As a controller for my lawn sprinklers that adjusts watering time based on historical rainfall data. Better than adjusting it every few months manually.
Yes! I’ve used RPi SBCs for various purposes over time:
- One early RPi I bought when RPi was very new to the market. I played around with it for a while and then I put it in a drawer.
- Months later I pulled it out of the drawer and started hosting my website on it for a while. I have since moved on from using RPi at home for hosting any of my sites. Might do again at some point in time.
- I use an SBC as one of the pieces of electronics that I use for controlling over 9000 LED pixels on a sculpture for which I created the light setup and programming. The LED strips we bought are from China and were supposed to be IP65 but even so we now have a bunch of the pixels showing only red, which is bad. No fault of the SBC. Also the SBC in this installation is not an RPi. But relevant nonetheless.
- I hooked up an image sensor with a lens to an RPi and put it in a surveillance camera housing, and added PoE to it. Currently not in use but would like to deploy somewhere in the future if given the chance to do so.
- I have an RPi that I have connected a 5TB drive to in an enclosure I bought from AliExpress. This RPi I both ssh into from my phone to download things for the future, and I also run a squid proxy on it via which one of my laptops connect.
> If you pair the raspberry pi with cache in cloudfare I think you can host on it
Yup. That’s actually what I did :)
And then the reason I stopped hosting my site on my RPi was because I felt like, well if I depend on Cloudflare anyways, I might as well just use a VPS, or GitHub pages, or Cloudflare Pages :p
But there is something appealing in hosting things from home still. And doubly so when doing it without relying on Cloudflare etc
What I will do however, is that next time I set up some internet reachable hosting of content at home I will maintain one version of it that is directly served from the machine at home itself, and then I will keep an up to date copy of it on one of my externally hosted servers.
Mine's reading temperature, humidity and pressure from sensors and uploading it to a VPS. My second one that is, my first one hasn't done more than collect dust.
Absolutely, ESPs are just microcontrollers. A Pi is a fully functional System-On-Chip. That being said the VPN is the only usecase you mention where you couldn't use a flavor of ESP.
Funny thing is that modern 3G/4G/5G modems are full System-On-Chip computers themselves supporting virtualization. The Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8916 is a popular SoC used for LTE dongles that runs the modem Baseband Real-time OS and Debian/Android OS on the same CPU.
Lots of them are also going into commercial products, eg https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain... from a time of tight supply said "We spend a lot of time on backlog management. We have to balance volume demand from commercial and industrial customers with the demand we see from individuals. Right now we feel the right thing to do is to prioritise commercial and industrial customers – the people who need Raspberry Pis to run their businesses – we’re acutely aware that people’s livelihoods are at stake."
The Raspberry Pi CM4 is the main system processor for our open source solar powered farming robot called Acorn. I designed a custom motherboard for it in Kicad. We also use the Raspberry Pi RP2040 processor on our custom dual brushless motor controllers (also designed in Kicad).
The only one I'm using now is a Pi 3 (B?) with a DVB TV hat. I'm using it to stream broadcast TV to my tablet or phone. I can watch TV anywhere in my house. I very rarely turn on my TV now.
I have another PI in a drawer as backup. I replaced all of them with Odroid since it became nearly impossible to buy Pis. I wonder if they'll start to make them available again to normal people but I don't know if I'm trusting the company anyway.
Home assistant instance with zigbee usb dongle, Volumio receiver connected to my speakers, screen for calendar, plant monitor, and for a while as a Kodi station.
The lifetime of an external USB drive is better than the SD card. My PINE64 after a few years stopped working due to the SD card giving up. It was a pain to recover my database from it but I did manage... that is why I am interested in this PI because of the PCI interface...
A Rpi3 as an octoprint server for my 3D oeubter, including canera feed.
A friend uses his as a HomeAssistant server to monitor and manage his home lights, temperature and garden watering needs.
And I have one as a nifty remote KVM (TinyPilot) that we also use for work. Connect it to the Internet and a PC and you can control that machine remotely.
It's my Wi-Fi hotspots, gateway, and network servers. I've got more powerful machines but it can route packets, serve http requests, manage dhcp, simple things like that without problem.
I use a USB 3.0 Ethernet cable for the second port. It can keep up just fine.
One for Stratum 0 NTP server (using GSP module with PPS)
One for Home Assistant
One for monitoring the solar power at my cabin, using a 4G USB device to send data home.
The Home Assistant runs on a 4B, the others are using 3B's and a clone (NanoPi Zero).
Got some Pi 4's that I use for various Linux experimentation and such. Sometimes I find it easier to get a Pi 4 up and running than a VM, and other times I need the GPIOs.
2. Web server (no external hosting hurray); TLS set up via LetsEncrypt.
3. Navidrome for streaming my music collection to my phone/computers. I ripped my thousands of CDs to MP3. I use subtracks on my phone for listening to it, and sonixd on my computers (Mac/PC). https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
4. mpd for driving some speakers via a USB audio interface so I can use some speakers plugged into the Pi for listening to music in the same room as the Pi (practicing guitar). I control this via the Supersonic app on my phone.
5. Wireguard VPN so I can connect home.
6. PiHole for my network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it means my phone is permanently connected to my home network and gets ad-blocking and stops apps dialing home. I use DroidHole on my phone to see what's going on.
7. xrdp server running, so a usable desktop is always available.
8. miniDLNA running connected to a NAS box so that I can watch all my DVDs easily on my TV downstairs (I spent weeks ripping them).
9. Tuya IoT API for turning some smart plugs in the house on/off via cronjob; I do this instead of using the timer in their app because it means my phone can be off the network/abroad and these plugs/lights still turn on/off.
11. Peer Calls (https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls) so I can video conference in decent quality without having to use Google Meet / Teams etc. I also host a STUN and TURN server on the Pi so that Peer Calls works behind NAT.
12. Runs CUPS so that my very cheap Samsung wireless laser printer actually shows up as an AirPrint printer for my wife's iPad/iPhone and shows up in Android printing. (The printer does not natively have AirPrint capability but CUPS means I can provide it to users on the network).
It fetches time over NTP on a cron job. It also blocks various ASNs and IPs by country on a cron job to stop annoying remote pests and cloud providers. It also runs Monitorix so I can see system load, and goaccess on a cron job so that I can see who's hitting my website without having to resort to analytics nonsense.
It boots from USB3 (it has a NVMe in an IcyBox caddy).
I've got one setup at work as a display for some networked security cameras. Displays 4 concurrent 720p streams on a TV for the office 24/7. Cheaper than Ubiquiti's solution [0] as we didn't need more than the 4 streams.
At home I've got one for Home Assistant, one as a TV box because Netflix's sharing blocking check is only on smart TV apps. I've also got multiple as 3D printer controllers (klipper/octoprint).
I used for some years a raspberry pi 2b as a media player with kodi. Then a bit as octoprint server to control a 3D printer.
I will explore a way to use a RP4 or now RP5 for a local NAS that would be extensible and that could run more services and yool that my current QNAP TS-28A but I'm not very confident I will follow
* 1 CM4 for a PiKVM on my desktop (my main home server uses a proprietary iLO).
* 1 CM4 as router running OpenWrt, to replace my ER-Lite.
* 3 CM4s in a Turing Pi 2, one Jetson Orin for ML. This is my homelab. The CM4 are running Dietpi.
* 2 RPi4 as remote VPN (Wireguard) endpoints to do tech support for my mother-in-law and mother. Also serves as Jellyfin server containing old movies, and jumphost for NAS backup.
* 2 RPi0 2 W with Enviro+. One indoor, one outdoor (with different, custom 3D printed casings). Runs Raspbian, will switch these to Dietpi.
* 1 RPi3 for with my portable HackRF (with custom 3D printed case). Batteries included!
* 1 RPi0 W for Pwnagotchi. Not really used anymore but too cute to break.
* 1 RPi0 W for Pimoroni grow to track water management in plants (with 3D printed case). Need to get that project moving, it is for my mother.
All my Docker containers run on my main server but I'm considering to switch to my Turing Pi 2. I got solar, so the Xeon is OK for now, but still...
Then I got: 1 RPi3B+, 1 CM4, 1 RPi2B, 1 RPi0 W. I should sell as they're right now 'Raspberry Piles'. Won't use them. To be frank I'd like to upgrade the RPi3 with the portable HackRF at some point, and once I get a 3D printer I might need Octoprint so I suppose I could use one of these machines for that.
I went with Dfrobot [1] because they also sell a case (and it is all in stock). Had the CM4 already. I wouldn't have minded another one if I could've 3D printed the case but I didn't find such. Btw, I did have to go from 3 to 2 ports.
Right now it is hooked up on my switch. I intend to put it between my desktop and my switch and run some iperf3. Because I'll get fiber soon, and I'd like to be able to saturate that.
I have a nice amp (Loxjie A30), but the bluetooth connection is both fidgety and subject to all the usual bluetooth incompetence (year 20 of the alpha test.)
