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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

#61

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

sq_ wrote: post #22
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 at this point the brand reputation and software quality are a big selling point. If you're trying to build a couple of units of some embedded thing where you need to toggle some GPIOs or serial devices in response to requests over the network, but don't have the expertise or resources to do it with a microcontroller, a Pi is a great option - you know you'll have software support, and you know that the vendor…

Development speed is also one of the forgotten axes. I mentioned upthread a system I built that was done in less than a day. There's no microcontroller solution I know of that would have let me deliver it that fast.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#62

Post by wao0uuno »

exe34 wrote: post #21

The only way I'll buy another raspberry pi is if they come with a power supply that's guaranteed to work with them. I got tired of the random reboots in the night and replaced my media center/NAS with an old Nuc.

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.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#63

Post by myself248 »

wrxd wrote: post #32
giobox wrote: 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

This just clarified something for me. I've always been annoyed when I see a Pi with nothing connected to its GPIO header; why not just use a cheap thin client? Or an old laptop, for that matter? But that's missing the point. Here's the point:

Pre-Beagleboard-and-Pi, if you wanted an programmable thing to work with GPIO, you used an Arduino or a BASIC Stamp, or just a plain old PIC. But they wouldn't run a real OS.

Pre-Beagleboard-and-Pi, if you wanted an embedded Linux box, you used a WRT54G or a Soekris or an old laptop. But getting GPIO out of them was a PITA. (And often involved lashing an Arduino to the side.)

The Beagleboard (released in 2008), could finally do both. It had gobs of I/O and first-class support for it under Linux. It was pretty affordable. Then the Raspberry Pi came out in 2012, with a similar amount of GPIO, but demolished the price point to where it made sense to use it in place of a microcontroller.

That's really the magic of the Pi. You can keep one cheap gizmo around, and use it to solve (a large fraction of) two classes of problems. It doesn't fully replace everything a PIC or a PC can do, but it replaces an awful, awful lot of them.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#64

Post by Rochus »

atoav wrote: post #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…

Same here. The 2b, 3b and Zero 2 have the best cost-benefit ratio. I recently migrated the Oberon System 3 to those three boards and particulary the Zero is a great host for this bare-bone system: https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberonsystem3native/. I hope the Raspi company postpones the end of life date of the 3b and Zero 2.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#65

Post by vardump »

wmf wrote: post #52
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…

Ideally each RPi generation should keep the same price (or lower now that it's gotten so high) but with better performance. If they can't do that they just shouldn't create a new generation.

Sure (inflation adjusted), but I see no harm if they also provide higher specced SBCs.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#66

Post by hedora »

tredre3 wrote: post #59
hedora wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some serious astroturfing going on with the N100/N150, or am I just jaded? I have a bunch of old intel atom boards laying around. The Intel Compute Stick (TM) burnt out its flash root drive in a few months. The C2000 board I had burnt out the clock pin to drive the bios. I have a Clover Trail with a PowerVR GPU (I thought I was getting an intel GPU because it was branded Intel Graphics or similar, but nope!)…

> I looked into using an N150 for a NAS [...] Lo-and-behold, they all have crazy PCIe / memory subsystem data corruption issues. Source? I've never had a single problem with PCIE on N100/N150/N200. I have had a ton of issues with drive corruption on the pi, both via USB3 and PCIE.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.4-Lands-PCID-INVLPG

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=48343.0

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#67

Post by michaelt »

Aurornis wrote: post #28
Neywiny wrote: 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…

> 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 comparable.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#68

Post by hedora »

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.

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#69

Post by hedora »

sq_ wrote: post #20
bradfa wrote: post #13

Would love to see actual security focused hardware/software features, like full OP-TEE, fTPM (or a more ideally a real physical TPM), and similar. For example, so that the OTP isn't the only way to store a disk encryption unlock key. The existing secure boot mechanisms aren't bad, but allowing for more than one public key hash in OTP would be nice, too. These kinds of things are expected to be on modern embedded SOCs…

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

Re: News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

#70

Post by ozim »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #56
giobox wrote: 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…

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.
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