Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership:
[The Raspberry Pi] Foundation has announced that it is joining the RISC-V Foundation, suggesting that a shift away from Arm could be on the cards. "We're excited to have joined the RISC-V Foundation as a silver member," the Raspberry Pi Foundation posted to its Twitter account. "[We're] hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and Debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture."
A shift from the proprietary Arm architecture to RISC-V would fit in nicely with the Foundation's goal of low-cost, highly-accessible computing for education and industry – but would put paid to its tradition of keeping backwards compatibility where possible, something it has already suggested might be the case when it moves away from the Broadcom BCM283x platform for the Raspberry Pi 4. Foundation co-founder Eben Upton, though, is clear: the Foundation is currently focusing on supporting the ISA in software, and not with a development board launch.
I'm curious how many Soylentils have a Raspberry Pi (or more than one) and which model(s). How has your experience been? What are the positives and shortcomings you've encountered? Do you think it would be a good move for them to move to RISC-V?
More background on RISC-V is available at Wikipedia.
Related Stories
Qualcomm Invests in RISC-V Startup SiFive
Investors are zeroing in on the open standard RISC-V instruction set architecture and the processor intellectual property being developed by a batch of high-flying chip startups.
Last fall, Esperanto Technologies announced a $58 million funding round. The chip IP vendor is incorporating more than 1,000 RISC-V cores onto a single 7-nm chip. Data storage specialist Western Digital is an early investor in Esperanto, Mountain View, Calif.
This week, another RISC-V startup, SiFive, announced a $65.4 million funding round that included new investor Qualcomm Ventures. SiFive, San Mateo, Calif., has so far raised more than $125 million, and is seen as a challenger to chip IP leader Arm.
Observers note that wireless modem leader Qualcomm is among Arm's biggest customers, making its investment in SiFive intriguing. Also participating in the Series D round were existing investors Chengwei Capital of Shanghai along with Sutter Hill Ventures and Spark Capital. Intel Capital and Western Digital also were early investors.
Also at EE Times.
See also: SiFive Acquires USB 2.0 and 3.x IP Portfolio to Strengthen RISC-V SoCs
Previously: RISC-V Projects to Collaborate
SiFive and UltraSoC Partner to Accelerate RISC-V Development Through DesignShare
SiFive Introduces RISC-V Linux-Capable Multicore Processor
SiFive HiFive Unleashed Not as Open as Previously Thought
Linux Foundation and RISC-V Proponents Launch CHIPS Alliance
Separately, a handful of RISC-V proponents launched the CHIPS Alliance, a project of the Linux Foundation to develop a broad set of open-source IP blocks and tools for the instruction set architecture. Initial members include Esperanto, Google, SiFive, and Western Digital. CHIPS stands for Common Hardware for Interfaces, Processors, and Systems.
Esperanto Technologies and SiFive look like the names to watch.
Related: First Open Source RISC-V Implementations Become Available
Western Digital Unveils RISC-V Controller Design
Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership
Western Digital Publishes RISC-V "SweRV" Core Design Under Apache 2.0 License
Physics World has a pair of articles on Eben Upton, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. One is an interview about the growing role that Raspberry Pi computers has in industrial activities and the other concentrates on his background, which was originally in physics.
From the interview on the Raspberry Pi in industrial settings:
I'm seeing an increasing focus on communications, making it easier for computers to interact with the real world. There isn't so much excitement anymore in doing lots and lots of maths really fast on one computer in isolation, and we actually see this on the educational side of our business.
When we built the first Raspberry Pi, I didn't want to put input-output pins on it, because I thought kids would be interested in using them to write programs. Of course, what children actually love doing with Raspberry Pi is interacting with the real world, building weather stations and robot controllers and things like that. And maybe that was a harbinger of things to come, or the kids were attuned to the zeitgeist more than we were. The kinds of things they were interested in then are the things we're all interested in now, which is working out what problems computers can solve for you. And now that the era of free returns is coming to an end, I think we can broaden that question out a little bit.
