Thank you for heads up Reggy. Half a dozen 4GB Pis on order before 0730. :)
Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has multiplied 3 by 3 and come up with 4: today a new Pi, the Raspberry Pi 4, officially launches with three times the grunt of the previous generation, the Raspberry Pi 3. The diminutive Raspberry Pi computer has enjoyed a number of updates since the original went on sale in 2012. The $35 Model B …
COMMENTS
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Monday 24th June 2019 10:32 GMT defiler
Re: Curious ...
Perhaps, but H.265 is on 4k BluRay discs, so if you're running on straight rips off the plastic (saves losing discs, kids mangling discs etc) then it's plenty.
Of course other people have other use cases - I'm not one for downloading movies, so AV1 is a new thing to me. Others, I'm sure, would choose to recode their disc rips to reduce size. I gave up on that game after the third time ripping all my CDs and just went lossless...
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Monday 24th June 2019 13:12 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Curious ...
You should be able to transcode BluRay to AV1, which is quite a bit more efficient than even h265, especially for hi-res. Though transcoding in software probably isn't going to be much fun. But I think there are already ARM/GPU combos that do offer HW-encoding and I think Apple's more recent offerings can.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 06:47 GMT defiler
Re: Curious ...
Morning, Charlie. To be clear, my movie library is H.264. Whenever I've got a 4k BluRay I've got a pack with a 1080 disc in it as well, basically because I'm running it all on Pis which are limited to 1080p (until yesterday!). Hence all my HD stuff is in H.264, with a few VC-1 outliers that required me to buy that codec key (2001, I'm looking at you...).
Yes, if I recoded it to H.265 I could save space. Yes if I recoded it to AV1 I could perhaps save space again. But unless I'm recoding them from the source each time I'll be hitting accumulating artefacts which build up surprisingly quickly when you change codecs about.
I'm a little bit away from 4k video here, as I'd have to upgrade the Pis, and also my amp. I know, I could use HDMI ARC, but I hate the interface on the telly for dealing with that nonsense. Come that day, though, I'll just use the H.265 from the discs again.
I have a mate with his video library parked on USB drives in a Raspberry Pi server. He balks at my profligate waste of drive space, and recodes everything - I'm not here to judge what he or anybody else does, and if that fits somebody's use case that's fine. If it comes to TV recording / time-shifting, slamming it all to a more efficient codec isn't a bad idea because the picture quality is rubbish anyway - I hadn't thought about that!
Dunno why we're both attracting downvotes on it all, though, because it's literally a case of personal preference. There's no right or wrong answer - you choose the tradeoff you're happiest with.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 07:28 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Curious ...
I never really worry about downvotes. Some people just don't like your face.
I've found that, while hard drives are cheap, they don't necessarily last that long. My library is mainly TV-recordings which is why a more efficient codec is interesting. Though it's currently a moot point as the most recent version of LibreElec doesn't have the TV-Headend for my tuner.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 11:40 GMT defiler
Re: Curious ...
Yeah, and it always amuses me that most times you say "but why the downvotes" there's always someone who comes back and downvotes everything you've written in that thread...
I use a separate TVHeadend server with an SSD for my recordings. It's indulgent, but it means it starts instantly for pausing live TV and stuff. It's in a VM, with the tuners passed down via MiniSatIP on a Rapsberry Pi. I'll maybe look at transcoding the recordings, because it's a bit of a waste to devote swathes of SSD to Love Island... :-/
Tell me, does it work if you start watching a recording while it's still recording the other end of the show? Or does that upset the transcode?
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 12:03 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Curious ...
I'll have to admit I haven't tried that and can't at the moment for obvious reasons. Then again, I don't record that much Jorman TV because it's quite frankly awful, and I mean awful. Even the copies of formats like Love Island, and I'm sure there is one, get some Teutonic turd-polishing to make them even worse than they were.
Getting the first downvote in early! ;-)
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 12:37 GMT andro
Re: Curious ...
my pi3 lives in the shed running the pi version of orchid core for its nice html5 interface for 6 1080p security cameras. the cams all talk to the pi on one isolated vlan and save back to a nas on another vlan. while this works io bandwidth is limited, and i want to write my own home automation app in ruby on rails as that language is now part of my day job. but rails is known to be a memory hog.... now a pi4 with gigabit, usb3 and 4gb of ram is going to increase the real world limits i was up against out of sight. $5 of adapters is slightly annoying but ill just buy what i need in one hit and its not a deal breaker for me. the improvements are more than worth it. i think they might sell more of the 4gb version than they realise. not everyone is chasing just price, a lot of the time the software quality and size of the community is what puts them ahead of competing platforms (real or perceived).
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Monday 24th June 2019 08:49 GMT werdsmith
Re: Curious ...
@bungle42 :
Curious ...
Out of curiosity what is it that you plan to do with 6 of the new PI's?
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I plan to use two. One is effectively a desktop computer which is the only non-laptop I use.
