Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions • Hacker News Board

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#91

Post by justin66 » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

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?

Judging by how often people talk about the feature online (or how often they enquired about the delay in implementating it on pi 4 - it's been possible with the 3 forever), a lot.

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

This is a not entirely uncommon but very badly thought out feature suggestion for the pi that comes from technical people who aren't the target audience and don't understand the target audience for the pi. It'd be an okay feature on the Pi compute module.

First things first, though: if you're really worried about storage reliability on these things (or anything), please stop prefacing your hardware suggestions with "cheap."

> low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months.

If you're trying to get this much value out of the thing, using either a legitimate, brand name USB ssd (not something cobbled together in a cheap enclosure), an industrial SD card built for embedded applications, or network booting are all good options.

Consumer grade sd cards are... cheap. It's not such a problem for a lot of the Pi's applications. I'm happy to use cheap sd cards to boot Pi 3s that serve as music players while using a Samsung T5 on the Pi that serves the music, for example (and on a development system).

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#92

Post by rainworld » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

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…

Industrial-grade SD cards seem to be the way to go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776344

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#93

Post by meekrohprocess » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #81

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 :)

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…

It is quite embarrassing for them; Flash write endurance is something that most new graduates are aware of.

There's an NHTSA investigation into the incident, but on the bright side, Tesla did remediate it in newer models...by using chips with twice as much eMMC memory to push the failures farther out.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#94

Post by shams93 » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

While the pi gets better and better this is still meant for the classroom rather than the enterprise user. Apple moving to arm will help with docker image availability however you’d need faster clock speeds and a lot more ram to be use for local development.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#95

Post by kllrnohj » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #90

kllrnohj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no shortage of chromebooks in the $250-300 range which then also include a display, narrowing the price difference drastically.

Of course there's also used options, which is also a good option for ipads and such that would still be a much better option than this for a non-techy user.

The Rpi 400 looks fun, but it's a tech toy for hobbiest electronics usage or general hackery. Not a generally good computing appliance for the masses.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#96

Post by jdietrich » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

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…

>One of my main concerns about the use of a raspberry pi as a desktop PC is microSD card write lifespan.

If you're so inclined, you can buy microSD cards with better endurance ratings than typical consumer SSDs.

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/embedded-removable-f...

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#97

Post by jdietrich » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #2

"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?

I just don't think a headphone jack justifies the BOM cost, given that most HDMI displays have a headphone output and Bluetooth headphones and speakers are commonplace.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#98

Post by heavyset_go » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #81

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 :)

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…

Compared to other luxury cars, Tesla's cars have a lot of issues and design problems you wouldn't normally see. I'm not surprised that those problems extend into the internals of their cars, as well.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#99

Post by Adverblessly » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

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.

IIRC both VLC Player and mpv allow you to set a keyboard shortcut for increasing/decreasing audio-video delay and are capable of streaming directly from YouTube (and I believe any website supported by youtube-dl).

I use mpv and whenever I get audio latency from my headphones* I just adjust in the player.

* - It seems like there's some adaptive algorithm where they start off at 0ms latency but if they experience one hiccup they increase to 250ms-300ms and then another hiccup causes them to jump to 500ms. This is also why a keyboard shortcut that let's you adjust the exact a-v delay value is useful beyond just setting the value once.

Re: Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

#100

Post by cbozeman » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

berryworm wrote: post #86

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 (e…

I'm about to take up the journey of learning a programming language.

What books would you recommend? What are the names of these "fancy books" you mention? And lastly, do you think there are websites that teach programming languages better than books, such as DataCamp, CodeCademy, SoloLearn, etc.?

What would be your recommendations?