Thats what it appears to be. Pi-Top (the brand) has always been geared towards maker-centric use cases. The previous Pi-Top models allowed you to incorporate plug-n-play modules into the laptop itself. Perhaps they thought the built-in peripherals limiting for those who want to use the Pi-Top for a headless project. They showcase drones, bots and similar use cases on the announcement page.
However, it seems you can connect it to a laptop-like device based on one of the product images. I wonder if they're building a laptop accessory that's driven by the main unit?
You can't, the port types and arrangement have changed substantially between the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4. For example, the Pi-Top 3 has holes for exposing the Pi 3's Ethernet port and two of the USB ports but the Pi 4 changed the position of the Ethernet and USB ports.
Only speculation until official announcement. However, it is worth noting that the Pi-Top 4 does not include built-in peripherals. That may affect the price.
I have one of the older Pi-Tops. Everything about it except the price is cheap. The keyboard was just awful, the trackpad was worse, the battery management totally sucked, and the screen was annoyingly low resolution. Very disappointing.
The new one looks considerably different than the model I have, so maybe they've fixed the issues, but I'm not inclined to buy another.
> The keyboard was just awful, the trackpad was worse, the battery management totally sucked, and the screen was annoyingly low resolution.
Perhaps thats why they did not include peripherals this time around. One of the big selling points of the Pi 4 is the 4K output. Providing anything less than a 4K screen would probably lock users into a disappointing product.
The majority of people are still using 1080p screens these days. My laptop has a 1440p screen but the other monitors I use at work are 1080p and work fine. I don't think anyone will be disappointed by a 1080p screen.
> The majority of people are still using 1080p screens these days.
Right, but for how long? It would be much easier to upgrade a separate monitor down the road. Otherwise, the Pi-Top team would need to make duplicate products: one laptop that supported a 1080p screen and another laptop that supported a 4K screen.
Very misleading, it states that "pi-top [4]" comes with all these great features like gigabit Ethernet and 2 usb 3's etc etc and that's just the raspberry pi 4. You're signing up and potentially paying for a really expensive case that includes q battery pack when there is a plethora of great cheap ones out already thanks to the great support from the pi community
What is misleading about it? The Pi specs are clearly labeled "POWERED BY PI". They go on to say "At the heart of pi‑top [4] is the brand new Raspberry Pi 4".
They say the purchase itself includes the base plate, which houses all the extra sensors and ports. Judging from the pictures, it has a lot of ports. That is extra value added.
I think part of it is just the marketing copy for this site is just, well, bad:
> pi‑top [4] comes with the following: gigabit ethernet meaning faster network storage and access to servers, dual HDMI for two 4k screen displays, 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM meaning more applications can run, two USB 3 ports and one USB 2 port for connecting devices and peripherals.
Nothing is listed that isn't part of the Pi 4 itself, while the picture clearly shows a bunch of other ports (what are they?). Later it mentions a "foundation plate" but with no details.
Also, some of the built-in ports are not mentioned:
* one of the USB 2 ports (guessing the case uses it for something?)
* 2-lane MIPI DSI display port
* 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port
* 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port
There's also a project page [1] that shows a camera added, which certainly looks like it uses the on-board camera port, but doesn't make it clear how that works or if the camera is included or not.
Seems like the case includes a display, buttons, what looks like a speaker, a kit of sensors and actuators, and a breakout board to plug them into. Plus, I'm sure all of the software on the SD card is already setup to talk to those parts easily. If you are leading a class for kids on programming embedded hardware, you don't really want to waste time on how to setup a raspberry pi. The hardware is all ready out of the box.
Love the model choices and I hope people find inspiration from them
I observe that the main reason people this kind of inspiration contrived is because their experience with people that look similar are with people that pride themselves in not understanding technology.
It looks nice enough, but like many of these Pi kits (including previous ones from this company) it will likely be somewhat expensive for what is being offered. I've yet to see any of these kits that I thought provided value over just buying a Pi plus separate components online for a reasonably motivated private individual. I think it's just likely really hard to get a reasonable margin on a product like this and keep the retail pricing sane.
I can for sure see environments that this might be attractive, such as education etc, but if you are a vaguely capable software engineer you are almost always far better off just buying a raw Pi and the electrical components you would like separately. There is so much information out there that even a novice can quickly educate themselves on what they might need for a given project.
