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News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

jeffgeerling.com

31–40 of 208 posts

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#31
I run the media lab at one of Europe's must prolific art universities. The variant I tend to use most is the 3B+.

Reasons: - full sized HDMI connector - headphone connector - good bang for the buck

If I had one wish for any new product in the Raspberry line it would be: Do the Raspberry Pi 3++ or something. Same thing. Faster, but with USB-C power connector, 4K Video resolution, 2× USB-C I/O, 2× USB-A peripherals and maybe M.2 support.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#32
post #24
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^^ when I tell people tangential to the field that the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port), they're astonished. It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it

> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers. The company didn't sell its fir…

It's still true that people, out of convenience and familiarity, used Raspberry Pi for tasks where a microcontrollers would have been perfectly adequate

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#33

Pi's refusal to drop a USB-C on Pico due to cost increases is a terrible call IMO. I seriously cannot fathom being someone doing development who wouldn't pay $0.50 extra to purge the last micro USB from their desktop.

There are broadly available third party RP2350 boards with subc and a variety of additional capabilities if that is important for you.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/en-us/collections/rp2350

https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-pro-micro-rp2350.html

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2913.html

https://www.seeedstudio.com/Seeed-XIAO-RP2350-p-5944.html

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#34
post #32
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers. The company didn't sell its fir…

It's still true that people, out of convenience and familiarity, used Raspberry Pi for tasks where a microcontrollers would have been perfectly adequate

There was definitely usecase overlap due to the presence of the GPIO, but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't - stuff like the PiHole and Retropie projects, and never used their GPIO pins at all.

Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#36

Pi's refusal to drop a USB-C on Pico due to cost increases is a terrible call IMO. I seriously cannot fathom being someone doing development who wouldn't pay $0.50 extra to purge the last micro USB from their desktop.

For what it's worth there are third-party rp2350 boards with USB-C connectors if that's important to you. Heck, WaveShare has one with two USB-C connectors: https://www.waveshare.com/rp2350-usb-c.htm

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#37
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^^ when I tell people tangential to the field that the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port), they're astonished. It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it

I agree that Raspberry Pi is not a good general purpose computer, but some of these criticisms are starting to feel like a pile-on with partially incorrect information. > the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot. If you're trying to get maximum performance out of it all the time, you w…

> FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.

What's the point of doing so though? If you're doing this, you're obviously using the wrong device. If all you need is to run some python scripts in a Linux environment, you should use a Pi 3 or Pi 0w2.

Agree with your other points.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#38
post #29

The 8GB Pi 5, at $170 [1], is encroaching on Jetson Orin Nano Super's $240 price point [2]. But the Jetson has a faster CPU (newer a78ae cores rather than a76) and, obviously, a whole-ass GPU. [1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/673711/raspberry-pi-5 [2] https://www.microcenter.com/product/691058/nvidia-jetson-ori...

Nvidia's software platform for the whole Jetson series was, at least in my experience, absolutely awful on the Jetson Nano and Orin boards I worked on. Has that improved at all? I did not appreciate that the only option they provided was a full desktop version of ancient Ubuntu... and even flashing the OS image was a bizarre process. Edit: looks like they at least have a better headless option now.

Nowadays upstream Linux with UEFI mostly works, with their out of tree drivers. I’ve managed to make it work in NixOS with the stock kernel. Look at the open embedded L4T project, they have some recipes for building that. No need to use nvidia’s kernel anymore!

Also, supposedly on the second half of 2026 they were going to be moving even more stuff out of their Jetson-specific drivers as they already do for their slightly newer chips (so you could use the standard drivers, and standard CUDA builds). Let’s see how that turns out.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#39

I have bought an rpi at every generation. And I still have yet to find an actual use for them. Everything they do from a compute perspective is just better with a mini pc or old laptop with a mobile spec chip. Everything they do from a programmability perspective is just better with a microcontroller specific to the task. I just don't see the actual market position for these things. They were supposed to be a cheap b…

> I just don't see the actual market position for these things.

Isn't it mainly for learning and hobby-ism?

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#40
post #38
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia's software platform for the whole Jetson series was, at least in my experience, absolutely awful on the Jetson Nano and Orin boards I worked on. Has that improved at all? I did not appreciate that the only option they provided was a full desktop version of ancient Ubuntu... and even flashing the OS image was a bizarre process. Edit: looks like they at least have a better headless option now.

Nowadays upstream Linux with UEFI mostly works, with their out of tree drivers. I’ve managed to make it work in NixOS with the stock kernel. Look at the open embedded L4T project, they have some recipes for building that. No need to use nvidia’s kernel anymore! Also, supposedly on the second half of 2026 they were going to be moving even more stuff out of their Jetson-specific drivers as they already do for their sli…

Yeah, one of my bigger complaints especially on the Nano was the GPU only had really limited model support (iirc, mostly tflite but maybe I'm misremembering) and it sounds like the newer ones are more normal. That and what seems from the docs to be better headless support would be major improvements. Going further to mainline distro support would make them interesting to me again.

I was always disappointed by the Nano as it was a pretty capable device, but it seemed like not many people picked it up as a platform for cool things which I always attributed to the software.

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