Tom's Hardware is reporting that Raspberry Pi Foundation is increasing production of its $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to meet demand from ventilator manufacturers which are using the board in their designs. The higher end Raspberry Pi boards are also reasonable desktop units for many typical home office uses, so they are being distributed in place of laptops to many working at home for the NHS. The Raspberry Pi is a low wattage single-board computer with convenient input-output hardware suitable for embedded applications but running a full Debian-based GNU/Linux distro, Raspbian.
As the need for ventilators grows, manufacturers are looking for control boards to serve as the brains of their devices. Recently, Intel was reportedly asked to produce 20,000 Broadwell processors to meet demand from medical companies. Because of its production abilities, Raspberry Pi Foundation is able to provide those orders quickly.
"One of the main challenges with rapidly scaling manufacture of products like this is that you may be able to surge production of the air-handling elements, but you still need to provide the control element: often the components you need are on 20-week lead times and (hopefully) we'll be out of the other side of this pandemic by then," said Eben Upton, CEO and Founder of Raspberry Pi. "Raspberry Pi 'builds to stock' rather than 'building to order,' so we generally have products either on-hand or in the pipeline with short lead times."
Even though Raspberry Pi builds to stock, the organization has still experienced a shortage of Raspberry Pi Zero Units, due to demand from consumers as well as the foundation's desire to hold stock for ventilator manufacturers. Upton says that the organization produced 192,000 Zero-line (Pi Zero / Zero W) products in Q1 but plans to increase that number to 250,000 going forward.
The BBC is reporting that Raspberry Pi-based ventilators are currently being tested in several locations. No word yet on how the certification process is going.
Related:
Raspberry Pi will power ventilators for COVID-19 patients
Raspberry Pi's $5 model is powering ventilators to fight coronavirus
Previously:
(2020) Company Prioritizes $15k Ventilators Over Cheaper Model Specified in Contract
(2020) Professional Ventilator Design "Open Sourced" Today by Medtronic
(2019) Interview with Eben Upton on Studies, the Raspberry Pi and IoT
(2019) Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Releases Compute Module 3+, the Last 40nm-Based RasPi
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership
(2015) Raspberry Pi's Latest Computer Costs Just $5
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:38PM (13 children)
Processor choice is important. Arm or risc to me is not the issue. What RPi needs is better Io. Usb to SATA for storage handling is a near failure now. 20MB per second gets you so far. Since that channel is shared by Ethernet and wireless and keyboard and mouse and ... anything else you want to connect. The GPIO is all good for building your own hardware but is limited. MIPI of camera and display gives more IO but does not give a better storage options.
Looking at the other fruit Pi. That offer more IO choices but not as main stream
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:45PM (8 children)
Don't be shy. You can link one of the dozens of other SBCs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:48PM (2 children)
Do you like bananas?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:50PM (1 child)
Maybe he likes Banana (Pi) on the MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWN, BEEYIIIIIIIIIIITCH! [/meme]
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by NPC-131072 on Sunday January 13 2019, @12:46AM
Are you okay?
(Score: 3, Informative) by crb3 on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:35PM (1 child)
LinuxGizmos [linuxgizmos.com] has been exhaustively covering this topic for years, and publishing a catalog/roundup for several years now. The latest such posting [linuxgizmos.com] has 122 entries, with catalog and tabular display (and the spreadsheet driving the tabular freely offered as well). Just, as mentioned elsewhere, look carefully: not all native-SATA boards have that attribute listed in the catalog-entry bullet points.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:49PM
GP referenced a single product at the end of the comment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by coolgopher on Sunday January 13 2019, @04:43AM (1 child)
Not the AC, but allow me to provide some links anyway:
None of these have the same community as the Raspberry, but in many cases advice for a Raspberry is applicable to any SBC running Linux.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:48PM
I use an odroid c1+ as a Kodi/libreelec server after the attempt as a supercollider audio sink was unsuccessful (no mmap mode for the hifi shield). It has an old kernel but if the kernel gets to 4.x i would try again. As a libreelec machine serving 1280x720 video @ 60 fps it is decent and stable. Also tried it with volumio and runeaudio, it worked. Eth is way better than rpi. I'll likely get a c2.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Teckla on Sunday January 13 2019, @02:07PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:30PM (1 child)
Read enough forums about the Raspberry Pi and the general consensus is that the #1 advantage of RPi is community / critical mass. You have a question or a problem, it's likely already been discussed / solved / made searchable.
