Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC
raspberrypi.org
raspberrypi.org
It reminds me of what Apple does when it redefines a product category by "just" bringing together existing technology into a more convenient form factor and UX.
I don't know if this will quite have that level of impact, but I see the potential, especially now with remote learning: My kids are on a hybrid schedule. I'm fortunate to be able to provide them their necessary computing resources. Not everyone can: The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book.
I'm also old enough to remember when you'd be hard pressed to find a desktop computer for under $1000, perhaps $1500 adjusted for inflation. One for $70-$100 really just hammers home how far we've come.
How crazy is it that one of the Big Players come in, port their OS to the device, and more or less take it over as just another platform with a Start Menu?
That's a wonderful observation. The form factor is as clever as it is logical. Stuff like this makes me really optimistic for the future of Raspberry Pi (and widespread computing!).
Like getting to the platonic form of a specific type of device.
The Pi 400 is the completion of the idea of an educational computer for kids, IMO. It's not going to compete with a Mac mini or anything like that, and the keyboard is likely not going to be anyone's top choice for a 'professional' keyboard. But it's good enough in all the right ways as a general purpose computer.
Especially for poor kids in Africa/Asia/etc. Hope it will be the "educational iPod" for them.
If there’s anything to aspire to its Hewlett Packard’s test and measurement and computing offerings between 1960 and 1990.
Those Brompton folding bikes are pretty well made, though pricey even with the deflated pound.
I'll bet you're thinking of British Leyland, which behaved a bit like Boeing currently does. But much, much worse, and at every level.
British companies that are aware they can fail produce quality just fine. It's a fairly simple tale.
In reality, the mouse will be on the right, and the cable will have to cross over top of all cables except the ethernet and usbc power. For such a beautiful form factor, it will look like a mess.
Then you've never seen my desk! (About 10-15% of the population is left-handed)
But really, the Pi 400 supports Bluetooth 5. So I expect many/most folks will go wireless for their rodents.
While yes, the BT mouse is going to be the better option, they're pushing the kit-included mouse.
In any case, over the years I have become very comfortable using mouse with left hand as a right hander.
I am right handed and use the mouse with the left, so that I have my right hand "free" to use a pen or the (right side) numeric keypad when crunching numbers.
And I do not (as many left-handers do) "invert" the miue buttons, maybe I am strange/an exception.
So I’m usually right handed, although I still move it around from time to time.
https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/23-fun-raspberry-pi-400-f...
Getting close?
So this makes a lot of sense economically, especially for cash-strapped organizations like schools that have to manage large fleets of machines.
Stuff that isn't touched and lasts long (screens) don't get replaced. Stuff that is touched (and likely to wear out over time) like keyboards or gets out of date due to Moore's Law (computer) is fused into one package, so there are fewer cables to worry about getting unplugged, worn out, etc.
This post shows some unboxing of Starlink: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=48297.msg2...
I’m really excited about these LEO satellite constellations just solving the rural/urban digital divide. As launch costs continue to go down (SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 has already made a massive difference in making this feasible, about a quarter the marginal launch cost per kg, and Starship should enable an order of magnitude improvement on that) and competition increases (OneWeb has been brought through bankruptcy but is starting to launch again, plus Amazon’s Project Kuiper and the potential of launching on the partially reusable New Glenn), it’s an exciting time for the ending of digital poverty in rural areas.
I recently moved out of the bay area to a my house in relatively rural Oregon. I can't actually work from home though, I had to rent a second house in a nearby town because the best internet connection I can get at my actual house is GEO satellite internet which is far from suitable for work.
I'm only 7 miles down the road from a town of 700, and only ~30 miles from a city of ~20,000, yet I have 0 options for wired internet and 0 cell reception from any provider at home.
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/broadbandgrants/comments/61B...
"Using the Bells own words and filings, by 2000, approximately 50 million homes should have been rewired with a fiber optic wiring to the home, capable of 45 Mbps in two directions, which could handle over 500 channels of video and was totally open to competition. About 86 million households should be wired by 2006."
Still waiting on that fiber optic connection to my home in 2020...sure would be useful to all the kids that are trying to learn remotely via a damn phone right now.
How many households in this situation have an extra monitor lying around to plug this into, or even a proper desk to have a desktop computer set up on? Plus they'll need a separate webcam (and I'm guessing finding one that just works out of the box on Raspbian without fiddling around with drivers and such could be non-trivial). This new Pi form factor is kinda clever but surely a $200-$300 chromebook or tablet is still significantly more accessible.
And how does a desktop enable more advanced STEM learning than a laptop?
let's allow a more realistic $80 delivered
yes, it's a great price for a great piece of kit, don't get me wrong. but if the price is still an issue (as implied by free monitor), it shouldn't be a big exaggeration to expect to find a second hand Pi4 for $40-50
Amazon.com $59.43 + free shipping (1-day w/Prime)
PiShop.us $55 + $7.95 shipping
...so $60 seems very fair including shipping, not to mention this larger keyboard model will cost at least as much to ship.
