And Pi 5s are still hard to find. But it's getting better. I wanted (and got) one for myself and one for my grandson.
Edit: Too bad they didn't credit what I suspect was the original source for this information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lky4FSfbc1E. (Hopefully that's the right URL, An ad was still playing.)
None of the players here seem to have much to say for themselves. Not Broadcomm (maker of RPi cpu) nor Rockchip (maker of opi cpu) nor RPi nor opi.
RPi has had some very dedicated mostly independent contributors dragging things along. I think a couple have received some small sums for their work from the producing companies but miniscule amounts compared to the work. OPi seems further behind and again reliant on volunteer forces.
It's just so damned sad.
Also sad: the best arm boards available for under say $500 are some chips announced 2018 (Cortex A76). Even with Intel flat out not shipping new nodes for half a decade, they still have steadier better delivery pipeline than arm.
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 and I've found it to struggle with basic stuff that is fast and easily done on low end x86 machines. But you're right about the community. When I had trouble with playing videos (massive tearing and frequent frame drops), I was able to find online that I needed to run a very specific video player (VLC) in a very specific desktop environment (the XFCE or whatever they use by default) running on top of a 32-bit kernel (which has the hardware acceleration features not present in the 64-bit kernel) to be able to take advantage of the hardware video acceleration. Nice to know but given that that sort of stuff just works out of the box on pretty much any x86 box, I've decided that my next tiny home server will be a low end x86 box. I had high hopes given the rave reviews I see online but the reality is somewhat not even close to the hype. Still a nice piece of kit for something very simple but don't expect too much from it.
Beelink, Minisforum and others in the same category have awful, nearly nonexistent post-sales support, no bios/firmware updates, and it's not built to last like the NUC.
My home server is an Intel NUC 11, the cheapest, least powerful version. It has a dual core Celeron, cost around $200 with 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD. I put Debian on it, tweaked the fan curve so that the fan only spins under load, put the whole thing in an IKEA cabinet and forgotten about it. It just sits on the network, responds to SSH, runs whatever Docker container I throw at it. Zero issues. It didn’t come from a shady Chinese marketplace, didn’t need an esoteric charger, didn’t need a special distro or weird drivers, came in a nice cardboard box, with warranty, from the largest electronics retailer in the country. If you can’t tell, I’m still really happy about my purchase.
Sure. It's an x86 PC. It does PC stuff, and it does it in a manner not unlike other PCs have done stuff for decades. There's nothing special about it.
A Raspberry Pi (any versions, and their friends in the marketplace) is not a like a PC. It's a got a little ARM SoC. It's a lot smaller than your NUC -- it can fit into a normal pants pocket. It has easily-swapped storage, making brain transplants trivial. It includes weird interfaces, like for LCD screens and cameras, and also some GPIO that is included just for tinkering with and integrating into other projects.
It can do PC stuff -- of course it can. It has USB and HDMI ports (and Ethernet and Wifi), much as a modern PC might. It can run Linux (and a whole desktop OS) just as a PC can.
But it can also do other stuff that PCs don't generally do, and that PCs (examples like the awesome GeekPort on the BeBox[1] notwithstanding) have never generally done.
Your NUC was sold as a complete system (including an absolutely-required "esoteric charger") that can be unboxed, powered on, and immediately put to work.
A Raspberry Pi is sold as a bare board that -- by itself -- can't actually accomplish anything at all, just as a common PC motherboard also cannot accomplish anything by itself.
They're very different things, with potential use-cases that only somewhat overlap.
Why this is still an issue of contention after very nearly a dozen years of Raspberry Pi existence boggles the mind. I mean: Some people enjoy dining out (and may not even know how to cook), and some others grow their own food (and thus participate in every stage of its production and consumption by necessity).
Neither set of people are inherently wrong for choosing to do things their own way. Even if one set can't can't understand why the other set does things so differently, both are still perfectly OK.
If a person wants a prebuilt PC to do PC stuff with, then they should absolutely get a prebuilt PC (new with warranty, old, janky closet laptop, whatever) and do PC stuff with it. If a person wants a computer that can be (must be) tinkered with in a very hands-on way, then perhaps a learning- and tinkering-oriented SBC like a Raspberry Pi (new, old, 3, 4, 5, zero, Craigslist score, whatever) might be a better option.
For my own part: I own some PCs that I do PC things with. I also own some Raspberry Pis that I do more-hackish things with.
My Home Assistant rig runs in a VM on a (very cheap, used) small Lenovo M600 box, because I felt that this was the best way for me to accomplish my goal at the time. My usage of HA doesn't need any special IO, and I enjoy using VMs. It sits there and just works.
My DIY energy monitoring rig runs on a Raspberry Pi 3, because I felt that this was the best way to accomplish that goal at that time. The system I chose absolutely requires the Raspberry Pi's GPIO, and conglomerates as a very small contraption that is easy to co-locate near the circuit breaker panel. It sits there and just works.
I'm very pleased with these purchases. 10/10, they suit my own proclivities just fine. (If they didn't, then I'd like to think that I would have chosen differently.)
It's OK to have more than one kind of product in a marketplace.
I was directly replying to a comment from someone who was disappointed with their Raspi as the home server and was clearly going to choose something like a NUC next time. That's why I talked about my NUC. You seem to think I have issues with Raspi being available on the market..? I do not, in fact my Raspi lives in the same cabinet as my NUC and runs Pi-hole and a backup of Home Assistant.