Freakish computing power, no.
Best design, no.
Loads RAM or storage options, no.
You can easily plug it into an HDMI monitor and add a keyboard / mouse, but using it as a general-purpose desktop would never be your first choice. Find a task within its limits, though, and I've found them to be quite nice with answers easily available.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:48PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:16PM
I agree that better designed SBCs exist. I personally like the ODROID products myself, with an ODROID-C2 next to me right now. I would also buy one of the ODROID's Intel powered H2 if it was on sale; I've migrated back to x86 after adopting Docker.
However, the Raspberry Pi has always been more than a fun piece of hardware. The Rapsberry Pi Foundation is a charity to promote computer science in schools, and the cheap computer Raspberry Pi was the result of that mission. Being a UK charity, I remember them struggling to find manufacturing in the UK and had to opt for overseas components because of lack of availability. They also have promoted open source and open design with their software and hardware at every opportunity. RISC-V should help remedy some of these comprimises.
(Score: 1) by crb3 on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:21PM
I'm currently running an Olimex A20-Lime [olimex.com] as a pivot (all office machines ssh in, text passed in notes for swipe-and-paste -- funky but it works here) and downloads server. The SATA is native and, hooked to a laptop drive, burp-free and fast enough to keep up with our modest needs, certainly faster than the K6-2/233 it replaced. Armbian runs it just fine, at 5 watts headless. The only complaint I have is that the GPIO pins are on 0.05" centers, not 0.1", so any hardware hacking will require either special connectors or tweezly wirewrapping. I expect the later Lime2 to be much the same but with better resources.
Check the latest LinuxGizmos catalog carefully: not all the SATA-equipped boards are listed as such in the bullet-points.
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:54PM (7 children)
Just never could really get into them.
Probably because I have a surfeit of old junkers that are far more capable I could hook to any given display device.
Left one just sitting there powered up for six months and it toasted the SD card (probably the cheap SD card's fault but who knows, new card and it worked fine again.)
I occasionally look for a reason to play with them without much success.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:08PM (2 children)
It's possible that a 4th or 5th edition of RasPi would be more powerful than my current computers. If they released a RISC-V version, I would probably turn it into a dedicated Tor box (not TAILS, that doesn't even run on ARM).
As for your existing pies, somebody has probably compiled a list of "10,000 things you can do with your RasPi". Even if 99% of them are shit or need extra hardware/sensors, I bet you could figure something out.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by NateMich on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:28PM (1 child)
But if the io and ram are crippled again, that's very unlikely.
The problem I've always had with these things (and I no longer own one) is that once you have all the parts needed to make this into a cheap and functional little machine, you've saved almost nothing from just using a very low end PC (like a mini itx with soldered on processor). The PC will be nearly infinitely more powerful and flexible.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday January 12 2019, @11:14PM
Do you know the intent of the Pi? It was to make the cheapest system so students could afford it for learning. If you need something more powerful then buy it. This is engineering 101.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:26PM
I had MycroftAI on mine, then tried to establish it as a media player (successful but slow, with Plex at least).
Just need time again to put Mycroft back on. Downloaded the image but .... sigh.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:58PM
I'm listening to some 1970's Prog right now from a Raspberry Pi running Volumio, with a 7" touchscreen and DAC plugged into a nice pair of powered speakers.