And I'm talking about households that literally do not have computers. There is no old hardware lying around, much less not just a keyboard & mouse, but the HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card, etc. Sure, search craigslist or similar, ask friends/family, you might get by. That's not a scalable solution for 1,000 kids in my school district that lack resources, much less the thousands more in surrounding districts. As with many technical problems, scaling is a challenge, not the single one-off solution.
that's an entirely different argument, which I agree with you on. the original argument was that it's more likely a spare keyboard is lying around than a comparatively expensive monitor (which is more prone to being repurposed)
> mouse, .. HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card
these would still be required anyway, they're not included in the price
It does call for a bit of scrounging, but an acceptable used monitor should be twenty bucks or free. Including a screen is optimizing for pessimism: the best you could do is something useless for the majority, and only as good/cheap as the minority could get a new one for.
That was a fair assertion 1997. Nowadays you will easily find a bunch of computers too.
>The brilliance here is that a kid in a poor family can get started with just a single piece of hardware that's available cheaply.
$100 isn't cheap when you're poor.
A poor family that has any sense certainly won't buy brand-new hardware.
When you have to save money, you buy second-hand, which will allow you to buy a fairly modern PC with a magnitude more power than that raspberry PI at half the price.
For instance I could pick this computer up for 1 euro simply because someone wants to get rid of it:
https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/pc-computer-acer...
You can find tons of offers like these if you'd browse your local ebay/craigslist/whatever listings.
Why would someone spend 100 bucks on a new machine?
Sure, smarter people can literally dumpster dive and get going. I literally did that as a kid. N9 big deal.
Tons of people will buy this and get a lot out of it.
Wicked, would love to hear the story.
I meant if they somehow got ahold of one (community program, kind person from across town, local school getting rid of them, etc.). The discussion was more about whether a child in a poor family who gets one can actually use it without any extra hardware, not how affordable $100 is to a family in poverty.
Most parents in poverty don't have the brain space to think about buying one of these for their kids, much less the $100 it costs.
You're absolutely right, and that's why the pi foundation includes schools as a target market. Schools deliver the greatest, and certainly the most equally distributed, value, and cheap computers mean more money to spend on that brain space.
I agree, only would say Apple 2 or C64, Atari...
you could just use the pi camera for a webcam, since the port is still there?
"Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US".
1) TV is comparatively cheap entertainment.
2) Flatscreens are the only kind of TV produced in years.
3) Is that objectively "a very high priority" for "poor people"? Citation needed.
4) Being poor sucks, and things which make life more pleasant would be a completely understandable high priority.
5) Obtaining things which make life better is a very high priority in all stratas of American life.
And yet the comment ""Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US" doesn't sound filled with empathy, understanding, approval, celebration that even poor people can afford material goods in America, does it?
Instead, somehow, it sounds judgemental, critical, accusatory. In the middle of a thread about a Raspberry Pi which was designed and made to be cheap so that poor kids have a chance of computing access, with the context "even poor people have TVs" who would throw in that comment and why?
From an opinion piece[1]: "The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. [...] Regardless of how they were intended, poor people and minorities sense that with those comments Gingrich is winking — some call it “dog whistling” — at certain white audiences by intimating that black people are lazy, happy to live off the government and lacking any intellect."
That's obviously what happened here. The comment "Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US" does not say "poor people value education and it's a good thing even poor people have access to a TV where they could plug in a Raspberry Pi", it says "of course poor people will have a TV, they're lazy and watch TV all day and feel entitled to the luxury of a flatscreen, right guys?" wink wink, allowing the poster to deny any responsibility because "many poor people own televisions".
The Center for American Progress paper "Moving away from Racial Stereotypes"[2] says "The notion that poor people, particularly poor people of color, are lazy is the most significant and persistent stereotype affecting efforts to address poverty in our country." and "It’s notable that labels suggesting laziness or lack of effort that have been used to describe African Americans are also applied to poor people more generally." and "Getting tough on poor people is a way to try to win votes during elections, derail legislation, or distract attention from positions that would otherwise be unpopular. Given modern-day sensibilities, however, very few single out groups directly—instead of using words like “black” or “Hispanic,” they raise stereotypes and employ code words that let audiences know exactly which groups they are actually talking about without actually saying so" and "Over the years, progressives have contributed to the continued association of African Americans and Hispanics with poverty"
That is, there's a certain demographic characterised roughly by older, white, 1950s, Republican, Fox-News watching, to whom "poor" means "black" and "TV" means "lazy", "flatscreen" means "entitled luxury" and "high priority TV" means "irresponsible" or "stupid", and the whole sentence is completely innocently deniable because everyone has a TV so it's just plain fact and completely innocent.
The only hint is that if it were a completely innocent observation, there would be no need to say it at all, no need to single out the poor, no need to mention "high priority", no need to mention "flatscreen". You'd just say "people who can afford a Raspberry Pi 400 probably have a TV, which is nice". And that was already said one comment before in the chain.
[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/juan-williams/207295-...
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2...
I could see a kid plugging this in , doing his homework and after school mom and dad can watch the Pistons.
Multiple kids -- definitely an issue, but it's still one fewer setups than before.
How many households in this situation have an extra monitor lying around to plug this into
Of course, in a multi-kid household, yes - one screen per kid would be needed.
plus they'll need a separate webcam
This new Pi form factor is kinda clever but surely a
$200-$300 chromebook or tablet is still significantly
more accessible.
And how does a desktop enable more advanced STEM learning
than a laptop?