The other is the learning machine where I try stuff out, fail and start again. The switching of an SD card is the effective revert to snapshot.
The other four are ordered for colleagues asked for one when I told them it was available.
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Monday 24th June 2019 06:58 GMT John Robson
Re: Sata
They added USB3, which is similar in terms of speed and rather easy in terms of access.
I presume it can still be net booted, with GigE and PoE that means a relatively easy ‘no SD card’ version, using one of those USB ports for local mass storage.
I can’t recall if the SOC even has SATA.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 19:19 GMT Steven Raith
Re: @John Robson... Sata
I like to justify these things in terms of takeaway dinners.
I mean, £50, that's two Dominos pizzas. Well, it is by *my* standards...
Boom, justified.
That said, my next project (seeing as I've just thrown PiHole onto a RaspPi Zero W after testing it on my old Pi3B+) is a used Proliant DL360, because if you sniff around (and aren't too fussed by power consumption - I justify that by reminding myself that I've replaced a dozen lightbulbs in this house with LEDs...) you can find them, sans disks admittedly, for around £50-100.
I'm sure I'll be picking up a Pi 4 once the software environment has matured though.
Steven "tinkering rather than moping and being depressed" R
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Monday 24th June 2019 19:51 GMT Nick Ryan
Re: Sata
This one has PoE? Skimming through articles I thought this was still a bit of a hack job? I know that PoE is a bit of a niche thing, but it's great for reducing annoying cable requirements.
As for the Micro HDMI connectors... while I love the idea of dual outputs, Micros HDMI connectors are the work of the devil and fail all the damn time. I can see that the USB3 port will be used for video instead on many systems as a result...
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 06:56 GMT defiler
Re: Sata
Loving the way people are attracting spurious downvotes for stating facts here.
Also, I hopped onto eBay and get PoE adapters that just dangle in-line with the Pi. No moving parts, awh then I got them the official ones were being pretty shonky.
Anyway, have an upvote to balance the silly downvote.
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Monday 24th June 2019 07:39 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: Sata
I have 3 spinning disks attached to a Pi via USB (and three more attached so something similar which does have an SATA port attached to an SSD). With an SATA port I would need a new box to hold the Pi and one disk + power for the disk. There are SATA hubs so I could connect all three but then I would need vibration mounts so the disks do not trash each other.
With eSATA the disk can go in a different box but it still needs power. With eSATAp, the disk could get power but not from the Pi. If there is an eSATAp hub then each disk would then need adaptors to separate the power from the SATA. (I used to own two eSATA devices. They were fine until they broke and I had to switch back to USB to recycle the SSDs.)
Boxes with a USB->SATA bridge plus power are cheap. If I run out of USB ports USB hubs are cheap. In seven years I have had two of those 6 disks fail. As all the enclosures are USB3 I could swap out the broken disk, attach it and its backup to a USB3 device and restore the data in a couple of days.
USB may be ugly but it is cheap and I have spare parts lying around. An SATA solution would require buying multiple expensive parts for redundancy and extra fiddling with a screwdriver to move disks around during a restore.
That other box I have is not noticeably faster for having the OS on SATA SSD instead of SDHC like a Pi. Mythic Beasts run their Pi servers with network attached storage and those have been hosting www.raspberrypi.org for years.
If you have a use-case that fits on a small cheap computer but only with SATA, try a cubox or something similar. A Pi 4 can solve plenty of problems without SATA so I can see why they chose to save money there.
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Monday 24th June 2019 08:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sata
I would much prefer eMMC on-board. To me that is the main draw of certain imitation Pi's
I don't have spare SD cards laying around, and I've found them far too unreliable so I just avoid them completely now.
My main box at home boots from SD but literally only the bootloader and then switches to a rootfs on external HDD.
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Monday 24th June 2019 10:30 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Sata
I don't have spare SD cards laying around, and I've found them far too unreliable so I just avoid them completely now
As the shepherd of 40+ Pis at work and home, several examples of just about every iteration since the original in 2012 except the "A" and "Zero" versions, I would like to point out that:
- onboard eMMC cannot be upgraded - I've often wondered how practical the small amount in the Compute Modules is - whereas for many applications you can simply fit an appropriately-sized SD card. Many of my Pis are unattended video players; they have no need of external storage if I fit 16GB or 32GB SD cards while the unit I use for desktop purposes at home is ok with 8GB as documents are on network storage.
- SD cards are not at all expensive
- it's practical to keep a spare SD card for swapping-out, and possibly easier setting it up by slotting it into another computer
- known-brand SD cards (I tend to buy Sandisk, the "official" ones are usually Samsung and I've also had good experience with Transcend) are remarkably reliable. I don't think over the years I've had more than one or two completely fail on me whereas all the "cheap" brand cards I've had have eventually died.