I have a raspberry pi running a spotify connect implementation outputting audio to the amp via usb. It sits there and silently (or, well, not so silently) works; it's great!
There's some mucking with alsa to get it set up, but under 90 minutes.
Price is actually secondary at this point. The primary advantage of the RPi over a lot of other SBCs is how widespread its use is, and all of the addons you can buy for it.
I'm happy that they're upgrading the pi, but it's not exactly lightweight computing in terms of power (they recommend a 27W PSU) or performance/watt (see: your cell phone)
To me the charm of the raspi ecosystem was always in giving you a very low power, "always on, almost no power draw" linux environment. Oh well, I guess there's always the older versions or the zero for that.
I don't think the newer models are supposed to completely supersede the older models. They are still available, and they still make them. If you have low power needs, you can use those.
It's great for my farming robot though. We have plenty of power but want something small and reliable, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module works wonders for this. More power will be welcome once they release a Compute Module version of the 5.
Is there a reason you're not interested in those NVIDIA Jetson modules? Even excluding the GPU compute, I had thought the Orin boards were significantly faster than a Pi 4.
So for what we’re using it for, which is handling Wi-Fi communications to a central server, handling CAN bus communications to four motor controllers, dealing with RTK GPS and calculating path following parameters for GPS paths, the raspberry pi is perfect. They are cheap, have excellent documentation, and until recently availability was no issue.
Jetson boards are much more expensive. We do plan on making a computer vision add on for our robot which uses the Orin or similar to process images, but I find the raspberry pi perfect for sort of stitching the whole system together.
Would be interesting to see benchmarks of different PI generations at the same power level, assuming the older ones have dynamic power mgmt features too.
"Raspberry Pi 5 consumes significantly less power, and runs significantly cooler, than Raspberry Pi 4 when running an identical workload. However, the much higher performance ceiling means that for the most intensive workloads, and in particular for pathological “power virus” workloads, peak power consumption increases to around 12W, versus 8W for Raspberry Pi 4."
Alright so 27W with heavy peripheral draw then? But 12 W still means it'll be drawing 2.4 amps instead of 1.6 when a random process decides to 100% it. I guess we can always underclock it.
The real unanswered question is, does it finally have a damn sleep mode so it can save power when idle.
# Disable Power LED after boot
dtparam=pwr_led_activelow=off
# Disable SD card activity led
dtparam=act_led_trigger=none
dtparam=act_led_activelow=off
# Disable the ethernet LEDs - these are Pi4 specific values.
# Look in the docs for the values for other Pi boards.
dtparam=eth_led0=4
dtparam=eth_led1=4
A smartphone has two entirely separate computers in it, the one that runs Android or iOS, and the baseband controller. The latter is built to be very power-efficient while waiting for a radio signal. It will wake up the dormant application OS computer when a push notification comes in.
The same likely can be built on top of an RPi, using, say, wake-on-LAN signaling, or some GPIO as an interrupt source. You'll have to suspend your OS while idle for a prolonged time though.
I read that the "PC style" power button allows both soft and hard shutdown, so I suppose suspend and hibernate come into the picture as well. It's mostly a matter of OS support, the firmware seems to be there.
> The real unanswered question is, does it finally have a damn sleep mode so it can save power when idle.
I dream of DIY'ing a laptop, and RPi looks like a great platform for prototyping that... until you realize there's just no sensible way to put it to sleep. Hibernate + aggressive boot time optimization?
You know it's funny, my current laptop has a weird firmware bug (certified Asus moment) where it refuses to go into sleep mode. If sleep is triggered by any OS it will straight up just shut down completely. I've lost some work the first few times I used it out of habit.
Eventually though it didn't turn out to be much of an issue, SSDs boot real fast these days anyway and I can just do a full power cycle.
Is there a way to limit the processor power so that it never exceeds a certain threshold? Because some people might be okay with slower processor if it means less power usage.
I read a lot of Jeff's blog, but his vlogs put me to sleep. He isn't charismatic and makes the worst jokes. People forget that a visual medium is visual. He channel is an example of great information that is ruined by the visual medium.
The new board supports more power hungry IO. If you want to use all of the IO available and push the new SoC then you're going to need a beefier power supply.
Exactly the same as every other hardware supplier. For pi there was some kind of scheme for businesses who _actually_ needed the hardware in order to stay in business. No idea how that worked.
Either way, this is all history. Raspberry Pi boards do not cost hundreds of dollars as claimed.
I am so grateful to the folks behind that site. It's the only reason I was able to track down units when I needed to buy them.
you not checking the site != people not being able to buy them
I'm not saying that it was easy, or anything like business as usual. They've done interviews where they talked about the difficult decision to prioritize companies that would go under without new stock over casual hobbyists. It's one of those unenviable situations where there's no good outcome, just a possibly less-bad one.
Only if you are looking for a latest-gen or last gen machine. You can find some old NUCs for cheap, and there are lots of mini PCs or thin clients for around ~100. Yes about twice as expensive but more than twice as powerful (in both processor speed and features). Of course only if you plan to use it as a Linux computer, not for GPIO stuff.
This isn't super-practical for a commercial application which requires 70 identical machines.
Not only are they expensive and relatively large, machines that have had previous owners often have mystery issues which make them great for home tinkering projects, less so for something that can get you in trouble if it breaks down.
There's a reason companies buy new parts instead of employing teams to scour Craigslist for deals.
Faster processor, 16GB RAM, 500GB NVME SSD, with case. $165! That’s damn impressive, considering the RPi5 with 8GB RAM is suggested to sell for $80 (good luck getting it for that little). And Amazon can get it to me in two days.
Yeah it’s definitely bigger, but I wasn’t expecting these systems to be so cheap.
There was at least one NUC with a full GPIO header set. The DE3815TYKHE.
I've done motor control, I2C and sensor IO with it and it was rock solid on that little NUC.
There was also the UP Board which was an Atom SOC with PI compatible GPIO. I believe that's still in production?!
It solves it, as much as adding a trailer to your sports car solves your problem of not having a pickup truck. It works, but it's very inconvenient.
Eventually those boards run into limitations and then you have to just opt to go with serial to a microcontroller which misses the entire point of having a SBC.
I agree that its not the ideal solution. Still would be better to use a SBC like the Raspberry Pi or other boards. But was just pointing out that if GPIO needed to interface with slower hardware like relay boards or sensors , then there is an option.
If you want the GPIO, that's a good reason to go Pi. Nothing equal to the software support inside the raspberry pi eco system for it's embedded controls.
If you want a small PC for media/homelab server/cheap desktop, they don't make any real sense anymore.
Yes, if I look at those new Intel N100 based mini PCs with a 15W TDP and their power / price / consumption ratio it would seems Intel took notice of the threat and reacted accordingly.
Especially now that the RPI kind of need a fan and you need to buy the power supply, the storage and the case.
Well the RPI has GPIO but for small home server use case nobody cares...
GPIO can be added via tons of USB to GPIO boards out there.
But I agree - lot of people tend to buy the Raspberry Pis for home servers instead of just opting for used mini-PCs from secondary markets. Even a 7-8 year old Intel CPU in those mini PCs will vastly outperform a Raspberry pi. Even the Raspberry 5. Plus, better I/O options and storage with mini PC.
Most of the stuff just flashes LEDs or reads a switch. Doesn't matter for that. And for more intelligent stuff there's i2c or api which have their own interface boards.
I have the above, it's max powerdraw is <5 watts, even at 50% cpu its <3watts. That comes with ram, SSD, case and motherboard.
so to get the pi5 to the same state would need an SD card (boo hiss poor speed.)
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.
Yeah, still happy I went with the Odroid M1 for a small home media server. It’s not fast, but it does everything I need out of the box, has a very nice aluminum case, and doesn’t use much power.
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)
I picked up a Beelink because the Raspberry Pi 4 was unavailable. I use it as a Linux desktop (next to my M1 Air) and a Jellyfin media server. It has replaced the Raspberry Pi for some purposes, but the Pi still has a place when hacking on hardware due to the GPIO.
I bought an N100 for 160 USD including an SSD off of
AliExpress. Thats 2x the cost of an rpi4. I benchmarked it and cpu perf is roughly 2x the rpi however i/o was easily 10x without any sdcard or USB shenanigans. Bonus because it's an Intel chip I can use the regular x86-64 os builds instead of some goofy fork. That's very compelling if you don't need a gpio or any of the raspberry pi accessories for your use case.
At 27W that is a strong pass vs a NUC. If I go with a low power x86 NUC, I can run all software on it, and probably insert a SSD + additional RAM, for probably ~15W.
That'll be peak power draw though: you have to spec the standard power supply to cope with the CPU running @ 100% & simultaneously feeding the 1G ethernet and all the USB ports at max power.
Jeff Geerling measured 11W peak board power running benchmarks. Idle power was measured at 1.8W.