I'm always extremely disappointed by the marketing of extremely expensive engineering kits and robots towards education. Most of the practical learning to be had is in figuring out how to make the thing work.
The kits become little more than elaborate toys with a few extra steps added to make the student feel like they did something. However, all they did was follow instructions. For at least 90% of what engineers do on a regular basis, following carefully tested instructions is not one of them.
There is a significant issue of retention for students. You typically want a "training-wheels" sort of experience to capture the student's imagination early on. Will it be the last tech they ever but? Obviously not. But having options other than "build stuff from scratch" is super important to growing interest in any particular industry.
Written by a guy who experienced a hell of a lot of criticism 20 years ago for writing games in JavaScript and now is the lead VR product engineer for a company.
"what we were seeing was the "hacker phenomenon," that, for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural." [0]
What you're describing is something that comes naturally to you and almost every person on this website. Kids who think that way will likely end up in engineering of some sort regardless.
The rest need this sort of guided approach to even show them that they could even possibly do this sort of thing and it helps move that percentage up.
Although, that being said I don't really think much to the Pi-Top 4 at all. You'd definitely have a more valuable empowering experience holding an actual board and plugging wires directly into it, the end result would be the same and I feel they smoothed out the wrong part of the experience.
I'm more than a vaguely capable software engineer, which is probably why this is still attractive. I have little patience for DevOps- and SysAdmin-type tasks. I think "reasonably motivated" part is the value-add here. If I'm just a hobbyist, and my inclination is towards having a grass-roots experience, then yes, I'll source the parts. But if I'm just trying to get something done (especially if I don't have a 3D printer), then I often just want to get things in a prefab package.
While I can see why someone might think this, from your comment I suspect you have never tried using a Pi? The value in these kits is not really in avoiding devops or sysadmin tasks, the default Raspian Linux distribution intended for the Pi is largely as ready out of the box for development work as any of these kits are. Most of them just ship Raspian anyway!
I have the original Pi and used it for a few basic things. I'm curious to try out the new Pi 4, because I found the original Pi to be too overpowered for what I would normally use an MCU for, but too underpowered for what I'd use a PC for.
I'm confused why this is actually relevant to the Pi-Top, which has always had a strong educational focus.
For someone who is in their teens and is eager to gain practical experience without dozens of hours of scrubbing YouTube and practicing programming basics, these kids are a solid idea. Further, I think the notion of pushing hard to differentiate itself from transitional machine form factors and work on a rugged"standard compute unit" is a very interesting experiment.
I'm not sure it's for me. But I've built a little Pi case with a charge controllers, a battery, and a screen just like this and I liked the result. This is certainly nicer than what I cobbled together and the idea of making a standard compute form factor for projects is really good.
> I'm confused why this is actually relevant to the Pi-Top, which has always had a strong educational focus.
> For someone who is in their teens and is eager to gain practical experience without dozens of hours of scrubbing YouTube and practicing programming basics, these kids are a solid idea. Further, I think the notion of pushing hard to differentiate itself from transitional machine form factors and work on a rugged"standard compute unit" is a very interesting experiment.
> I'm not sure it's for me. But I've built a little Pi case with a charge controllers, a battery, and a screen just like this and I liked the result. This is certainly nicer than what I cobbled together and the idea of making a standard compute form factor for projects is really good.
I never found any. I read "What's in the box" and was trying to parse it:
> Every pi‑top [4] comes with 12 pi-top component modules comprising programmable sensors, buttons and LEDs to bring your inventions to life.
Okay, so pi-top [4] is the main thing in the box. Thus there are 12 pi-top component modules, so I guess it's a variety pack of sensors and buttons? Well, how many of each, and what are they?
> You connect these to your pi‑top [4] using a Foundation Plate that fits snuggly underneath it.
We further learn the pi-top [4] is a thing, and this plate fits it.
Obviously, I can infer that it's the case with the CPU, but this product is trying to introduce people to programming.
It's amazing that a company can put up a product page that never plainly explains what you're buying. And this is shockingly common.
The raspberry pi occupies a really sad place for me. I know so, so many people who were very well intentioned, and bought a raspberry pi for one of their friends or family members. They've heard of "making", and the good associations that it has, and they see things about the raspberry pi, so they go on amazon and buy some pi-kit thing.