Of course, whether or not this matters depends on the kid and the curriculum. If all the kid's doing is some web-based online curriculum whose needs are perfectly serviced by a Chromebook, then yeah - an RPi device isn't magically going to grant them magical STEM learning powers by osmosis.
Raspberry Pi 400 is what ChromeOS/Chromebooks could have been if Google cared about making computing empower people, rather than seeing it as a tool to manipulate them through adverts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_Unit...
I have an old one with DVI and VGA, so I have a DVI-HDMI dongle and HDMI-HDMI mini cable and my first dongle didn’t work because the form factor of the monitor case didn’t allow it to fit. Quite a pain.
Of course DVI would rule out old TVs, so I don’t know what the “best” choice is, if there is one.
2) Webcam isn't strictly necessary: You'll be able to "see" your teacher, type in chat, virtually raise your hand, etc.
3) This enables more advanced STEM (The "T" portion, really) not because it's a desktop but because of the built-in 40-pin connector opening it up to the massive catalog of projects that exist for the Pi platform already.
4) Perfect is the enemy of the good: You're complaining this isn't a perfect solution for those lacking resources. It's not. But it is significantly better than nothing, or a phone with a 5" screen and no keyboard.
First peripheral I would sell is an add on breadboard station with lots of good sensors, lights, input controls, motor drivers and such that is buffered to prevent damage and start producing education kits.
yes really, this is nearly spectrum-opposite of a chromebook (desgined to keep you in a prebuilt ecosystem)
I don't feel all that good about developments on things like iPads and Chromebooks. Not for stem type tasks.
5x5 RGB LED matrix, gyro, accelerometer, magnetometer, thermometer, hydrometer, barometer, joystick sensor, all for ~$30 USD
Oddly, this board spots a separate ethernet transformer which does support PoE, but there's no circuity to tap that, and nowhere to add it. Which begs for a modification, but seems like missed opportunity.
The bit I don't get is why use an ethernet transformer at all, especially if they're not reaping the benefit from it.
What we've got here is something a lot like that. But it has a lot more power connectivity. All the things the simple machines don't have. But it's all still pretty lean too. I'm excited.
Not in our school district (Mass), students are required to have cameras on and showing most of their face.
I imagine if I were a kid now-a-days, but with the same hobbies I had when I was a kid for real i'd probably be deep-faking a wobbling face image pretty fast.
I've been appalled by wide adoption among schoolkids of Chromebooks. Google promises not to build profiles of kids, but they are still capturing all their online and OS behaviour. The volumes of data captured are unimaginably large.
Pushback and scrutiny of ChromeOS is practically zero in tech circles. In fact it's quite the opposite, as discussed by some in this thread: there's excitement about the thought of porting ChromeOS to Pi.
Tomorrow's headline?
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/latitude-14...
These are resources restricted households as well: $200-$250 represents a significant increase over $100.
Raspberry Pi 400 is fine, but it is not cheapest.
The satisfaction in making a tiny little computer board go is very apparent when you see a kid do it, even if it’s just to make some lights flash or boot into a Nintendo 64 emulator via a console. It all feels very close to the metal but without a great risk of damage.
The only difference I could imagine is "Pi is not a "real" computer, expectations are not high" as it does not run Microsoft Windows.
On the other side, it is perfectly reasonable to let the pupils find a screen on their own, most TVs or used computer screens will do.
From a quick online search, I could find monitors for $30 - $50 and webcams $20 - $30 which is pretty price competitive with a $200 - $300 Chromebook. The Pi community would help with any driver installation issues, and the Pi setup seems powered up enough to run Zoom with no issues.
Though I do see even cheaper Chromebooks in the same price range, so I wonder why / how districts are not able to provide these to students.
> Component shortages continue to disrupt Acer's Chromebook shipments, which can fulfill only 30% of customer orders, with shipments for the remainders having to be deferred, according to the company.
Finally no way to run headless if you wan't 64bit OS.
It's good computer for r/iamverysmart type of people, but not to be actually productive hacker.
Could you expand on that a bit more? I'm currently running a Pi3B+ 64bit Raspbian headless and have had no problems so far. Does the Pi4 not allow 64bit headless?
I agree tablets and laptops are more accessible. But I think when it comes to really learning how to use a computer and realize its full potential you want a proper desktop computer with mouse, keyboard, connection ports. I think it is useful to learn how to plug in different USB devices, monitors etc.
Unlike a Chrome book or Tablet, a "real" computer give you a chance to learn about how a file system works, organizing files into folders. Using multiple programs to work on a collection of files. The single task orientation of tablets make them very user friendly and low threshold but that also limit you in how far you can go.
My kids started out on tablets but now I try to push them more onto using a regular computer.
It would be just like telling kids in the early nineties "this GUI stuff is great and all, but the real way to interact with computers is the command line". Or even longer ago, telling kids "this terminal is nice and all, but the real way to use computers is punch cards".