They claim it will draw less power than the Pi4 for the same workloads.
> When using a standard 5V, 3A (15W) USB-C power adapter with Raspberry Pi 5, by default we must limit downstream USB current to 600mA to ensure that we have sufficient margin to support these workloads. This is lower than the 1.2A limit on Raspberry Pi 4, though generally still sufficient to drive mice, keyboards, and other low‑power peripherals.
This is also very uncool, since powering it through the GPIO header with a capable PSU won't trigger the PD signal and makes it impossible to draw any meaningful current through USB? I hope this blockade can be worked around in the boot config.
I mean theoretically dupont connectors are rated for 2.5 A so two of them could get it done, but the current will never be completely equal across both and one may get overloaded. Maybe the safest option would be to find some kind of barrel-jack-to-usb-c dongle.
In practice I doubt it would be a real problem since you'd need to max out both the USB draw and CPU load at the exact same time to get the full draw.
It’s worth noting that this is _allowed_ by the USB-PD spec, but you’re right that 5V @ 5A is not common because it is not required. At least it’s better than the Pi 4 was at launch? :D
I pulled up the actual USB power delivery standard[1] USB_PD_R3_1 V1.8 2023-04.pdf, and 5V 5A is perfectly compliant, albeit optional.
On page 805 you find Table 10-2 SPR Normative Voltages and Minimum Currents, which specifies that a USB PD source with a rating of 15 < x ≤ 27 watts *shall* support 3A at 5V, however it *May* advertise up to RoundUp (PDP/Voltage) to the nearest 10mA. Requires a 5A cable if over 3A is advertised. 27W/5 rounded to the nearest 10mA comes to 5.4A
The problem here is that a power supply offering 5V 5A is compliant, but a device requiring a 5V 5A source is not.
If a device needs 25W it is required to accept 9V 2.8A, if it wants to be PD compliant. This is precisely because 5V 5A is optional for a 25W source, so a device cannot rely on it being present.
It doesn't need it, on the blog they say that if you use a standard 15W USB supply, it (by default) limits the board's USB output current so it can't cause a power failure at 100% CPU.
Oh, I see, so 100% CPU with no USB devices can run fine on 5V3A? That's nice to know. I could just use a powered hub for USB devices then.
I wish they had an auxilary DC power connector of some sort though that could just power the Pi on straight up + and - from a DC power supply. Ideally anywhere from 5-12V.
The fins on the active cooler are the wrong orientation (the fan is blowing at the flat sides instead of along it). I'm curious why it was designed this way when so much effort was put into using a proper 4 pin blower fan and header.
It will probably work fine but it's something you notice just like how Dell put the heatsink on the IDRAC card in the R420 the wrong way, which would have significant impacts on airflow and cooling.
I suppose you have a point. It was probably extruded along the fins like this (coming straight in/out of screen):
__|||||||___(fan)____
Then they would have to CNC the edges off to create the mounting ears anyway and cut the slots in the fins. I suppose they could just make the gaps larger but this is probably getting into the details...
What is (or would be) the "Tsundoku" equivalent for Raspberry Pi?
I started with Pi-Hole a few years back but ended up with a commercial paid DNS resolver. The timeline usually goes like this -- will stumble on another interesting video of Jeff Geerling, then spend the weekend tinkering with the Pi, keeps running, forget about it, found it to be not needed, plugs off and is lying around.
I think it’s hard to generalize that into a phenomenon.
I have always bought 2 new raspberry pies with every release. I’ve used some and forgotten, unplugged some, given away some, broke some, and now they’re all used in some way.
I bought them because I knew I’ll use them. I didn’t buy any other random toys or mini computing devices (even though they were alluring) because I knew I wouldn’t use them.
There should be a name for the art of making every thing that randomly happens to some people into a phenomenon.
I do recognize GP, though. In college, I was obsessed with Linux. Nowadays I have a Macbook, and like you, have an Intel NUC (running Windows). I really don't need a Raspberry. But boy, do I need to resist the urge to get one.
I hadn’t enough resources to delve into Linux too much back then, and switched to macOS instead. Fast forward 15 years and I’m back to Linux and don’t enjoy my macOS time any longer. Windows, always despised.
I think it should be "The art of buying single-board computers and never running them once". I think the "once" is needed in the case of computers. They are as machines not directly comparable to books...
A book, like any media, fulfilled its initial purpose after it has been "consumed" - anything else (looks nice, feels nice, smells nice) are physical, subjective qualities attached to it. You might even buy it solely for these physical qualities, but that's besides the point.
A machine has its purpose in its usage, and that usage requires known resources that should not be carelessly wasted. I personally buy them to enable a utility for myself and have fun discovering it. It fulfilled its initial purpose even if it was powered on just once.
Even those single-board computers that were put to "good use", as building blocks for new devices (eg. [0]), are still not in use the whole time.
> I think it should be "The art of buying single-board computers and never running them once". I think the "once" is needed in the case of computers. They are as machines not directly comparable to books...
I have a few orange pi boards in a drawer that would disagree with you.
Because every machine you use requires maintenance whereas NextDNS [1] costs 2 EUR/month. The time wasted on maintenance alone is worth more, add to that the electricity bill.
Examples: I also use one with OpenWrt (though I'd prefer OPNsense on it), and I use one as PiKVM. I use one with a portable HackRF (3D printed case), batteries included. I use two with Pimoroni Enviro+, and I have a fun Turing Pi 2 homelab/miniNAS with 3 CM4s (one Jetson Orin Nano). I got two RPi4's one at my mother in law, one at my mother, allowing a VPN connection for tech support and also running Jellyfin with old content for them.
Personally, I still enjoy my Pi's (and no not all of them are on and used 24/7) however I also very much enjoy Proxmox and VMs. But the Proxmox machine is a Xeon... (HP MicroServer 10 Gen 10) the fan is loud af and difficult to replace with say a Noctua due to HP ingeniousness.
I have about 10 unused Raspberry Pis, so I collected unused monitors as well, and now run a mini code club in my local school. The school's laptops are all locked down to the point that running Python on them that this was the easiest way to provide a Python dev environment.
In my case at least, it's because Python has a strong ecosystem. Everybody's heard of it - parents, kids, and teachers. There are lots of good kid-friendly education materials.
Of course, that begs the question "how did that ecosystem develop in the first place?", but I can't answer that.
It doesn't require a person to change how they think about programming from their college C or Java classes, but is a lot simpler than those two languages.
Only quad core, no 16gb or 32gb ram option and pcie only available through a hat (and possibly slower than the usb3 port)? I was expecting a bit more to be honest.
They say that the silicon was "designed in-house" for the best possible performance. What does that mean, exactly? Does it have semi-custom ARM cores? That seems unlikely to me.
Its not the main SOC that was designed in house, it is an I/O processor. Which still sounds great. There is much more I/O throughput which has plenty of value for me (robotics).
It only feels like recently that you can pick up a RPi 4 used for the price they should've been new. Otherwise, scalped listings on eBay or Amazon have took over. I still want my first RPi but I already have associated them with being hard to buy and way more expensive than makes sense.
I would love to see a more side by side comparison of specs. 2-3x times the speed pretty good though. The raspi 4 was just on the cusp of being usable as a main computer, I wonder how good this will be.
I've used one in person. I would say that it has crossed the threashold. I've only played w/ it using a microSD card. Whilst the microSD card slot now has support for high-speed SDR104 mode (roughly twice as fast as the Pi4), I can only imagine that speeds will increase when connecting SSDs via PCIe.
They like to use JS benchmarking to do this. I forgot which exact benchmark they usesed (sorry)! The RPI4 was benchmarking ~50, the PI5 was scoring about ~130. They were saying the RPI5 was scoring equivalent to a 2015 MacBook Air.
> raspi 4 was just on the cusp of being usable as a main computer
I use a Pi 400 (running Debian) as my primary dev box and access terminal to the Internet. ^_^
It definitely works for me, but I fear that you will next tell us that you need to run software that isn't compiled for ARM (e.g. Adobe graphics suite) or to connect some specific hardware, such as a centrifuge that works only with Windows drivers.
I'm tired of information being vague, under-specified, or only available under NDA (if you're lucky). I'm not stupid enough to hop on this ride again.
Are there any fully open (in terms of schematics, firmware) RISCV rpi-"compatibles" out there? I'd be happy to pay triple the price of this thing for a power-efficient linux-capable sbc that is open.
"Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis, and like most general-purpose computers, it will perform best with active cooling. The Raspberry Pi Case for Raspberry Pi 5, with its integrated fan, is one way to provide this."
They pose a question themselves, and don't even answer it. Of course something will perform best with active cooling. Does it need it?
I don't need this wishy-washy marketing language from Raspberry Pi.
I think they answer your question in the PSU section “Raspberry Pi 5 consumes significantly less power, and runs significantly cooler, than Raspberry Pi 4 when running an identical workload.”
That's not documentation of any reasonable level though.