Given the somewhat flaky nature of RPi's in terms of heat/load issues, and combined with the fact that they're quite slow I completely bypass them these days for cheap AMD miniPCs (x64). The Wo-We AMD Excavator A9-9400 unit has 8GB DDR4, a 128GB M2 drive, wifi, USB3, etc for $98USD. Despite how ugly it is it's still very good performance wise.
https://www.wo-we.com/collections/mini-pc/products/mini-pc-a...
a lot of people need the rpi to be something different than a media center that gets stuffed somewhere. 90% of the rpis I have at home are interfacing with something via pins, not just the usb hub. if I want to do something like that with the amd option then i'm back to some kind of usb device mated to that and another software layer that'll be undoubtedly more poorly supported than the rpi equivalent.
for something like a nas or media center though I absolutely agree with you.
Right, for me the RPi is the system to hook a breadboard up to or some other hardware if I don't want to drop down to a raw microprocessor or an audrino-like and don't need anything faster than what an OS provides.
I think there is a divide in the RPI community between electonic enthusiasts and those who just need a small portable PC (media center, game cabinet, NAS/server/etc)
No but with the raspberry you're not there without a power supply, case, cooling and storage.
Add them up and a Quad-Core N100 becomes equivalent. Here they're on Amazon for 180€ with 16GB ram and 512 GB storage. And cheaper options with less storage and ram (usually coupled with the sightly slower N95 chip)
It's not a pi and if you want to integrate it into electronics a pi is much better but for the "small mini server" usecase I don't see the benefit of going for a pi anymore.
This sums up Raspberry Pi to me. If I want to do something with a RPi there are probably a bunch of posts and videos related to it because of the incredible RPi community. Buy something like an ODROID and good luck. That's been my experience with non-RPi SBCs.
If you need more than RPi, then a proper open platform like x86/x64 is really your only other 'community' option usually.
I was actually looking into the Orange Pi this weekend... the driver situation remains a deal killer for me. Sadly the Raspberry Pi offers crap hardware with almost good drivers while most of the other SBC's offer good hardware with crap drivers and/or binaries only for specific kernel releases. It's impressive how actively bad ARM is for anything remotely user facing on Linux... nVidia wasn't even this bad for this long.
The older RK3399 boards are basically mainlined. The PinePhone Pro uses a variant of that SoC, the RK3399S. But it's an older SoC these days. The open source Panfrost GPU drivers for that are great though: full desktop OpenGL support! Not just that OpenGLES stuff.
Right, that's the problem: getting mainline support while the processor is still relevant rather than years after the fact... if at all.[1] Also, the bar has moved. OpenGL was good enough 10 years ago. What about OpenCL? Vulkan? NPU support? HDMI in? etc. (I'm very interested in the functionality the 3588 offers but not if that functionality is just on paper with the hope that maybe someday someone gets it working or if I need to run a cobbled together kernel build that won't see meaningful updates)
[1] There have been plenty of devices where someone was working on drivers and then the developer moved on or a new revision was released etc and the original thing never gets the support people bought it anticipating.
I've got a few Orange Pi boards, but I think the rPi 5 does slot inbetween Orange Pi's offerings. The Orange Pi 5 is definitely nicer hardware, with an NVME M2 slot and rockchip's NPU (which I want for Frigate object detection on my home security cameras). But it's easily 100$, double the price of a rPi 5.
Their lower end board is in a more similar price point to the Raspberry Pi, the Orange Pi 3B with a Rockchip RK3566. And it is slower than the Raspberry Pi 5 in benchmarks I've seen. Though if you don't mind ordering from Aliexpress, it's more in the Pi 4's price range there and does beat out that in performance. It also has an NVMe slot which is why I picked it for my use.
Unfortunately it's also lacking a maintainer for Armbian: https://www.armbian.com/orangepi3b/ . With how fast they drop board support, I'm wary about long-term support from Orange Pi without Armbian. I've got an Orange Pi 4 (not the 4B or 4 LTS which are different) that they haven't released a new image for in years. Meanwhile Raspberry Pi OS still supports the rPi 1. Also ignore the order of numbers, the Orange Pi 4 is older and slower than the Orange Pi 3B.
This! I recently had to rig something up in an emergency: Did a `pacman -S rpi-imager` since that's what Google says the kids use these days (it's new to me!), selected the RPi4, selected the headless Armbian, gave it my ssh public key, entered WiFi credentials and hit go. Then realized I could not find that lovely 3A USB power supply, and couldn't get one since it was saturday night.
Next I messed around with an old OrangePi just to realize they never updated the Armbian (even though I got the device tree into the Kernel!). Downloaded the ancient image from their Google Drive, got BalenaEtcher running again (its not in my repos) and then figured the SBC must be fried anyway.
Luckily I remembered that I still had a RPi1 that was collecting dust and should work with any old USB charger. Checked `rpi-imager` and indeed, it supported that old thing! Created the SD card (config was still saved), grabbed an old USB WiFi adapter and powered the thing up. And it just worked :)
The emergency was: My 20m USB extension cord with the zigbee coordinator failed after 2y, and I could not turn on a few of our lights. Using `usbip` I now forward it to the automation server from that RPi1 (I initially didn't think about the RPi1 since I wanted to run zigbee2mqtt on the device, but eventually found out about usbip). Bonus 1: I still have the spare RPi4 that I wanted to attach to the 3D printer because I could re-use the old one :) Bonus 2: I now know that rpi-imager has a ready-made Klipper image and I don't need to set it all up by hand.
Next time I consider getting another SBC, it will be an RPi again.
I've rebuild part of my Delta the last few evenings and today it had it first print since ~1.5y: The humble pressure advance calibration cube for Klipper; but with PETG [which I couldn't print before, but was all I had left] on a new bed, with new glass surface, on self-designed & resin printed mounts, with higher speed than I previously used (100mm/s)... - with other words, I did expect it to just fail, but it worked reasonably well! Dimensional calibration is next, and I'm waiting for the accelerometer to add resonance compensation.