I also don't think the idea that ChromeOS is too locked down to be a real learning environment for kids really holds up. If anything, it's too open. There are billions of websites out there, and thousands or however many that might be excellent learning resources or sandboxes for kids, it can just be hard to know about them/find them all. But the abstractions are just shifting around, there are plenty of full development environments on the web where you can program and host entire apps. Or you can tinker with IFTTT or Zapier to connect different hosted services and hack them to do different things you make up. There's still a lot of room for creatively using technology, I certainly wouldn't sweat pushing kids onto "regular" computers instead of chrome books or tablets (beyond just a basic introduction to broaden their horizons and let them at least understand that this other paradigm exists).
However, is Pi offering indeed reaching out to the developing countries? Are there any sources that substantiate the adoption of Pi platform in such communities, especially whether there're any lasting effects beyond the inaugural opening and ribbon-cutting, so to speak?
It's tempting to seek the BBC Micro effect from Pi platform, and I hope it can be achieved. Still, one needs to keep in mind that such effect largely was a result of a government policy which supported wide adoption.
They hit this sweet spot of just enough power to be useful, yet totally silent (with a Flirc case on the Pi).
The RPi3b just wasn't quite there yet in terms of speed, but the 4 can easily drive dual monitors and provide enough oompf to be useful in a game jam. Quite a nice little device for hobby development.
I mean, I've had an Atari 65XE myself when I was a kid, but tvs are much bigger nowadays, less accessible and HDMI cables are much more difficult to run through the room (stiffness and length limits are real issues); OTOH keyboards and mice are easy to come by. The hard part of the Pi is the display. The kit also doesn't include a cam nor a headset, nor even a mic. This is super important for online learning. Maybe you could fit in a mic in the keyboard somewhere?
A Pi all-in-one (iPi if you excuse me) or a Pi-book in an affordable price range would be revolutionary. I have an old VGA-only monitor but guess what - no D-SUB on the Pi 400 and a proper dongle would be another... $30?
As is, nostalgia value is super-high but I don't feel it's as practical as one would hope without any kind of display.
The webcam is a different issue, there doesn't appear to be much for a plug and play option for the Pi. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
If these were to be used as an option for remote education, I would hope that the same organization promoting them would also sell a kit with the system preconfigured to use an included webcam.
Doubtless one of the resellers will augment this with a package that includes an inexpensive USB webcam.
$1499. In 1994.
But you know what would be really interesting with these guys - is if they would auto-hive once online - and would just have access to whatever apps were avail - say, you pick a role or profile (switchable) for the unit...
"e-learning box" or "games" or "news" or "community" such roles/profiles
And it would join that hive and then auto pkg whatever apps it needed to to provide access to those communities or content...
Giving students a $100 phone + $10/mo of cell internet access for 9mos out of the year pays bigger dividends.
Besides the longest essay you have to write on the ACT, SAT or AP tests is about 300 words. You can do that on a phone - kids do it now on paper.
What if kids cram tests on their phones for a few hours then read books the rest of the day? Maybe take your phone outside. Sounds like a decent enough curriculum to me.
Anyway my point is you don’t really need a keyboard in education. And with that the logic of this stuff as an educational policy kind of goes away.
and education should really be separated from the entire phone mobile ecosystem with all the behavioral manipulation that it entails
I'm old enough to remember buying a 40MB hard drive for $4,000 (about $9,600 after adjusting for inflation).
Remember OLPC? It was painfully slow, but that was more than 10 years ago.
Seems like you could just repurpose a cheap android tablet...
> Remember OLPC? It was painfully slow, but that was more than 10 years ago.
OLPC may not have been a hit itself, but it seemed to usher in an era of inexpensive low-powered-but-still-useful PCs.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's an engineered price point because lesser hardware at lower prices can't even be shipped and make a profit. And frankly, if I remember back 10-15 years, there were $350 boxes back then, too, so maybe it's a minimum price/rule of thumb that was calculated a long time ago.
And back then salaries where much lower even adjusted for inflation. That Amiga had 256 KB of RAM. This Raspberry is just a beast in comparison to what me and my brother had and it costs 31x LESS, in a world where salaries are higher than back then.
I can see this opening up a lot of opportunities for families and schools in less affluent countries. Maybe even businesses. I can imagine various famers and small businesses out in the countryside in Africa or India could benefit from a computer like this to lookup market information for crops, plan budgets, savings, purchases etc.
There are also a couple videos linked in the post, if you're more visually-inclined.
Fun fact: the Pi 400 (and Compute Module 4) both have newer revisions of the BCM2711 SoC (C0 instead of B0), and that's part of the reason the clock speed is higher on the Pi 400 (1.8 GHz) than on the regular Pi 4 model B (1.5 GHz)—the newer revision apparently handles faster clocks and scaling with less heat than the older revision.
I have a Pi 4B with a heat sink and fan that's running BOINC 24x7 (yielding a RAC of about 750-775 on World Community Grid), and with the fan connected to 3.3V it runs at a comfortable 52-54°C with absolutely no throttling. I think I'm going to try overclocking it a bit and see how it handles it.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/thermal-testing-raspberry-p...
I love this Pi 400 and think in the new year I will pick one up for my son. We have a Pi 4 that we use a lot and he loves but like you say in your video it is a bit annoying with this little box off the side with a bunch of cables coming out of it.
Not terrible by any means just annoying so I really love the form factor of it all being in the keyboard.
I have thought for a while now they should do this kind of form factor or sell a simple RPi branded monitor with a Pi built in so I am happy to see they thought about it too. A keyboard is much more practical than a monitor of course so it is a far more sensible choice!