An MPU designer expects to see something like "200mA draw from the 1.2V power-domain when running at 400 MHz" or "10mA draw from the 1.2V power-domain when in first level of sleep". (Maybe not this small since Rasp. Pi is a more powerful chip, but... you know... actual specifics).
"Will my Raspberry Pi 4 power supply work with Raspberry Pi 5?
"Raspberry Pi 5 is a higher-performance computer than Raspberry Pi 4, and you may have problems using an under-powered supply. We recommend a high-quality 5W 5A USB-C power supply, such as the new Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C Power Supply."
The question asks about power requirements, but the answer is about performance?
The first time I read that I thought the 5 needs more power than the 4, not less.
But then you get 5V 5A ... 27W that is clearly incorrect too. So my guess is nobody is proofreading the technical specifications, and everybody that cares was kept away from that page.
You don't specify a PSU by its energy consumption. You specify it by output.
Also, that 92% efficiency, is believable, but a bit high for a 5V 5A PSU (this is a difficult combination). I would expect any such unity to be marketed as high-efficiency.
If you frequently work it really hard, it'll have larger temperature swings and may fail earlier, but it'll still probably last quite awhile. The failure is not likely to be catching on fire.
The answer is nuanced. It can run workloads somewhat faster and cooler than Pi 4 without active cooling. But it also can't reach close to its peak performance without active cooling.
pi5 with active cooler is about 1.2-1.5x faster than pi5 without cooler for most workloads that care than without.
Pi5 with active cooler is about 2-2.5x faster than Pi4. So Pi5 without cooler is probably about 1.5x faster than pi4, depending upon workload. (And more than this for quick bursts where thermal mass wins).
And if you dont have a heatsink and fan of sorts just use alternativing fingers on the cpu, they can still absorb about 10-15 DegC off the cpu temp and thats overclocking a 3b in the 1.35Ghz range. Surprisingly robust. Sadly cant get it to idle below .6Ghz yet, that needs more work.
But it makes wonder how much more phone manufacturers could squeeze out of their phones, although Apple are definately overclocking the 15.
"The combination of a newer core, a higher clock speed, and a smaller process geometry yields a much faster Raspberry Pi, and one that consumes much less power for a given workload."
They can't tell you how the board will behave on any random case you decide to put it on.
The uncased requirement is exactly what I'd expect to see there. Other than that, only if they decide to get really technical (they should) and tell you dissipating power / °C and temperature limits.
It depends on what "need" means. I'm pretty sure you can take a 400W TDP Threadripper and run it without active cooling. It will throttle down to run at whatever speed (well, TDP) that doesn't fry it. The Raspberry Pi does the same thing.
If your goal is to get the highest score on every benchmark, then yeah, you need active cooling. That has been true on every Raspberry Pi, I think. (I don't remember if the 1 needed active cooling. I did not have any. I also remember it taking over a day to recompile Linux! Still faster than setting up a cross compiler at the time ;)
And how hot does the bulb get? Googling yields "The surface temperature of incandescent light bulbs varies from 150 to more than 250 degrees" (https://www.pacificlamp.com/temperature-of-a-100-watt-bulb.a...). Which, googling says, is likely hot enough to damage a CPU.
150F is like 65C which loads of CPUs run fine at. Going past 212F (100C) is usually where you'll start having problems with a lot of common desktop processors.
I hate it when someone answers a yes/no question with something other than yes or no.
Here’s my proposed edit:
Q: "Does Raspberry Pi 5 need active cooling?
Original A: "Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis…”
Better A:
"For modest workloads, no. For heavier workloads, you will get better performance with active cooling. Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis…”
It literally tells you that you don't need cooling, but if you add it you'll get more performance.
I don't find it hard to understand what this means: the soc limits it's core performance based on thermal conditions and will throttle when hitting limit temperature. That's standard behavior on every computer or smartphone or GPU out there.
Make temperature lower and it will clock and run at higher speeds without throttling.
Beaglebone (from Texas Instruments) is more open, but still not as open as you'd probably like. Still, its a better balance than what Rasp. Pi organization has (more documents are available on AM335x, open-hardware for Beaglebone Green and reference designs, full chip specifications and the like). Beaglebone isn't really "more expensive", as much as its just "lower specs at the same price" though.
The "most open" are MPU chips and their associated "System on Module" boards. This isn't quite a SBC, but its easier to use than a BGA. These SoMs are very poor from price/performance perspectives, but instead serve as reference designs and/or prototypes to the $8 or $9 chips. The overall expectation is that you're "supposed" to be building your own PCBs eventually, so the SoM are kind of just a prototyping aid.
Most SoM provide 100+ pins from the chip as well, meaning you absolutely have to build a PCB to use them. However, 2-layer boards solder very easily to a SoM with castilliated edges (even with a hand-soldering iron)... albeit with a bit of flux and technique and practice. Its just the easiest way to deliver the most-pins of customization in the smallest space. So a relative beginer should be able to boot an SoM. The most difficult routing and Power-Delivery-Network details are already solved on an SoM, you just gotta apply power and build out the final interfaces / connectors.
Take the ATSAMA5D27-SOM1, 104-pins in a 40x40mm form factor. $50 from Mouser for 500Mhz and 128MB RAM (though fully open source and fully documented at linux4sam, and processor manual, U-boot process and everything). But the underlying SiP (MPU + DDR2 RAM) is like $15... while the MPU alone is like $8 and 128MB of DDR2 RAM is only like $3.50 in practice. Since in mass-production, you'd probably have a custom PCB anyway, that's the most expected use case. https://www.linux4sam.org/bin/view/Linux4SAM . I'd say that Microchip / Atmel's MPUs seem to be the best documented that I've found, but are unfortunately the lowest specs. Still, they also have some of the lowest power-consumption (like 200 mW or something), so really they're in a low-power class of their own. Still Linux though.
------------
STM32MP1 is the MPU from ST Micro. Like the Microchip SAM-MPU series, the STM32MP1 is available in SOM, SiP, and "raw" MPU form. Except the SOMs are like $100+, the SiP is like $50+, while MPU is $10ish.
-------------
I know NXP has a huge line of MPUs. I haven't researched them yet though.
---------------
I think all the hardware designers at this level just "assume" that their customers, if they care about "open source", are probably making their own PCBs.
If someone "just" wants a SBC (like the Rasp. Pi), there's not much point in publishing a ton of documents. People can just boot the Rasp. Pi and start messing with Linux.
-------
I got no experience with this yet. I'm just curious and am thinking of a simple MPU layout project ever since I discovered that OSHPark has 6-layer boards and KiCAD supports BGAs in practice. Overall, these lower-power lower-end MPUs fill a different niche than a Rasp. Pi ever would. But I feel like there's enough overlap that these might scratch your "open source" and "fully documented" itches.
I always thought the beaglebone had a better hardware design. The thing I first noticed was the female header pins - why would the pi have pins that can be shorted out?
the beaglebone pru is cool too.
But all of that pales in comparison to the huge mindshare the pi has, which makes all the difference.
Genuinely curious: why does their announcement upset you so much?
Most of the tech world announces products, executes a marketing strategy and then releases stock into the market.
You make it sound like someone left you standing at the altar. You didn't know it existed an hour ago. If you were on a long vacation, it might have released before your return. Why get angry?
Why do you assume this specific announcement is what upset me? Why do you assume this has anything to do with their product marketing strategy? Why do you assume I wouldn't have gotten angry even after they released the product?
Not only that, they wont even release all the information needed to it for certain applications. The x86 platform is far more open than raspberry pi ever was.
Any board based on StarFive's JH7110 is currently best in this regard, I think. Datasheet & reference manual for this SoC is available.
Especially their VisionFive 2 board. I've even downloaded a schematic for it (although older revision than actual board I have). And they're pretty good about upstreaming drivers.
That said: what you probably care about is documentation for integrated peripherals (esp. GPU), and existence of open source, mature drivers for those.
RPi is very good in this regard. Afaik the only binary blobs there is some GPU/SoC firmware, and (maybe) some boot code.
RPi's in general are very well supported & documented, and its software ecosystem is very mature compared to anything RISC-V based.
Could you pinpoint what you think is lacking there?
Other ARM based boards may offer more bang/$. Likely at the cost of documentation or driver support (Beagleboard being an exception).
This is exciting. I wish this would work without a fan, just with a good cooling system.
I say this because I love the idea of a full linux computer without a fan. I'm loving the Apple silicon machines at the moment for this. Perfect silent computing.
I wish it came as well in a larger board, with proper HDMI ports. There is a market for silent linux machines, I think!
The other day, I found myself in the interesting state of needing an x86 binary, but not having any x86 machines readily available. My (i)phone, laptop - apple silicon macbook, home server - raspberry pi, all run ARM! Previously, that would have been limited to just my phone, but, ah, time marches on
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 alternative that was not as much as a jump as those SSD flash drives or NVME drive. Maybe OS grade eMMC M.2 drives the size of those wifi cards?
