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.
From the article about his start in physics:
I'd been a computer programmer since I was a kid and, on some level, the Raspberry Pi is an attempt to recreate the positive aspects of how people like me learned computing back in the 1980s. I had a BBC Micro computer at school and at home, and a Commodore Amiga at home as well, so I had access to all these programmable machines starting from when I was about 10.
In my postgraduate work, I drifted into working purely on software, designing compilers and programming tools, but I probably went too far in the abstract direction. The place where I've ended up is closer to silicon engineering or electrical engineering. The former is kind of a software job these days, now that human beings aren't drawing polygons that turn into bits of masks on silicon chips anymore. Instead, they're writing descriptions of the chip's behaviour in high-level languages and leaving the rest up to the tools they've developed. But there's also an aspect of hands-on work in what I do – the actual grungy bit of getting a PCB [printed circuit board] and stapling stuff down on it to make a physical product you can sell. After a period of oscillation, I guess I ended up somewhere that's right for me.
Earlier on SN:
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Launched
Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge
Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership
Related Stories
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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-47143411:
The team behind the pocket-sized Raspberry Pi computer is opening its first high street store in the city where it was invented.
In a move bucking the online retail trend, the company will open an "experimental space" in Cambridge.
The firm will also now offer a new starter kit of parts - to accompany the popular tiny computer.
Founder Eben Upton said he hoped the shop would attract customers who were "curious" about the brand.
The store opens in Cambridge's Grand Arcade shopping centre on Thursday.
It will offer merchandise and advice on the use of the popular computer, which measures 3.4in by 2.1in (8.6cm by 5.3cm) and is designed to encourage people to try coding and programming.
The story does not mention if the street address was 314 something something.
The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has been launched, despite months of tricky misdirection implying that it wouldn't be on the market until 2020. The technical specifications include two micro HDMI ports, two USB3 ports, two USB2 ports, dual band Wi-fi, Bluetooth 5, Gigabit Ethernet, and either 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of RAM. Power consumption is noticeably higher than similar earlier models and the power can be supplied over USBC.
From the spec sheet:
- Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz
- 1GB ($35), 2GB ($45), or 4GB LPDDR4-2400 SDRAM ($55)
- 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
- Gigabit Ethernet
- 2 USB 3.0 ports; 2 USB 2.0 ports.
- Raspberry Pi standard 40 pin GPIO header (fully backwards compatible with previous boards)
- 2 × micro-HDMI ports (up to 4kp60 supported)
- 2-lane MIPI DSI display port
- 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port
- 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port
- H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)
- OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics
- Micro-SD card slot for loading operating system and data storage
- 5V DC via USB-C connector (minimum 3A*)
- 5V DC via GPIO header (minimum 3A*)
- Power over Ethernet (PoE) enabled (requires separate PoE HAT)
- Operating temperature: 0 – 50 degrees C ambient
takyon: Review at Tom's Hardware. Cons: "Key software doesn't work at launch, Poor high-res video playback". Cases for the previous Pi don't work due to the new micro-HDMI ports. Tom's measured nearly ten times better storage performance using one of the new USB 3.0 ports, and the gigabit Ethernet port can actually reach nearly 1 Gbps (943 Mbps vs. 237 Mbps for the previous model).
Also at The Verge and Ars Technica.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
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
A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35
In two days' time, it will be our eighth birthday (or our second, depending on your point of view). Many of you set your alarms and got up early on the morning of 29 February 2012, to order your Raspberry Pi from our newly minted licensee partners, RS Components and Premier Farnell. In the years since, we've sold over 30 million Raspberry Pi computers; we've seen our products used in an incredible range of applications all over the world (and occasionally off it); and we've found our own place in a community of makers, hobbyists, engineers and educators who are changing the world, one project, or one student, at a time.
[...] Which brings us to today's announcement. The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35. Effective immediately, you will be able to buy a no-compromises desktop PC for the same price as Raspberry Pi 1 in 2012. [...] And of course, thanks to inflation, $35 in 2012 is equivalent to nearly $40 today. So effectively you're getting all these improvements, and a $5 price cut.
[...] In line with our commitment to long-term support, the 1GB product will remain available to industrial and commercial customers, at a list price of $35. As there is no price advantage over the 2GB product, we expect most users to opt for the larger-memory variant. [...] The 4GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 will remain on sale, priced at $55.
In addition to falling RAM prices (which will hopefully continue to fall in the future), there is likely an oversupply of the 2 GB model as the 4 GB model proved to be the most popular.
Also at TechCrunch, Tom's Hardware, PCWorld, and Hackaday.