Really hope this sells well and they continue with this kind of form factor in the future. Even a slightly bigger keyboard with a "forehead" (C64 vibes) would be excellent.
Oh, I'd definitely be up for that!!
If your VESA mounts are close enough together, you can just drill holes directly in the RPi case and mount it to the back of the monitor. If they're too far apart, use the mounts to put in a plastic or wood bar, then drill holes through the RPi case and the bar (while not attached to the monitor), then mount the case to the bar and the bar to the monitor.
I've looked at doing similar in the past, but I wanted to make the mounting block along the bottom of the monitor with the SD card exposed. That way I can set up a series of SD cards to test with. Want to test something on Ubuntu 18.04? Cool, switch monitor 2 to input 2 (the RPi) and then swap the SD card out to the Ubuntu 18.04 one and you're ready to rock. It's not as easy as a Docker container, but I'm often using the GPIO pins and I don't have the desire to try to make GPIO pins work in Docker. It might not even be that hard, I just don't feel like adding another step to my troubleshooting.
[a]: Ignoring the obvious differences between a TV-as-a-monitor and an actual monitor
If they go the all-in-one route they should include an external HDMI port and a switch to choose between it and the internal Raspberry Pi.
*: But upgradeable and repairable.
Them's fighting words to a NEC C651Q owner.
My thinking for a Raspberry Pi monitor would be to have the ports in an easier to access location on the rear of the monitor so hats, etc. can be made to a standard design.
Of course the monitor will likely out last the Pi inside it but there is nothing to stop it being used as just a monitor one the Pi instead is no longer useful.
also fyi the pi-top project has a DIY 'all in one' for the PI:
https://www.pi-top.com/products/pi-top-ceed
and a DIY laptop:
https://www.pi-top.com/products/pi-top-3
only claim pi-3 compatibility at the moment, not sure if it would still work with 4, probably need some adapters or so
(maybe other projects like this, not sure)
(side note, I love the ansible roles you've made, especially AWX, saved me a bunch of time back in 2018)
I can type fine on it, though I still prefer an Apple Magic Keyboard (latest version) for daily typing since the body of it is slightly more solid.
I'm not a mechanical keyboard fan, though I know many would like that kind of keyboard here, and it would be more fitting for the nostalgia!
Gen-x who remember the TRS80 MC10 and its keyboard remember chiclet keyboards as not much better than membrane keyboards (Consider the ZX81 Spectrum)
But decades later Apple started shipping chiclet-appearing keyboards that actually worked, so the style has been somewhat revitalized.
That said, yeah they could be shipping a 1980s quality chiclet keyboard or a 2020s quality chiclet keyboard, so that's worrisome.
"Gen-x first computers" sounds like an interesting site
But at least it was waterproof! Thank goodness they saw the light and used a proper keyboard on the 800.
Where did you find a replacement mechanical keyboard for the 400? I never found one. I was so envious of the Sinclair owners because they had tons of options.
they were all the same design. 3 layers of plastic foil. 1 for horizontal wires, 1 for vertical wires to create a matrix and a 3rd sheet of foil between them with holes, so the horizontal and vertical wires can contact when pressed.
before that, when I was around 6 years old, I remember my father was sticking round aluminum foil stickers on his finger and type directly on a keyboard made out of a PCB with a key matrix.
The keys were the shape of 2 combs facing each other and you had to short them by touching them with the alu stickers on his finger.
It was an AirComp II computer, iirc. I can't find any references to it online now...
Sony was already using that style of keyboard at the time, so although Apple contributed to the momentum, they didn't start the trend.
Sauce: I have the keyboard without the computer in it, from when I bought a Pi 4 "starter kit" a year ago.
It had to use the one USB-C connector that's used for power for emulating the keyboard and mouse since that's the only one that supported USB-OTG. So you kind of either need PoE or another adapter to both power the device and be able to hae the Pi act as an input device.
>It would be possible to do this, but you’d have to run a simple buildroot SD card which runs a suitable dwc2 OTG HID driver to pretend it is a keyboard…
Otherwise, you can use the Pi 400 as a Barrier server to the other computer… See my other blog post for details!
Gordon
A build of KeePass that uses the OTG mode for autotype. You plug the Pi 400 into a USB port on your device (whether computer, console, or whatever) and the password file is never on the computer in the first place.
Edit to add:
Might work better with a tablet build of the Pi, though, and you'd probably still want it to sync the file to Dropbox or some other storage place for safety.
Have you tested the Keyboard hub's limits? Controller seems to be QinHeng Electronics USB-Serial.
Reading your article
> the Pi 400 didn't overheat even when I was running it with an overclock to 2.147 GHz, the maximum it allows currently
This only makes me wish they sold an 800 version with 8 GB of RAM, just like the Pi 4.
(Folklore says the original product plan had the Atari 400 come with 4K of RAM, and the 800 8K... and then memory got cheaper by release.)
---
You might want to replace the link to the plexiglass cutter to remove the tracking info (linking everyone who clicks it back to you); here's the smallest you can get it:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000BZZ1D0
The same goes for your SD card links.
