Raspberry Pi 4 Review
electromaker.io
electromaker.io
Remember the goal of the Raspberry Pi is to make computing accessible via a low cost. This necessitates the resellers having almost no margin. In fact, their margins are most likely negative after importation duties and taxes, e-waste levies etc, and they're expected to make up for this by selling accessories.
You mention the SDCard and Power Supply. It is good that the Canadian resellers are encouraging end customers to buy these (most will not be as sophisticated as the average HN reader).
Most users who have an existing Raspberry Pi will go and try to use their existing SD card and have it not work, or buy a cheap one (hear not Class 10 or above) from their local stationary shop and end up in a worse fate.
Most users who think they have a power supply that meets the needs of the RPi4, in fact, do not. This is primarily due to the new current requirements (hear most cell phone power supplies will not work).
One would be excused for thinking that your MacBook power supply would work, however, these power supplies are "smart" and negotiate the power requirements with the end device.
Unfortunately, the RPi4 does not support this, and "smart" power supplies do not provide it with enough current.
To summarise:
The resellers are businesses and not charities, they don't make money on hardware from the Raspberry Pi foundation and must make it up on accessories or some form of cross-selling.
They will no doubt go the same way as the independent Apple resellers, until that time they are still playing a valuable role in making it possible to purchase Pis in your country.
I'm rather surprised that there is still no SPI Flash or eMMC onboard this latest Raspberry Pi, MicroSD cards are significantly slower than eMMC, and even some cheap SPI Flash would be great to let you throw a small backup distro on the RasPi for when you have no SD card inserted (or the card has failed/corrupted)
I guess eMMC goes up to 500 MB/s. I do wonder how much that fast eMMC chips cost, though.
A bit below 50 MB/s on RPi4 is actually pretty ok for most cases and whenever it's not, one can use an SSD over USB3.
Just need to make sure you have a good power supply and good quality cards, and SD card corruption is unlikely.
Can't blame resellers for reselling.
Buyapi.ca seems a bit better. I specced a 2GB, heat sinks, a case. Totals CAD $95 (13% tax and $11 shipping).
My frustration is probably a combination of:
- I get to listen to US prices being advertised all the time. "$45 for a 2GB!" and my brain loves to not do the conversion from USD to CAD. This is a longer rant for another time.
- 13% freedom tax
- Amazon has spoiled me with free shipping so $11 has some sticker price shock to ship a little box.
Are the 4s different somehow? Or has every 3 I've purchased (somewhere around a dozen) been defective? (I don't have this issue with the Zeros.)
Under benchmarking cooling was required to stay under the 80deg C throttle limit.
Article referenced: https://blog.hackster.io/meet-the-new-raspberry-pi-4-model-b...
I got a 40mm 5V Noctua fan for it and 3D printed a case that takes it. The thing now runs very cold. Idle CPU temperatures were about 60 degrees before, now loaded temperatures are around 40. Airflow is a big deal. (I am not using any heat sinks.)
I'm working on a blog post and YouTube video with the full details, but it's not that difficult an operation, and I liked the look/size of the official Pi case more than a printed case or one of the thousands of knockoffs.
I do agree with the parent that a fan (active cooling) is absolutely necessary on the Pi 4, more so than any before, as the CPU is not the only part on the board putting out a lot more heat than previous generations—that heat needs to move somewhere.
I printed it honeycomb infill and no top/bottom layers (and also rotated it so it printed with the top and bottom on the bed, instead of upright; having to change that might be an artifact of the slicer I used, though; Simplify3D)
For almost everything I've thrown at the 3 all has been well. The thermal throttle kicks in after a while playing 1080p HEVC clips and occasionally on 720p ones, and makes them skip badly until it has chance to cool down, but that is not unexpected (I'm surprised 720p works as well as it usually does) as those are fairly processing intensive formats and being decoded in software. h264 and other encodings play back for hours on end (1080p or less, the limit of my current TVs) without it getting too warm for comfort. This is in a bog-standard case, with vents but no extra heatsinks or fans.
When I have time to faf around (this is a busy month) I'll probably grab a 4 for the HEVC-in-hardware (though support for that in LibreELEC is only in Alpha versions ATM), and hand down the 3 (or put it away for some future project).
I _have_ had overheat issues with the updated 3B+, though it usually involves 720P video and/or an active RTL-SDR dongle. That's somewhat to be expected given the power draw and processor demands of such.
So far it works at full load without throttling for at least the time span of a full length movie(my use-case is a plex media server). The concept is that exhaust heat leaving through the larger opening up top is heated(and expanding) air. The depressurized vase pulls cooler ambient air in through the 2 funnels, which strike the CPU and wifi module for a poor-mans "active cooling", albeit at much lower speeds than a motor-driven fan could provide.
The downside is required vertical; the case is 8 inches tall. This is several times the vertical height of the board itself, so it's a bit of a non-starter for small embedded device use-cases. If you have space to spare though, it might be worth a shot depending on your use-case.
Just because someone's selling something, doesnt mean you need to buy it.
I got rid of the case and just nailed it to the wall with some space on either side as a stopgap measure. This has reduced the frequency of the throttling as indicated by the temp gauge on screen, but not entirely avoided it. I have plans to add cooling this weekend.
This is with all upgrades as of today.
Update information: https://www.retrorgb.com/raspberry-pi-4-firmware-update.html
Comparing a product to its previous generation provides some information but does next to nothing to inform how product stands within the rest of the market.
Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/meltdown-spectre-kpti-82752...