The USB Type-C resistor issue has been fixed by the latest revision of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B hardware, which is confirmed to be out in the wild. The issue prevented some USB-C power supplies from working with Pi4B:
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Friday November 08 2019, @03:17AM (4 children)
A Pi plugged into industrial equipment purely for telemetry purposes is OK, but the next step beyond that is a Pi controlling industrial equipment, and that scares the crap out of me. It's an educational/experimenters toy, not serious SCADA gear that can be relied on to control industrial machinery. I can however see mission creep moving it into that role...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 08 2019, @03:39AM (1 child)
Companies could use a Compute Module with on-board eMMC instead of the normal units. Or get customized versions [element14.com] made, although that might not be as cheap as they'd like.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:56AM
A compute module is just a bare CPU and RAM from a Pi, that doesn't change anything. You still need to plug it into something, and if it's the standard CM I/O board all you've got is a two-component Pi with all the problems of a one-component Pi: No power conditioning or protection, no protection on the USB, corruption-guaranteeing filesystem (no proper FFS), no OS suited for real-time control, etc. Compare that to the PLCs behind me, the power for example is specc'd as 12V-48V, with the actual rated range being 9V-56V or something, but we've run it down to 7V without problems, and it can handle noise on the power bus, brief outages, changing voltages, etc. There's one set of SCADA controllers that one of the guys likes to use to show off, he'll pull them off the DIN rail, wave them around in front of visitors, and then plug them back in again and they're still running (they detect loss of power and go into a low-power mode and resume when power is restored, it's actually a bitch to do testing on some of the recent ones because you have to leave them unplugged for hours before they'll actually fully shut down).
In terms of the OS, I've worked on controllers that can be restarted (hard reset) mid-task and they're back again so quickly you don't notice the outage. In other words their IPL time is milliseconds at worst. Now compare that to how long a Pi takes to start...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday November 08 2019, @03:53PM
So long as it's reliable enough and failure isn't going to cause physical harm to people, I don't see the problem here. As takyon mentioned in a different post, they'll likely not be using an off-the-shelf RaspberryPi, but a compute module version. You can break out whatever functionality you want with a compute module version, there's no reason why the bluetooth/wif-fi would be needed. Yet, even then, you don't have to provide internet access to your industrial controllers. While having them on an intranet could be very beneficial.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @04:03PM
Serious SCADA gear like those Iran was using, the kind that runs xp and is on the network?
In my application, the expensive industrial embedded PCs have not been as reliable as the raspberry pis.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday November 08 2019, @03:35AM
Make the Wi-Fi/4G/5G/6G SoCs small and cheap enough, and you'll see more of them in things that are practically disposable.
You won't have to interact with them... knowingly. Don't waste time worrying about it.
3D designs such as 3DSoC [soylentnews.org] will deliver vast performance increases (in the interim, 2.5D/3D stacking of DRAM near the CPU, or 3D TSV SRAM). They won't be "free returns", but we'll see computers with at least 10-100 times more single or multi-threaded performance. That means even more people will use smaller computers like SBCs or dockable smartphones without needing a beefy desktop. Or we can write even more bloated and inefficient code.
Even without exploiting 3D, we'll get some nice lunch out of the transition from "7nm" down to "3nm" gate-all-around and maybe a couple nodes below that. We can also attach chip(let)s from different process nodes, as Intel is advertising with Foveros. So a 3DSoC made on a "90nm" node could be put on an interposer with completely different "7nm" components.
That was an acceptable but lazy answer from Ebin mixed with his desire to see efficient software again, which we know most programmers won't care about. JavaScript is the language, the browser is the operating system. AI will learn to code™ and handle the efficient and highly multi-threaded stuff.
Other than that, it is neat to see some of the industrial use cases out there, which are more creative than "cheapo desktop".
Note that the boards are exposed (case lids partially removed) in the Sony factory photo. Those Pis are 3B+ or older, as you can tell from the full size HDMI and position of the Ethernet port. The heat issues from RPi4B have been toned down somewhat by firmware updates, but in general the trend has been towards greater power consumption [futurecdn.net] for new Pi models. I think that will come to an end. They jumped from the efficiency-oriented Cortex-A53 to the performance-oriented Cortex-A72 while moving from the "40nm" to "28nm" node. But now that they are on Cortex-A72, the ARM performance cores beyond that (e.g. A75 [wikipedia.org], A77 [wikipedia.org], A78/Hercules) add performance while increasing power efficiency over the A72. So with a newer design and a node shrink, power/heat should drop. They have made it sound like they could be on "28nm" for a long time (multiple models) like with "40nm", but I doubt it. "14/16nm" could happen (a node GloFo can actually produce chips on, and China is targeting that node). Finally, somewhere down the line, 3DSoC will replace everything and could drop power consumption to sub-1W.
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