I am in the process of sorting out my financial situation - tough founder luck. But I am happy to order a few of these (and monitors) and rent a small garage to give local kids a free computer lab to learn. (Kolkata, India)
Rent for a small garage would be about USD 35 / month. Electricity would not cross USD 50 / month.
One local school here threw away 50+ small dell quad-core i5's in their quest to make sure they spend their money wisely.
I've assembled a small lab, with many computers, laser printers, scanners, tablets, projectors, big-screens, etc. Without spending a single dollar on hardware.
This has two effects, it reuses a resource that was destined for destruction, and it doesn't add fuel ($$$) to the ecological dumpster fire that is modern capitalism.
This is exactly how it's done in many places. A 10yr old computer is perfectly fine for this, maybe even older. Yes it might not play all youtube videos, but it works.
I think broad computer illiteracy in the general population has convinced people that you "need" a new, powerful computer. In reality, 95% of the population can get away with any decent computer from the last 10 years. Grandma isn't training a neural net, she's checking Facebook.
I continue to use a 2nd generation i3 desktop as a "daily driver" for a lot of my computing/server needs, without issue.
My primary laptop is a newer T25 because I couldn't resist the keyboard, but my primary desktop is still a 9-year old AMD FX8350; with 32GB of RAM and SATA SSD, I game, Lightroom, Photoshop, VMWare Workstation, and anything else I need easily enough.
Unfortunately, layer after layer of framework on abstraction on framework on abstraction sometimes means that we need a supercomputer to render a user interface, and still end up with perceptible lag. :)
Regarding elsewhere where I mentioned running BOINC on a Pi 4B, I'd also note that (at least from a RAC standpoint) it's almost up there with a ThinkPad X201 Tablet with an i7-640LM throttled to 1.2 GHz. If I switch the BIOS from "balanced" to "performance" mode, the ThinkPad will run a bit faster but within an inch of thermal shutdown. I might be able to overclock the Pi enough to achieve parity with the throttled i7.
Eight years ago, I'd never had guessed that we'd see the Pi turn the corner to become a usable general-purpose desktop.
Also, don't under estimate the performance of future SD cards.
v0, get it shipped
v1, improve
https://carcamcentral.com/guide/recommended-microsd-cards-fo...
I know there are other power down issues with SD cards and corruption well. I think in a class setting I would have important files replicated to an NFS server, with at least hourly snapshots.
Every Pi SD card has ended in irreparable disk corruption. The SD hardware’s wear-leveling and delayed allocation is fundamentally incompatible with any device without a battery, especially with frequent writes.
The “official” solution for the Pi is to use read-only SD cards with overlayfs. That’s not the default and it’s not how entry-level users will use this.
+1 for i3. Been using my Thinkpad W510 with i3 non-stop since 2010 and it's still working like a charm. For the past months, though, I've had to use a Dell XPS 13 for work. Now that I've equipped it with i3, as well, it's merely using 3.5W while I'm doing ordinary computer work and some coding, meaning that I can get 15 hours of battery life easily, and often even 20h. Absolutely mind-blowing.
Hard to give more info, there isn’t just one auction site for all schools or counties, but a bit of googling will probably get you what you want.
On the other hand, you're often looking at "Lot of 38 Dell Latitude 5570 Core i7", "These items have been used by students or employees within a professional Community College environment. Items have been maintained, updated, and well kept.", minimum bid $5,800.00
Or something like "(1) Dell Optiplex 780, bad power supply, pickup in-person only, we don't ship" so you'd have to be in the area and interested in swapping a PSU.
It's a pretty sweet machine too, an HP Elite 8300MT from about 2012 or so. It has one of those side panels that can be removed by working a latch with your hand -- no screws necessary. I'm making it into a build server.
This RP400 is small, can be taken everywhere by kids, has all necessary interfaces to make something funny and can on worst even run from a manual energy-source (which of course is more relevant for a poorer country than a rich country).
I can see kids taking this RP400 around like a (paper)notebook, work with them at school, home, their friends home or somewhere else and motivating them to use them more than some stationary device. And because of the hdmi they even can switch places fast if neccessary, limiting the interuptions in their work.
Not usefully it can't. There's no display, so that "everywhere" is restricted to places that have an HDMI display just hanging out. Which is then a vanishingly small number of places. And since we're talking about kids - places with a front panel HDMI port, which is even rarer. Or you have to pair it with a portable monitor, in which case you spent as much as an entry level laptop and got something worse in return.
This is a cute little toy, and I want one, but that's all it is - a toy. Same as all the RPI's before. Good intro to hobby electronics programming with the GPIO, but not a disruptive entry-level computing experience, either. That place remains in the realm of the ultra-budget laptops, as they require no existing infrastructure.
Wait what? Doesn't virtually every TV sold in the last 10 years have an HDMI port?
Like where else can you use this other than a basically permanent installation at home for this to qualify as "taken everywhere by kids"?
The point I was trying to make, which doesn't seem to come across, is that spending $ on new equipment is a shortcut. A quick fix. Spending just a bit of time seeking out the sources of e-waste in your community, in the right technical hands, can pay off big.
You don't have to feed the beast. It doesn't take much vision to see that the action of paying $ into a system that happily externalizes all damage is part of the problem and directly contributes to the ecological and socialogical degradation we are all hopefully observing.
