Raspberry Pi Model 3A+ | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi Model 3A+

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61 pointsAlexeyBrin28 comments

The Rasp Pi is amazing, and everything it has done for the industry is amazing.

But cameras, ISP, and image sensors are still third class citizens, without any support, hidden behind NDA's, and generally impossible to build. (Yes, the rasp pi comes with support for a couple sensors, the awful OVT 5Mp sensor and the slightly less awful sony sensor).

Well that's on Broadcom so there's not too much the RasPi people can do. Since they must have pushed for some openess.

Well, they could perhaps choose a different chip, no? I'm sure the chip they went with was the right choice at the time, but I wonder if perhaps the landscape has changed some since.

Alright, I'm curious, what exactly has the RPi done for "the industry"? As far as I can tell, it's largely used as an overpowered LED blinker or a reasonably-powered media player.

So long as "the industry" refers to the maker community [since the RPi was never really intended as an industrial product], it has done a lot. And it shows by the number of copycat products available. I personally know dozens of people who never would have experimented with robotics or electronics if it weren't for the RPi. An Arduino/clone opened up the world for a lot of people. But being able to just type a command on the Pi and see something happen does a great deal for the learning process. And it provides a somewhat familiar GUI to get it up and running before continuing on. The fact that it doubles as a low end computer helps justify the cost.

I guess that's my problem, I think it's a pretty big stretch to refer to the maker community as "the industry".

> Alright, I'm curious, what exactly has the RPi done for "the industry"?

Without the raspberry pi there would be no market for inexpensive barebone linux SoCs with enough computational power to serve as desktop replacements.

It's contributed to the open source ARM desktop/server community quite a bit. While ARM has had first class support in for embedded and mobile for a long time people weren't really running X11, Gnome, database servers, etc. As a result the experience was rough around the edges.

Now it's easy for any open source developer to pick up a working ARM machine for $35 for testing. qemu is an option but running on actual hardware is more rewarding. I've personally worked on open source code that would not have ARM support if something like the Raspberry Pi didn't exist.

ARM desktops and servers have become more common recently but I think Raspberry Pi's laid some of the groundwork for that.

I've been using the 3B+ as a media server for a year now. Omxplayer handles 1080p (even m2ts files) easily. Truly amazing what can be had for $35. My Pi replaced an $800 fujitsu laptop and I haven't noticed a single bit of difference in performance.

same, though i wish they'd make one capable of playing 10 bit video encoding.

Do things like mkv files work ?

Yes.

Everything but x265 or 4k

The latest Pi versions are fast enough to serve as a Linux desktop. I use one every day and have no complaints so far.

Interesting to hear!

I just bought my 10-year-old a Zero W, though she doesn't know it yet. I'm not expecting her to use it as a primary PC or anything, but I'm curious to see if she takes to using it on the TV in the living room. She likes building small electronics kits, so I got her a case, heatsink, a GPIO header, and a couple of shields to see if I can't get her interested in learning more by letting her put it together and play with it. If not, I'm out like a total of $40.

Good to know that if she does like it, I can buy her one of the more full-featured ones and she can use it more productively.

The original Pis are a little too underpowered to be an everyday desktop. Firing up Chromium brings it to its knees. You really need a Model 3 to get a reasonable desktop experience.

I love my RaspberryPis (I have 5 now), but they still struggle sometimes. I would really like to see them come out with one with more memory. I know there are Pi-similar boards out there with more memory, but I would hate to give up the advantage of the huge Pi ecosystem.

IIRC the SoC they're using, and specifically the VC4 GPU portion which contains the memory controller, only supports 30-bit physical addresses so they'd have to move to a new SoC/GPU to increase the memory beyond 1 GB. The good news is that it looks like Broadcom is developing a new "VC5" GPU (with open-source drivers[1]) but there's no telling when that would make it in to a shipping product.

[1]: https://anholt.github.io/twivc4/2017/07/10/twiv/

I'd love to see a more capable Raspberry Pi, perhaps based on the RK3399.

There are some devices out there already but the community support of the Raspberry Pi is unmatched.

Honestly, I'd rather have the Ethernet port than the Wi-Fi.

Agreed. Ethernet is just more convenient and there's always the possibility to add a USB WiFi stick

There’s always the possibility to add a USB Ethernet stick to be fair.

USB Ethernet stick will cost you probably more than 10 USD, so just buy an RPI B3+ in case you need Ethernet...

3 B+ has both.

The WiFi chip also handles Bluetooth. If you would use a USB wifi stick you're severely limited.

Same here, with support for PoE without requiring another hat. But that might be a limitation of physics and power supplies.

Seems to be the last of this family before going to a nrw SoC line.

Dual nic PIs welcome. Need a cheap router.

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