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Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

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Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#111

Post by scns »

JohnBerea wrote: post #106
jdietrich wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of my main concerns about the use of a raspberry pi as a desktop PC is microSD card write lifespan. If you're so inclined, you can buy microSD cards with better endurance ratings than typical consumer SSDs. https://www.westerndigital.com/products/embedded-removable-f...

I still have issues with the high endurance cards. Bought two identical high endurance 128GB's for Pi4's. After 1 day of use each (with minimal writes beyond installing RPi OS), GParted could resize one partition, but the other failed due errors that couldn't be repaired with fsck.

Did you use another filesystem than what they came with? Possibly you overwrote the section where the sdcard stores some important data. Check out this page: https://superuser.com/questions/381208/how-can-i-format-an-s...

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#112

Post by LeoPanthera »

walrus01 wrote: post #73

One of my main concerns about the use of a raspberry pi as a desktop PC is microSD card write lifespan. microsd cards were not meant to be used as the boot disk for a live operating system. The amount of times you can write over one sector on them, and the write wear leveling algorithms, are much worse than even a $45 consumer grade SATA3 interface SSD. Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard…

If you have a home NAS, you can netboot the raspberry pi. I have five or six pis around my house doing different things, and they all netboot.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#113

Post by FandangoRanger »

HeyHoJoe wrote: post #25

> I own several Raspberry Pi computers (1, 2 and 3). Most of them are the Model B format, but I have couple of Zeros too. All of them sit in a box, unused. Same for me and most people I know who have bought an rpi. Buy it because it seems like a cool toy and then stick it in a box and never use it for anything.

I notice this comment repeated on every web site, Reddit, Slashdot, even 4chan. It’s too similar and comprehensive to be anything but astroturf.

My suspicion is Intel’s still got sour grapes about burning billions on Edison, and are extra angry that people seem to be doing just great without x86.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#114

Post by freerobby »

castratikron wrote: post #84
freerobby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, same problem with eMMC on Tesla's Tegra board. Solution: mount /var/log and other such partitions as ramdisks :)

Where do you save the log on a reboot or power loss?

I have a reverse-ssh tunnel + script to upload the logs to my home server on demand. If the MCU crashes or reboots unexpectedly, I would lose those logs.

Ironically, my system for downloading the logs writes them to an SD card on a raspberry pi.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#115

Post by freerobby »

walrus01 wrote: post #81
freerobby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, same problem with eMMC on Tesla's Tegra board. Solution: mount /var/log and other such partitions as ramdisks :)

That's really scary and a poor choice that something which is probably buried deep in the car, and costs thousands of dollars to remove and replace, is a soldered onboard flash drive which will fail from constant use. I'd be surprised if tesla didn't have embedded systems engineering responsible for this thing, and indeed even flash memory experts on staff, who are intimately familiar with all of the design problems…

I believe they avoid socketed chips due to vibration issues. Definitely should have upped the physical capacity to distribute the writes, though.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#116

Post by beervirus »

jdietrich wrote: post #97
tyingq wrote: post #2

"The 400 doesn’t have an audio-out." That does seem like a miss for an otherwise decent platform. HDMI out support is fine, but since this setup is quite portable, exposing a headphone jack seems obvious. I suppose bluetooth is the expectation now?

I just don't think a headphone jack justifies the BOM cost, given that most HDMI displays have a headphone output and Bluetooth headphones and speakers are commonplace.

What does it add, 15 cents?

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#117

Post by bhauer »

walrus01 wrote: post #73

One of my main concerns about the use of a raspberry pi as a desktop PC is microSD card write lifespan. microsd cards were not meant to be used as the boot disk for a live operating system. The amount of times you can write over one sector on them, and the write wear leveling algorithms, are much worse than even a $45 consumer grade SATA3 interface SSD. Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard…

I use Samsung Pro Endurance microSD cards [1] in most of my Raspberry Pi 4s. My RPi devices don't see the wear and tear of my main computers, so I can't speak with authority on the matter of durability. But anecdotally, I have had none of the microSDs fail or show any evidence of degradation.

Theoretically the Pro Endurance cards are slower than other Samsung SD cards. But in my usage, I've not noticed a difference in I/O versus the one Raspberry Pi 4 that I've got with a "regular" microSD card.

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

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#118

Post by berryworm »

cbozeman wrote: post #100
berryworm wrote: post #86

I can't find the PDF of the starter book, although they say in the announcement it should be available. (Edit: found it https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/beginners-guide-4th-ed ) I learned programming from the handbook of my ZX Spectrum. If the Pi would come with a similar book it would be fantastic. Maybe there are other books that fill that niche for the Pi? In general I find it very hard to get my kids coding (e…

I'm about to take up the journey of learning a programming language. What books would you recommend? What are the names of these "fancy books" you mention? And lastly, do you think there are websites that teach programming languages better than books, such as DataCamp, CodeCademy, SoloLearn, etc.? What would be your recommendations?

I bought this book for my son (elementary school), but it is in German: "Programmieren mit Python® - supereasy".

I would have preferred JavaScript, but had not immediately found a kid friendly book I liked (in German).

As for recommendations, the Pi Getting Started Book does have chapters about Python and Scratch, maybe it is a good start (see free download link).

I still like good books to learn a programming language. Also, good online documentation in a language is important imo. I still like the original Java tutorial from Sun/Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/

I know a teenager who has taught himself Java development from YouTube videos, which YouTube suggested to him.

I think it is important to have a project and be dedicated to solve it. What is it you want to do?

To give an example of an early issue we encountered: I wanted to write a simple program with my son, that asks for your date of birth and computes the number of days since your birth. But dates were not a subject of our python games programming book, so we had to read the online API documentation to figure out how to parse dates and compute time differences. Not too hard, but I think it requires dedication.

In a similar way, I think books or tutorials can never cover all sorts of issues one might encounter, so a lot of patience and dedication is needed to eventually master the coding.

For kids, I liked Micro:Bit, and if you are German, I would recommend the "Jugendwettbewerb Informatik" and accompanying tutorials.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#119

Post by a1369209993 »

walrus01 wrote: post #85
castratikron wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you save the log on a reboot or power loss?

I'm absolutely not an expert on this, but you ideally provide a sufficiently large amount of storage area, with a flash memory controller, that over the expected (20 year plus hopefully!) lifespan of the product, the amount of periodic daily writes can be evenly distributed, and will not exceed the individual cell write lifespan. Some people who have intentionally done torture test writes on consumer grade SSDs have…

> If you were to write 2GB per day in an industrial/embedded application nonstop for 20 years, that is considerably less data than 700TB.

Specifically:

  $ units
  You have: 2GiB/day * 20yr
  You want: TiB
  * 14.267273
  You have: 2GiB/day * 20yr
  You want: 700TiB
  / 49.063334
14TB total, or about one fiftieth of your quota.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#120

Post by vaccinator »

tyingq wrote: post #14
vaccinator wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A portable computer like this is probably more likely to be plugged in a TV, like at hotels.

Not everyone likes their hotel porn going through the speakers :)

Thats why they invented the mute button :)
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