The original model Pis did have some difficulty with SD cards, you could easily cause card errors requiring a re-image by removing power at an inopportune moment (particularly during boot) but OS updates have largely mitigated this on those old units, and I've found recent models to be much more forgiving.
M.
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Monday 24th June 2019 14:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sata
Onboard cannot be upgraded, true, but that doesn't mean that you can't add extra storage through an SD card or similar if needed. You could have the OS on eMMC and your video files on an SD card if you wanted - that way surely you have the best of both worlds?
Quality SD cards add a significant proportion to the cost of the Pi. I can get an equivalent SBC (except the GPIO/HAT bits) with onboard storage, a case and a PSU for less than the cost of a bare rPi.
eMMC can be implemented such that a USB port becomes a client when unpowered - plug the whole SBC into a computer and write to the onboard storage. Just as easy as writing to and swapping SD cards.
My most recent SD failure was about 2 months ago - a Sandisk 32GB jobby.
I too have purchased many Pis over the years - I was even fortunate enough to get 2 in the first commercial shipment (the ones that you had to short out the USB fuses if you wanted any chance of powering USB devices)
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Monday 24th June 2019 14:40 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Sata
>I would much prefer eMMC on-board. To me that is the main draw of certain imitation Pi's
That is the entire point of the Pi.
Kids today don't learn computers because if they break something on the classroom Windows PC the teacher doesn't have the time/skills to fix it and so the school machines are under a support contract.
So if a kid explores and breaks something it costs real money, so there are rules against it, so you get a generation of kids who are afraid to click anything in case they are expelled for "terrorist cyber hacking destroying school property"
The point of a Pi was: encourage kids to break them, a fix is just an SD card swap away.
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Monday 24th June 2019 07:11 GMT dajames
Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
That's interesting, as I was going to comment that I couldn't see any point in the 2GB version.
I'd have thought a lot of people would be happy with the 1GB version as an upgrade from a 1GB Pi 3/3+ and it is, after all, the cheapest while a lot of people will be keen to get more RAM -- especially for desktop-type use -- and will go straight for the 4GB.
UK prices are £43/£44/£54 at the places I've checked, so the incremental RAM cost from 1GB to 2GB is £10/GB but from 1GB to 4GB it's only £6.67/GB -- why would anyone buy the 2GB model?
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Monday 24th June 2019 07:58 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
My largest computer has 2GB so I expect that is plenty for many use-cases. When I buy one Pi 4 it will have 4GB in case I need it for some reason later because it will be cheaper than "upgrading". The obvious use case for 2GB is if you are buying a hundred. You might actually notice £1000 off the bill that includes boxes, PSUs, video cables and installation. If you are buying monitors, SDHC cards, keyboards, mice and installing ethernet cables too then the extra money for 4GB becomes rounding a error.
I too am surprised that 2GB is expected to be popular but Pi's often end up in places that are price sensitive. That must be a bigger market segment than we think.
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Monday 24th June 2019 11:24 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
I too am surprised that 2GB is expected to be popular but Pi's often end up in places that are price sensitive
For my specific use-case at work the 2GB option is likely to be the best. I use a lot of Pis as video players and have been wondering about how to get them running in-synch for a particular display which uses twin projectors. Two video outputs (especially if they can be treated as one) on a single Pi would solve that (at the moment I'm working on an x86 solution) and I suspect that although I'm not doing anything else with the computer it would be a tight fit for two video streams (even just HD as the projectors are certainly not 4k) in 1GB RAM, but 2GB would be comfortable.
For desktop use, yes, 4GB. Web browsing is tedious in 1GB though LibreOffice works well if you go easy on the clipart. For headless or single video output, 1GB is more than enough; a dozen or so of my video players are model 1 Pis with 256MB RAM.
M
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 03:47 GMT theDeathOfRats
Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
@Martin an gof:
I don't know what you really want to do with those twin projectors, but your comment reminded me of this article in the raspberrypi.org blog:
Video playback on freely-arranged screens with info-beamer
Just in case you didn't know about it and it can help.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 10:14 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
Thanks, that looks great, though it's a bit overkill for my application which will simply be a repeating film on a pair of projectors side-by-side. The current solution uses two specialist video players, each with half the film, synchronised simply by receiving a "start" command - in other words, more by luck than judgement (this wasn't my installation).
My existing potential replacement is an x86 machine running a Linux with two video outputs and mplayer which will play a unified version of the film in "fullscreen" spanning both outputs. I have actually proved this setup across three screens, but only need two in this instance.
Great an' all, but if I can do it with a single Pi4 then I save myself £200 - £300 on the kit and I have three of these pairs to think about.
Sound may be a problem. The films use 4 or 5 channel sound which an x86 machine could decode for me but I may need an external decoding box for the Pis - always assuming I can get multichannel audio out of at least one of the HDMI sockets.
M.