It has been a really nice way to have access to my media server and a bunch of online radio stations.
The fact that there's such a great community means that if I break it someone else has probably done much worse and has a solution for me.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:19AM
I only had one Pi fail and I've got a shitload of Pi's, 13 at last count. The only failure was an 8GB SD card that came with one of those crappy Amazon kits that provide a Raspberry Pi, power supply, SD card and case. Total shit card. Every other SD card I got with a kit was slow as hell too but I've not had any failures. Lesson learned. I always buy high quality cards now, usually EVO+ or better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by toddestan on Monday January 14 2019, @03:15AM
I have one, and like you it was cool to play around with but couldn't find a use for it. Hooked it up to a keyboard mouse and monitor, but contrary to what some people say it's just too slow to run a modern desktop and web browser. Hooked up some LEDs and blinked some lights and stuff, but after the novelty wore off it got shelved for a bit.
Eventually, I did manage to turn it into a music player. Nothing fancy, just installed Slackware ARM (for some reason the Debian derivative would lock up after a couple of weeks) and hooked up an old monitor and keyboard and mouse, mapped some network drives, and use XMMS to play music.
There's some at work they bought for us to play around with. Maybe if they actually gave us time to do something with them we might find something to use them for. We tried turning some into web terminals, but once again just too slow.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:02PM (6 children)
At $10 or even $5 for a bare computer, why not? But it's pretty bare-- no case, no storage, no cables, no power supply. By the time you add all that, a Pi costs $50. And that's with the old trick of "monitor not included", a tactic that's been used since the 1980s to make PCs seem cheaper. Still a great deal, but not quite as fantastically throwaway cheap.
The main problem I have with the Pi and ARM platforms in general is lack of performance. I haven't looked in recent months, so the latest I have is a model 3. The ones I've tried are fine for the small display sizes of the typical smartphone, but strain to run a 1080p display. It's not so good for watching Youtube videos in a web browser on one 2K display, which I think is about the most severe of the everyday uses one might expect of a desktop machine for general purpose Internet browsing. True, watching video that way introduces unnecessary overhead, but lots of people do it. A low end PC is just plain better at 1080p video, and a laptop can be had for as low as $150, which is about the same price as a Pi with all the extras needed to make it a complete system.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:13PM (4 children)
The Pi isn't meant to be a general desktop replacement, and it would be fine if browsers didn't have so much overhead let alone the extra from video DRM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:40PM (2 children)
Bingo. I dont know why people cant get this thru their tiny minds.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:01PM (1 child)
It could be used as a desktop replacement, depending on what software you're using and what you're doing with the web browser.
Use adblock and script blocking in the browser like many here do, and that takes care of a lot of your problems.
Raspberry Pi 4 will likely not be made on a 40nm process node like its predecessors. If they bring it down to 28nm or 14nm, there could be a significant performance increase. Not enough for everybody, but most people don't need a state-of-the-art computer these days.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:25PM
Yes, I find Adblock absolutely essential on limited hardware such as older computers and Pis.
Another performance trick I stumbled over was turning off the font aliasing and hinting. That makes no noticeable difference on modern hardware, but on something like a 133 MHz Pentium from the 1990s, it helps a lot. Of course that makes most fonts look awful. One of the few that still looks good is Terminus.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:55PM
It could very well become that if hardware improvements outpace what the OS and typical software need. Even the bloated browsers.
It seems that the Broadcom BCM2837B0 used in Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is built on a 40nm process. The talk [raspberrypi.org] is that it is expensive to develop a new version using a more modern process node (duh) and that they have pretty much reached the limits of 40nm.
Eben Upton has said that the Pi Foundation would shift away from hardware for a few years [wired.co.uk]. When they do come back with a major hardware release, they might include [wired.co.uk]
something like a tensor processor, since Raspberry Pi is meant for students and machine learning is a big deal right now.