This was a great decision! Created a USB stick for the RPi4 with Mainsail OS. No display necessary, just connected Ethernet (WiFi did not connect, didn't debug though). The printer setup was really easy, though I had to adjust the template configuration for my hardware modifications (mostly tmc2130). Most actual effort was in reworking parts of the hardware (remove case, solder new build plate, design and test the mounts, fix bad soldering that only caused half the heat plate to heat up [good bless thermal cameras!]). Overall, the UX has increased tremendously since I first heard about Klipper (IIRC Kevin just added delta support back then). I think the Mainsail UI has a huge impact on UX. Especially manual calibration of the delta kinematics with the Mainsail web UI is a delight. I scrapped getting piezo probes or stuff like that (for now).
Running with iPhone/Mac charger.. the desktop shows notification about “Power supply not supporting 5A” and runs Ok until I try to play a video on YouTube, then it simply reboots.
And yes it’s nearly impossible to find 5v5a power supply in India.
It does support USB-PD. It just doesn't do it in a way that many USB-PD power supplies work with.
Whereas lots of USB-PD devices (at each end) will negotiate higher voltages in order to accomplish greater power delivery, the Pi 5 only ever wants 5V -- not 9V, not 12V, 15V, not 20V, and not PPS.
Ideally, it wants up to 5A of 5V.[1]
And many (I dare say "most," or "nearly all") USB-PD power supplies top out at 3A when in 5V mode.
Also: Getting 5A of USB-PD also requires a special e-marked cable because that's getting into the realm of current flow where things can get melty. A dumb cable will never be expected to transmit 5A of current with a USB-PD device at each end.
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The Pi 5 still can still work even if it can't detect that it is running from a 5 Amp-capable supply, though. It may be slower (due to detected voltage sags), and there will be less power available for USB devices attached to the Pi (which can be toggled in config.txt). But it can work.
It can also be powered through the GPIO header, just as other models in the past: Nothing prevents those who think they know what they're doing from using whatever they have laying around that they think is adequate, and just powering the device up in full capacity.[2]
Isn't more than 3A at 5V out of USB-PD 2 and 3 spec? You can set max 3A amp for USB PD with just placing a 5.1k resistor on each USB CC line without the need for a USB PD IC.
If you need more you would need to request for example 20V at 5A and then buck convert it down to 5V. Not ideal but you can at least pull the current you need through thinner cables and you also have enough to power external USB devices.
The “normal” way to support 25W would be to support 9V 3A input, giving 27W adapters functionality. Or possibly accept multiple options such as 9, 12, and 15, and then buck any of those down to the system voltage needed. The 5V5A is because raspberry pi org is being cheap/lazy and doesn’t want to design or pay for a power converter to handle that on the pi, and instead is pushing that complexity/cost to the user via an overpriced and nonstandard supply.
>And many (I dare say "most," or "nearly all") USB-PD power supplies top out at 3A when in 5V mode.
5 A at 5 V seems to be sufficiently unusual for USB-PD that Wikipedia's section on the specification doesn't mention it as being part of the specification at all, giving 3 A as the maximum in the specification for 5 V, and only mentioning 5 A with EPR and marked cables at higher voltages [1]. Discussions about 5 A at 5 V seem to come up essentially only in the context of the rpi5, and there most references seem to be to footnotes in the specification mentioning that more than 3 A can be advertised if a 5 A cable is detected. The rpi5 also apparently doesn't support 5 A at 5 V with PPS; it only supports it as a fixed voltage profile.
The result would seem to be that essentially no USB-PD power supply other than theirs, and one other SBC power supply, actually offers 5 A at 5 V in a way that the rpi5 will accept.
It is unusual. I'd even go as far as to say that it is an awful and stupid decision to do this at a time when USB-PD operating at higher voltages is finally becoming somewhat commonplace (common, as in: we might have extra junk laying around that can do it), but I'm not trying to make 90,000 widgets per month and build them down to a price.
But a casual Google search where I am located at least two alternative suppliers that are already shipping appropriate power supplies that can do 5@5.
And the usual (US) distributors (places like Adafruit and also places like Digikey) are selling the official power supply for $12, which I personally consider to be very cheap.
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And remember, wanting peculiar power supplies is normal in the RPi space. The very popular Pi 3 was weird (5.1V@2.5A over MicroUSB, with many unofficial recommendations suggesting 3A), for instance -- in a world where common "high-power" USB power bricks topped out at 5.0V@2.4A on a good day, with the wind from the South, and under the direction of an unladen sparrow.
Many of us are familiar with the struggles that this entailed as we worked on whatever we were working on. But other suppliers did come to the front and offer alternative products that reliably delivered 5.1V@3A, and there's no indication that this won't be the case for this round as well -- especially if they're able to produce the quantity of RPi5s that they say they will.
At a projected 90k units per month, then: Every 7 seconds, an opportunity to sell another RPi5 power supply opens up.
(The Pi 4 has a different version of the same story.)
> It is unusual. I'd even go as far as to say that it is an awful and stupid decision to do this at a time when USB-PD operating at higher voltages is finally becoming somewhat commonplace (common, as in: we might have extra junk laying around that can do it)
Not even "junk drawer gear". USB-PD is recent enough that any gear supporting a good cross-section of that spec will be recent if not brand new.
As 1 data point: I recently bought a USB-C power adapter that supports USB-PD up to 35W at a variety of voltages & negotiation methods.
A RPi5's power needs are well within that 35W. And yet, beside supplying 5V @3A (which comes with its own set of issues / limitations), it'll be largely useless as a RPi5 power supply. Regardless of cable used.
Many USB-PD power bricks will be in same boat. So indeed this is a stupid design decision on RPi's behalf. I've read & understand their rationale for that decision. But it doesn't make it less stupid. Other SBCs use USB-PD as intended (in this case, @ higher voltages like 9, 12 or 15V, or even variable) no problem, and without needing special 5A rated cables. The onboard electronics / ICs to do this are cheap & plentiful.