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Monday 24th June 2019 13:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
The kernel is a breeze. This 4GB craptop (3.6GB available) chokes to death on waterfox, specifically on linking libxul.so, and that's with make -j 1. If I want it to finish this week, I have to close any major programs e.g. qtcreator and waterfox, which likewise takes plenty of patience because we're already using more than a half GB of swap on spinny rust. I just close everything but that terminal and it has enough RAM to get done, barely.
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Monday 24th June 2019 10:34 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
"On the Pi Hut only the 2GB model is listed as being in stock (09:28). I guess that settles the popularity contest..."
But production and therefore supply is aimed at the 2GB model so it's likely PiHut had a lot more of the 2GB models. Unless you know the initial stock levels and actual sales, it means nothing and doesn't settle anything. Not to mention that the people buying on day one are the most tech aware and enthusiastic and far more likely to always go either for the biggest and best or the version most suitable for a project.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 03:04 GMT doublelayer
Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
For me, I'd only consider the 4 GB or 2 GB models. I have enough of these with only a gigabyte of memory. I have never said to myself "I really need more processing but my memory usage is small". Every time I've been tasking the processor, most of the memory is full, too. For that reason, the 1 GB option holds little appeal. 2 GB and 4 GB would both significantly advance. Of course, I have to put all the pis I've collected over the years to use before I start buying more. Or maybe I'll just succumb to the desire again; who knows?
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 07:59 GMT eldakka
Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
I agree.
Maybe if they had skipped 2GB entirely and just had 1GB and 4GB, the volume increases in the 1GB and 4GB by sacrificing the 2GB may have reduced them by a few $$ each.
But hey, maybe they ran the numbers and it wouldn't have made even a few $ difference in the unit prices.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 10:08 GMT fajensen
Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular
The 4 GB model will be an upgrade from my Lenovo X-230 which has 2GB of RAM. Because IBM used some wierdo-standard proprietary "laptop-special" SDRAM and those 2 GB all we had left when I acquired the thing used from work ... which was about 10 years ago.
I'll probably get two 4 GB ones, one for my mother, who keeps screwing her windows machine up, and one for myself.
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Monday 24th June 2019 07:17 GMT dajames
Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector, replaced by a couple of type D micro HDMI connectors.
While this will be a boon for those seeking dual screen delight, it will also elicit a groan from users wondering where to stick their old larger HDMI connectors after unpacking their shiny new Pi 4.
The Raspberry Pi Zero has always used micro-HDMI, so a lot of Pi users will already have an adaptor or two on hand. It's not as big a change as the switch to USB-C (but that will at least stop people trying to use old USB2 PSUs that don't provide enough current).
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Monday 24th June 2019 08:26 GMT The Eee 701 Paddock
Re: Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector,
Yes, the Pi Zero (looking at mine for confirmation...) has mini-HDMI.
I sort-of get why they added two micro-HDMIs to the Pi4 (there *must* be a good few Pi-fans out there who want to drive two displays), but I wonder if they missed a trick with the Pi4's USB-C being power-only? I own an Asus Chromebook Flip C101PA, which packs two USB-C ports. With one of those USB-C "hubs" ("port-replicators", really) you can pick up from Amazon for £30, you can send all sorts of I/O via one USB-C socket, plus "passthrough" power.
I suppose it's cheaper to cough up for two HDMI-to-microHDMI cables than one of those USB-C hubs, but if it were possible engineering- and cost-wise, I'd really like to see a future "Pi4+" sport a USB-C "plug" which can handle data as well as power.
Still wouldn't mind one of these little fellas, though - maybe it could run the RasPi port of CentOS at a more usable speed?
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Monday 24th June 2019 09:36 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector,
The problem is that two mini-HDMI to full-HDMI dongles won't fit side by side, at least the standard ones that get shipped in the Pi Zero kits (the "solid block" type dongle).
The new cables aren't exactly expensive though, and there's always the cable-type dongles as well which probably would fit side-by-side into the new Pi4.
And there's a new FLIRC case especially for the Pi4, which is excellent to deal with the heat issue (as was the previous version one for the 3B/B+).
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Monday 24th June 2019 10:47 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector,
I wonder if they missed a trick with the Pi4's USB-C being power-only?
I'm not sure they have. In the caption to the picture of the power connector on the Raspberry Pi Blog it says:
An extra half amp, and USB OTG to boot
This is not explained anywhere in the article as far as I can see, but it's an interesting comment...M.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 03:10 GMT doublelayer
Re: Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector,
This is nice, and I'm tempted as usual to buy one of these. Of course, the pi continues to walk further in the direction of power problems. I understand why they do it, but it makes it harder. At this point, a strong mains powered device will be almost necessary. Gone are the days when you could power a modern pi from a USB phone charger. The zero can do that, but I don't think anything else produced in the last two years can. Similarly, people now need to be recommended to purchase a dedicated power supply with their pi rather than using the old mains to USB adapter and USB cable everyone has in the closet.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 07:46 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector,
It depends what you are doing with it. At this very moment I have a Pi3B (not a B+) running from a "powerbank" which has a stated output of 1A and a capacity of 4000mAh. The Pi also has a picamera, but it doesn't have any other peripherals.