So maybe we'll see a RasPi 4 released as late as 2021, on a mature "14nm" process (around the time TSMC is making "5nm"), and packing some Google-sponsored AI hardware. The performance increases could be exceptional and more than enough to make it a usable desktop replacement.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Sunday January 13 2019, @12:09AM
No, it didn't make PCs seem cheaper, it made them cheaper - especially when they came with UHF modulators so you could plug them into the TV set that you already had... (proper monitors cost an arm and a leg in 1980 when there was no mass market for them...)
My first Pi spent most of its life providing DNS, DHCP and an endpoint for incoming SSH tunnels on my home network, for which it didn't need a keyboard, mouse or monitor after it had been set up. The second one spent a couple of years as a set-top box (acting as a front-end for TVHeadEnd on my too-noisy-for-the-living-room server) and is now acting as an audio player hooked up to my HiFi and is likewise headless. The third one, I actually bought the "official" touch screen for and I'm experimenting with using it as a sequencer/function generator for a Eurorack synth - and if that doesn't work out it could replace the audio player.
I could have tried to do these things with a jailbroken/rooted set top box or Android tablet - but they wouldn't have been any cheaper and wouldn't have anything like the level of online support. Also, a Pi can be swapped between tasks and back in a jiffy just by swapping out the SD card, without some touch-and-go re-flashing ritual.
The cheapness of the bare board is really important - if you find a permanent use for one, its an impulse buy to replace it, and if you try to hook one up to some electronics and let the magic smoke out there's not too much to cry over.
Yes there are drawbacks - all of the network/USB I/O is bottlenecked through a single and slightly quirky USB 2 port and relies on some proprietary binary blobs - but those are compromises resulting from using a mass-market system-on-a-chip designed to be embedded in consumer electronics and hence cheaply manufactured in vast quantities. Moving to full open-source, fixing the USB etc. is all well and good, but not if it ends up doubling the price.
There are lots of Pi alternatives that do one thing or another better - but the Pi is a good jack of all trades that combines reasonable general-purpose I/O, reasonable graphics and video performance, quite a decent CPU and completely unmatched community and commercial support.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:38PM
Before everyone starts bitching about 'they are too low power, cant run xyz' remember they are really EMBEDDED devices, not a 'cheap desktop'. ( Sort of like trying to use a mustang to haul drywall and then complain it sux. Right tools, right job. ) Moving to RISC-V isn't going to change that.
However, moving away from proprietary SoC architectures is a good thing in this space in the long run, from an openness and usability stand point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:46PM (1 child)
A Raspberry B - Used for secondary DNS and DHCP. This replaced a Windows box.
A Raspberry B+ - used for an Amiga emulator.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:25PM
3B with display and digital io card as squeezebox touch.
2B as Philips hue hub emulator
Another 3B+ waiting for something to do with it. Probably garage door monitor.
The benefit in all cases is the community, someone already did most of the work. I could do these projects from scratch, but that day job interferes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Farkus888 on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:41PM (2 children)
I have one 3 b+ running Lakka, an all in one emulator that is pretty slick. I have never tried higher than snes but they work flawlessly at that level.
I have 3 more of the same model as nodes in a small lab I built. 3 routers, 4 switches and 3 pcs (the pis). They are great for this application. I have a case that stacks them up, combined with a multi port USB charger it gives good node count in a small space. I plugged one of them into my home network directly and paired it with 4 USB console cables, it worked great as a console server on the cheap.
In the future I think mine will serve as a cheap, both up front and power consumption, way to build a lab to work on kubernetes.