Okay - RPi's rationale is an excuse. Not a good one. Supplying a 5V/5A brick themselves, doesn't do much to paper over that fact.
The issue isn't the cables. It's the USB pd wall adapters, that usually use the same broad range of USBPD ICs and those rarely support 5v5a. So you are fundamentally limited to almost just some raspberry centric hardware since no one else uses that USB PD level.
With 5V @ 5A the heat isn't the only problem, you also have a relatively higher voltage drop to contend with. Which the raspberry is also known to be pretty sensitive to. I imagine that will need even thicker cables to work reliably than 20V@5A.
Wow, that's rough. I use a set of raspberry pi 4Bs as a k8s cluster (with an SSD over USB, otherwise etcd crashes cause the storage is too slow).
Luckily I have 5 of them (and a k8s cluster is fault tolerant), because the USB disk randomly does not get enough power -- the voltage drops a lot even pulling 2-3A out of most chargers, I can't imagine doing 5 (the USB cable resistances start to become a factor at higher amperages).
Hi! How's that working for you? I have a similar cluster, but for CEPH specifically and I couldn't bear the hassle (supposedly hassless updates stuck, until I cleaned up some dirs as a root etc.)
It's been working fine. I have the pi's set up to reboot on disk failures, which fixes 99% of the problems (looking at the up time, ony node still reboots once ever 3 weeks or so), and the pods just get migrated, it's not a huge deal.
I use longhorn though, not CEPH, and it's been relatively painless.
If you have a cluster, why not just buy a single decent power supply for everything? You can even find good quality ones even on aliexpress, like meanwell lrs-350 (5V, 60A output) for ~$40 on aliexpress and a bit more locally.
(not afilliated, just use them a lot for 12v systems)
In some situations power delivery to the Pi is not the issue. It is power delivery from USB to the SSD. I ran into this myself and it was weird.
* When the Pi 4B first came out, I connected a cheap Inland (Microcenter house brand) SSD, booting from that, and it ran fine for a while. (Months?) "Better" SSDs like Crucial MX100 had problems under heavy load and I suspected that the instantaneous power demands of the SSD were not met by the USB port on the Pi. (The Pi 4B supports UAS and older Pis did not and the older ones never had problems with USB connected SSDs.)
* At some point it started to run into difficulties with the SSD disconnecting under heavy load, requiring a power cycle to restore operation. At that point I began using a powered USB hub to work around this.
* Recently a user on some forum (which I have forgotten) suggested that one particular SSD model from Kingston worked fine w/out the need for a powered hub. I acquired one and tested [1] and found this to be true. Just for grins, I also tested some other SSDs that had previously only worked with a powered hub and they worked fine when directly connected.
This leads me to believe that the RpiOS folk have been tweaking some settings in the "firmware" [2] that have modified the power delivery from the USB ports.
[1] Testing involved running several disk benchmarks as well as 'stress-ng' to load the storage as much as possible.
[2] I'm unclear what the Rpi folk mean by "firmware". As an embedded systems developer "firmware" is something written to non-volatile solid state storage like flash or eeprom but when I updated firmware on a Pi, it installed a new kernel too.
The Raspberry Pi 5 does support USB-PD. There aren't very presently very many USB-PD chargers that support the 5A@5V mode that it prefers, but they do exist.
And like what happened with the Raspberry Pi 3s and 4s (which also had somewhat peculiar power desires and also did not include a power supply), additional third parties will come forward to produce their own versions of Raspberry Pi 5 power supply. (It's only natural, and history supports this happening.)
But even on a desert island: It can be powered through the GPIO header just like all other previous versions, if that's what you want to do. Just put a reasonably-stable 5V supply on there that can output 5A, and power it up. No big deal.
Also like with previous Pis: A person is also free to goof around with using whatever USB bricks they have laying around. Might work, might not -- but it's a device that is intended to be a learning tool.
Or: Buy a kit from a kit-maker like Vilross or something, if you need accessories included all in one box.
(At any rate: Raspberry Pis have always just been bare boards, not complete systems.)
The most difficult soldering I've ever done was swapping an ATMega 2560 chip between two boards with a very basic hot air station, and that one still doesn't work right (but it works well enough to be useful).
The QFP or the BGA version? Either way, that's already pretty impressive to me, I probably couldn't do it. The best I've done so far on that front is fixing a board that had a layout error which caused the pads of a USB connector to be offset by bridging the gap with individual strands of copper. I also hope to never have to do something like that again :)
As far as I know more than 3A at 5V is out of USB spec and should require the use of USB-PD negotiating 20V or so at 5A and then buck convert that down to 5V.
USB-PD rev 3.1 supports 5A at 5V with electronically marked cables. It's not a requirement to support it, and it's rare to find in the wild, but it's within the spec.
I love the Pi Foundation's weird cabal of doing things the non-standard way like throwing things like 5V5A or Micro HDMI.
Makes things so much more convenient when you have to stop everything to hunt for the right dongle or power adapter and can't just use-what-you-have :)
Raspberry really needs to pick up the pace to compete with newer (albeit more expensive) SBCs with Intel N100 and similar processors. The TDPs are very comparable, but the x86_64 still blows it out of the park performance-wise. Also, software support is a non-issue on Intel platforms, which still is not the case for Arm platforms.
On non-accelerated tasks the performance is very close[0] and at half the idle power consumption. For the specific case of a low-power always-on platform, it's still the best.
I'm not sure based on what exactly you think the performance is very close (video is a terrible way to present information), but in the benchmark shown at the end of the "CPU Performance" section, the Intel beats the Pi by almost 3x.
Probably not. However, a large portions of their customers are integrating them into industrial products because of their cost-effectiveness or scalping them to sell at a markup.