It's taking one picture every 30 seconds and until recently it would save that picture to network storage, but it is now sited in an area with limited coverage so it's storing the pictures locally - so long as it can reach the WiFi at some point to update the clock, that's fine. Yesterday I set it going at about 7am and if I remember correctly (I don't have the files to hand) it lasted until about 3pm, maybe a little later. Saving to network used to use a little more battery.
The red power light does go off occasionally (a sign of "not enough power") but I gather it's mainly there to warn of low power availability to the USB ports (don't forget, it's taking 5V USB in and supplying 5V USB out), while the supply for the electronics is capable of dealing with a much wider range.
A Pi3B+ won't run from that same powerbank with any reliability, but it runs just fine from one with 2A output doing similar duties and lasting slightly longer because that battery has a capacity of 6000mAh.
On the desk, connected to HDMI, keyboard, mouse, network, the PSUs I have which are marked 2A are marginal in my experience but a 2.5A power supply works fine.
As Eben notes in his article, the 3A capability of the USB-C socket is mainly so that there's plenty of power available downstream:<cite> ensuring we have a full 1.2A for downstream USB devices, even under heavy CPU load</cite>
Hope this helps!
M.
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Monday 24th June 2019 10:29 GMT dajames
Re: Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector,
I think the Zero is mini-hdmi....
Yes, sorry, you're right. I'd sort-of forgotten that there were two different varieties of "smaller than full-size" HDMI. This is micro, the Zero has mini.
That IS slightly annoying, but I suppose they couldn't fit two mini-HDMI connectors on the Pi4?
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Monday 24th June 2019 13:50 GMT bob, mon!
Re: Ethernet
True GigE will be a boon for beowulf clusters running MPI or whatever over Ethernet, as the node interconnect is a bottleneck.
I just built up a 4-node RPi 3B+ cluster for class use, now i need to justify getting 4 new RPi 4's. Also glad to hear that the boards can run on 2.5A, since the cluster doesn't have any peripherals and the current generation of multiport USB P.S.'s max out at 2.5A per port.
Next step - find out whether 64-bit Devuan will run on the new board.
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Monday 24th June 2019 07:47 GMT John 73
Re: Pi-top
It won't - it uses the HDMI connector to connect its screen. Plus, if the CPU is in a slightly different position, the heatsink connection wouldn't work. But it shouldn't be *that* hard for them to produce a new bridge for the new configuration. The extra RAM would definitely be helpful because their Polaris OS is a lot hungrier than basic Raspbian - I swapped mine over to vanilla Raspbian for various reasons but mostly that RAM issue, and it's a lot happier.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 05:29 GMT doublelayer
Re: Pi-top
Given their previous pricing, it will probably be a lot more expensive than it should be. My problem with the PiTop idea is that they're making a laptop without some of the hardware standard on other laptops and yet still at a higher price. Having the pi as the brain is great and all, but I give the pi a lot more credit for that than the enclosure.
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Monday 24th June 2019 09:26 GMT werdsmith
Re: Pi-top
There is a Pi-Top [4] thing for the Raspberry Pi 4, but I can't work out from their website what it actually is.
https://www.pi-top.com/products/pi-top-4
Looks like a Pi4 in a case with a built in battery and tiny OLED screen but you need to connect a keyboard and screen.
I would have preferred another integrated laptop, like PiTop [3]
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Monday 24th June 2019 10:36 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Pi-top
James,
On the subject of PiTop, I got one years ago for my grandson. My reaction was that for that purpose the location of connectors didn't work out very well. In particular the power and headphone connector were on the same side and as the power connector needed to be internal there was no easy way to connect plain old phones or speakers. Perhaps it would be worth thinking about how best to lay out the connectors for this sort of purpose - and then about something along the lines of chromebook except running NextCloud as the server (on a Pi, of course).
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Monday 24th June 2019 13:28 GMT DCFusor
Spin-down
Is important to me, being off-grid.
While even the earlier pies make a usable NAS, I never did get drive spin down when idle, even using hdparm and other utilities. I went with Odroid HC2's for that and I'm happy. Those are as fast as makes any difference with multi TB spinners.
Here, pies tend to grow a camera (I have a big place and it's nice to see parts of it without hiking) and always-on ones strictly use solid state storage. Those milliamp hours do add up when you have a bunch of machines on your network.
FWIW, all my active pies run NGINX and VNCserver and both fit easily in a GB of ram, along with some of my own code for data acquisition and remote control of things...I even run (ugh) the arduino ide on the ones that have an arduino slaved to them. Thus making the management of backups a little easier - it's all in one place for a particular project (though it might be SD card boot and something else for the root filesystem). More ram will be nice, but...
