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First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

blog.alexellis.io

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Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#61

Post by iszomer »

spicybright wrote: post #57
alexellisuk wrote: post #2

I know many of you may be wondering if you should get one of these, and if they can be used to create a cheaper cluster than RPi4s. I try to answer that as well as talk about my experience with the RPi Zero and how quick it is with Go and Node.js compared to the older generation. Are you running Zeros now or other models? What would you run on an RPi Zero 2?

Just a question on pi clustering in general. Is there an advantage vs buying a single more powerful computer, or a few powerful machines instead of a dozen+ pis?

Isn't this more of question on redundancy, ie: "two is one and one is none"? RPi's aren't technically best known for general purpose usage.

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#62

Post by ohthehugemanate »

spicybright wrote: post #57
alexellisuk wrote: post #2

I know many of you may be wondering if you should get one of these, and if they can be used to create a cheaper cluster than RPi4s. I try to answer that as well as talk about my experience with the RPi Zero and how quick it is with Go and Node.js compared to the older generation. Are you running Zeros now or other models? What would you run on an RPi Zero 2?

Just a question on pi clustering in general. Is there an advantage vs buying a single more powerful computer, or a few powerful machines instead of a dozen+ pis?

The big difference is number of cores you have to work with, and to a lesser extent the amount of RAM. For say 800€ you can get probably a 4 core CPU, maybe 8. I guess 8GB RAM? Or you can get 10 raspberry pi 4s for a total of 40 cores and 40GB RAM.

What makes more sense for you will depend on your workload and scaling requirements.

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#63

Post by sitkack »

marktangotango wrote: post #42
alexellisuk wrote: post #2

I know many of you may be wondering if you should get one of these, and if they can be used to create a cheaper cluster than RPi4s. I try to answer that as well as talk about my experience with the RPi Zero and how quick it is with Go and Node.js compared to the older generation. Are you running Zeros now or other models? What would you run on an RPi Zero 2?

My dream device for clustering is dual core 1Ghz+, 1GB ddr4 (ddr3 in a pinch) and wired Gb ethernet. In bulk (where bulk ~ 100) price $5-10. Some of the allwinner and rockchip based pi clones get close but price is a lot more.

You can hit this now with the CM4 modules,

For qty 1 @ $30 you get 2GB and 4 cores, you could put 2 more ethernet ports on the PCIe port for a total of 3. That gets you into the same-ish performance regime.

I am all for aggregates of low end compute, but I think something with more processing power and more PCIe lanes would scale better.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC02...

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#64

Post by my123 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #60
foxfluff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, but that's because I largely dismiss the early Pis altogether. They sit in the awkward space where they're larger and faster than a microcontroller but practically speaking require an OS that wastes a lot of the available resources; for running Linux applications, they feel way underpowered. Pi 3 seemed powerful enough to be interesting and I did a small project with it, but Pi 4 pushes it to where I'm ac…

This is the first time I'm hearing of the Pico. Is there any reason to use it, instead of the ESP32 or ESP8266 boards, or one of the many Arduino compatible uC's? The competitors seem to be much more common than the Raspberry Pico (i.e. it is much easier to find expansion boards, examples etc. for them). They seem to cost roughly the same too, and the ESPs even include WiFi and in the case of the ESP32 even Bluetooth…

Good documentation and the killer feature is the PIO. (Programmable I/O unit)

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#65

Post by thenewwazoo »

spicybright wrote: post #58
blippage wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think there are too many. Everyone tends to go for the latest and greatest. The Pi is heading towards becoming a PC replacement, but I'm not sure what advantage that is. Instead of have faster computers, I want a faster OS. Or preferably very little in the way of an OS. Something like a DOS, perhaps. Something where you could write blazingly-fast software because the kernel is straightforward. And I want a rea…

Is there anything fundamental in pi hardware that prevents putting a real time OS on it? (I'm not a hardware engineer)

How do you define "real-time"?

The Broadcom CPUs in the RPis have unpredictable pauses to let the GPU refresh the RAM (really). That makes them unsuitable for hard real-time applications where you must service an interrupt within a certain time, or emit a signal on a strict deadline, etc.

They're just fine for soft real-time applications where some jitter is acceptable, but what counts as "soft" real-time versus "not-at-all" real-time is the subject of some debate.