I think the RPi is more of a jack of all trades, master of none. This also applies to performance. It bundles an impressive amount of partially niche, but overall well supported, features (Linux, USB3, gigabit ethernet, okish wifi & BT, HDMI with CEC, GPIO, camera, okish GPU) with a powerful enough CPU and enough RAM for an acceptable price.
If you want the traditional desktop experience or a higher workload server, the RPi is likely not going to win against an N100 SBC or mini PC. For many applications besides that the RPi fits the niche of powerful enough to run it, power efficient enough to not worry about it running all the time, cheap enough to not worry too much and common enough to be well supported. Things like single-purpose software packages/distributions are often better supported on an RPi, just because it has become the "standard". Sure, you might find hardware better suited for each use case, but it seems like the RPi can handle most of it and thus becomes the default choice.
As an example, I recently tried out an N100 mini PC to drive my living room TV instead of an RPi4. I liked the option of having a fully featured desktop with decent performance just in case (most importantly Firefox). Plus the N100 on paper has more video decoding options, either via HW decoders or just by virtue of handling more via software decoding. In practice, these advantages were irrelevant for my primary use case (watch movies, series & long-form YT videos). But, I lost out on "it just works" features. The RPi4 just boots into Kodi (via LibreELEC) and works flawlessly with HDMI CEC, the N100 does not have any CEC capability (missing HW feature). Sure, I can use an external USB dongle to get CEC support, but after buying that I am at a far higher price than for the RPi4 + SD card + good power supply + simple case.
Side note: the RPi4 also beat a Pine64+ for that use case, just because I couldn't get the board to play nice with LibreELEC. No CEC and no wifi, even after tinkering for far too long.
Well, intel CPUs have always been jack of all trades as well and the software support is the best so far to this date.
What scares me about those ARM SBCs is the lack of software support, especially when it comes to GPU acceleration. They perform very well in headless mode, but on graphics they all still lag far behind.
One day (maybe another couple of generations of SBCs) will be better, but we are not there yet.
How's the heat on the 5s? I've been a bit disappointed at how hot RPi4 was getting (and how much power it's using) while essentially idling - with CPUs parked at 300Mhz it still runs at 50C+ while passive, which is... a lot.
I wonder if it’s due to Linux? Are there other operating systems designed for efficiency? I look at what smartwatch makers are able to do with a tiny battery and think there has to be a way.
Yeah, that's actually what I'm asking - phones and watches have SoCs that can idle at much lower power uses while RPi SoC seems a bit wasteful. Was that improved with RPi5?
You need active cooling if you want to extract all the performance out of it. The standard cooling kits sold by Raspberry Pi are neat and cheap though, so not a problem in my experience. They have two options: A case with a fan on top, and a small heatsink + fan combo. The fans run at variable speed, so generally pretty quiet.
Are there really significant use-cases which require both a higher performance processor and GPIO pins? I imagine at this point there is value in splitting the product line to tailor towards "mini Arm server", and "IoT/robotics" users separately.
Any specific questions? It's a home/office automation project, it's for fun and learning, we started it during a hackathon at my company. It does things like close the window blinds or turn off the lights with funny remarks in response.
Application Frameworks tend to become quite heavy (think Electron on X11, event QT) where most activity on the processor is rendering and business logic wise in some UI flows while once in a while, local data is collected (like temperature, humidity or your custom sensors).
Think a terminal in a Museum with lights, think a local hotspots with sensor and connected (normal tablets), think a ECG machine, ... . Use Cases there are enough, whether other criteria (like quality/reliability) are sufficent, is another story).
Yes, a lot. Also, the GPIO pins are there just because they are, and why not? There's enough pins, why not route them out?
You need gpio pins for random kiosks (web access, photo printing/scanning, etc. to control the leds, lights, etc., even coin slots), retro arcades (to get input from joysticks, buttons, etc.), robotics (camera for video, a lot of cpu for processing, gpio pins to control the movement), advanced sensor boards (where the processing is done on the device), smart home stuff, etc.
"Back in my time", we used to use parallel ports for that... 8 very limited gpios were enough to drive a few leds or read some data from an external device.
I gave up on Raspberry Pi and have just started buying refurbished small form factor ThinkCentre models with i7 processors, adding my own SSD. They’re cheap for what you get, easily serviced, and _everything_ is available on x86-64 anyway. I haven’t been able to find a Raspberry Pi to purchase in years. There obviously have been, but never from a retailer I trust when I need one.
Thanks for the advice! This looks exactly like what I've been looking for as a home server.
Have you by any chance tried a dual SSD installation for the RAIDZ/RAID1?
The Pi 2's I had were hit or miss and had hardware issues, and ended up repurposing an old laptop to fill in for it. Worked fine, and had decent luck buying older laptops off of kijiji / craigslist / fb marketplace and using those in lieu of Pi's.
Outside of GPIO that's on the Pi's, the laptops are fine, and though a little more expensive they can also run more powerful VMs, have cooling, and can do x86 stuff.
Surprised they're moving so many. There are much better spec'd SBCs available at a +30% price point. (e.g. 32gb orange pi 5+)
The only advantage a pi 5 has is good ecosystem, but if you're not after performance then you can get that with a 2nd hand pi4 - that has the pins and software.
I don't get it but I'm all for SBC ecosystem seeing growth & enthusiasm of any kind.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadEdit: Too bad they didn't credit what I suspect was the original source for this information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lky4FSfbc1E. (Hopefully that's the right URL, An ad was still playing.)
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/raspberry-pi-5-shorta...
RPi has had some very dedicated mostly independent contributors dragging things along. I think a couple have received some small sums for their work from the producing companies but miniscule amounts compared to the work. OPi seems further behind and again reliant on volunteer forces.
It's just so damned sad.
