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Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

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Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#81

Post by walrus01 »

freerobby wrote: post #77
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…

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 of flash memory write wear leveling. And they went ahead and send that design to production anyways?

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#82

Post by mobilio »

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…

Write lifespan can be improvement if you make some similar as this: /dev/mmcblk0p1 on /var/log.hdd type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro,commit=600) /dev/zram0 on /var/log type ext4 (rw,relatime,discard)

Because zram is compressed ram disk: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/...

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#83

Post by beagle3 »

pta2002 wrote: post #79
beagle3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the elements in your system is either very old or borked.

I have an AppleTV4K, and everything is perfectly synced with at least 3 brands of Bluetooth headphones - an 3-year-old eKids one, a 1-year old TaoTronics one, and a 2-year old nameless one.

In the early PlayStation 2 days, many flatscreen TVs (both Plasma and LCD) had delays that made games like Guitar Hero unplayable, so the games added a latency estimation/calibration setting you could use; My 12 year old Onkyo HDMI receiver has a special "eliminate latency in game mode" setting which disables some processing features and reduces sound latency by 50ms or so.

It's not that there were never problems; But anything made in the last 5 years or so, especially using BT4/BT5, should not have these issues.

Edit: just tried with an 8 year old or so JBL Clip I found lying around, and it does have ~100ms latency (estimated, not measured). But the newer ones don’t have it.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#84

Post by castratikron »

freerobby wrote: post #77
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…

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?

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#85

Post by walrus01 »

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'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 discovered the actual cumulative TB writes that a $50 to $100 SSD will take before ultimate failure. From back in 2015: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

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

With teslas that have a persistent LTE data connection for the car, you also have the option of doing something like 300KB of file upload per day to a remote server.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#86

Post by berryworm »

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 (especially as their English isn't good yet, and many languages don't have German documentation). There are some fancy books, but it turns out there are a lot of details in coding that most books can't cover.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#87

Post by inetknght »

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?

Either you attach dedicated storage for it or you send the logs elsewhere using a network-mounted /var/log or using a syslog daemon on another host.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#88

Post by phkahler »

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…

>> 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?

>> something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.

As nice as M.2 would be, AFAICT it's not supported by the SoC which is what allows these things to be so inexpensive. Go with USB then.

IMHO an AMD APU could be under clocked to not need a fan, and would allow things like M.2 in a keyboard form factor. That might be amazing but would probably cost 2x to 3x the price. Also, at the higher price people would then complain about the keyboard.

BTW I thing SFF designs and keyboard computers should have a couple USB or SD on the top to make it easy to plug in storage devices.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#89

Post by poisonarena »

jaster wrote: post #43
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.

If you're looking for a fun use for your shelved rpi, I can recommand installing a retro-gaming distro such as recalbox ( https://www.recalbox.com/ ) or retropie ( https://retropie.org.uk/ ). I installed recalbox on a rpi3, and it runs nes/snes fine, and even some n64 games. On occasions I brought it along when visiting friends, and plugged it into the TV/projector with a couple of joysticks. It has been a blast! All…

thats always the suggestion, but every computer and laptop can easily emaulate all those things+ more.. I see no reason to use a rasp for that

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#90

Post by VLM »

kllrnohj wrote: post #57
jl2718 wrote: post #48

Is this thing suitable for kids and grandparents? Every other platform seems to abuse them with bloatware.

Not at all. Chrome OS would be a better fit there. Unless you're teaching your kids & grandparents how to sysadmin linux and don't think they want to watch any videos online (browser support for accelerated video decoding remains a giant disaster on linux), then sure? And also that they want a desktop instead of a laptop.

Of course a "ASUS CHROMEBOX 3-N018U" runs over four times the price, so you could just buy three pi and toss them as the flash card fails and still save money.
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