Pi-Top 4
pi-top.com
pi-top.com
I can for sure see environments that this might be attractive, such as education etc, but if you are a vaguely capable software engineer you are almost always far better off just buying a raw Pi and the electrical components you would like separately. There is so much information out there that even a novice can quickly educate themselves on what they might need for a given project.
The kits become little more than elaborate toys with a few extra steps added to make the student feel like they did something. However, all they did was follow instructions. For at least 90% of what engineers do on a regular basis, following carefully tested instructions is not one of them.
Written by a guy who experienced a hell of a lot of criticism 20 years ago for writing games in JavaScript and now is the lead VR product engineer for a company.
What you're describing is something that comes naturally to you and almost every person on this website. Kids who think that way will likely end up in engineering of some sort regardless.
The rest need this sort of guided approach to even show them that they could even possibly do this sort of thing and it helps move that percentage up.
Although, that being said I don't really think much to the Pi-Top 4 at all. You'd definitely have a more valuable empowering experience holding an actual board and plugging wires directly into it, the end result would be the same and I feel they smoothed out the wrong part of the experience.
[0] http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/#smalltalkAndC...
For someone who is in their teens and is eager to gain practical experience without dozens of hours of scrubbing YouTube and practicing programming basics, these kids are a solid idea. Further, I think the notion of pushing hard to differentiate itself from transitional machine form factors and work on a rugged"standard compute unit" is a very interesting experiment.
I'm not sure it's for me. But I've built a little Pi case with a charge controllers, a battery, and a screen just like this and I liked the result. This is certainly nicer than what I cobbled together and the idea of making a standard compute form factor for projects is really good.
SO many of these things end up sitting in boxes or on shelves. The raspberry pi is pretty cool for a very small niche of things, but really the main thing making it interesting is that it's a cheap desktop computer.
If you already have a computer in your house, then you've already got a much, much more powerful version of a raspberry pi.
If you have a friend or family member who is interested in an introduction to software and hardware engineering, or electronics, then they'll be MUCH MUCH better off with one of these: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Shield-Bot-p-1380.html
and an arduino uno.
Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.
> Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.
How does buying one with good intentions that goes unused hurt any other effort? I don't think I'd have even heard of any other devices if it weren't for the attention that the Pi gets.
Not just a naked Pi (and even if that's the goal it's typically not done with just the pi, you need some amount of stuff around it too). E.g. the previous version of the Pi-Top is $319 (Pi included)
Now imagine you’re a kid who had the idea to water your garden with a computer. On an arduino, you’d write about 20 lines of code.
On a PI...I mean, how do you even get a computer program to run at boot? What’s a computer program? Okay I have a .img file now what? Python? But some people say I should use $somethingelse. Okay I need another monitor to connect to it? Open up my router and find a DHCP entry so I can SSH into it? What do ANY of those words mean?
“Oh well I’ll get to it someday.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of raspberry pis in many different projects, and in fact I’d make a strong wager that I have deployed more raspi projects than most people who consider themselves huge raspi fans. For SOME things there isn’t a substitute. For most things they’re extremely discouraging.
From my experience, RPi might be more appealing since it runs a real OS and you can have a desktop environment.
However, for our daughter we ended up buying (1) a Micro:Bit, which is much easier for kids to tinker with, especially with MakeCode [1]. Our 5yo daughter loves to draw 5x5 emoji + write words, associate them with buttons, to upload them to the Micro:bit. It makes her really proud. (2) An Intel NUC, which is much faster and less constrained than a Raspberry Pi. (Obviously, it is more expensive, but she has one of the low-end Celeron NUCs.)
You can't reasonably expect a child to understand hardware virtualization, can you? Much less how to use something like Docker. Maybe if Docker was perfect and there were no version or dependency incompatibilities, and the Docker service behaved predictably, and a bunch of other things. Hell, I would've bailed a few minutes into the build process as a child. I get bored waiting on it as an adult.