Also sad: the best arm boards available for under say $500 are some chips announced 2018 (Cortex A76). Even with Intel flat out not shipping new nodes for half a decade, they still have steadier better delivery pipeline than arm.
Hot take: If I need something more powerful than an RPI then I'm shooting for x86.
A Raspberry Pi (any versions, and their friends in the marketplace) is not a like a PC. It's a got a little ARM SoC. It's a lot smaller than your NUC -- it can fit into a normal pants pocket. It has easily-swapped storage, making brain transplants trivial. It includes weird interfaces, like for LCD screens and cameras, and also some GPIO that is included just for tinkering with and integrating into other projects.
It can do PC stuff -- of course it can. It has USB and HDMI ports (and Ethernet and Wifi), much as a modern PC might. It can run Linux (and a whole desktop OS) just as a PC can.
But it can also do other stuff that PCs don't generally do, and that PCs (examples like the awesome GeekPort on the BeBox[1] notwithstanding) have never generally done.
Your NUC was sold as a complete system (including an absolutely-required "esoteric charger") that can be unboxed, powered on, and immediately put to work.
A Raspberry Pi is sold as a bare board that -- by itself -- can't actually accomplish anything at all, just as a common PC motherboard also cannot accomplish anything by itself.
They're very different things, with potential use-cases that only somewhat overlap.
Why this is still an issue of contention after very nearly a dozen years of Raspberry Pi existence boggles the mind. I mean: Some people enjoy dining out (and may not even know how to cook), and some others grow their own food (and thus participate in every stage of its production and consumption by necessity).
Neither set of people are inherently wrong for choosing to do things their own way. Even if one set can't can't understand why the other set does things so differently, both are still perfectly OK.
If a person wants a prebuilt PC to do PC stuff with, then they should absolutely get a prebuilt PC (new with warranty, old, janky closet laptop, whatever) and do PC stuff with it. If a person wants a computer that can be (must be) tinkered with in a very hands-on way, then perhaps a learning- and tinkering-oriented SBC like a Raspberry Pi (new, old, 3, 4, 5, zero, Craigslist score, whatever) might be a better option.
For my own part: I own some PCs that I do PC things with. I also own some Raspberry Pis that I do more-hackish things with.
My Home Assistant rig runs in a VM on a (very cheap, used) small Lenovo M600 box, because I felt that this was the best way for me to accomplish my goal at the time. My usage of HA doesn't need any special IO, and I enjoy using VMs. It sits there and just works.
My DIY energy monitoring rig runs on a Raspberry Pi 3, because I felt that this was the best way to accomplish that goal at that time. The system I chose absolutely requires the Raspberry Pi's GPIO, and conglomerates as a very small contraption that is easy to co-locate near the circuit breaker panel. It sits there and just works.
I'm very pleased with these purchases. 10/10, they suit my own proclivities just fine. (If they didn't, then I'd like to think that I would have chosen differently.)
It's OK to have more than one kind of product in a marketplace.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox#GeekPort
a lot of people need the rpi to be something different than a media center that gets stuffed somewhere. 90% of the rpis I have at home are interfacing with something via pins, not just the usb hub. if I want to do something like that with the amd option then i'm back to some kind of usb device mated to that and another software layer that'll be undoubtedly more poorly supported than the rpi equivalent.
for something like a nas or media center though I absolutely agree with you.
I think there is a divide in the RPI community between electonic enthusiasts and those who just need a small portable PC (media center, game cabinet, NAS/server/etc)
Add them up and a Quad-Core N100 becomes equivalent. Here they're on Amazon for 180€ with 16GB ram and 512 GB storage. And cheaper options with less storage and ram (usually coupled with the sightly slower N95 chip)
It's not a pi and if you want to integrate it into electronics a pi is much better but for the "small mini server" usecase I don't see the benefit of going for a pi anymore.
The grandparent comment said you could get an N100 for the same price, but they are all more expensive no matter how you look at it.
That is sure a nice system for the money! Wow. I will check if I can get those in Europe.
If you need more than RPi, then a proper open platform like x86/x64 is really your only other 'community' option usually.
Pine64 does have a newer QuartzPro64 that they're also working on mainline support for. The Orange Pi 5 uses the same SoC. And yeah support isn't there yet, but I'm hopeful: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...
[1] There have been plenty of devices where someone was working on drivers and then the developer moved on or a new revision was released etc and the original thing never gets the support people bought it anticipating.
Their lower end board is in a more similar price point to the Raspberry Pi, the Orange Pi 3B with a Rockchip RK3566. And it is slower than the Raspberry Pi 5 in benchmarks I've seen. Though if you don't mind ordering from Aliexpress, it's more in the Pi 4's price range there and does beat out that in performance. It also has an NVMe slot which is why I picked it for my use.
Unfortunately it's also lacking a maintainer for Armbian: https://www.armbian.com/orangepi3b/ . With how fast they drop board support, I'm wary about long-term support from Orange Pi without Armbian. I've got an Orange Pi 4 (not the 4B or 4 LTS which are different) that they haven't released a new image for in years. Meanwhile Raspberry Pi OS still supports the rPi 1. Also ignore the order of numbers, the Orange Pi 4 is older and slower than the Orange Pi 3B.
Next I messed around with an old OrangePi just to realize they never updated the Armbian (even though I got the device tree into the Kernel!). Downloaded the ancient image from their Google Drive, got BalenaEtcher running again (its not in my repos) and then figured the SBC must be fried anyway.