SO many of these things end up sitting in boxes or on shelves. The raspberry pi is pretty cool for a very small niche of things, but really the main thing making it interesting is that it's a cheap desktop computer.
If you already have a computer in your house, then you've already got a much, much more powerful version of a raspberry pi.
If you have a friend or family member who is interested in an introduction to software and hardware engineering, or electronics, then they'll be MUCH MUCH better off with one of these: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Shield-Bot-p-1380.html
and an arduino uno.
Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.
> Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.
How does buying one with good intentions that goes unused hurt any other effort? I don't think I'd have even heard of any other devices if it weren't for the attention that the Pi gets.
Because kids get them, don't do anything useful or fun with them, and conclude that engineering is not for them. They also eat up often-tight discretionary budgets for educational tools.
> please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things
Not just a naked Pi (and even if that's the goal it's typically not done with just the pi, you need some amount of stuff around it too). E.g. the previous version of the Pi-Top is $319 (Pi included)
For example, if I want to create something to monitor and auto water my garden. I don't want to have a laptop sitting outside 24/7 or a line inside and require my desktop PC on 24/7.
So youre running an entire Linux environment to turn a relay/solenoid on and off?
Now imagine you’re a kid who had the idea to water your garden with a computer. On an arduino, you’d write about 20 lines of code.
On a PI...I mean, how do you even get a computer program to run at boot? What’s a computer program? Okay I have a .img file now what? Python? But some people say I should use $somethingelse. Okay I need another monitor to connect to it? Open up my router and find a DHCP entry so I can SSH into it? What do ANY of those words mean?
“Oh well I’ll get to it someday.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of raspberry pis in many different projects, and in fact I’d make a strong wager that I have deployed more raspi projects than most people who consider themselves huge raspi fans. For SOME things there isn’t a substitute. For most things they’re extremely discouraging.
The nice thing about a Pi is you’re not worried about flashing it and losing all your data and replacing the microSD or even frying the whole thing. It’s small and cheap. That’s the main draw. Not many people have a spare desktop they’re comfortable playing around with—my parents would have definitely been happier if I had been messing up a Raspberry Pi as a kid rather than the family computer ;)
I don't agree with the original post of not buying these. That being said, don't you solve that problem by teaching your kid about virtual machines or docker? Arguably that's easier than flashing an SD card.
I think for a lot of kids the 'having your own computer' factor is nice.
However, for our daughter we ended up buying (1) a Micro:Bit, which is much easier for kids to tinker with, especially with MakeCode [1]. Our 5yo daughter loves to draw 5x5 emoji + write words, associate them with buttons, to upload them to the Micro:bit. It makes her really proud. (2) An Intel NUC, which is much faster and less constrained than a Raspberry Pi. (Obviously, it is more expensive, but she has one of the low-end Celeron NUCs.)
Virtualisation and so on doesn't help if you're wanting to do electronics, connect sensors, solder things – and you don't want to worry about destroying your expensive computer. I've never actually bricked a Pi, but I've been quite happy when hacking things together not to have to worry about damaging something expensive in the process.
> That being said, don't you solve that problem by teaching your kid about virtual machines or docker?
You can't reasonably expect a child to understand hardware virtualization, can you? Much less how to use something like Docker. Maybe if Docker was perfect and there were no version or dependency incompatibilities, and the Docker service behaved predictably, and a bunch of other things. Hell, I would've bailed a few minutes into the build process as a child. I get bored waiting on it as an adult.
Also real-life hardware can be super interesting, even if you're not hacking at it! I found much joy just cracking open the family's old Windows machine and having a look. It's hard to quantify the effect something like that has, but it's got to be greater than zero.
Hardware will always still connect with certain child or interested hobbyist. There is a reason, people open up electronics... at age 5. For quite a few it is not for the virtualised code running that brings joy it's the black box of whatever. And we should encourage this behavior.
Edit: I write this with several generations of pi. sitting idle on a shelf. The most interesting project I used one for was Halloween automation of off the shelf decorations. Made up for the stagnant pi's sitting around and all the neighborhood agrees.
I also don't agree with the assertion, but getting a virtualization environment set up for "normal" development is far more complicated, letting alone getting set up with USB, GPIO, or anything else that Raspberry Pi comes with out of the box.
Why would anybody care that they're being bought and put in drawers or shelves? The RPi isn't in finite supply, and buying more helps the project overall even if nothing is done with it.