Also real-life hardware can be super interesting, even if you're not hacking at it! I found much joy just cracking open the family's old Windows machine and having a look. It's hard to quantify the effect something like that has, but it's got to be greater than zero.
Edit: I write this with several generations of pi. sitting idle on a shelf. The most interesting project I used one for was Halloween automation of off the shelf decorations. Made up for the stagnant pi's sitting around and all the neighborhood agrees.
As for teaching your child docker being easier than flashing an SD card... you must have some bright kids, pal!
Why would anybody care that they're being bought and put in drawers or shelves? The RPi isn't in finite supply, and buying more helps the project overall even if nothing is done with it.
With a Raspberry Pi, you've brought that back in a way that doesn't risk expensive hardware. You can get a breadboard and something like the Pi Cobbler for an instant prototyping setup where you can play with electronic components and program them with C or Python with far less difficulty than a garden variety microcontroller. The Arduino comes close, but the computing power of the Pi offers a lot more flexibility and options.
If nothing else, this has allowed me to use a cheap intel NUC instead of beefier hardware for a VM server. No more SD card failures...
This is in contrast to Raspberry Pi, which runs linux and you can program in any language and everything is like on your main PC.
Maybe latest model is overkill for anything except desktop PC or home server, but there are simpler models. I think it's pretty normal to use, for example, Raspberry Pi Zero for IoT, because good luck implementing HomeKit on avr/esp8266/stm32.
I hate commercical electronics manufacturers putting fancy desktop-level ARM controllers on everything, but let hobbyists use them without hesitation even if the only reason is support of python.
I run micropython on my esp8266 because I didn't like the lua that it shipped with. If this is a problem, then it's specific to Arduino.
Edit: lua, not node.js
At one time, long ago, it did - mainly the ATMega8 platform that was at the heart of the Wiring project, which ultimately begat the original Arduino (and Processing).
But the ecosystem expanded; first via different Atmel microcontrollers (many which became so-called "official" platforms), then eventually to other microcontroller platforms (and Microchip, maker of the venerable PIC microcontroller platform, eventually purchased Atmel).
The ESP8266 is a part of that ecosystem today, along with other so-called "ESP" controllers:
https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino
https://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=start-with-esp-12-a...
https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32
It wouldn't surprise me to find out there is a core available for the Raspberry Pi - or at least for the SOC on the board...
Hmm:
https://github.com/me-no-dev/RasPiArduino
I looked to see if I could find any kind of "real" core for the Raspberry Pi or Broadcom SOCs but I didn't find anything other than the above, which seems to be in active development. Honestly, though, you wouldn't really use a Raspberry Pi that way; more likely you would use the Raspberry Pi as a development platform for an Arduino ecosystem platform, that would likely be attached to the Pi via USB or some other method.
People, especially beginners, are often confused by what the name "Arduino" means; as I've noted, today it's an ecosystem composed of many different platforms, some "official", but many more that are not.
...and this of course doesn't get into the whole "real" vs "knockoff" vs "counterfeit" debate (which is a whole 'nother story).
https://learn.adafruit.com/welcome-to-circuitpython/what-is-...
Here is a HomeKit device on a nrf52:
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino/blob/mast...
The library situation is pretty good these days. You can talk to TLS-enabled web servers. You can talk to Bluetooth devices. You can integrate sensors with a couple lines of code. It isn't trivial but it isn't hard either.
The advantage of using a microcontroller is that you don't have to stress out about all the other things that a computer is going to be doing. You don't have to write systemd configurations to start your application at boot. You don't have to prevent syslog from ruining your SD card. You don't have to update the Linux kernel when there is a 0day. You don't have to work hard to power the machine from a battery. (I have a Bluetooth-based temperature/humidity/pressure logger + epaper clock that runs off a 100mAh LiPo battery. A Raspberry Pi that isn't even turned on would suck that thing dry in 3 hours, not counting power loss in the boost converter that would be required.)