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Monday 24th June 2019 08:12 GMT hammarbtyp
I am sure at some point some commentator will say something like "This is not as good as <insert Raspberry Pi clone name here>" and totally miss the point of the Pi. It is not designed to be cutting edge, but part of a education infrastructure system. There may be faster/cheaper/more memory systems out there, but none have the community/peripheral/add on support of the Pi
While I am a little irritated by the move to new connectors, I understand why they have done it and it looks like a great upgrade. Despite its educational background, we are finding loads of use for Pi's in industry, especially for those one off jobs which turn up.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 10:19 GMT fajensen
Re: Worst product launch ever!
I can weld you up a stand in the garage, proper metal
Do it right, ferricekakes: You need to *machine* a stand from a block of solid Titanium or Incone, using a high-end 3D CNC machine with online swappable tools, to not have the product tainted by unclean human labour!
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 05:35 GMT doublelayer
Re: Worst product launch ever!
Probably not. I'm sure the price for the memory upgrade is somewhat less than $10, but it's not like the pi people are going to be raking it in with the small margin on that. Meanwhile, Apple charge premiums of $100-$250 depending on how much additional memory is installed. Their memory may be faster and thus more expensive, but they are making more profit on them, their devices already have a rather large profit margin, and it tends to rub people the wrong way more often. I don't think that's a major problem, but it's useful to concede that there is a difference.
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Monday 24th June 2019 14:43 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Thank you el reg.
"The Foundation has always set its target prices in US Dollars. "
Oh, I got that for that actual RasPi, but the article carried on with USD only prices for cables, adaptors and PSUs too, not even bothering to put £ in brackets until almost the end of the article. It was the lack of consistency as much as anything else.
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Monday 24th June 2019 09:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
victims of own success
they got a tidy margin of x but the appetite has grown for xx and then - hey, think big, man! - XXX. This is a well-trodden path taken by all current giants (and those which have since withered). That said, they will have probably been bought by one of them, sooner or later and added to the "portfolio of products".
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Monday 24th June 2019 11:22 GMT Pete 2
Re: victims of own success
> Your point is obscure - what are you talking about?
One possible point is that $40 will buy you a 2GB + 8GB eMMC Orange Pi 3 (plus lots of extra on-board goodies).
if that platform had any working / usable software ir would be eating the RPi 3 (or 4)'s lunch every day of the week.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 11:03 GMT Synonymous Howard
Re: victims of own success
Armbian Linux is very usable on the Orange Pi 3 as mine can testify even though it is currently marked as a "work in progress". The OPi 3 makes a rather fast firewall with native GigE, USB 3 .. the PCIe port is not supported under Linux because the "Allwinner H6 has a quirky PCIe controller".
I use Armbian on the various Orange Pi models I have deployed .. PC2, +2E, Zero and One
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Monday 24th June 2019 11:10 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Yay!
Back in February I made some predictions to friends about the next Pi. I got the launch date wrong (I hoped it would be the end of Feb 2019) and I totally failed to see the twin HDMI ports coming, but I got most of the rest of it right.
The key thing for Eben is keeping to that $35 price point and a key request from users has been "better (standard) connectivity" (i.e. ignoring the GPIO stuff). Since "connectivity" can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, it makes sense to put effort and money into a multipurpose interface. Upgrading to "real" USB3 solves several problems in one go - by getting rid of the single USB2-OTG bottleneck. The USB3 is run from a single PCIe v.2 lane and so can provide more bandwidth (Eben's article reckons a throughput of about 4Gbit/s from PCIe v.2's raw 5Gbit/s) than any spinning disc needs (SATA2 is 3Gbit/s raw) and as a bonus can be used for loads of other things too, which wouldn't be the case with SATA.
What interests me is doing a comparison for everyday "desktop" productivity use of the Pi4 against a low-end x86 machine. Ignoring common peripherals (Monitor, mouse, keyboard), the cost of a usable 4GB Pi is not going to be as much cheaper as you might imagine.
That said, I'm swapping out the "third desktop" at home for a Pi4 as soon as practical, releasing the Pi3B for other duties - web browsing (and hence using things like Google Docs) on the existing 1GB RAM machines is a lesson in patience, but LibreOffice runs surprisingly well. I would imagine that 4GB will make a huge difference.
M.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 05:43 GMT doublelayer
Re: Yay!
I can't really agree with a zero and a 4 being the only models. The zero is great for its use cases as a controller for hardware, battery-powered machine, or headless WiFi device, but it's pretty much useless for everything else. It can't so easily be used for education because the price in getting its weird HDMI (that mini one that is between standard and the small one people decided to use) to connect to a school monitor and the USB OTG cable and hub to get input devices makes it more practical to just use the standard pi for that. The compute module helps people build stuff with the pi, which encourages open source development and helps support the foundation as well.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 19:46 GMT Steven Raith
Re: err games
Some sniffing around suggests the OpenGL3.X compatibility will likely mean more accurate emulation of 3D stuff, so yes, it should be an improvement, although as I understand it most of the popular emulators and retro gaming megapackages will need a bit of tweeking to be happy with the A72 architecture.
