room for some meaning to evolve and not be some kind of robots based on historic meaning and roots.

E.g. It's OK for "decimated" to mean "destroyed/removed a sizable part of" and not "killed precisely 10% of".

It's also OK for us to disagree on when the exact place an object becomes no more useful than a brick and to think that this could be a gray area. To me, something is slightly/soft bricked when it requires specialized, non-garden path recovery procedures to fix (e.g. a firmware flashing tool). It is hard bricked when it requires tools and processes only usually found in depot maintenance or manufacturer facilities, even if my home workshop happens to be capable of these things.

Of course, this means some things that are hard bricked could become soft bricked or even not bricked at all, if the manufacturer releases a tool or updates the normal software to deal with a situation.

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

#164

Post by smileybarry »

You mentioned an external SSD and a microSD, but there's a nice inbetween option of using a thumb drive, like Samsung's FIT drives[1] where it's just a nub sticking out of the USB port. You get better performance than an SD card, something that can arguably get "SSD-like" performance in short bursts, and you don't have to jury-rig an external SSD to the Pi. Doesn't offer the same durability as a full-size SSD but might be good enough (and cheap enough to try IMO).

There's also endurance microSDs made for constant writing -- and I bought one for my current Pi 4 -- but I don't have enough experience with those to say whether it solves the Pi corruption issues.

[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/usb-flas...

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

#165

Post by lsiebert »

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?

Do adults meet a lot of kids without adults present though? This seems like a bit of observer bias.

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

#166

Post by dom96 »

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…

I did some quick testing of IO games on mine and was quite disappointed, when even Slither.io cannot be played smoothly in a browser (a relatively simple 2D game) then the experience is quite underwhelming for a machine that has had this many iterations.

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

#167

Post by nikisweeting »

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.

It is when they have to build the thing for <$25 though.

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

#169

Post by stjohnswarts »

m-p-3 wrote: post #79
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…

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.

Ack, why do away with SD slot? Sure add an nvme port that would be awesome but don't take away stuff, that's why we lost aux out on phones!

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

#170

Post by boogies »

mlyle wrote: post #155
boogies wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yah, it’s technically functional, but there’s an actively maintained alternative that can support such advanced features as spawning mobs (like, say, the mascot in Minecraft’s logo).
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