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#66

Post by el_oni »

throw10920 wrote: post #32
foxfluff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, but that's because I largely dismiss the early Pis altogether. They sit in the awkward space where they're larger and faster than a microcontroller but practically speaking require an OS that wastes a lot of the available resources; for running Linux applications, they feel way underpowered. Pi 3 seemed powerful enough to be interesting and I did a small project with it, but Pi 4 pushes it to where I'm ac…

> for running Linux applications, they feel way underpowered I think that's because the Raspberry Pi's might be best used as tiny consumer servers, not desktop (or embedded) computers. They seem perfect for running things that require an OS and a moderate amount of processing power - say, DNS, Syncthing, audio streaming, ssh tunnel point, a VPN, a small personal (static) website, or a NAS that doesn't have particular…

A pi2b lives under my desk and runs a discord bot, pihole and database. Now that I've learnt docker im tempted to go back and containerize everything on it

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#67

Post by pbalau »

spicybright wrote: post #57
alexellisuk wrote: post #2

I know many of you may be wondering if you should get one of these, and if they can be used to create a cheaper cluster than RPi4s. I try to answer that as well as talk about my experience with the RPi Zero and how quick it is with Go and Node.js compared to the older generation. Are you running Zeros now or other models? What would you run on an RPi Zero 2?

Just a question on pi clustering in general. Is there an advantage vs buying a single more powerful computer, or a few powerful machines instead of a dozen+ pis?

Nope, you build a RPI cluster for the sake of it.

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#68

Post by foxfluff »

spicybright wrote: post #58
blippage wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think there are too many. Everyone tends to go for the latest and greatest. The Pi is heading towards becoming a PC replacement, but I'm not sure what advantage that is. Instead of have faster computers, I want a faster OS. Or preferably very little in the way of an OS. Something like a DOS, perhaps. Something where you could write blazingly-fast software because the kernel is straightforward. And I want a rea…

Is there anything fundamental in pi hardware that prevents putting a real time OS on it? (I'm not a hardware engineer)

Not at all. It's just that writing drivers and supporting all the peripherals is a massive undertaking (even Linux is often way behind on support -- chips that came out years ago might have poor or no support for some peripherals and the only support you find is in some vendor fork of an ancient android kernel).

There's also the fact that compared to PCs, ARM boards are kinda special snowflakes. DOS could boot and run on thousands of different machines ("IBM PC compatible") from different manufacturers, in part thanks to BIOS abstracting out some of the core peripherals, in part thanks to (de-facto) standard peripherals. Your custom ARM OS? Well, it won't boot on the next board. UEFI is sort of changing that, but really it pushes the problem to the bootloader (until they start implementing UEFI in firmware).

In a way, I actually prefer not having to rely on BIOS or UEFI, because that protects me from stupid implementations and allows me to customize things. And on the other hand, if you want high performance drivers for modern peripherals, you probably don't want to rely on a firmware abstraction for it (but it'd still be nice to be able to boot and get a shell & some basic I/O going even without hardware specific drivers). But that means you do need drivers in your OS, and as long as chips keep changing as often as they do, it's a never-ending battle to stay on top of driver support.

PCs also gave you a nice escape hatch in that you'd plug in your peripherals to a slot and you could choose parts that you have drivers for. That's not really the case for laptops of course, and ARM SoCs integrate most of the peripherals so if you get a new chip, you get new everything.

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#69

Post by occamrazor »

Waterluvian wrote: post #5

Does anyone else have feelings about “there’s too many tiers of Pi” yet? I’m not sure if I feel that but it’s on my mind.

I wouldn't say so. RPi doesn't discontinue products, but it doesn't really make sense to buy most older models.

In practice there are 4 RPi's: the Zero (5$ is hard to beat), the Zero 2 W (small, cheap, with WiFi) and the 4 Model B.

Then there is the Pico, but it is a microcontroller, a completely different product, and the CM4, for large scale deployments.

Re: First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

#70

Post by one_off_comment »

alexellisuk wrote: post #4
Stampo00 wrote: post #3

The idea of using it as a self-hosted Github Actions runner spoke to me. I wouldn't have thought of that. Thank you!

Don't blame me. The idea came from Martin Woodward (from GitHub) and I was surprised how I had it up and running, executing builds in a few minutes. What kinds of things would you run with yours? Maybe you could use a GitHub action to trigger IoT lights on and off.

I use Github Actions mostly for automatically publishing my website when I change its content. But I haven't fully set up my build pipeline to my liking. And getting logs and stuff when the pipeline goes sideways isn't very easy right now with Github Actions. If I hosted my own running, at least I could poke around my build environment to see why it failed until I have it running reliably enough to let the cloud handle it.

That's a long-winded way to say: debugging.

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