Luckily I remembered that I still had a RPi1 that was collecting dust and should work with any old USB charger. Checked `rpi-imager` and indeed, it supported that old thing! Created the SD card (config was still saved), grabbed an old USB WiFi adapter and powered the thing up. And it just worked :)
The emergency was: My 20m USB extension cord with the zigbee coordinator failed after 2y, and I could not turn on a few of our lights. Using `usbip` I now forward it to the automation server from that RPi1 (I initially didn't think about the RPi1 since I wanted to run zigbee2mqtt on the device, but eventually found out about usbip). Bonus 1: I still have the spare RPi4 that I wanted to attach to the 3D printer because I could re-use the old one :) Bonus 2: I now know that rpi-imager has a ready-made Klipper image and I don't need to set it all up by hand.
Next time I consider getting another SBC, it will be an RPi again.
I might end up just using it as a Klipper board too.
This was a great decision! Created a USB stick for the RPi4 with Mainsail OS. No display necessary, just connected Ethernet (WiFi did not connect, didn't debug though). The printer setup was really easy, though I had to adjust the template configuration for my hardware modifications (mostly tmc2130). Most actual effort was in reworking parts of the hardware (remove case, solder new build plate, design and test the mounts, fix bad soldering that only caused half the heat plate to heat up [good bless thermal cameras!]). Overall, the UX has increased tremendously since I first heard about Klipper (IIRC Kevin just added delta support back then). I think the Mainsail UI has a huge impact on UX. Especially manual calibration of the delta kinematics with the Mainsail web UI is a delight. I scrapped getting piezo probes or stuff like that (for now).
Is that not the case?
And yes it’s nearly impossible to find 5v5a power supply in India.
Apple has a 12 W charger....
Whereas lots of USB-PD devices (at each end) will negotiate higher voltages in order to accomplish greater power delivery, the Pi 5 only ever wants 5V -- not 9V, not 12V, 15V, not 20V, and not PPS.
Ideally, it wants up to 5A of 5V.[1]
And many (I dare say "most," or "nearly all") USB-PD power supplies top out at 3A when in 5V mode.
Also: Getting 5A of USB-PD also requires a special e-marked cable because that's getting into the realm of current flow where things can get melty. A dumb cable will never be expected to transmit 5A of current with a USB-PD device at each end.
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The Pi 5 still can still work even if it can't detect that it is running from a 5 Amp-capable supply, though. It may be slower (due to detected voltage sags), and there will be less power available for USB devices attached to the Pi (which can be toggled in config.txt). But it can work.
It can also be powered through the GPIO header, just as other models in the past: Nothing prevents those who think they know what they're doing from using whatever they have laying around that they think is adequate, and just powering the device up in full capacity.[2]
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...
[2] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=358008
If you need more you would need to request for example 20V at 5A and then buck convert it down to 5V. Not ideal but you can at least pull the current you need through thinner cables and you also have enough to power external USB devices.
5 A at 5 V seems to be sufficiently unusual for USB-PD that Wikipedia's section on the specification doesn't mention it as being part of the specification at all, giving 3 A as the maximum in the specification for 5 V, and only mentioning 5 A with EPR and marked cables at higher voltages [1]. Discussions about 5 A at 5 V seem to come up essentially only in the context of the rpi5, and there most references seem to be to footnotes in the specification mentioning that more than 3 A can be advertised if a 5 A cable is detected. The rpi5 also apparently doesn't support 5 A at 5 V with PPS; it only supports it as a fixed voltage profile.
The result would seem to be that essentially no USB-PD power supply other than theirs, and one other SBC power supply, actually offers 5 A at 5 V in a way that the rpi5 will accept.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver...
But a casual Google search where I am located at least two alternative suppliers that are already shipping appropriate power supplies that can do 5@5.
And the usual (US) distributors (places like Adafruit and also places like Digikey) are selling the official power supply for $12, which I personally consider to be very cheap.
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And remember, wanting peculiar power supplies is normal in the RPi space. The very popular Pi 3 was weird (5.1V@2.5A over MicroUSB, with many unofficial recommendations suggesting 3A), for instance -- in a world where common "high-power" USB power bricks topped out at 5.0V@2.4A on a good day, with the wind from the South, and under the direction of an unladen sparrow.
Many of us are familiar with the struggles that this entailed as we worked on whatever we were working on. But other suppliers did come to the front and offer alternative products that reliably delivered 5.1V@3A, and there's no indication that this won't be the case for this round as well -- especially if they're able to produce the quantity of RPi5s that they say they will.
At a projected 90k units per month, then: Every 7 seconds, an opportunity to sell another RPi5 power supply opens up.
(The Pi 4 has a different version of the same story.)
Not even "junk drawer gear". USB-PD is recent enough that any gear supporting a good cross-section of that spec will be recent if not brand new.
As 1 data point: I recently bought a USB-C power adapter that supports USB-PD up to 35W at a variety of voltages & negotiation methods.
A RPi5's power needs are well within that 35W. And yet, beside supplying 5V @3A (which comes with its own set of issues / limitations), it'll be largely useless as a RPi5 power supply. Regardless of cable used.
Many USB-PD power bricks will be in same boat. So indeed this is a stupid design decision on RPi's behalf. I've read & understand their rationale for that decision. But it doesn't make it less stupid. Other SBCs use USB-PD as intended (in this case, @ higher voltages like 9, 12 or 15V, or even variable) no problem, and without needing special 5A rated cables. The onboard electronics / ICs to do this are cheap & plentiful.
Okay - RPi's rationale is an excuse. Not a good one. Supplying a 5V/5A brick themselves, doesn't do much to paper over that fact.
I mean, a lot of cables(Certainly all Anker ones) support 100W charging and that's 20V@5amps, so the 5amp part really shouldn't be a big problem.
Luckily I have 5 of them (and a k8s cluster is fault tolerant), because the USB disk randomly does not get enough power -- the voltage drops a lot even pulling 2-3A out of most chargers, I can't imagine doing 5 (the USB cable resistances start to become a factor at higher amperages).
I use longhorn though, not CEPH, and it's been relatively painless.