You can get all you need for hardware for free if you spend the time to seek it out and at the same time, you are helping clean up the mess.
We developers, many of us have been around from the time that 16K was a lot of memory, a 40MB hard drive could hold all you had, and 1 MHz was fast enough to play with almost any of the ideas in computer science. This is still true for many many tasks. I would argue that learning algorithmic complexity (big O) can be easier when you don't have a massive amount of compute that blasts through O(2^n) in about the same time as O(n) for many data sets. Try that on an apple II. A ten year old computer can have 16G of ram and run dual cores over 2GHz. You can learn a heck of alot of computer science with one of those machines. No need to feed the beast.
In the developing world electricity tends to be very scarce. Raspberry Pis, and stuff of that sort, are ideal for that environment.
But how much more? Just "a bit" or a significant amount?
I would love to get some insights. I have been wanting to get into some long-term model of social giving. I have been really lazy and only do regular donations to Watsi (YC funded) for about 6 years now. I constantly feel I need to invest more of my personal energy into this but I would like some guidance.
Is there somewhere one could read more about this? Sounds nifty.
There are alternatives to RPi that do what you want, odroid-h2plus for example.
Broken connectors, duff microSDs, bricks.
They don't use them now, preferring python on windows.
It was built like a tank.
I believe the compute module is somewhat better in that it uses eMMC rather than SD cards.
- https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/27619/is-it-... - https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ex7dvo/quick_...
microSD is a mess in this regard. Wear leveling is less common there and only present in very specific and expensive niche models.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Industrial-MicroSD-UHS-I-SDSD...
It's really a terrible computing experience compared to using a simple off the shelf windows box running python with full single-sign-on to GCPW. They don't crash and the cables are never yanked around because they are AIO boxes and the storage never goes wonky. Teachers prefer them because the first 30 minutes of a 80 minute slot isn't getting 30 raspberry pi's limping again.
They could use a different power connector that doesn't cause this confusion, or they could design Pis to use less power and therefore work properly with more USB power supplies.
A USB connector, at this point, is a PHY (like a serial DB-9 connector), not an inter-ecosystem compatibility promise (like a FireWire or SCSI port.) Lots of things use USB for lots of different incompatible use-cases. They just happen to share a connector.
But on the other hand, you can also think of it like a regular PSU: all motherboards connect to all PSUs, and there’s no way for a PSU and motherboard to communicate to “lock out” a mismatch. And a PSU will seem to work for a given configuration of motherboard+CPU+peripherals, until you drive that configuration hard enough to overdrive the PSU, and it shuts off.
The solution in both cases is the same: you overbuy on PSUs. A good high-wattage-rated power supply (whether a USB one or a desktop molex one) will power anything below that wattage requirement just fine. USB PSUs do negotiate power draw with the client device, so you can run a Pi off a big-brick laptop-class USB charger without damaging it.
And that’s mostly why Raspberry uses USB power, I think: if you already have a big beefy USB PSU from something else (as most early-market adopters do), you can use it to power your Pi for playing around, without having to buy the Pi its own PSU, if you’re not sure you want/need to set it up for its own standalone use-case.
(Also, the Pi will run just fine on a wimpy 5V1A iPhone charger if you don’t tax it very hard. Just like a cheap desktop PSU will power a gaming rig with a beefy GPU, if you never open a game. And most embedded use cases, e.g. PiHole, don’t tax the Pi very hard. So there’s a lot of cases where people get along just fine with the cheapest possible configuration, where forcing them to buy an actual power adapter would make things a lot more expensive for no gain.)
> or they could design Pis to use less power
You know that they stop selling old-model Pi’s, right? It’s not because they want to. It’s because those chips stop being manufactured upstream; and Raspberry doesn’t do enough volume to drive production of SoCs all on their own.
Raspberry is constrained by what parts they can put in a Pi that are both available and sufficient for the use-cases their customers have (e.g. driving monitors at native resolution.) Those chips have minimum power requirements. The power requirements never go down, because there’s no high-volume customer with exactly Raspberry’s use-case (where that use-case is “using process-shrinks to build a graphical desktop SoC of the same performance at ever-lower current draw, rather than achieving ever-higher performance at the same current draw.” An SoC process-shrink that is taken as-is with no commensurate re-layout for increased perf, is extremely rare in the industry. Not rare in microcontrollers, but an MCU can’t drive a desktop computer.)
You might suggest they undervolt the newer chips — and they do! — but there’s only so far you can undervolt a chip before it just stops functioning at all. (Especially an SoC, that contains DRAM that must get refreshed, IO controllers that must drive peripheral lines with to-spec line voltage, etc.)
I'm just nitpicking your otherwise great post here but wouldn't the IO voltages be entirely separate from the core voltage? Or do they all need to be kept within a certain range of each other?
Is it such a terrible "learning" Experience that yanking the power cable out is a bad idea as others have said the pi's should have better power supplies.
Do you mean the microSD cards tend to wear out, or that they’re DOA?
If the former — I’m pretty sure there’s an option to load RaspberryOS into a RAM-resident mode (like a live CD) where regular OS usage won’t hit the disk at all, and only a “Local Documents” partition is mounted writable, with nothing configured to implicitly write to it by default.