The advantage of using a Raspberry Pi is that you get a ton more CPU power and all the advantages of a computer. Your GPIO sensors can show their data on 2 4k screens. You can browse the web with Chrome. You can run complex software trivially.
They are both great for different use cases. I think someone that wants to make a tiny robot or blinky light would be better served by an $8 M0-based Arduino clone. I think someone that wants to run image recognition on a video feed would be better served by a Raspberry Pi. The power level of the Pi is greater than a micro. Getting something simple working perfectly without any future maintenance is easier on a micro.
Biggest win for Pi is IMHO the combination of the two, you get both a linux box and an arduino-like platform with HW pins access and kit hats, all in a small package that can easily be fit anywhere - and at the same time it's cheap and simple enough to allow you to play freely without worries.
An atmega and C++ are absolutely NOT toys however. And in fact, arduinos are so cheap at this point that I have put many of them into many finished products.
I've never seen that product before. It appears to be a Pi-Top branded tablet/screen attached to a keyboard.
1: https://www.pi-top.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Redesigned%20website/pi-t...
I'd love to see a drop-in-replacement motherboard design for an old hardy laptop (maybe something like a ThinkPad X220 -- < $100 on ebay). This could end up being fairly straightforward to design once the Compute Module 4 comes out.
Some new hinges and a little elbow grease and you could have a nice little 20-hour-battery laptop that's actually usable.
They say the purchase itself includes the base plate, which houses all the extra sensors and ports. Judging from the pictures, it has a lot of ports. That is extra value added.
> pi‑top [4] comes with the following: gigabit ethernet meaning faster network storage and access to servers, dual HDMI for two 4k screen displays, 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM meaning more applications can run, two USB 3 ports and one USB 2 port for connecting devices and peripherals.
Nothing is listed that isn't part of the Pi 4 itself, while the picture clearly shows a bunch of other ports (what are they?). Later it mentions a "foundation plate" but with no details.
Also, some of the built-in ports are not mentioned:
* one of the USB 2 ports (guessing the case uses it for something?)
* 2-lane MIPI DSI display port
* 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port
* 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port
There's also a project page [1] that shows a camera added, which certainly looks like it uses the on-board camera port, but doesn't make it clear how that works or if the camera is included or not.
[1] https://www.pi-top.com/bett-2019-maker-projects/portable-pho...
> Every pi‑top [4] comes with 12 pi-top component modules comprising programmable sensors, buttons and LEDs to bring your inventions to life.
Okay, so pi-top [4] is the main thing in the box. Thus there are 12 pi-top component modules, so I guess it's a variety pack of sensors and buttons? Well, how many of each, and what are they?
> You connect these to your pi‑top [4] using a Foundation Plate that fits snuggly underneath it.
We further learn the pi-top [4] is a thing, and this plate fits it.
Obviously, I can infer that it's the case with the CPU, but this product is trying to introduce people to programming.
It's amazing that a company can put up a product page that never plainly explains what you're buying. And this is shockingly common.
I observe that the main reason people this kind of inspiration contrived is because their experience with people that look similar are with people that pride themselves in not understanding technology.
So there is an ongoing incongruence.
Regarding the machine itself, it looks too big.
It's a real failure in product design.
Every major board revision the Foundation ships has seemingly no upgrade path, the amount of things that breaks every time they move Debian versions is unacceptable.
The real product design failure seems to be building upon the Pi at all.
No (regular) internet.
The new one looks considerably different than the model I have, so maybe they've fixed the issues, but I'm not inclined to buy another.
Perhaps thats why they did not include peripherals this time around. One of the big selling points of the Pi 4 is the 4K output. Providing anything less than a 4K screen would probably lock users into a disappointing product.
Right, but for how long? It would be much easier to upgrade a separate monitor down the road. Otherwise, the Pi-Top team would need to make duplicate products: one laptop that supported a 1080p screen and another laptop that supported a 4K screen.