Oh yeah, I've lost quite a few camera projects to these connectors with cables breaking, slipping out of the connector and whatnot. Maybe just a bad choice of cables, not sure.
FPC is used in billions of devices with perfectly fine robustness. As long as it isn't part of some flexible mechanism (e.g., a flex display, or something folding), it should be just fine. If you toss it into a box with the FPC flopping in the breeze then I'm sure it would be terrible, but... don't do that?
FPC is used in billions of devices-- that are professionally assembled, usually assembled only once, well-enclosed, and careful attention has been given to strain relief. It's cheap and compact and allows very small assemblies.
It's not so hobbyist/tinkerer friendly, where you're likely to put a lot of cycles on the connector, bend things back and forth, and end up with an enclosure that does not protect everything as well as one would like. Indeed, you have a sibling comment talking about breaking lots of FPC going to cameras.
Mechanical/connector failure is a small but noticeable share of the SD robustness problems on SBCs. I would expect FPC to be worse.
Again, this sounds overblown. Obviously the cables are somewhat fragile and you can't just be a brute with them... but the alternative is making a PCB that is much larger to accept a M.2 slot. It just isn't possible in the current footprint from what I can tell.
Also, other connectors for this type have surprisingly low durability. Most M.2 slots are rated for extremely low mating cycles. Amphenonol, who I would considered to be an high quality manufacturer, rates their M.2 slots for '25-60' mating cycles total. Less than 100. Most manufacturers do not even specify the number of mating cycles.
> but the alternative is making a PCB that is much larger to accept a M.2 slot. It just isn't possible in the current footprint from what I can tell.
I'm not saying they made a bad choice; they're facing a lot of constraints and have a lot of IO to get out while staying hobbyist friendly.
> Also, other connectors for this type have surprisingly low durability. Most M.2 slots are rated for extremely low mating cycles.
Sure, but I don't -need- as many mating cycles for M.2, as it'd be screwed to the board and done. Whereas if I'm dealing with a Pi stackup and coming in and out of the case, I'm likely to get through the couple dozen cycles I'm allowed with FPC. And if I'm putting it on a vibration-intensive environment like a quadcopter, I need to be pretty dang careful with mechanicals.
> Again, this sounds overblown.
Everything's a tradeoff. Flex is cheap and small and offers versatility. It's also delicate and annoying.
Agreed. I recently had the rather unpleasant discovery that when samsung called their SD cards “high endurance”, they actually meant 3-6 months, and that half of the video on my dashcam was missing.
"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, allowing users to attach NVMe SSDs and other M.2-format accessories."
As you keep spamming this here, did you read the HN Guidelines[0]?
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
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.
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.
I've recently stumbled upon a SBC with a M.2 slot... Then promptly closed the tab, to stop the temptation to get another shiny dust collector. But they exist.
This. I've had an always-on Pi 3 since 2016 and after countless random corruption issues from various micro SD cards, I moved to booting them from old USB2 flash drives, first an 8gb then an 16gb one. Never had an issue with them and they've been solid. I only had to mess with the flash drives when I had to do an OS upgrade.
Also, those micro SD cards were always fine after a format/partition and I can still use them in other devices just fine. I've read before that the Pi has a tendency to corrupt micro SD cards through its reader, and IIRC it's related to power issues.
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.
I use LibreELEC. I don't watch streaming TV, I have traditional cable and an HDHomeRun Prime box which acts as a cable-ethernet interface, which Kodi will happily connect to.
Raspberry Pi's don't use PXE boot, they have their own proprietary system. The kernel is fetched by TFTP, along with a config text file which species an NFS location to mount as root. Boot then continues from there.
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.
If an sd card is too slow and too unreliable for you, considering the full price of a raspberry pi (including case, fan, psu etc) you might be better served by some intel based small computer, like a thin client or some small form factor computer (hp, dell, lenovo have many models, that can also be acquired super cheap on ebay and similar).
It would be nice if there was just an improvement to reliability and speed of SD cards. I’ve used SBCs with eMMC built in (non-removable) and using them is a lot more complex compared to just flashing a new SD card image as needed. Based on the forums it takes a lot more effort for support as well, so from this point of view I’m not surprised raspberry pi has kept as cards as the main option.
I've had some really cheap cards fail but have mostly had better luck with name brands.
One of the things I do is to configure hosts to use the overlayfs (read only fileystem) where appropriate and that helps to reduce wear on the SD cards.
I don't use then where I want a responsive system and use USB/SSD or NVME/SSD instead.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 720 ms ] threadCustom cron job that uses:
https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/
- One early RPi I bought when RPi was very new to the market. I played around with it for a while and then I put it in a drawer.
- Months later I pulled it out of the drawer and started hosting my website on it for a while. I have since moved on from using RPi at home for hosting any of my sites. Might do again at some point in time.
- I use an SBC as one of the pieces of electronics that I use for controlling over 9000 LED pixels on a sculpture for which I created the light setup and programming. The LED strips we bought are from China and were supposed to be IP65 but even so we now have a bunch of the pixels showing only red, which is bad. No fault of the SBC. Also the SBC in this installation is not an RPi. But relevant nonetheless.
- I hooked up an image sensor with a lens to an RPi and put it in a surveillance camera housing, and added PoE to it. Currently not in use but would like to deploy somewhere in the future if given the chance to do so.
- I have an RPi that I have connected a 5TB drive to in an enclosure I bought from AliExpress. This RPi I both ssh into from my phone to download things for the future, and I also run a squid proxy on it via which one of my laptops connect.
Yup. That’s actually what I did :)
And then the reason I stopped hosting my site on my RPi was because I felt like, well if I depend on Cloudflare anyways, I might as well just use a VPS, or GitHub pages, or Cloudflare Pages :p
But there is something appealing in hosting things from home still. And doubly so when doing it without relying on Cloudflare etc
What I will do however, is that next time I set up some internet reachable hosting of content at home I will maintain one version of it that is directly served from the machine at home itself, and then I will keep an up to date copy of it on one of my externally hosted servers.
https://imgur.com/a/UhL4OuD
Connectivity can tilt towards RPi, you can do vpn, ipv6, mobile data (if you use a usb stick), ethernet etc.
Funny thing is that modern 3G/4G/5G modems are full System-On-Chip computers themselves supporting virtualization. The Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8916 is a popular SoC used for LTE dongles that runs the modem Baseband Real-time OS and Debian/Android OS on the same CPU.
If you mean a Raspberry Pi 1, try RISC OS.
Very un-Unix-like, predates Linux by nearly a decade. Single-core and goes very fast on a Pi 1.
https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/
Is that much processing power necessary? Not even a little, but hey now it hosts its own web UI (local network only).
Firmware (Elixir, nerves): https://github.com/benwilson512/coffee_time/blob/a49814e5d8a...
And last but not least just a Linux machine to ssh into to play around with.
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/january-2023-update-ne...
I have another PI in a drawer as backup. I replaced all of them with Odroid since it became nearly impossible to buy Pis. I wonder if they'll start to make them available again to normal people but I don't know if I'm trusting the company anyway.
- One for hosting low usage applications at home network (Unifi controller and some more).
- Octoprint (https://octoprint.org) connected to the 3d-printer.
- One on my desk for hardware hacking – mostly as just a PC with GPIO.
- Some wireless Raspberry Pi Zeros as security cameras.
A Rpi3 as an octoprint server for my 3D oeubter, including canera feed.
A friend uses his as a HomeAssistant server to monitor and manage his home lights, temperature and garden watering needs.
And I have one as a nifty remote KVM (TinyPilot) that we also use for work. Connect it to the Internet and a PC and you can control that machine remotely.
Also use it as a Windows RDP thinclient.
And to tinker on electronic projects.
Previously I've also used the RPi 3 running AirPlay and hooked up to external speakers as a poor man's Sonos.
I use a USB 3.0 Ethernet cable for the second port. It can keep up just fine.
Thank you for the laugh.
* Squeezebox music system
* Plex video library
* Homeassistant home automation
* Retropie gaming
* PiHole ad blocker (I have a second older pi running just this for redundancy)
* Running a couple of minor web services and scripts on cron jobs.
I also wired up my garage remote to it, so I can hit a web page to open up my garage.
https://youtu.be/cyh0QJT0rAQ?si=Tcf-CjcD8BFZgSDq
* Download agent (i.e. torrent, JDownloader, ARIA)
* Tailscale exit node
* Endlessh tarpit
* Sadly more reliable than my Mac Mini when running server workloads (lots of open SMB files crash MacOS)
And all of this at quite a low power dissipation, which is the primary expense in running a home server.
I don't do these things, but could:
* PiHole
* Kodi or Plex STB
* Add a hat and have an indoor air quality monitor or similar
One for Stratum 0 NTP server (using GSP module with PPS)
One for Home Assistant
One for monitoring the solar power at my cabin, using a 4G USB device to send data home.
