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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

#181

Post by wao0uuno »

hedora wrote: post #76
wao0uuno wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Official power supply is sold separately. Pis work fine with unofficial USB-PD power supplies but will limit maximum current for USB devices. I have two Pi 5's and one 4 and they all are perfectly stable when powered with an old Lenovo laptop charger.

It's still a huge pain point. I keep a magic "correctly sized, but provides clean power" USB charger with my Pi in a drawer, because I know that, if I lose that charger, I'm buying a replacement. It's unclear to me why they're so borderline. Maybe USB-C would help?

I don't know much about older models but on 4 and 5 they chose to use a weird power standard to reduce cost. Just buy the official charger. They're not expensive.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#182

Post by moffkalast »

ChrisRR wrote: post #177
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #2

> " ...: It sounds like the key feature will be 'more': a faster CPU and faster IO, rather than new features. " Raspberry Pi Holdings is a embedded systems manufacturer for pity's sake; we don't need more from them, we need less. [EDIT] A faster Raspberry Pi 6 is encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150 and its successors and mainstream Linux distributions and that is a battle they would lose in terms of price…

We need a 5 lite. The specs of the 5 without the massive power draw and heat generation

At least now they literally cannot pull more power over USB 5V, because they maxed out the spec. It's even slightly beyond it.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#183

Post by asddubs »

peteforde wrote: post #11

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.

You can at least buy USB-C boards from other vendors since they sell the rp2040/rp2350 separately. If you want wifi it gets a little more complicated unfortunately.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#184

Post by asddubs »

peteforde wrote: post #27
bee_rider wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile for them to produce both. Well, it will be hard to compare because the design cost doesn’t show up in the BOM, haha. But it seems like it would be useful nowadays, since some laptop have mostly USB-C connectors, and USB-C to USB-C is pretty common. I’ve never seen a C to Micro. Do they even exist?

I have an unfair bias because I design PCBs as a significant part of my job, and switching out to USB on this board appears to be a non-issue. I have a Pico in front of me, and there's plenty of room there for a USB-C footprint and the two 5.1k resistors. Given that, I cannot reasonably agree that the "design" stage is significant. In other words, it's a change that I would make to my own board in 2-5 minutes because…

One caveat is that the pico isn't so old that micro usb wasn't a weird choice even when it came out

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#185

Post by dangus »

ssl-3 wrote: post #118
dangus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m talking about used on eBay, obviously.

Or do a search for “mini PC” on aliexpress.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#186

Post by Narishma »

modeless wrote: post #35

I recently found out about the Radxa Dragon Q6A. A Qualcomm chip with faster CPUs, a good GPU, a DSP and AI accelerator, and a hardware video encoder seems very compelling. It even supports Windows if you want that for some reason.

And poor software support.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#187

Post by JimmyBiscuit »

wlesieutre wrote: post #138
ianburrell wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raspberry Pi uses USB-C and USB-C is more generous with power. Almost everything except computers provides 15W. With USB-C, devices request want they and there is no reason has to work with minimum possible. The problem with the Pi5 is that they use weird profile, 5A/5V, that requires special charger. Most 5V chargers are 100W and beefy. If they hadn't cheaped out on power circuits, they could have used normal 30W ch…

That’s crazy, 5A/5V is not and has never been in range of the USB power delivery spec. It only goes to 5 amps at 20V for the 100W output, or higher voltages in the newer Extended Power Range topping out at 5A/48V. 5A/5V what are they smoking?

Probably the same stuff they smoked when they cheaped out on a resistor on the raspberry pi 4 and made it so chargers thought it was an audio device.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#188

Post by vablings »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #2

> " ...: It sounds like the key feature will be 'more': a faster CPU and faster IO, rather than new features. " Raspberry Pi Holdings is a embedded systems manufacturer for pity's sake; we don't need more from them, we need less. [EDIT] A faster Raspberry Pi 6 is encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150 and its successors and mainstream Linux distributions and that is a battle they would lose in terms of price…

A refresh for a Pi Zero with real sleep. lower power consumption and moving away from GPIO would be awesome. Stuff like a dedicated i2c connector, PoE support and display over USB-C.

M5Stack and other esp32 based ecosystems rule the world for MCU so the Zero just need to be linux SOC with all the fancy bells and whistles with good driver support

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#189

Post by flyinghamster »

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.

I have yet to even get started with ESP32, mainly because software-defined radio is my main use case. Once you start getting into absurdly high sampling rates, you start to need a lot of horsepower, and that's where the more powerful SBCs shine.

As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#190

Post by pyreko »

swiftcoder wrote: post #49
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.

> Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's. They may not have intended to be in direct competition, but in the current crisis conditions they are priced about the same as equivalent RAM/storage N150s, have even worse supply issues than the N150s, and have worse performance/watt than the N150s. Its mighty hard to recommend them for new projects at the moment (nor any of the Pi clones, which are also rocket…

I think they were kinda competing for some people even before then, there was a good amount of time where people looked at Pis as a decent small, cheap, and low-power computer to throw server stuff at. Back then there wasn't much competition but mini PCs have entirely trounced them for this now outside of certain niche cases.
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