I'm interested in this use case as well, can you tell?
Steven R
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Monday 24th June 2019 10:05 GMT Bob Vistakin
Still no damn onboard flash
Haven't they heard how SD cards are practically guaranteed to fail being hammered by Linux so much in its normal operation, never mind when running apps? At the start, when the Pi was aimed at teaching kids, that was OK because when they got corrupt you just put another in. But long term? How much would it have cost just to add 4G eMMC? No serious IoT user could rely on it as it stands. Possibly deliberately...
The other downer is Google abandoning Android Things for all but smart home devices. This new device would have been brilliant had they not abandoned it for everything else. Oh, and taken away the only official way to discuss it with Google engineers when they killed G+.
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Monday 24th June 2019 10:24 GMT James Hughes 1
Re: Still no damn onboard flash
SD cards are still the best way for the 'desktop' Pi, cheap and easy to use. And yes, we are entirely aware of lifetime issues, which you can mitigate hugely by avoiding writing to them unless you really need to (ie logs to tmpfs etc). Some people have had Pi's running for multiple years with no SD card issues.
The cost of adding EMMC would be a real problem - margins on devices like this are small - we don't want to make them even smaller.
If you want industrial, use the compute module, which has EMMC. (No Pi4 version yet).
That said, there is some flash on the Pi4! Not a huge amount, but it contains the bootloader. In the long time, it MIGHT be possible to leverage that, but that is subject to change.
Cannot comment on the Google stuff, we are not Google.
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Monday 24th June 2019 14:26 GMT Lee D
Re: Still no damn onboard flash
I will happily cope without onboard flash which will only fail over time (in ten years, I bet most Pi's will still be fully operational).
However, what they need to do is put a second microSD slot on (at minimum) so you can run a RAID1 mirror (bootloader-supported, of course). If they can do it with hot-swap, then SD-card failures become moot so long as you are watching them.
I still can't work out why China can't sell me a "microSD" that actually is a flat ribbon cable that connects to 6 microSD cards and a tiny RAID5/6 controller. The increase in reliability for everything from photographers with cameras to people running RPi's would be fabulous, not to mention the cheap and easy increase in capacity / migration to new storage. If you can cram a Wifi access point and SD storage into a micro-SD size package, you can damn well make it so I don't have to rely on a single microSD not failing to keep my things running.
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Monday 24th June 2019 14:48 GMT Dan 55
Re: Still no damn onboard flash
Something like this plus a USB to SATA interface plus USB boot for Pi 4 when it happens?
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Monday 24th June 2019 14:23 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Good stuff
My house is getting built and I've been able to spec a server cupboard into it
Snap! Mind you, I barely have enough money to pay the builder, let alone buy any actual, you know, cable for power and network :-)
I've used a reasonable amount of TP-Link kit at work. Yes, it's Chinese, yes there may be "issues" but there's no denying they're good value for money.
At the low-end of "smart", the SG-108E is a capable little 8-port device for under £40 while the SG-108PE adds four PoE ports at around £80. It's upwards from there, really, I doubt 8 ports is going to be sufficient for anyone. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any reasonable alternatives to TP-Link these days.
M.
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Monday 24th June 2019 14:45 GMT 0laf
Re: Good stuff
Yeah looking at the POE ceiling WAPS and it's TP-Link that comesup. Would like to run POE cameras to the house exterior as well. Found a reasonable priced Atom 1U rack mounted server that might well serve as a CCTV server. Suprised just how hard it is to find an open rack that isn't 42U.
Significant other is rolling her eyes often at my excitement over Cat6 cabling routes.
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Monday 24th June 2019 20:58 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Good stuff
If you want an open rack, you don't have to buy a ready-built rack, you can get rack strip from any one of several different suppliers, hacksaw it to the exact size you need, knock together a frame from some two-by-two and screw together your own bespoke cabinet for not-a-lot of money. The difficulty is getting the 19" just right. My experience with audio equipment is that no two manufacturers quite agree on the exact distance, and they don't all include elongated mounting holes.
M.
(there seems to be something wrong with the CPC website tonight on my browser, I hope the link is correct)
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 08:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
"A VLan aware switch might be posssible soon"
VLAN are fine and useful, but remember you may need to route among them depending on your setup - or devices on different VLANs may not be able to communicate - sometimes is exactly what you want, sometimes not.
The routing may happen in the switch - if it supports that and it's OK - or on another device acting like a router.
VLANs are a layer 2 thing, but IP routing is a layer 3 thing.
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Monday 24th June 2019 20:47 GMT jtaylor
Re: Good stuff
For casual use, you don't even need VLANs if you're careful with DHCP. Just make a separate subnet and use the RPi as the gateway and to assign DHCP. One physical interface, but 2 IP addresses.