The Home Assistant runs on a 4B, the others are using 3B's and a clone (NanoPi Zero).
Got some Pi 4's that I use for various Linux experimentation and such. Sometimes I find it easier to get a Pi 4 up and running than a VM, and other times I need the GPIOs.
- nextcloud
- django test environment
- pihole
- simple NAS
1. Mox mail server at home (PTR record set up with ISP) - https://github.com/mjl-/mox.
2. Web server (no external hosting hurray); TLS set up via LetsEncrypt.
3. Navidrome for streaming my music collection to my phone/computers. I ripped my thousands of CDs to MP3. I use subtracks on my phone for listening to it, and sonixd on my computers (Mac/PC). https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
4. mpd for driving some speakers via a USB audio interface so I can use some speakers plugged into the Pi for listening to music in the same room as the Pi (practicing guitar). I control this via the Supersonic app on my phone.
5. Wireguard VPN so I can connect home.
6. PiHole for my network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it means my phone is permanently connected to my home network and gets ad-blocking and stops apps dialing home. I use DroidHole on my phone to see what's going on.
7. xrdp server running, so a usable desktop is always available.
8. miniDLNA running connected to a NAS box so that I can watch all my DVDs easily on my TV downstairs (I spent weeks ripping them).
9. Tuya IoT API for turning some smart plugs in the house on/off via cronjob; I do this instead of using the timer in their app because it means my phone can be off the network/abroad and these plugs/lights still turn on/off.
10. linx-server (https://github.com/andreimarcu/linx-server) for sharing files so that I don't have to use Google Drive and share with people that way.
11. Peer Calls (https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls) so I can video conference in decent quality without having to use Google Meet / Teams etc. I also host a STUN and TURN server on the Pi so that Peer Calls works behind NAT.
12. Runs CUPS so that my very cheap Samsung wireless laser printer actually shows up as an AirPrint printer for my wife's iPad/iPhone and shows up in Android printing. (The printer does not natively have AirPrint capability but CUPS means I can provide it to users on the network).
It fetches time over NTP on a cron job. It also blocks various ASNs and IPs by country on a cron job to stop annoying remote pests and cloud providers. It also runs Monitorix so I can see system load, and goaccess on a cron job so that I can see who's hitting my website without having to resort to analytics nonsense.
It boots from USB3 (it has a NVMe in an IcyBox caddy).
Incredibly useful device.
At home I've got one for Home Assistant, one as a TV box because Netflix's sharing blocking check is only on smart TV apps. I've also got multiple as 3D printer controllers (klipper/octoprint).
[0] https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-cameras-nvrs/pro...
I will explore a way to use a RP4 or now RP5 for a local NAS that would be extensible and that could run more services and yool that my current QNAP TS-28A but I'm not very confident I will follow
* 1 CM4 for a PiKVM on my desktop (my main home server uses a proprietary iLO).
* 1 CM4 as router running OpenWrt, to replace my ER-Lite.
* 3 CM4s in a Turing Pi 2, one Jetson Orin for ML. This is my homelab. The CM4 are running Dietpi.
* 2 RPi4 as remote VPN (Wireguard) endpoints to do tech support for my mother-in-law and mother. Also serves as Jellyfin server containing old movies, and jumphost for NAS backup.
* 2 RPi0 2 W with Enviro+. One indoor, one outdoor (with different, custom 3D printed casings). Runs Raspbian, will switch these to Dietpi.
* 1 RPi3 for with my portable HackRF (with custom 3D printed case). Batteries included!
* 1 RPi0 W for Pwnagotchi. Not really used anymore but too cute to break.
* 1 RPi0 W for Pimoroni grow to track water management in plants (with 3D printed case). Need to get that project moving, it is for my mother.
All my Docker containers run on my main server but I'm considering to switch to my Turing Pi 2. I got solar, so the Xeon is OK for now, but still...
Then I got: 1 RPi3B+, 1 CM4, 1 RPi2B, 1 RPi0 W. I should sell as they're right now 'Raspberry Piles'. Won't use them. To be frank I'd like to upgrade the RPi3 with the portable HackRF at some point, and once I get a 3D printer I might need Octoprint so I suppose I could use one of these machines for that.
CM is the computer module, right? what kind of "board" do you use the CM4 with to use it as a router?
Right now it is hooked up on my switch. I intend to put it between my desktop and my switch and run some iperf3. Because I'll get fiber soon, and I'd like to be able to saturate that.
[1] https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2705.html
Pi4 for SSH server and general arm64 playground.
Pair of Pi4 running Ardupilot and OpenHD, one on my quadcopter, one driving the base station monitor and antenna tracker.
I have a raspberry pi running a spotify connect implementation outputting audio to the amp via usb. It sits there and silently (or, well, not so silently) works; it's great!
There's some mucking with alsa to get it set up, but under 90 minutes.
I'm kinda tired on not being able to buy a PI because the production is so limited...
To me the charm of the raspi ecosystem was always in giving you a very low power, "always on, almost no power draw" linux environment. Oh well, I guess there's always the older versions or the zero for that.
Jetson boards are much more expensive. We do plan on making a computer vision add on for our robot which uses the Orin or similar to process images, but I find the raspberry pi perfect for sort of stitching the whole system together.
"Raspberry Pi 5 consumes significantly less power, and runs significantly cooler, than Raspberry Pi 4 when running an identical workload. However, the much higher performance ceiling means that for the most intensive workloads, and in particular for pathological “power virus” workloads, peak power consumption increases to around 12W, versus 8W for Raspberry Pi 4."
The real unanswered question is, does it finally have a damn sleep mode so it can save power when idle.
Based on my experience with previous Pis, I bet you’ll be able to drop that even further by turning off unused board components at boot time.
It appears to depend on firmware or kernel but for recent kernels (recent 6.1 or 6.2) activelow is no longer necessary [1]. It seems to work on CM4.
PS: my bad I disabled the LEDs via /sys not /proc previously:
> # for i in /sys/class/leds/*; do echo 0 > "$i/brightness"; done
[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1742
The required lines were different between the Pi 2 and Pi 4 I was using at the time, and the documentation was not updated (or I'd found old docs).
An exercise in trial and error.
The same likely can be built on top of an RPi, using, say, wake-on-LAN signaling, or some GPIO as an interrupt source. You'll have to suspend your OS while idle for a prolonged time though.
My reading of that was:
"soft" = trigger an orderly OS shutdown, the same as if you executed `shutdown now` on the command line.
"hard" = cut power immediately, as if you just unplugged the power cable.
I dream of DIY'ing a laptop, and RPi looks like a great platform for prototyping that... until you realize there's just no sensible way to put it to sleep. Hibernate + aggressive boot time optimization?
Eventually though it didn't turn out to be much of an issue, SSDs boot real fast these days anyway and I can just do a full power cycle.
Jeff Geerling on YT has a great in-depth review of these options in his latest video.
And that's with a real SSD.
Either way, this is all history. Raspberry Pi boards do not cost hundreds of dollars as claimed.
Before that there was no need for a locator, just buy from whatever eshop, everyone had it in stock and at MSRP.
you not checking the site != people not being able to buy them
I'm not saying that it was easy, or anything like business as usual. They've done interviews where they talked about the difficult decision to prioritize companies that would go under without new stock over casual hobbyists. It's one of those unenviable situations where there's no good outcome, just a possibly less-bad one.
Not only are they expensive and relatively large, machines that have had previous owners often have mystery issues which make them great for home tinkering projects, less so for something that can get you in trouble if it breaks down.
There's a reason companies buy new parts instead of employing teams to scour Craigslist for deals.
https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Intel-N100-Computer-Desktop-D...
Faster processor, 16GB RAM, 500GB NVME SSD, with case. $165! That’s damn impressive, considering the RPi5 with 8GB RAM is suggested to sell for $80 (good luck getting it for that little). And Amazon can get it to me in two days.
Yeah it’s definitely bigger, but I wasn’t expecting these systems to be so cheap.
There was also the UP Board which was an Atom SOC with PI compatible GPIO. I believe that's still in production?!
https://up-shop.org/up-board-series.html
Then again that is severely dated, the Atom was a very capable processor... when it launched, almost a decade ago.
There are other cheaper boards for USB to GPIO out here as well.
Eventually those boards run into limitations and then you have to just opt to go with serial to a microcontroller which misses the entire point of having a SBC.
If you want a small PC for media/homelab server/cheap desktop, they don't make any real sense anymore.
Especially now that the RPI kind of need a fan and you need to buy the power supply, the storage and the case. Well the RPI has GPIO but for small home server use case nobody cares...
GPIO can be added via tons of USB to GPIO boards out there.
But I agree - lot of people tend to buy the Raspberry Pis for home servers instead of just opting for used mini-PCs from secondary markets. Even a 7-8 year old Intel CPU in those mini PCs will vastly outperform a Raspberry pi. Even the Raspberry 5. Plus, better I/O options and storage with mini PC.
