Ask HN: Did you find something to use your Raspberry Pi 400 for?
It's so cute (to look at)!
But it seems to be utterly useless for just about anything I thought I might be able to do with it..
This 4 gigabyte memory, almost 2 ghz quadcore machine seems unable to do much of anything, browsing the web is an utterly horrid experience..
Playing a game of Quake 3 is impossible.
Doom can run, but only at 320x240 unless you don't mind terrible lags.
I'm considering what I can do with it.. For once, I can run an IRC client on it, but what else?
Have you found something to actually use this for?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadFor more general compute - works but you’ve got to have a lot of patience and no other options. Even a modest NUC will be way faster
Still I think the raspberries fulfill their intended roll well.
With the latest RPi 4 with 8GB ram, with an SSD drive, for my use cases I haven't found the performance problems at all. However I can totally see that for many other use cases performance might be a limiting factor.
I also considered going with NUC earlier, but because RPi is very "standard" it is very no-hassle to set up, and internet is full of different tutorials etc.
I just hope that in the future they also launch some premium & beefy version of RPi, so you could use all the same software etc but have more performance.
I haven't used one, I'm considering getting one for my oldest kid when he turns 7 next year, so it's really interesting to hear people's experiences in this thread.
[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
Not everyone has spare, fully functional laptops lying around “free”.
By the time my first kid was born, I’d bought a new computer...well, a whole more than two times. And he’s five, and I’ve done more than two since. But the ones that aren't repurposed and in use also aren't reliable (that's why they aren't repurposed), and while you don't need much performance to learn (a plus for the Pi because it's not a master of performance), having something trustworthy is valuable. (Sure, in some cases the reliability issue is fixable with replace parts costing more than a Pi, but then...)
At our software company we used to use PlayStation 3 as a development server running YellowDog Linux. Just testing our RPM .spec files was a gargantuan eye opener as to how many things we got wrong when we'd try rpmbuild --rebuild on YellowDog, and just because we'd write the .spec file on a PC-bucket server running CentOS. Monoculture is an extremely toxic, blinding thing, and it breeds ignorance.
I don't have a Pi 400 but I have a similar cyberdeck that has the addition of a screen with the keyboard and board. I use it as a swiss army tool on the go for managing my cloud servers. Its like the classic monitor and keyboard you have hanging on top of your rack, but portable :D
I read that for the RPi3 they would bottleneck at around 40mbps.
It has a huge range of GPIO, and I think hats are still compatible.
its a great terminal machine. So anything that requires text based interaction with a monitor is grand.
I tried to use it as an alternative workstation (running on sway over arch); the 4K display output is nice, but limited to 30hz, and the machine just isn't peachy enough for my use-case.
[1] https://pi-hole.net/ [2] https://tailscale.com/
Pi 4 is a different beast. It's actually feasible to run it as a NAS without greatly compromising performance. They did a great job reducing the bottleneck, to the extent that I don't mind attaching all my external drives to a couple of these.
I literally just installed the official operating system, following the official instructions and installed both pieces of software from the official package repositories.
For Quake3, you may have to change the renderer to opengl1 or try q3lite. See https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=247841
(I have not tried Q3 myself but I know it can run, it even runs on RPi1. There are videos on youtube)
Also, is everyone missing that this is about the Raspberry Pi 400. Why are half the comments about Raspis in general and running servers on them etc?
By comparison, a basic Pi is development friendly, easily fixable, fairly cheap and inexpensive to replace if broken. If you already have the peripherals, the cost is quite low.
I've previously used an older RPi version as server, specifically:
It did work fine, although I personally find SD cards slow (and didn't want to add extra complexity, ie. adapters), and ARM tricky in some cases, so I moved to an SBC that was more comfortable for my use case.The problem though is that in an embedded system you often want instantaneous boot-times. So from that perspective the pi doesn't seem to serve both markets very well.
Now planning on buying a second RPi 4 to combine it with a touch screen from Waveshare and a fat battery pack to ultimately replace my Aidsdroid smartphone.
Their complaint is that Calc sometimes lags/hangs with a few thousand rows of heavily formatted data (they're not a data scientist, but still need to deal with government-issued xls[x] files). It wasn't a serious problem though and a great opportunity to "look under the hood" of what was happening and introduce them to CSV files. The other "problem" is that online shopping websites are often horribly slow, but again, I'd say there's a lesson in there and it could be viewed as a feature.
So all in all I am a huge fan. I think it's a great way to onboard people on good-enough-computing and open source. There is something magical about its form factor that resonates with "non-technical" people. Also quite cheap and accessible.