For someone who wants do self education lab work in IT they are hard to beat unless you need windows. Network nodes, traffic generators, kali linux and a victim, a test environment for devs or an ssh server so you can access your lab from anywhere. That is just what I've already thought of and tried.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:05PM
http://www.lakka.tv/ [lakka.tv]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:17PM
I have a B+ running samba paired with a 2TB hard drive that serves up music and movies on my home network. I have another B+ that runs PiHole and keeps my LAN clear of ads and malware. I have a Zero W that is a surveillance camera. I have an original 2 that is also a surveillance camera. I have another zero W that is slated for a project for my garage. I have another 2 that is going into a home weather station project when I get some free time to assemble the parts together. I have a 3B+ that is currently my toying around box. My kid has a 2 that he set up with Kodi and hooked it up to his TV. One of these days, I'm going to set up an Onion Pi Tor Hotspot with one of my spare Pi's but when I tried it a couple of years ago, the networking wasn't reliable across boots and I wanted a set-it and forget-it box.
I deployed a 3 at work with Samba and forced it to be the browse master because Windows 7 and Windows 10 combined environments SUCK unless you are on AD. Now all the network shares are browsable all the time. I have deployed two more 3's at work for various remote projects including one that talks to a cellular data hotspot and spits out field data at prescribed intervals. It monitors the whole setup and resets anything that fails. A watchdog board monitors the Pi.
I have a half dozen or more various Pis laying around as spares and uncommitted projects.
Raspberry Pi's are reliable and cheap for all kinds of projects. They are a lot of fun for us hardware nerds. People who bitch that they won't replace their i7 just don't see their great potential.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:31PM
I have several and they are used to test how well my drawers can hold things.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SemperOSS on Sunday January 13 2019, @12:22AM
I use a number of RPis as headless servers:
The above servers are all RPi 3 B+ based and I have four backups (old RPi 2 B boards) at my friend's house and another at my brother's house. The backups are the original RPis used for 1 to 5 above.
The firewall at my friend's house used to be a Raspberry Pi too but died at an inopportune moment and was replaced with his son's discarded laptop, which provided sufficient oomph to actually not become a bottleneck in the firewall functionality (running IPtables and nginx).
I had thought about using an RPi as a media server but I realised it was easier to play music from my laptop via Bluetooth on my sound bar and that my Blu-Ray player supports Netflix and Prime Video, my primary entertainment choices for movies and TV shows the few times I watch that.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by optotronic on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:06AM
1. Pi 2 Model B v1.1 running Domoticz as my home automation server
2. Model B+ with 10 pushbuttons serving as a wired home automation remote on my nightstand
3. Model B Rev 2 serving as a sump pump camera
4. Pi 3 Model B (I think) running OpenElec for watching videos while cycling in the basement
I'd like to set one up with sensors for monitoring the water heater, and I'd like to build another home automation remote using a Zero W.
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday January 13 2019, @09:54AM (2 children)
I've read with interest the comments here and, to be honest, those who imagine that any version of the Pi would be usable as a stand alone computer are at best be optimistic or at worst deluding themselves. Sure it is possible, but as even the leanest operating systems are subject to increasing bloat you are unlikely to match the capabilities of a 5-year-old computer as a desktop machine. I can pick up computers of that age for free at my local dump; indeed, I have over 12 desktop computers here and only 2 of them are what you would describe as 'modern'. Over half of them have been obtained for free.
I have a variety of Pis in use around my home, over a dozen at the time of writing.
The Raspberry Pi fills other roles perfectly. I am interested in receiving ADSB [wikipedia.org] transmissions from aircraft and displaying them on software that I have written myself , although there is plenty of open source code available that will do the job and quite a few commercial offerings as well. I have 5 Pi's employed in this role, each with its own antenna, and the Pi processes the received data at the antenna on the masthead, and then supplies the data via ethernet to my local computers and also feeds several aggregation sites overseas. I have, in effect, a real-time 'radar' picture of all of the aircraft operating within about 200nm of my home, and that range limit is dictated by local geography and not by the capabilities of the Pi. When Trump flew to Iraq, hobbyists such as myself tracked the aircraft for much of the route, it's callsign and (bogus) ICAO code being identified by someone who detected it taking of in the US, although at the time we did not know it's destination.