Depends on the use case. USB adds a few orders of magnitude more latency and jitter versus what's probably just APB.
Most of the stuff just flashes LEDs or reads a switch. Doesn't matter for that. And for more intelligent stuff there's i2c or api which have their own interface boards.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/TRIGKEY-Mini-PC-Desktop-Computer/dp...
I have the above, it's max powerdraw is <5 watts, even at 50% cpu its <3watts. That comes with ram, SSD, case and motherboard. so to get the pi5 to the same state would need an SD card (boo hiss poor speed.)
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.
But that's all kind of crazy when cheaper, faster SBCs commonly simply boot to reliable, on-board, eMMC.
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)
I have had several SDs fail sooner or later since rpi1 though which is why I personally won't be using them any further.
The Pi 5 looks to be $112.
By the time I buy a PSU, SD card, case, RTC battery, etc, I'm definitely not saving money buying a Pi.
Disclaimer: Canadian dollars.
Jeff Geerling measured 11W peak board power running benchmarks. Idle power was measured at 1.8W.
They claim it will draw less power than the Pi4 for the same workloads.
Difference being if your workload now demands it, the increased power rating allows faster race to idle, and overall gain in power efficiency.
None of your 100W Anker or Apple power bricks will supply this. They'll do 12V3A, 12V5A, 20V5A, but not 5V5A.
Yet another piece of nonstandard USB-C equipment.
This is also very uncool, since powering it through the GPIO header with a capable PSU won't trigger the PD signal and makes it impossible to draw any meaningful current through USB? I hope this blockade can be worked around in the boot config.
In practice I doubt it would be a real problem since you'd need to max out both the USB draw and CPU load at the exact same time to get the full draw.
On page 805 you find Table 10-2 SPR Normative Voltages and Minimum Currents, which specifies that a USB PD source with a rating of 15 < x ≤ 27 watts *shall* support 3A at 5V, however it *May* advertise up to RoundUp (PDP/Voltage) to the nearest 10mA. Requires a 5A cable if over 3A is advertised. 27W/5 rounded to the nearest 10mA comes to 5.4A
[1]: https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-power-delivery
If a device needs 25W it is required to accept 9V 2.8A, if it wants to be PD compliant. This is precisely because 5V 5A is optional for a 25W source, so a device cannot rely on it being present.
I wish they had an auxilary DC power connector of some sort though that could just power the Pi on straight up + and - from a DC power supply. Ideally anywhere from 5-12V.
> LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM (4GB and 8GB SKUs available at launch)
This implies there will be either smaller or bigger SKUs at a later date. The 8 GB SKU of the Pi 4 wasn't available at launch, either.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/cdn/shop/files/PI_5_TOP_1500x1500....
It will probably work fine but it's something you notice just like how Dell put the heatsink on the IDRAC card in the R420 the wrong way, which would have significant impacts on airflow and cooling.
__|||||||___(fan)____
Then they would have to CNC the edges off to create the mounting ears anyway and cut the slots in the fins. I suppose they could just make the gaps larger but this is probably getting into the details...
I started with Pi-Hole a few years back but ended up with a commercial paid DNS resolver. The timeline usually goes like this -- will stumble on another interesting video of Jeff Geerling, then spend the weekend tinkering with the Pi, keeps running, forget about it, found it to be not needed, plugs off and is lying around.
[Tsundoku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku) (Japanese: 積ん読) is the art of buying books and never reading them.
I have always bought 2 new raspberry pies with every release. I’ve used some and forgotten, unplugged some, given away some, broke some, and now they’re all used in some way.
I bought them because I knew I’ll use them. I didn’t buy any other random toys or mini computing devices (even though they were alluring) because I knew I wouldn’t use them.
There should be a name for the art of making every thing that randomly happens to some people into a phenomenon.
I do recognize GP, though. In college, I was obsessed with Linux. Nowadays I have a Macbook, and like you, have an Intel NUC (running Windows). I really don't need a Raspberry. But boy, do I need to resist the urge to get one.
A book, like any media, fulfilled its initial purpose after it has been "consumed" - anything else (looks nice, feels nice, smells nice) are physical, subjective qualities attached to it. You might even buy it solely for these physical qualities, but that's besides the point.
A machine has its purpose in its usage, and that usage requires known resources that should not be carelessly wasted. I personally buy them to enable a utility for myself and have fun discovering it. It fulfilled its initial purpose even if it was powered on just once.
Even those single-board computers that were put to "good use", as building blocks for new devices (eg. [0]), are still not in use the whole time.
[0]: https://www.creativeapplications.net/objects/paragraphica-co...
I have a few orange pi boards in a drawer that would disagree with you.
Examples: I also use one with OpenWrt (though I'd prefer OPNsense on it), and I use one as PiKVM. I use one with a portable HackRF (3D printed case), batteries included. I use two with Pimoroni Enviro+, and I have a fun Turing Pi 2 homelab/miniNAS with 3 CM4s (one Jetson Orin Nano). I got two RPi4's one at my mother in law, one at my mother, allowing a VPN connection for tech support and also running Jellyfin with old content for them.
Personally, I still enjoy my Pi's (and no not all of them are on and used 24/7) however I also very much enjoy Proxmox and VMs. But the Proxmox machine is a Xeon... (HP MicroServer 10 Gen 10) the fan is loud af and difficult to replace with say a Noctua due to HP ingeniousness.
[1] https://nextdns.io/pricing
Of course, that begs the question "how did that ecosystem develop in the first place?", but I can't answer that.
It's a very clean language.
It only feels like recently that you can pick up a RPi 4 used for the price they should've been new. Otherwise, scalped listings on eBay or Amazon have took over. I still want my first RPi but I already have associated them with being hard to buy and way more expensive than makes sense.
They like to use JS benchmarking to do this. I forgot which exact benchmark they usesed (sorry)! The RPI4 was benchmarking ~50, the PI5 was scoring about ~130. They were saying the RPI5 was scoring equivalent to a 2015 MacBook Air.
Don't worry, software developers are on it. Soon the Pi 5 will also be on the cusp of being usable as a main computer.
I use a Pi 400 (running Debian) as my primary dev box and access terminal to the Internet. ^_^
It definitely works for me, but I fear that you will next tell us that you need to run software that isn't compiled for ARM (e.g. Adobe graphics suite) or to connect some specific hardware, such as a centrifuge that works only with Windows drivers.
Cheers!
This is game changer as TV box.
That said, LibreElec has been beta testing the RPi5 and will support it. Dev images are ready: https://libreelec.tv/2023/09/28/rpi5-support/
Are there any fully open (in terms of schematics, firmware) RISCV rpi-"compatibles" out there? I'd be happy to pay triple the price of this thing for a power-efficient linux-capable sbc that is open.
"Does Raspberry Pi 5 need active cooling?
"Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis, and like most general-purpose computers, it will perform best with active cooling. The Raspberry Pi Case for Raspberry Pi 5, with its integrated fan, is one way to provide this."
They pose a question themselves, and don't even answer it. Of course something will perform best with active cooling. Does it need it?
I don't need this wishy-washy marketing language from Raspberry Pi.
An MPU designer expects to see something like "200mA draw from the 1.2V power-domain when running at 400 MHz" or "10mA draw from the 1.2V power-domain when in first level of sleep". (Maybe not this small since Rasp. Pi is a more powerful chip, but... you know... actual specifics).
"Will my Raspberry Pi 4 power supply work with Raspberry Pi 5?
"Raspberry Pi 5 is a higher-performance computer than Raspberry Pi 4, and you may have problems using an under-powered supply. We recommend a high-quality 5W 5A USB-C power supply, such as the new Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C Power Supply."
The question asks about power requirements, but the answer is about performance?
The first time I read that I thought the 5 needs more power than the 4, not less.
Ermmm, what?
But then you get 5V 5A ... 27W that is clearly incorrect too. So my guess is nobody is proofreading the technical specifications, and everybody that cares was kept away from that page.
Also, that 92% efficiency, is believable, but a bit high for a 5V 5A PSU (this is a difficult combination). I would expect any such unity to be marketed as high-efficiency.
If you frequently work it really hard, it'll have larger temperature swings and may fail earlier, but it'll still probably last quite awhile. The failure is not likely to be catching on fire.
The actual info I'd rely upon at this point:
https://www.phoronix.com/benchmark/result/raspberry-pi-5-coo...
pi5 with active cooler is about 1.2-1.5x faster than pi5 without cooler for most workloads that care than without.
Pi5 with active cooler is about 2-2.5x faster than Pi4. So Pi5 without cooler is probably about 1.5x faster than pi4, depending upon workload. (And more than this for quick bursts where thermal mass wins).
But it makes wonder how much more phone manufacturers could squeeze out of their phones, although Apple are definately overclocking the 15.
"The combination of a newer core, a higher clock speed, and a smaller process geometry yields a much faster Raspberry Pi, and one that consumes much less power for a given workload."
