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Raspberry Pi 5

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Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#811

I am curious to know how people here use their RPIs today, and how the RPI5 might help. I have had a model 3 for many years, which I enjoy tinkering with from time to time. I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having such small, cheap computer that runs Linux and does a pretty good job of it. That said, all I do is tinker with it. I turn it on, write a bit of code, marvel that the code runs, and turn it off. I'…

I’ve got one of mine showing album art for music I’m playing[1], one with an e-ink display that shows which subways are leaving soon near me, one running Homebridge for a variety of sensors[2], one for WireGuard and Pi-Hole, and one to run Klipper/Mainsail for my 3D printer. I guess these are all tinkering as well but they’ve basically been running 24/7 for a few years now!

[1] https://github.com/aaronhktan/rpi-albumart [2] https://github.com/aaronhktan/vesta

Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#813

TBH the thing I hate most about this category of SBC is the reliance on SD cards. They are both too unreliable to trust and so slow that they often bottleneck the SBC. Buying them is often a crap shoot too, I've purchased cards batches of cards from the supposed reputable manufacturers that were all over the board when benchmarked, and rarely did they hit the claimed speed spec. I would love if there was an alternati…

Did you read the blog post? :) "One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5 feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface. Intended to support fast peripherals, it is exposed on a 16-pin, 0.5mm pitch FPC connector on the left-hand side of the board. From early 2024, we will be offering a pair of mechanical adapter boards which convert between this connector and a subset of the M.2 standard, al…

Did you read my comment? :)

I did read that they were going to support M.2., and I have gotten around my issues with SD cards in the past using SSD-grade USB drives and NVMe adapters. My comment was about how crap SD cards are, and how this class of SBCs (including the PI 5) often use them as their default storage (as in, not needing an adapter or special firmware to boot). My final statement was my wish for a high speed durable storage standard that was better than SD cards without having to spend more money than the SBC itself on storage, although looking today on Amazon it seems that NVMe drives have gotten way cheaper, no idea of those are quality though.

Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#814
post #113

TBH the thing I hate most about this category of SBC is the reliance on SD cards. They are both too unreliable to trust and so slow that they often bottleneck the SBC. Buying them is often a crap shoot too, I've purchased cards batches of cards from the supposed reputable manufacturers that were all over the board when benchmarked, and rarely did they hit the claimed speed spec. I would love if there was an alternati…

I haven't had much trouble with the SD cards. The thing is, writing to them all the time means your chances of corrupting the filesystem is higher (like any filesystem). I would try to make the filesystem read-only as much as possible. There are settings for this.

I am aware of the write endurance problems of sd cards, but I've had numerous cards that are cooked fresh out of the box, even from 'good' manufactures like Samsung. I don't like having to do binning for the manufacturer.

Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#815

I am curious to know how people here use their RPIs today, and how the RPI5 might help. I have had a model 3 for many years, which I enjoy tinkering with from time to time. I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having such small, cheap computer that runs Linux and does a pretty good job of it. That said, all I do is tinker with it. I turn it on, write a bit of code, marvel that the code runs, and turn it off. I'…

Things I've used mine (plural) for at various points in time, in no particular order: Wireguard & ssh entrypoint into my home network. Pi hole. Kodi. Calibre ebook server. Orchestrating turning on/off IP-based lightbulbs or plugs (since I'm too cheap to get a gateway for ZigBee/Threads/$IOT_protocol) - automatically turning on my Christmas lights at sundown daily after querying an API for my local Civil twilight time was good fun. "NAS server" connected to a cheap 5-disk USB JBOD device. Hosting a low-intensity crawler that ran into blanket IP-range black-listing issues when hosted on cloud-providers. Hosting a Gitea/Forgejo server: I no longer star projects on Github - I mirror them locally and keep them synced, storage is really cheap now. Periodical syncing my backups from NAS to cloud. As a digital "tape recorder" for broadcast radio using FM receiver, aux cable, and USB sound card. Twitter Spaces recording for time-shifting conversations I wanted to listen to later; I beat Twitter's "record" feature to the punch! Twitter crawler/archive bot for a niche community.

Wishlist projects: getting alerted when my home loses electric service or internet connectivity, using UPS and LTE modem. "Calendar dashboard" site that displays the household's schedule for the day on a tablet/jailbroken kindle. A lazy-loading reverse-proxy Caddy API server that will keep the connection open while it turns on my workstation in the background if it's off. Archiving tweets using mitmproxy to passively scrape Twitter's API responses while I use the official mobile client.

Basically anything that I wanted to automate and was not demanding on compute would get assigned to a Pi.

Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#816

TBH the thing I hate most about this category of SBC is the reliance on SD cards. They are both too unreliable to trust and so slow that they often bottleneck the SBC. Buying them is often a crap shoot too, I've purchased cards batches of cards from the supposed reputable manufacturers that were all over the board when benchmarked, and rarely did they hit the claimed speed spec. I would love if there was an alternati…

You can netboot a Pi. Every Pi in my house netboots. I have a whole bunch of them. Some play games, some play videos, some play music, and a few other minor things. Because they all netboot, you can change what each one does by renaming a file on the server and then rebooting it. It's great.

Are they using like a RAM disk then or are they mapping a network drive for storage while they're running? I've always been curious about setting up netbooting but beyond a failed experiment a long long time ago I haven't really tried.

Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the intel n100 is absolutely fantastic. but even at bargain basement price its at least 2-4x the price: https://www.amazon.co.uk/TRIGKEY-Mini-PC-Desktop-Computer/dp... I have the above, it's max powerdraw is From what I've seen the pi5 is 1/3rd faster than the intel j5005. (in pybench at least.) but comparing to a real intel NUC, of course its going to be faster, the NUC costs an entire order of magnitude more.

The SD is the worst for reliability, but if it's like rpi4, you can put UEFI on the SPI flash and come up on non-SD boot devices without SD now. But that's all kind of crazy when cheaper, faster SBCs commonly simply boot to reliable, on-board, eMMC.

eMMC isn't that reliable. It's basically an SD card on a chip.

Difference is they're more optimised for random writes than large files like most SD cards, but you can get such SD cards too ("High Endurance" models)

Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#818

I am curious to know how people here use their RPIs today, and how the RPI5 might help. I have had a model 3 for many years, which I enjoy tinkering with from time to time. I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having such small, cheap computer that runs Linux and does a pretty good job of it. That said, all I do is tinker with it. I turn it on, write a bit of code, marvel that the code runs, and turn it off. I'…

I have 4 pi4's running HiFiBerryOS. They connect to my Roon VM. I can group them together & they will play the same song in sync.

I have a pi4 running OSMC with the Plex addon attached to my television.

I've got about a half dozen Pi 0 W's with addon sensors that inform my Home Assistant of the temp, humidity, PM2.5 level, and CO2 levels in each room.

I just ordered a CM4 to run the PiKVM board for my homelab server.

I also plan to monitor and water my plants using Pi 0 W's.

I just ordered a Pi4 for running BirdNet, to identify birds in my area.

I would also like to work with ChatGPT to identify people and/or birds around my house.

Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#819

I am curious to know how people here use their RPIs today, and how the RPI5 might help. I have had a model 3 for many years, which I enjoy tinkering with from time to time. I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having such small, cheap computer that runs Linux and does a pretty good job of it. That said, all I do is tinker with it. I turn it on, write a bit of code, marvel that the code runs, and turn it off. I'…

I think the Pi 5 would be well positioned to be a free, OSS media box. Android TV and Google TV are very popular today, along with Roku, Apple TV, etc.

I installed PiHole and noticed that every single click of my Roku remote gets sent to Roku’s servers. PiHole blocks this of course, but there was nothing I could do to disable this telemetry on the Roku device itself.

Google TV is slightly better - there’s options to adjust targeted ads, and an “app only” mode, but there’s still usage and other data sent to Google. Also you can’t use it at all if you don’t sign in with a Google account.

I haven’t used other platforms.

But I would like to see an easy to use, easy to configure, OSS streaming box. Now that this can do 4k60 and HDR, it might just work for things like Netflix, Plex, and other services.

Right now the best products on the market for high-bitrate streaming are Apple TV and Nvidia Shield Pro. I wonder if the RPi 5 can compete with that?

Re: Raspberry Pi 5

#820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get some rather large USB sticks these days. Amazon is awash with 928Gb units for about £10 which are probably not the best. A 256GB or 512GB from a known brand is around £30-50. There are several USB ports on a Pi and you can always boot off a SD card. Finally, if a network is available then network boot and use NFS or whatever. The RTC is a cool addition and long overdue. At work I have three Pi 3s with GPS…

> Amazon is awash with 928Gb units for about £10 Those are almost certainly 8 to 32GB drives that are modified to report a higher capacity. They are scams that hope your return window expires before you try to load them up with a lot of data. Nobody can profitably manufacture flash drives for less than the wholesale price of the flash chips.

There's no almost about it. They are all scams 100%. The most popular are SD cards with a USB adapter fitted in various housings. The internal adapter or SD cards are modified to do various things like report much larger sizes, allow phantom writes, or even install malware. They can also potentially burn your house down.

Search "SD card caught on fire"

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