Does anyone know if there's any projects underway to make a mechanical version of this? I would pay a lot of money, and I know several internet communities that would crowdfund DIY or prebuilt versions within instants.
Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
71–80 of 151 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#72> I own several Raspberry Pi computers (1, 2 and 3)... All of them sit in a box, unused. I’ve played with them, then put them away. Part of that is because the performance hasn’t been that great, but the form factor is a major factor. It feels like the Raspberry Pi 400 has the power I need (for casual projects), and comes in a form factor that I can happily leave plugged in on my desk. Amazing how the addition of a k…
I wonder if an after-market website for selling or giving away your old RPis makes sense. I run a k3s on RPi3, but I have a few RPi2 spares which can be used for small side projects.
Craigslist? EBay?
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#73One 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 drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that?
I would say that a huge percentage of failures I have seen of raspberry pis, when people attempt to turn them into low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months.
something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#74Is this thing suitable for kids and grandparents? Every other platform seems to abuse them with bloatware.
Yes, especially if they are into tinkering.
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#75Is this thing suitable for kids and grandparents? Every other platform seems to abuse them with bloatware.
It is, it’s extremely stable in use. There’s no bloatware. You have to set it up, but after it’s stable.
It does word processing, browsing, printing etc, extremely well. Streaming (Netflix etc) is indeed troublesome, at least directly.
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#76Does anyone know if there's any projects underway to make a mechanical version of this? I would pay a lot of money, and I know several internet communities that would crowdfund DIY or prebuilt versions within instants.
Do you mean a mechanical keyboard?
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#77One 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…
Yep, same problem with eMMC on Tesla's Tegra board. Solution: mount /var/log and other such partitions as ramdisks :)
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
There aren't any free PCIe lanes on the SoC, so even if they added a bridge chip for a SATA / M.2 SSD it would have to be connected over USB. Besides, the device is $70. A $10 32GB eMMC chip would be a far more reasonable ask at this price point if greater reliability is desired.
that's interesting. curios: are these two comparable in terms of speeds: eMMC and NVME/M2SSD ? or am I confusing among oranges and apples?
eMMC tops out at 80-100 mb/s, NVME is an order of magnitude faster usually.
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bluetooth introduces (even more...) latency, which isn't always acceptable.
This is not a gamer machine at $70. Yes, Bluetooth introduces a tiny bit of audio latency, which is perfectly acceptable for 98% of all use, and 99.9% of RasPI 400 uses. For the rest of the cases, use one of the other RasPI400 options, a RasPi 4 or a Razer laptop.
In my experience, bluetooth audio latency has made watching videos completely impossible, extremely annoying to be hearing something and not seeing the lips of the person moving the right way.
Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
#80"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?
The on-board sound quality on the raspberry pi line has traditionally been quite poor so you probably want a dedicated sound dongle anyway especially if you are using headphones. This is an article about the model b+. It's an older version than the 4 but explains the problem just as well since the 4 still uses PWM instead of a DAC. http://www.crazy-audio.com/2014/07/sound-quality-of-the-rasp...
The hardware hasn't changed much but the software has tremendously and stuff from 2014 isn't relevant. Do you think the current implementation (sometimes known as audio_pwm_mode=2 but it is the default firmware these days) is still poor? I've found it's fine for everyday use and listening to music. I think a line-out would have been fine for people to use.