AFAIK Spectre implementations have been limited to security researchers in universities ATM.
So I'll ask, is it worth worrying about this for you? In terms of vulnerabilities there are lower hanging fruits.
This isn’t necessarily true for your smartphone, because some ARM CPUs don’t do the speculative execution that Spectre/Meltdown exploit. For example, CPU in the raspberry pi 3 didn’t have these vulnerabilities which I assume is why the parent was asking this question.
Some notes here: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2019/07/14/1400
So there are plenty out there, I'd chase yours up
Get one off amazon that has a fan. - "Acrylic case for raspberry pi 4"
edit - well it might not matter actually, I'd rather not spread false concern.
Desktop / gui use requires either hanging the board so there is air passing on all sides or a cooling solution.
*edit - wayback link below is a much better cached copy. thanks manchoz.
Swarm only uses CPU power so you cannot take advantage of GPUs to bake lighting.
I wonder if I could get 100 RPi4's to run Windows + Swarm and create a render farm for $3500...?
1. Is there a version of Windows for the RasPi (I think this is true, but it's been a while)?
2. Will Swarm and any other software you'd need for the cluster also run on the RasPi version of Windows?
3. How well does a single instance run on the RasPi?
At that point, assuming #3 looks good - you could take it to the next level. Try two RasPi systems connected via a gigabit switch (cheap 5 port), and see how the performance scales vs a single instance. Then try four RasPi systems.
At that point you should have enough data to determine how well a large render farm would run, compared to your desktop or whatever else you could come up with (would it be cheaper to spin up virtual servers as needed on AWS or similar?).
Also realize that $3500 (approx) will only cover the RasPi systems; you'll need even more money for the power supply(s), cooling fans, switches, networking cables, power cabling, "enclosure" (even if just stacked using standoffs, you should still figure out how much all that will cost), etc. $4500 might be a more realistic figure.
Even so - if it worked, and worked well - that dollar amount might not be that big a deal. Worst case, you could get a HN article out of it (whether as triumph or post-mortem - it would still be an interesting read).
For USD2850 you can get 3 rack mounts that can power 90 RPi 4's: http://my.bitscope.com/store/?p=view&i=item+7
The clusters can get pretty big: https://www.bitscope.com/blog/FM/?p=GF13L
If I had the expertise, I would make large clusters with a bunch of the RPi CM3+.
Since you can't run CM3 standalone, you'll be making custom hardware. Even if you don't count your development time, my gut feeling says that $5 is not enough to cover even just BOM costs for such a project.
Not using something that cannot help in such situations is a good reason or even merely sanity. The problem is websites want to feed you some cookies and generate pages dynamically for each visitor, so things like full page caching don't just work, they require special considerations. At which point setting up such set-cookie stripping caching on the webserver would solve the problem anyway.
------
2.1.8.1. Audio Codec
- Two audio digital-to-analog(DAC) channels
- Support analog/ digital volume control
- One low-noise analog microphone bias output
- Analog low-power loop from line-in /microphone to lineout outputs
- Support Dynamic Range Controller adjusting the DAC playback output
- Three audio inputs: -Two differential microphone inputs -Stereo Linein input
- Two audio analog-to-digital(ADC) channels - 92dB SNR@A-weight - Supports ADC Sample Rates from 8KHz to 48KHz
Support Automatic Gain Control(AGC) and Dynamic Range Control(DRC) adjusting the ADC recording input
Even a low end external ADC is going to greatly outperform anything RPi could ship onboard for a reasonable cost, and even if they did ship something onboard, at this point it would almost certainly just be a USB ADC, but onboard.
And of course, HTPC users would likely be taking their audio over HDMI anyway.
Second, you're talking about $30 or $40 per unit to upgrade to the capabilities you want. I wouldn't wait for Raspberry Pi to include additional ports, I'd check the couch for change.
https://www.hifiberry.com/shop/#boards
EDIT: Amazon reviewers seem to think the sound quality is extremely good for the price. I guess I know what I'll be playing with next.
https://www.amazon.com/HiFiBerry-6009-DAC-Pro/dp/B01MF77LH9#...
Generally speaking sound cards for regular computers aren't very good, so I'd bet the pi's is probably close to non-existent. You'd want some sort of DAC/ADC anyway. For listening purposes I've used a Fiio E9(or 7?) dac, and now I use a schiit stack.
If it's only 1-2 (xlr) mics, I would use a Scarlet 2i2 audio interface if possible and connect via its usb out. Although I have no idea how well it works with raspbian / ARM operating systems. There may be another type of interface that works with the rpi.
Either way, this is rather niche and goes beyond the rpi is intended for. You can still achieve rather good sound on a budget with a usb microphone depending on the room setup, etc.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
"Support for these additional bootmodes will be added in the future via optional bootloader updates. The current schedule is to release PXE boot first, then USB boot."
https://www.hifiberry.com/shop/boards/hifiberry-dac-pro-xlr/
Phantom power is usually 48V, sometimes 12V, and rarely some voltage in between.
As far as I know there are three kinds of microphones:
* The cheap analog ones, can be USB or audio jack. Presumably you want one of these?
* The digital ones, USB. Even some MEMS microphone chips now come integrated with amplifier and ADC. This can be almost as cheap as the preceding option, but can also be high quality; seems like the best option.
* The XLR proffesional microphones. You probably do not need or want this, assuming you will use just one microphone per Pi.
It's Linux so the setup is a little fiddly (or at least it was with piCorePlayer) for reasons that have nothing to do with the hardware, but it works fine with the Pi.