I would think the set of parents who can teach their kid about virtual machines and docker, but don’t have a spare Machine lying around for their kid to mess up is as good as empty.
One of the killer features is also GPIO. Back in the old days, a computer of similar vintage to the Commodore/Tandy/Sinclair micros would have a "user" port that you could wire things to and then program with BASIC PEEK and POKE statements.
With a Raspberry Pi, you've brought that back in a way that doesn't risk expensive hardware. You can get a breadboard and something like the Pi Cobbler for an instant prototyping setup where you can play with electronic components and program them with C or Python with far less difficulty than a garden variety microcontroller. The Arduino comes close, but the computing power of the Pi offers a lot more flexibility and options.
Ah well, you're hitting a nail on the head there. I have bought a Pi 3b+ a few months ago, put some test webpage on it, and then switched it off for security reasons. Now it's sitting on my desk, because I lack the time to write the web program I wanted it to run. :/
So many of my Raspberry Pi projects end up as a VM in my homelab esxi server, because they're just easier to manage that way. Pi-Hole, Octo-pi, wee-wx, virtual radar, etc. All of these I started with a Raspberry PI, then realized what a pain in the butt it is to manage a PI when I can manage a VM instead.
Exactly. In process of moving hass.io to a VM environment on windows because I got tired of corrupt sd cards and slowness. Pis are great for prototyping and running a POC.
Similar for me, except I just use Docker for container versions of whatever project I played with on the Pi instead of VMs. Makes simple automated upgrades possible with extremely few lines of scripting too, ideal for home server that I want to setup and forget about. I have a single docker-compose file describing the services I need and its worked great for me for years. Most Pi server-app projects already have an official x86 docker image too.
If nothing else, this has allowed me to use a cheap intel NUC instead of beefier hardware for a VM server. No more SD card failures...
Programming smaller microcontrollers could be much harder (and unfamiliar). You have to use C and C++ only, in which you don't have standard C library. You have to use either Arduino as an OS, and it has no multitasking and perverted TCP/IP stacks (built on top of single-thread everything-blocking paradigm); or RTOSes, which are cryptic (again, no libc and no posix TCP/IP stack) and you have to write or port your own implementation of everything, including software serial and i2c. Debugging is hard, usually you print messages to serial port.
This is in contrast to Raspberry Pi, which runs linux and you can program in any language and everything is like on your main PC.
Maybe latest model is overkill for anything except desktop PC or home server, but there are simpler models. I think it's pretty normal to use, for example, Raspberry Pi Zero for IoT, because good luck implementing HomeKit on avr/esp8266/stm32.
I hate commercical electronics manufacturers putting fancy desktop-level ARM controllers on everything, but let hobbyists use them without hesitation even if the only reason is support of python.
The term "Arduino" is for the ecosystem; it doesn't refer to any singular microcontroller.
At one time, long ago, it did - mainly the ATMega8 platform that was at the heart of the Wiring project, which ultimately begat the original Arduino (and Processing).
But the ecosystem expanded; first via different Atmel microcontrollers (many which became so-called "official" platforms), then eventually to other microcontroller platforms (and Microchip, maker of the venerable PIC microcontroller platform, eventually purchased Atmel).
The ESP8266 is a part of that ecosystem today, along with other so-called "ESP" controllers:
I looked to see if I could find any kind of "real" core for the Raspberry Pi or Broadcom SOCs but I didn't find anything other than the above, which seems to be in active development. Honestly, though, you wouldn't really use a Raspberry Pi that way; more likely you would use the Raspberry Pi as a development platform for an Arduino ecosystem platform, that would likely be attached to the Pi via USB or some other method.
People, especially beginners, are often confused by what the name "Arduino" means; as I've noted, today it's an ecosystem composed of many different platforms, some "official", but many more that are not.
...and this of course doesn't get into the whole "real" vs "knockoff" vs "counterfeit" debate (which is a whole 'nother story).
I think you are understating the current power of microcontrollers. They can run Python. You get a REPL. The days of 8 bit micros for hobbyists are over; 32 bit micros that are hundreds of times more powerful in terms of CPU, memory, flash, and APIs cost the exact same amount.
The library situation is pretty good these days. You can talk to TLS-enabled web servers. You can talk to Bluetooth devices. You can integrate sensors with a couple lines of code. It isn't trivial but it isn't hard either.
