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News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#111

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

hedora wrote: post #68
dirtikiti wrote: post #17

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 think I found a use case, but would love to be proven wrong with some faster / cheaper approach: I've tired of buying S1 compatible sonos speakers on ebay, so I'd like to build a speaker enclosure with a WiFi device that has a high-quality DAC and the ability to use pipewire or similar to do real-time DSP and multi-room audio sync. A RPI + third party hat should work well for this, or so I am told.

I have spent 100$+ on multiple esp32s3 amplifiers instead with multiple software solutions ready to flash and be up and running in no time.

https://sonocotta.com/esp-products/

Now I have a wifi radio running in homeassistant. Running my own (music only) radios with azuracast. Loud enough for high quality 30+ year old 10kg 100/140 Watt speakers. Next step is making a remote for it, cheap ikea one with two buttons or a tap dial with more.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#112

Post by selectodude »

kllrnohj wrote: post #79
michaelt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Powering something off of any old USB port means it would have to fit within the 5V 500mA basic specification, which the Raspberry Pi 3 exceeded long ago. Theoretically, devices like the iPhone have lower power consumption than that and loads of performance features like recording 4k 120fps video. Of course, an iPhone costs much more than a RPi, and has much better economies of scale, so they’re not truly comparabl…

An iPhone will absolutely draw more than 2.5w under load.

Yeah an iPhone 17 Pro can get over 15W if you’re really getting at it.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#113

Post by sq_ »

hedora wrote: post #69
sq_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A physical TPM with their overall high-quality software support would be awesome. I've spent far too much time messing around trying to get TPMs working over SPI or I2C to meet security requirements with 4Bs and 5s over the years.

You do know those are trivially bypassed with a signal processor, right? If physical access is outside your threat model, that's OK, but it makes (for example) the forced Win11 upgrade for DRM^H^H^H boot integrity enforcement seem ridiculous. https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/articles/TPM-sniffing

Yeah, fair enough. "Compliance" is probably the phrasing I should've used, rather than "security".

I've been curious for a while about the overall taxonomy of security, especially for embedded platforms. It seems like the only hope is defense in depth, given the power glitching attacks and the like that you can find demonstrated.

Specific to the Raspberry Pi, I believe I even saw a thread at some point where one of their firmware engineers was making the case that secure boot on the Pi 5 was equivalent to a TPM in almost any reasonable threat model, since, in either case, you were out of luck if an attacker had physical access and was willing to put in enough effort.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#114

Post by brucehoult »

margalabargala wrote: post #75
Aurornis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the burst performance is helpful. Most light workloads are very bursty. When you type a command or click on something you want latency to be low. Having the overhead to get it done quickly at the full clockspeed is good if you are latency sensitive. Throttling has become a bad word. Some feel compelled to avoid it at all costs, doing things like buying big coolers and running synthetic benchmarks to avoid it.…

If you're consistently doing bursty loads that throttle, the thermal cycles are going to do some damage to your chip and it'll fail sooner than if you ran it cooler.

Yeah, in 20 years instead of 100 years.

I'm going to replace it before then.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#115

Post by ssl-3 »

margalabargala wrote: post #75
Aurornis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the burst performance is helpful. Most light workloads are very bursty. When you type a command or click on something you want latency to be low. Having the overhead to get it done quickly at the full clockspeed is good if you are latency sensitive. Throttling has become a bad word. Some feel compelled to avoid it at all costs, doing things like buying big coolers and running synthetic benchmarks to avoid it.…

If you're consistently doing bursty loads that throttle, the thermal cycles are going to do some damage to your chip and it'll fail sooner than if you ran it cooler.

So that means what, exactly?

Do heat cycles mean that the device only lasts half as long as it might if it were kept at some constant ideal temperature? A third as long?

If so, then...so what? The tinkerers using these things aren't broadly concerned about these things. We're all out here running our real-live desktop, laptop, and pocket computers with bursty loads, dynamic clocks, and dynamic heat anyway, and these things are generally doing just fine. We aren't driving space ships with this stuff; it'll be alright.

I insist that there is no merit to holding a lowly Raspberry Pi board to a higher standard than we hold everything else.

Furthermore: If perfection is necessary for some kind of application, then maybe starting with a <$100 hobby SBC isn't the best move. It might be time to look within for a better pathway.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#116

Post by ssl-3 »

myself248 wrote: post #90
michaelt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the esp8266 came along, offering wifi and gpios and an arduino-like programming experience at a price point of literally $1

And the ESP32 is offering CPU power on par with many of the embedded-x86 SOCs that powered some of the early wifi routers...

A $2 Chinese ESP32 dev board is more stout in many ways than the first Pentium machine I had, which sure did feel fast-enough to run the whole world with at that time. :)

In this amazing world full of such inexpensive choices, it seems so bizarre to me to demonize any of them. They're all excellent in some way, and it's OK that there's more than one.

This isn't football, handball, American politics, or Highlander: There can be more than one. It's OK.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#117

Post by wolpoli »

michaelt wrote: post #77
wolpoli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's. Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.

Among the people making things like a DIY NAS, who want fast USB, lots of cores and RAM, small-ish, not-too-bad power consumption, running Linux; and not caring much about GPIOs or passive cooling, it’s in competition with the N150 Among people who want GPIOs and network connectivity, a low price and an open, microcontroller like experience, not caring much about USB speeds and lots of cores and running Linux and suc…

The Pi SBCs are squeezed in between the SFFs and the microcontrollers for many use cases. It's only a good fit if there is a need for the GPIOs/Linux/Display. For anything else, there are better products out there.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#118

Post by ssl-3 »

dangus wrote: post #42
tetris11 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance per Watt still outranks any other (quasi-)mainline linux device

Performance per watt is nice but I’d be more inclined to talk about “problems being solved per dollar.” If you don’t specifically have a project where you need the GPIO pins built in, I struggle to understand the use case proposition of a raspberry pi compared to a typical x86 mini PC or even just grabbing a think client desktop like a ThinkCentre. Almost everything that is unique to a Pi compared to an x86 mini PC s…

Can show us where to find a new ThinkCentre for the price of a new Raspberry Pi 5 kit?

The ones I find on Lenovo's website don't seem to get any cheaper than $649.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#119

Post by Gigachad »

ozim wrote: post #70
Rebelgecko wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point, the raspberry pi was a decent option if you wanted something hobbyist friendly that could toggle GPIOs and connect to the Internet (and later Bluetooth). I suspect Espressif has mostly taken over that market now

Yeah every "hardware hacker" I know has pile of ESP32 at home now instead of pile of raspberry pi's.

The pi, particularly the pi zero is still useful if you need something that can run normal software but not a full mini pc. One example I've seen is using a Pi zero as a "wireless usb" where you can plug it in to a machine that accepts files over usb, and can now drop files on to it over the network.

Maybe you could do this with a ESP32 but it's easy on linux where you can use all the normal tooling and filesystem drivers.

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