A beefy heatsink case should be able to handle that.
I'm pretty sure what it means is that kids who use the pi on their desk don't need to spend on a cooler. It will probably throttle and run slower.
Meanwhile an adult using the pi could put on a cooler and wring lots of performance out of it.
> "Raspberry Pi 5 has been designed to handle typical client workloads, uncased, with no active cooling".
IMHO, uncased means you're doing maintenance or it's a toy, but it's not a 'production' configuration.
The uncased requirement is exactly what I'd expect to see there. Other than that, only if they decide to get really technical (they should) and tell you dissipating power / °C and temperature limits.
If your goal is to get the highest score on every benchmark, then yeah, you need active cooling. That has been true on every Raspberry Pi, I think. (I don't remember if the 1 needed active cooling. I did not have any. I also remember it taking over a day to recompile Linux! Still faster than setting up a cross compiler at the time ;)
Here’s my proposed edit:
Q: "Does Raspberry Pi 5 need active cooling?
Original A: "Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis…”
Better A: "For modest workloads, no. For heavier workloads, you will get better performance with active cooling. Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis…”
I don't find it hard to understand what this means: the soc limits it's core performance based on thermal conditions and will throttle when hitting limit temperature. That's standard behavior on every computer or smartphone or GPU out there.
Make temperature lower and it will clock and run at higher speeds without throttling.
The "most open" are MPU chips and their associated "System on Module" boards. This isn't quite a SBC, but its easier to use than a BGA. These SoMs are very poor from price/performance perspectives, but instead serve as reference designs and/or prototypes to the $8 or $9 chips. The overall expectation is that you're "supposed" to be building your own PCBs eventually, so the SoM are kind of just a prototyping aid.
Most SoM provide 100+ pins from the chip as well, meaning you absolutely have to build a PCB to use them. However, 2-layer boards solder very easily to a SoM with castilliated edges (even with a hand-soldering iron)... albeit with a bit of flux and technique and practice. Its just the easiest way to deliver the most-pins of customization in the smallest space. So a relative beginer should be able to boot an SoM. The most difficult routing and Power-Delivery-Network details are already solved on an SoM, you just gotta apply power and build out the final interfaces / connectors.
Take the ATSAMA5D27-SOM1, 104-pins in a 40x40mm form factor. $50 from Mouser for 500Mhz and 128MB RAM (though fully open source and fully documented at linux4sam, and processor manual, U-boot process and everything). But the underlying SiP (MPU + DDR2 RAM) is like $15... while the MPU alone is like $8 and 128MB of DDR2 RAM is only like $3.50 in practice. Since in mass-production, you'd probably have a custom PCB anyway, that's the most expected use case. https://www.linux4sam.org/bin/view/Linux4SAM . I'd say that Microchip / Atmel's MPUs seem to be the best documented that I've found, but are unfortunately the lowest specs. Still, they also have some of the lowest power-consumption (like 200 mW or something), so really they're in a low-power class of their own. Still Linux though.
------------
STM32MP1 is the MPU from ST Micro. Like the Microchip SAM-MPU series, the STM32MP1 is available in SOM, SiP, and "raw" MPU form. Except the SOMs are like $100+, the SiP is like $50+, while MPU is $10ish.
-------------
I know NXP has a huge line of MPUs. I haven't researched them yet though.
---------------
I think all the hardware designers at this level just "assume" that their customers, if they care about "open source", are probably making their own PCBs.
If someone "just" wants a SBC (like the Rasp. Pi), there's not much point in publishing a ton of documents. People can just boot the Rasp. Pi and start messing with Linux.
-------
I got no experience with this yet. I'm just curious and am thinking of a simple MPU layout project ever since I discovered that OSHPark has 6-layer boards and KiCAD supports BGAs in practice. Overall, these lower-power lower-end MPUs fill a different niche than a Rasp. Pi ever would. But I feel like there's enough overlap that these might scratch your "open source" and "fully documented" itches.
the beaglebone pru is cool too.
But all of that pales in comparison to the huge mindshare the pi has, which makes all the difference.
RP4 doesn't have LoRA like the Beaglebone Play. 3mile / 5km radios can do many things that RP can never do.
[1] Youtube Video on the RPi 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_QPM9xV_sw
[1]: https://cdn.geekbench.com/Geekbench-6.2.0-LinuxARMPreview.ta...
748 single / 1507 multi
Most of the tech world announces products, executes a marketing strategy and then releases stock into the market.
You make it sound like someone left you standing at the altar. You didn't know it existed an hour ago. If you were on a long vacation, it might have released before your return. Why get angry?
Why do you assume this specific announcement is what upset me? Why do you assume this has anything to do with their product marketing strategy? Why do you assume I wouldn't have gotten angry even after they released the product?
Especially their VisionFive 2 board. I've even downloaded a schematic for it (although older revision than actual board I have). And they're pretty good about upstreaming drivers.
That said: what you probably care about is documentation for integrated peripherals (esp. GPU), and existence of open source, mature drivers for those.
RPi is very good in this regard. Afaik the only binary blobs there is some GPU/SoC firmware, and (maybe) some boot code.
RPi's in general are very well supported & documented, and its software ecosystem is very mature compared to anything RISC-V based.
Could you pinpoint what you think is lacking there?
Other ARM based boards may offer more bang/$. Likely at the cost of documentation or driver support (Beagleboard being an exception).
https://www.phoronix.com/review/raspberry-pi-5-benchmarks
I say this because I love the idea of a full linux computer without a fan. I'm loving the Apple silicon machines at the moment for this. Perfect silent computing.
I wish it came as well in a larger board, with proper HDMI ports. There is a market for silent linux machines, I think!
What would be your dream linux fan-less setup?
I am quite satisfied using the Pi 400, a portable LCD display, and a wireless backlit keyboard.
I do like the Pi 400 and would be happy to see one configured with 8GB. Lovely little machine.
The Compute Module 4 series have been able to support eMMC chips, so I don't see why they wouldn't continue with the 5 if/when it shows up
It's a fiddly FPC connector though, which isn't a great contributor to mechanical robustness.
It's not so hobbyist/tinkerer friendly, where you're likely to put a lot of cycles on the connector, bend things back and forth, and end up with an enclosure that does not protect everything as well as one would like. Indeed, you have a sibling comment talking about breaking lots of FPC going to cameras.
Mechanical/connector failure is a small but noticeable share of the SD robustness problems on SBCs. I would expect FPC to be worse.
Also, other connectors for this type have surprisingly low durability. Most M.2 slots are rated for extremely low mating cycles. Amphenonol, who I would considered to be an high quality manufacturer, rates their M.2 slots for '25-60' mating cycles total. Less than 100. Most manufacturers do not even specify the number of mating cycles.
I'm not saying they made a bad choice; they're facing a lot of constraints and have a lot of IO to get out while staying hobbyist friendly.
> Also, other connectors for this type have surprisingly low durability. Most M.2 slots are rated for extremely low mating cycles.
Sure, but I don't -need- as many mating cycles for M.2, as it'd be screwed to the board and done. Whereas if I'm dealing with a Pi stackup and coming in and out of the case, I'm likely to get through the couple dozen cycles I'm allowed with FPC. And if I'm putting it on a vibration-intensive environment like a quadcopter, I need to be pretty dang careful with mechanicals.
> Again, this sounds overblown.
Everything's a tradeoff. Flex is cheap and small and offers versatility. It's also delicate and annoying.
250 MB/s is for PCIe 1.
"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, allowing users to attach NVMe SSDs and other M.2-format accessories."
As you keep spamming this here, did you read the HN Guidelines[0]?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmlI 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.
Those I’ve acquired this way worked well, those I’ve brought off online stores almost always had problems or short lives (or both).
Also, those micro SD cards were always fine after a format/partition and I can still use them in other devices just fine. I've read before that the Pi has a tendency to corrupt micro SD cards through its reader, and IIRC it's related to power issues.
Combined with a portable LCD, it's a low-power dev workstation on a battery. ^_^
One is an NTP server which gets the time from GPS, although that one will probably be retired soon, internet time works fine.
I used to have one inside a MAME cabinet but I upgraded it to a "real" PC because the Pi isn't really powerful enough for modern versions of MAME.
You need a server to host the ISO (via http/ftp/tftp or whatever you prefer) and a DHCP server that will distribute the ISO URI to the client.
Configure the client to boot from the network in the bios and put it in the same LAN as the dhcp server.
That's the gist of it.
99% of the time it's the verbose logging of application servers that is the culprit of sdcard failures.
https://github.com/azlux/log2ram
I had to do this when I was doing some long-running I/O intensive operations and it was basically killing the SD card storage.
One of the things I do is to configure hosts to use the overlayfs (read only fileystem) where appropriate and that helps to reduce wear on the SD cards.
I don't use then where I want a responsive system and use USB/SSD or NVME/SSD instead.