The advantage of using a microcontroller is that you don't have to stress out about all the other things that a computer is going to be doing. You don't have to write systemd configurations to start your application at boot. You don't have to prevent syslog from ruining your SD card. You don't have to update the Linux kernel when there is a 0day. You don't have to work hard to power the machine from a battery. (I have a Bluetooth-based temperature/humidity/pressure logger + epaper clock that runs off a 100mAh LiPo battery. A Raspberry Pi that isn't even turned on would suck that thing dry in 3 hours, not counting power loss in the boost converter that would be required.)
The advantage of using a Raspberry Pi is that you get a ton more CPU power and all the advantages of a computer. Your GPIO sensors can show their data on 2 4k screens. You can browse the web with Chrome. You can run complex software trivially.
They are both great for different use cases. I think someone that wants to make a tiny robot or blinky light would be better served by an $8 M0-based Arduino clone. I think someone that wants to run image recognition on a video feed would be better served by a Raspberry Pi. The power level of the Pi is greater than a micro. Getting something simple working perfectly without any future maintenance is easier on a micro.
If you don't have access to such a device, the probability you'll do something with it is zero. Getting them into the hands of many people increases the chance that some of those people will actually do something worthwhile. They're cheap enough that you can tinker without losing a lot of money if you break it, and if it goes unused it's not a huge loss either.
To be fair the 4 bumps the devices up out of the awkward "somewhat better than an Arduino, but still kinda crappy at almost everything" the 2 and 3 were stuck in. Much better I/O speeds, h265 and 4k, enough memory (and dual-monitor support!) to run a real desktop workstation on it. I skipped the 3 because two of my three Rpi2s were gathering dust after the novelty wore off and they proved to be too weak to repurpose for much of anything useful (one hangs on as an MPD server) but the 4 is way, way more capable.
> If you already have a computer in your house, then you've
> already got a much, much more powerful version of a
> raspberry pi.
> If you have a friend or family member who is interested in
> an introduction to software and hardware engineering, or
> electronics, then they'll be MUCH MUCH better off with one > of these: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Shield-Bot-p-1380.html
> and an arduino uno.
Biggest win for Pi is IMHO the combination of the two, you get both a linux box and an arduino-like platform with HW pins access and kit hats, all in a small package that can easily be fit anywhere - and at the same time it's cheap and simple enough to allow you to play freely without worries.
- using one RPI running as a cheap desktop/internet/YouTube computer in a living room, because I don't want to accept the "Terms and Conditions" on my TV regarding automatically sending all my usage data to the internet
- using another one to regularly backup all my data
- using another two for undisclosed projects
- planning to use another one as a Subversion repository server to store all my company documents which I share with my wife who is not a programmer but has learned to use Subversion (which BTW is better to store large binary documents than GIT)
- etc.
Arduino based toys have their place, but in the end, the shield-bot is a toy.
Where the Pi shine's in my opinion is this: It packs the processing power of a small desktop and combines that with enough interface options (GPIO, Clock, AD and DA, I2C, etc, etc) to interface it with real world projects.
True, some things might be a bit too complex for a kid, but the opportunity to play and learn together with your kids are endless!
The shield bot is a learning tool. I don’t think a reasonable interpretation of what I’m saying is anything other than that.
An atmega and C++ are absolutely NOT toys however. And in fact, arduinos are so cheap at this point that I have put many of them into many finished products.
It's too bad that Pi-Top is moving away from the laptop form-factor right around the time the Raspberry Pi is becoming usable as a desktop computer.
I'd love to see a drop-in-replacement motherboard design for an old hardy laptop (maybe something like a ThinkPad X220 -- < $100 on ebay). This could end up being fairly straightforward to design once the Compute Module 4 comes out.
Some new hinges and a little elbow grease and you could have a nice little 20-hour-battery laptop that's actually usable.
I am extremely displeased that none of the previous Pi-Top hardware is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4. The Pi-Top team is quite unresponsive and will provide no technical details. I suspect it's because their drivers do not build on aarch64 or work with the Stretch kernel, but to find out I'll have to spend hours reverse-engineering everything.
It's definitely a product design failure, but is the failure on their end or the Pi Foundation's end?
Every major board revision the Foundation ships has seemingly no upgrade path, the amount of things that breaks every time they move Debian versions is unacceptable.
The real product design failure seems to be building upon the Pi at all.