I also use my Raspberry Pis to decode satellite broadcasts, track satellite movement across the sky, and control the direction that the antenna points. A single Pi is more than adequate for this task. I can power it by POE or using LiPO batteries although the motors driving the antenna movement need a significantly higher current than the Pi itself can supply of course.
Finally, I use Pis to operate as servers or to carry out downloads that will take a long time. Leaving the Pi running 24/7 incurs a negligible cost and I can transfer the maximum of 58 Gb that the on-board data storage will hold to a separate computer that has SATA storage during my usual daytime operating hours.
However, any SBC would probably match the Pi in such capabilities providing that it has its own C compiler and can also run Python software. The CPU type is not of any great importance and I'm sure that a RISC SBC will be fine for this and similar roles.
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Monday January 14 2019, @12:58AM (1 child)
200 nanometers? For your sake I hope the number of aircraft sits at zero, consistently! ;)
(Yeah yeah, nautical miles, I get it...)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday January 14 2019, @03:16AM
Well as long as they don't touch, it's all good! Bit of soundproofing...
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:33AM (1 child)
I have a version 3 which I attempted to use to get into ARM assembly programming. It was a frustrating experience. As far as I could tell it's not possible to bring an ARM system up and run bare metal assembly code. It needs some sort of bootstrapping kernel and drivers. So basically a black box computer at heart.
I also have a https://www.movidius.com/ [movidius.com]Movidius neural compute stick jammed into a USB port, which is pretty fun to mess around with.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:52PM
If you want to learn bare-metal ARM assembly, get one of the mBed series of devices. They're M-profile, but with a nice set of developer tools. The RPi uses a chip that was originally designed as a graphics coprocessor for set-top boxes, with the ARM core added as an afterthought for controlling some of the less-programmable GPU features. This is apparent in the way that it boots from the GPU first, then the CPU. It's definitely not a good device to try to bring up an OS or some bare-metal code on.
That said, ARM assembly is no different bare metal or in an OS. If you just want to learn, you're probably better off writing userspace code and being able to use your favourite debugger...
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @11:39AM
I have Pi Zero - https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/ [raspberrypi.org]
and Pi Zero W - https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/ [raspberrypi.org]
both are excellent and very capable embedded systems. I have one with camera and am testing it as a security device. The larger Pi are just too much computer for me!
(Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday January 13 2019, @02:56PM (1 child)
Is it that ARM said "You sell at nice margins there, how about you pay $10 per core licensed now, you'll easily communicate the value-add." and Broadcom went "Hey, we're going RISC-V anyway, you better pay us when you want your legacy crap to survive a few more years"? Like every large company happens to investigate Linux desktops when Microsoft sales come ringing.
Or has it to do something with some Broadcom shakeup? We read "... Avago Technologies Ltd. agreed to buy Broadcom Corp. ... , which completed on February 1, 2016" and "In May 2016 Cypress Semiconductor announced that it will acquire Broadcom Corporation's full portfolio of IoT products.". Does the Pi-crew still have the capacity to spin a new SoC at all? Which would include convincing their new bosses to kick off that project. Which would need to include USB3 and PCIe and a new VideoCore, all one step of difficulty above what they use now, if they want so stay in the game. Eben Upton's statements in 2017 about "we'll do software first now" might hint to something in that direction.
I considered the $5 offer for the Zero to be pretty much a dumping scheme to keep competition out, and now they go "Oh, hello! Diversity! Here, don't develop for our ARM, how about some nice RISC-V? Yes, you'll have to buy some competing board, but we're happy as long as you educate yourself!". ???. Please.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:12PM
Follow-up: Broadcom do seem to have contenders there with the BCM7251 dual-core and BCM7271 quad-core Cortex A53. I didn't really notice those before, probably because I was too focused on the RK3399.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:01PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @07:00PM
if they make a riscv board i will consider it. i have not bought a pi just b/c it is arm.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Monday January 14 2019, @09:08AM
sudo mod me up