(not afilliated, just use them a lot for 12v systems)
* When the Pi 4B first came out, I connected a cheap Inland (Microcenter house brand) SSD, booting from that, and it ran fine for a while. (Months?) "Better" SSDs like Crucial MX100 had problems under heavy load and I suspected that the instantaneous power demands of the SSD were not met by the USB port on the Pi. (The Pi 4B supports UAS and older Pis did not and the older ones never had problems with USB connected SSDs.)
* At some point it started to run into difficulties with the SSD disconnecting under heavy load, requiring a power cycle to restore operation. At that point I began using a powered USB hub to work around this.
* Recently a user on some forum (which I have forgotten) suggested that one particular SSD model from Kingston worked fine w/out the need for a powered hub. I acquired one and tested [1] and found this to be true. Just for grins, I also tested some other SSDs that had previously only worked with a powered hub and they worked fine when directly connected.
This leads me to believe that the RpiOS folk have been tweaking some settings in the "firmware" [2] that have modified the power delivery from the USB ports.
[1] Testing involved running several disk benchmarks as well as 'stress-ng' to load the storage as much as possible.
[2] I'm unclear what the Rpi folk mean by "firmware". As an embedded systems developer "firmware" is something written to non-volatile solid state storage like flash or eeprom but when I updated firmware on a Pi, it installed a new kernel too.
The Raspberry Pi 5 does support USB-PD. There aren't very presently very many USB-PD chargers that support the 5A@5V mode that it prefers, but they do exist.
And like what happened with the Raspberry Pi 3s and 4s (which also had somewhat peculiar power desires and also did not include a power supply), additional third parties will come forward to produce their own versions of Raspberry Pi 5 power supply. (It's only natural, and history supports this happening.)
But even on a desert island: It can be powered through the GPIO header just like all other previous versions, if that's what you want to do. Just put a reasonably-stable 5V supply on there that can output 5A, and power it up. No big deal.
Also like with previous Pis: A person is also free to goof around with using whatever USB bricks they have laying around. Might work, might not -- but it's a device that is intended to be a learning tool.
Or: Buy a kit from a kit-maker like Vilross or something, if you need accessories included all in one box.
(At any rate: Raspberry Pis have always just been bare boards, not complete systems.)
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
The most difficult soldering I've ever done was swapping an ATMega 2560 chip between two boards with a very basic hot air station, and that one still doesn't work right (but it works well enough to be useful).
Hacks like this are very impressive.
Or you can google "raspberry Pi 5 power supply".
Makes things so much more convenient when you have to stop everything to hunt for the right dongle or power adapter and can't just use-what-you-have :)
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hekzpSH25lk
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967 :
> The RTk.GPIO is a Plug & Play USB Device which adds 28 x Raspberry Pi style GPIO pins to your computer
An RP2040 (RPi Pico) is also a USB 2x20 GPIO, with a uf2 bootloader and upgradeable firmware.
Conda-forge builds arm64 Linux and now MacOS packages from feedstocks.
There's usually not a maintained arm64 copy of containers though, so you must build containers yourself with or for ARM64 with cross-compilation from a faster build machine, which distrobox makes really simple. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...
If you want the traditional desktop experience or a higher workload server, the RPi is likely not going to win against an N100 SBC or mini PC. For many applications besides that the RPi fits the niche of powerful enough to run it, power efficient enough to not worry about it running all the time, cheap enough to not worry too much and common enough to be well supported. Things like single-purpose software packages/distributions are often better supported on an RPi, just because it has become the "standard". Sure, you might find hardware better suited for each use case, but it seems like the RPi can handle most of it and thus becomes the default choice.
As an example, I recently tried out an N100 mini PC to drive my living room TV instead of an RPi4. I liked the option of having a fully featured desktop with decent performance just in case (most importantly Firefox). Plus the N100 on paper has more video decoding options, either via HW decoders or just by virtue of handling more via software decoding. In practice, these advantages were irrelevant for my primary use case (watch movies, series & long-form YT videos). But, I lost out on "it just works" features. The RPi4 just boots into Kodi (via LibreELEC) and works flawlessly with HDMI CEC, the N100 does not have any CEC capability (missing HW feature). Sure, I can use an external USB dongle to get CEC support, but after buying that I am at a far higher price than for the RPi4 + SD card + good power supply + simple case.
Side note: the RPi4 also beat a Pine64+ for that use case, just because I couldn't get the board to play nice with LibreELEC. No CEC and no wifi, even after tinkering for far too long.
What scares me about those ARM SBCs is the lack of software support, especially when it comes to GPU acceleration. They perform very well in headless mode, but on graphics they all still lag far behind.
One day (maybe another couple of generations of SBCs) will be better, but we are not there yet.
Is 5 any better at power savings?
Think a terminal in a Museum with lights, think a local hotspots with sensor and connected (normal tablets), think a ECG machine, ... . Use Cases there are enough, whether other criteria (like quality/reliability) are sufficent, is another story).
You need gpio pins for random kiosks (web access, photo printing/scanning, etc. to control the leds, lights, etc., even coin slots), retro arcades (to get input from joysticks, buttons, etc.), robotics (camera for video, a lot of cpu for processing, gpio pins to control the movement), advanced sensor boards (where the processing is done on the device), smart home stuff, etc.
"Back in my time", we used to use parallel ports for that... 8 very limited gpios were enough to drive a few leds or read some data from an external device.
Outside of GPIO that's on the Pi's, the laptops are fine, and though a little more expensive they can also run more powerful VMs, have cooling, and can do x86 stuff.
The only advantage a pi 5 has is good ecosystem, but if you're not after performance then you can get that with a 2nd hand pi4 - that has the pins and software.
I don't get it but I'm all for SBC ecosystem seeing growth & enthusiasm of any kind.