I got the original Pi-Top when it was crowdfunded and I was sorely disappointed, mostly due to the extremely poor quality of the keyboard. The whole thing was awfully big, too. To the point of being unwieldy. Has anyone here bought a "Pi-Top [3]"? Has the quality/design improved at all?
I'm not going to give you my personal details if you won't front up with basic information like a price, shipping costs and whether or not you'll ship internationally (and where). Interesting device, great marketing, but hell no.
The "No (regular) internet" thing is tough - the global public Internet is kinda the only game in town. But otherwise, there are so many cheap laptops that can run Linux. We're in a golden age.
I want a cheap and rugged laptop. With access to kid-friendly Wikipedia, drawing and programming and a few educational applications as well as maybe some music.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadhttps://accounts.pi-top.com/products/pi-top/
I've never seen that product before. It appears to be a Pi-Top branded tablet/screen attached to a keyboard.
1: https://www.pi-top.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Redesigned%20website/pi-t...
The new one looks considerably different than the model I have, so maybe they've fixed the issues, but I'm not inclined to buy another.
Perhaps thats why they did not include peripherals this time around. One of the big selling points of the Pi 4 is the 4K output. Providing anything less than a 4K screen would probably lock users into a disappointing product.
Right, but for how long? It would be much easier to upgrade a separate monitor down the road. Otherwise, the Pi-Top team would need to make duplicate products: one laptop that supported a 1080p screen and another laptop that supported a 4K screen.
They say the purchase itself includes the base plate, which houses all the extra sensors and ports. Judging from the pictures, it has a lot of ports. That is extra value added.
> pi‑top [4] comes with the following: gigabit ethernet meaning faster network storage and access to servers, dual HDMI for two 4k screen displays, 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM meaning more applications can run, two USB 3 ports and one USB 2 port for connecting devices and peripherals.
Nothing is listed that isn't part of the Pi 4 itself, while the picture clearly shows a bunch of other ports (what are they?). Later it mentions a "foundation plate" but with no details.
Also, some of the built-in ports are not mentioned:
* one of the USB 2 ports (guessing the case uses it for something?)
* 2-lane MIPI DSI display port
* 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port
* 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port
There's also a project page [1] that shows a camera added, which certainly looks like it uses the on-board camera port, but doesn't make it clear how that works or if the camera is included or not.
[1] https://www.pi-top.com/bett-2019-maker-projects/portable-pho...
I observe that the main reason people this kind of inspiration contrived is because their experience with people that look similar are with people that pride themselves in not understanding technology.
So there is an ongoing incongruence.
Regarding the machine itself, it looks too big.
I can for sure see environments that this might be attractive, such as education etc, but if you are a vaguely capable software engineer you are almost always far better off just buying a raw Pi and the electrical components you would like separately. There is so much information out there that even a novice can quickly educate themselves on what they might need for a given project.
The kits become little more than elaborate toys with a few extra steps added to make the student feel like they did something. However, all they did was follow instructions. For at least 90% of what engineers do on a regular basis, following carefully tested instructions is not one of them.
Written by a guy who experienced a hell of a lot of criticism 20 years ago for writing games in JavaScript and now is the lead VR product engineer for a company.
What you're describing is something that comes naturally to you and almost every person on this website. Kids who think that way will likely end up in engineering of some sort regardless.
The rest need this sort of guided approach to even show them that they could even possibly do this sort of thing and it helps move that percentage up.
Although, that being said I don't really think much to the Pi-Top 4 at all. You'd definitely have a more valuable empowering experience holding an actual board and plugging wires directly into it, the end result would be the same and I feel they smoothed out the wrong part of the experience.
[0] http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/#smalltalkAndC...
For someone who is in their teens and is eager to gain practical experience without dozens of hours of scrubbing YouTube and practicing programming basics, these kids are a solid idea. Further, I think the notion of pushing hard to differentiate itself from transitional machine form factors and work on a rugged"standard compute unit" is a very interesting experiment.
I'm not sure it's for me. But I've built a little Pi case with a charge controllers, a battery, and a screen just like this and I liked the result. This is certainly nicer than what I cobbled together and the idea of making a standard compute form factor for projects is really good.
> For someone who is in their teens and is eager to gain practical experience without dozens of hours of scrubbing YouTube and practicing programming basics, these kids are a solid idea. Further, I think the notion of pushing hard to differentiate itself from transitional machine form factors and work on a rugged"standard compute unit" is a very interesting experiment.