Internet - Router - Home Network (192.168.0.0/24) - RPI - Private subnet (192.168.55.0/24)
Raspberry Pi has 192.168.0.100 and 192.168.55.1 both configured on the Ethernet interface, and it's configured to forward packets. Not NAT, just simple forwarding.
The main router gives DHCP addresses only where they have been assigned by MAC address. The Raspberry Pi gives 192.168.55.0 DHCP addresses to everyone else. All computers share the same physical network.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 08:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Couldn't you do that with multiple VLAN's on the Ethernet interface?
If the interface supports it you can create assign multiple VLAns - but IIRC the switch port needs to be a tagged/trunk one as it has to support tagged packets which the NIC can identify.
As you can assign multiple IPs - one works at layer 2, the other at layer 3.
Still, the bandwidth is the same of single interface and switch port - and hardware resources will be share as well - with two real NICs you have double the bandwidth and dedicated hardware resources.
Anyway I don't think even a Pi 4 could work as a router/fw at the full 1Gb speed. But at lower speed it could work without issues.
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Monday 24th June 2019 12:45 GMT Ramis101
USB3 & Real Gigabit ethernet - WOOP WOOP!
The only thing missing from the Pi3 was true gigabit connection. ever since the 2B i've run one of these as an ever-increasing in size NAS system. It truly is the lowest power NAS solution you can make/have. The only slight down side was the speed i could get it to sync at (with the backup NAS, naturally)
I'm not going to poo poo the twin hdmi connectors, i'm sure there is a market & that's why they fitted them. For me, however i use all my PI's about the house headless & only need a monitor for basic set-up (via kvm before anyone pipes up with a @Gah vga, who uses that???). It seems now i'll need a tinky-winky hdmi to normal hdmi adapter, plugged into my hdmi to vga adaper. hay ho
CPC Farnell only has the 2Gb in stock too. £42.53 inc vat. only 29 left.....28 now ;)
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Monday 24th June 2019 13:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Running hot. 21st Century fake stress
" Those keen to hammer their Pis, in terms of workload, would therefore be wise to look at options for keeping things cool."
Just getting around to recycle a turn-of-the-century server this week. It has fans bigger than a Raspberry Pi, bigger than a couple of Pies actually
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Monday 24th June 2019 16:16 GMT John Brown (no body)
Well, faster, bigger, should help...
...with hacking JPL even more quickly :-)
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Monday 24th June 2019 16:26 GMT Phil Dalbeck
Huge Thin Client Potential
2 x 4k capable video outputs, h.265 hardware decoding (not that any streaming protocols use it... yet) and FINALLY putting the ports on only 2 sides instead of 3. Add that to the USB-C power and a proper, non bus speed constrained GBe NIC and more power to peripherals, and the Pi4 is the basis of a bloody amazing low cost thin client platform.
Just in time for Windows Virtual Desktop to launch as well!
Hoping the various low cost linux thinclient OS vendors (Thinlinx et al) jump on it soon.
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Monday 24th June 2019 20:28 GMT jmecher
libreelec already has a beta supporting it
...see https://libreelec.tv/2019/06/libreelec-9-2-alpha1-rpi4b/
Other uses I'd like to get it for: RetroPie as I have the controllers already and a lightweight desktop.
Lightweight desktop is deployable today provided you have a cooling solution, the rest would need a bit more time to mature.
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 02:24 GMT Shadow Systems
I wish I were rich.
I'd buy a bunch of (Pi + case + PSU + cables) for my son to use in his class teaching the kids.
Make it so he doesn't have to buy anything else in order to get them running, so a box of SD cards to go with it as well.
And then I'd get about 100 for my own nefarious uses, like wiring one to a Roomba with a laser so I can mess with the pets!
MUH HAHAHAhahahaha*Cough*
Damn, now it's on My Skippy's List. Stupid list! =-)P
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Tuesday 25th June 2019 14:45 GMT DasWezel
Mind blowing
I still can't get over the RPi, haven't since 2012, and every time I get close they impress me again.
I know there are alternative SBCs out there, but for a pittance you can get something the size of a credit card that can serve so many purposes from a plethora of robotic applications to a full-blown lightweight PC or server substitute, all while running a pretty tight variant of a /very/ common free OS, all very well supported and documented either by RPF or the aftermarket.
I've got or had these things running everything from robotic tea carriers while I was on crutches, to webcams to model railway controllers to IR cameras on rallies to email/web/etc servers to TV alternatives and countless other things beside. It's a fantastic platform for learning, for any age - the original RPi was my gateway to Arduino, ESP etc., while other people have made personal compute clusters, 3D scanners, or put them into use in industry. (I'm pretty sure someone will be churning out RPi4s as VESA-mounted thin-clients pretty soon, if they're not already)
To my mind, it's the closest thing to an utterly universal and accessible computer currently going. Such a wonderful piece of kit.
Beers for all at RPi Towers.