You are also one of the few that specifically gives a use case for the pi 400 (basically a Keyboard with a pi inside [0]), not just a normal pi, which I think has many other use cases (more server-y). The pi 400 is a desktop computer indeed.
[0]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
I find the consistent use of the plural "they/their" really jarring and for some reason it stands out even more than normal in this post. I hope this fad will pass and people will finally accept that it is fine to say "he" or "she" again like has been done for centuries without problems. Considering that acceptance of differences - between male and female, between heterosexual and homosexual, between religious and secular, between "white" and "black" and between any other potential identity category - has been the focus of society for the past half century it is counterproductive (to say the least) to suddenly start hiding behind plural pronouns. This trend is even stranger when considering the fact that it has become fashionable to explicitly proclaim membership of other identity categories.
Language changes. Get used to it. Or not, but it will anyway.
I have to add, if someone is gay or straight, tall or short, black or white, fat or thin, or has any shade or variety of other attributes we don't immediately reveal that with a pronoun. Perhaps gender should be the same. Unless you think gender is special? In which case, well, maybe that is the problem.
The fact that what I wrote just now is considered to be "controversial" is a good indicator of the revolutionary drive behind the language change - had I written this 10 years ago nobody would have blinked an eye or if they would it would have been for me stating an obvious fact.
Anyway, “they” is a perfectly natural way to refer to a person of unspecified gender. I wish HN posters used “they” more often instead of just assuming everyone is male
Well, I'm not super trendy and on balance I'm in favour of it.
But neither of our views will carry much weight in the long run. It's not up to us.
Also, I have to say, there's a lot of stuff that used to be treated as "obvious fact" that was hugely prejudiced.
RPi400 could be the replacement for the One latop per child project perhaps.
But for a stand alone computer which is slower than my 2 years old phone, I can't find an use. Maybe it could be useful to slowly and painfully port some software to ARM.
After a while, I realized that an RPi 4 is a terrible device if you intend to use it as a desktop. Either hardware acceleration won't work and even if it does, YouTube will lag like hell on 1080p. Forget YouTube, even stock XFCE with hardware acceleration is not as responsive as it would be on a meager Celeron/Pentium potato. The cost might justify using RPi 4 as a desktop for some people but if you're not restricted by cost, don't buy an RPi 4 to use it as a desktop.
RPi 4 can be a great choice for a headless server though. I use it to run AdGuard Home to block ads on all of my devices. I'm also considering buying another RPi 4 to use it as a router and another for using a e-Ink screen to show time.
Github was probably the most painful website (although it's still better than Gitlab which doesn't work at all without js). I think it had recently removed a bunch of functionality for users without js and it's not designed with people who care about every 100MB of RAM in mind.
Using RPi 4 8GB as a desktop PC for office manager (LibreOffice) and for a couple of developers as a "terminal" to bigger dev system. They pretty much used to it.
Thanks to generous donations, we've provided thousands of these devices to children all over the UK, to enable them to access education, especially important during the pandemic. Providing an affordable computing platform was always the aim.
You can learn more and donate here - https://www.raspberrypi.org/support-learn-at-home/
Disclaimer - I work for The Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Anyhow, I purchased it as a solution waiting for a problem, and I'm trying to find the problem with this post. I didn't mean to come across as overly negative, making such a product for the price point it has, is an achievement no doubt.
However, one can buy used "conventional" computers that are far more powerful than the pi, if one wishes a "cheap desktop computer".
What's attractive about the 400 is the formfactor and, well, it's something new to play with.. I'm truly trying to find out what to do with it, what the things are, where it'd be neat to have this tiny machine, that is totally silent, and can be always-on, probably next to my battlestations for a new usecase that I'd not want to reserve an entire workstation for.
So yea, sorry about the rant, but I'm asking this question not as a way to put down the 400, but to hear what people have used theirs for.
Initially, I was disappointed with the performance, but with some tweaks (namely, replacing the default browser with "Chromium Media Edition") it can handle a 15-person hangout well enough. It definitely performs much better in that aspect than our 5-year-old iPad we used before. For one, it doesn't turn your camera off without any notice like the Google Hangouts app does on iPad when the processor usage is too high.
TL;DR I higly recommend this for a early-primary-school child (even one without strong technical inclinations.) +++ Very small, easily fits on the desk + Cheap: I think for this price we would only be able to get an old and clunky PC. + Good way to introduce your kid to Linux and its quirks (like only being able to connect a bluetooth speaker after you try 3 times... ;) ) + Potential for future fun with hacking - Not very good for games (but we like to keep an eye on our children's screentime anyway, so they can play on a console in the living room instead)