> I'm not sure it's for me. But I've built a little Pi case with a charge controllers, a battery, and a screen just like this and I liked the result. This is certainly nicer than what I cobbled together and the idea of making a standard compute form factor for projects is really good.
Ssss
> Every pi‑top [4] comes with 12 pi-top component modules comprising programmable sensors, buttons and LEDs to bring your inventions to life.
Okay, so pi-top [4] is the main thing in the box. Thus there are 12 pi-top component modules, so I guess it's a variety pack of sensors and buttons? Well, how many of each, and what are they?
> You connect these to your pi‑top [4] using a Foundation Plate that fits snuggly underneath it.
We further learn the pi-top [4] is a thing, and this plate fits it.
Obviously, I can infer that it's the case with the CPU, but this product is trying to introduce people to programming.
It's amazing that a company can put up a product page that never plainly explains what you're buying. And this is shockingly common.
SO many of these things end up sitting in boxes or on shelves. The raspberry pi is pretty cool for a very small niche of things, but really the main thing making it interesting is that it's a cheap desktop computer.
If you already have a computer in your house, then you've already got a much, much more powerful version of a raspberry pi.
If you have a friend or family member who is interested in an introduction to software and hardware engineering, or electronics, then they'll be MUCH MUCH better off with one of these: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Shield-Bot-p-1380.html
and an arduino uno.
Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.
> Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.
How does buying one with good intentions that goes unused hurt any other effort? I don't think I'd have even heard of any other devices if it weren't for the attention that the Pi gets.
Not just a naked Pi (and even if that's the goal it's typically not done with just the pi, you need some amount of stuff around it too). E.g. the previous version of the Pi-Top is $319 (Pi included)
Now imagine you’re a kid who had the idea to water your garden with a computer. On an arduino, you’d write about 20 lines of code.
On a PI...I mean, how do you even get a computer program to run at boot? What’s a computer program? Okay I have a .img file now what? Python? But some people say I should use $somethingelse. Okay I need another monitor to connect to it? Open up my router and find a DHCP entry so I can SSH into it? What do ANY of those words mean?
“Oh well I’ll get to it someday.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of raspberry pis in many different projects, and in fact I’d make a strong wager that I have deployed more raspi projects than most people who consider themselves huge raspi fans. For SOME things there isn’t a substitute. For most things they’re extremely discouraging.
From my experience, RPi might be more appealing since it runs a real OS and you can have a desktop environment.
However, for our daughter we ended up buying (1) a Micro:Bit, which is much easier for kids to tinker with, especially with MakeCode [1]. Our 5yo daughter loves to draw 5x5 emoji + write words, associate them with buttons, to upload them to the Micro:bit. It makes her really proud. (2) An Intel NUC, which is much faster and less constrained than a Raspberry Pi. (Obviously, it is more expensive, but she has one of the low-end Celeron NUCs.)
[1] https://makecode.microbit.org/
You can't reasonably expect a child to understand hardware virtualization, can you? Much less how to use something like Docker. Maybe if Docker was perfect and there were no version or dependency incompatibilities, and the Docker service behaved predictably, and a bunch of other things. Hell, I would've bailed a few minutes into the build process as a child. I get bored waiting on it as an adult.
Also real-life hardware can be super interesting, even if you're not hacking at it! I found much joy just cracking open the family's old Windows machine and having a look. It's hard to quantify the effect something like that has, but it's got to be greater than zero.
Edit: I write this with several generations of pi. sitting idle on a shelf. The most interesting project I used one for was Halloween automation of off the shelf decorations. Made up for the stagnant pi's sitting around and all the neighborhood agrees.
As for teaching your child docker being easier than flashing an SD card... you must have some bright kids, pal!
Why would anybody care that they're being bought and put in drawers or shelves? The RPi isn't in finite supply, and buying more helps the project overall even if nothing is done with it.
With a Raspberry Pi, you've brought that back in a way that doesn't risk expensive hardware. You can get a breadboard and something like the Pi Cobbler for an instant prototyping setup where you can play with electronic components and program them with C or Python with far less difficulty than a garden variety microcontroller. The Arduino comes close, but the computing power of the Pi offers a lot more flexibility and options.
If nothing else, this has allowed me to use a cheap intel NUC instead of beefier hardware for a VM server. No more SD card failures...
This is in contrast to Raspberry Pi, which runs linux and you can program in any language and everything is like on your main PC.
Maybe latest model is overkill for anything except desktop PC or home server, but there are simpler models. I think it's pretty normal to use, for example, Raspberry Pi Zero for IoT, because good luck implementing HomeKit on avr/esp8266/stm32.
I hate commercical electronics manufacturers putting fancy desktop-level ARM controllers on everything, but let hobbyists use them without hesitation even if the only reason is support of python.
I run micropython on my esp8266 because I didn't like the lua that it shipped with. If this is a problem, then it's specific to Arduino.
Edit: lua, not node.js
At one time, long ago, it did - mainly the ATMega8 platform that was at the heart of the Wiring project, which ultimately begat the original Arduino (and Processing).
But the ecosystem expanded; first via different Atmel microcontrollers (many which became so-called "official" platforms), then eventually to other microcontroller platforms (and Microchip, maker of the venerable PIC microcontroller platform, eventually purchased Atmel).
The ESP8266 is a part of that ecosystem today, along with other so-called "ESP" controllers:
https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino
https://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=start-with-esp-12-a...
https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32
It wouldn't surprise me to find out there is a core available for the Raspberry Pi - or at least for the SOC on the board...
Hmm:
https://github.com/me-no-dev/RasPiArduino
I looked to see if I could find any kind of "real" core for the Raspberry Pi or Broadcom SOCs but I didn't find anything other than the above, which seems to be in active development. Honestly, though, you wouldn't really use a Raspberry Pi that way; more likely you would use the Raspberry Pi as a development platform for an Arduino ecosystem platform, that would likely be attached to the Pi via USB or some other method.
People, especially beginners, are often confused by what the name "Arduino" means; as I've noted, today it's an ecosystem composed of many different platforms, some "official", but many more that are not.
...and this of course doesn't get into the whole "real" vs "knockoff" vs "counterfeit" debate (which is a whole 'nother story).
https://learn.adafruit.com/welcome-to-circuitpython/what-is-...
Here is a HomeKit device on a nrf52:
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino/blob/mast...
The library situation is pretty good these days. You can talk to TLS-enabled web servers. You can talk to Bluetooth devices. You can integrate sensors with a couple lines of code. It isn't trivial but it isn't hard either.
The advantage of using a microcontroller is that you don't have to stress out about all the other things that a computer is going to be doing. You don't have to write systemd configurations to start your application at boot. You don't have to prevent syslog from ruining your SD card. You don't have to update the Linux kernel when there is a 0day. You don't have to work hard to power the machine from a battery. (I have a Bluetooth-based temperature/humidity/pressure logger + epaper clock that runs off a 100mAh LiPo battery. A Raspberry Pi that isn't even turned on would suck that thing dry in 3 hours, not counting power loss in the boost converter that would be required.)
The advantage of using a Raspberry Pi is that you get a ton more CPU power and all the advantages of a computer. Your GPIO sensors can show their data on 2 4k screens. You can browse the web with Chrome. You can run complex software trivially.
They are both great for different use cases. I think someone that wants to make a tiny robot or blinky light would be better served by an $8 M0-based Arduino clone. I think someone that wants to run image recognition on a video feed would be better served by a Raspberry Pi. The power level of the Pi is greater than a micro. Getting something simple working perfectly without any future maintenance is easier on a micro.
Biggest win for Pi is IMHO the combination of the two, you get both a linux box and an arduino-like platform with HW pins access and kit hats, all in a small package that can easily be fit anywhere - and at the same time it's cheap and simple enough to allow you to play freely without worries.
An atmega and C++ are absolutely NOT toys however. And in fact, arduinos are so cheap at this point that I have put many of them into many finished products.
I'd love to see a drop-in-replacement motherboard design for an old hardy laptop (maybe something like a ThinkPad X220 -- < $100 on ebay). This could end up being fairly straightforward to design once the Compute Module 4 comes out.
Some new hinges and a little elbow grease and you could have a nice little 20-hour-battery laptop that's actually usable.
It's a real failure in product design.
Every major board revision the Foundation ships has seemingly no upgrade path, the amount of things that breaks every time they move Debian versions is unacceptable.
The real product design failure seems to be building upon the Pi at all.
No (regular) internet.