If the latter — trust me, the same is true of eMMC, or any other Flash media ordered in bulk quantities. You just have to QA them on arrival. Set up an RMAed-parts box with a shipping label in advance; you’ll need it.
> broken connectors
The microSD connector? In an educational context, that shouldn’t be end-user exposed. It’s essentially a maintenance port. Stick some tape over it.
In the computer labs of the 90s, kids would break the CD-ROM drive trays, too. MDM software was developed that would, among other things, lock out the CD-tray eject mechanism unless/until a teacher enabled it (presumably for working through some whole-class “multimedia” product that never materialized, because who’d trust kids to insert the CDs?)
SD cards and USB flash drives are manufactured with lower-grade flash memory than SATA and NVMe SSDs. The stuff that wears out in RPi usage is the stuff that was rejected for desktop usage. So having a large failure rate is not the only option, if you can expose a SATA or PCIe port. It's a little disappointing that they cannot even offer end users that upgrade path.
RPi3+ has had no problem so far, and I'm not upgrading to RPi4 out of fear of it becoming an unstable mess again.
I've stopped complaining because I already know how the issue manifests and how to solve it.
A SD-card is not a proper replacement for a drive, it's a fine storage medium.
My guess: The VL805 USB 3.0 UAS is broken.
USB could remain available through USB OTG and it would sit in the middle between the RPi4 and the Compute Module 4. Using the USB power socket for OTG is doable already on the Pi4, but to do it in a fully supported way would need some extra components to properly handle USB-C configuration. Still cheaper than an H2plus
MMC and TransFlash at this point is a synonym for SD Card when someone cannot refer to them for license/certification reasons.
The alternatives to RPi don't have nearly as rich selection of polished software, vibrant community and ecosystem as Raspberry Pi has. The best parts (besides hacker-orientedness) of RPi are its uniformness and popularity.
Whilst education is still important, particularly on the charity side, these days the RPi Trading division explicitly targets multiple markets, for instance, the compute boards specifically targeted at industrial usage. This product is described in their own press release as targeting the christmas toy market amongst others.
RPi4 is great... small cheap, basically a full pc in a small box, with low power usage, low heat production, no noise, and yes... with a shitty storage solution.
GPIO is a bit trickier, since most devices don't break it out, but for some purposes the audio jack is usable. There's also USB-GPIO adapters but they can be a bit pricey (although if you're interfacing with something like an ESP32 BLE works really well)
Geekworm Raspberry Pi 4 X872 M.2 NVMe SSD Expansion Board Compatible with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B only, Support X735/X710/X765/X725
But yeah, I would also love this to be built in on something like the RPI. Closest option according to my research is probably the Rock Pi, but then it's not really straight forward to boot from it etc...
[0]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/ [1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4-io-boa...
https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/
It's a bit sad the Pi foundation dropped the DDR form factor, though, it was a good idea IMO.
For this, they could have gone with an EOMA68 form-factor, that would have been awesome: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
Gives you an option to install os on external storage. You can set it up to dual boot multiple distros if you wanted.
I agree pi4 would benefit from better storage options, but for the money it's still a impressive package.
It also has a firmware bug where it cannot boot unless there is an (empty, unused) SD card in the slot, which is annoying!
[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running...
The Samsung T5 and T7 are frighteningly fast USB-attached portable SSDs - some simple tests of mine had them at around 335MB/s. On paper the T7 should be twice as fast, so it's interesting that they tested so close (the T5 was even a little faster, as high as 350MB/s), but they are both totally good enough.
It sounds like literally all your problems would be addressed by using the official power supply and a USB-connected SSD - although your problems might very well be solved just by using the official power supply and a decent SD card.
SATA and NVMe interfaces are something some nerds who aren't the target audience for this hardware would like but they don't address the real-world problems you mentioned at all.
I used to have the low-power indicator show up all the time in the past, but it seems the usb-c power supply has resolved that.
Additionally usb boot + usb3 speed has made running completely off of usb instead of sd a good solution. There are also pretty fast yet small form factor drives like the samsung fit to choose from as far as physical size.
(M600, sort of a NUC)
Clock speed: 1827x
Benchmark: 430000x
Memory: 65536x
Power: 0.5x
Screen resolution: 130x
Serial port rate: 1562500x
Introductory price: 6x less
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/Shared-Image-2020-11-02-20-0...
Benchmark: 430000x
Unfortunately, your "reference" is just the same numbers you posted but as an image. I don't know if this counts as a "reference" :)
Any links to who performed those benchmarks?
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
Every benchmark is meaningless or unfair to somebody.
How do you figure? They were released 30+ years apart. 2^30 would be a billion times faster. Instead it's something under 19 doublings, nowhere close to doubling every year for 37 years.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=37+%2F+log+base+2+%284...
Now all I want from them is a custom edition with the function keys in red, the rest in black, and the body in beige.
[Even more unpopular opinion] ... even if they were functionally different and marked explicitly as USB 3 x3, HDMI x2, power x1.
† I hear this is not everyone's case, but I just decided to buy a bunch of USB-C <-> whatever cables and stash the old cables in a drawer. The experience has been refreshing ever since, even emergency charging the laptop over 5W.
references:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#/media/File:BBC_Micr...
or an actual ARM model:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#/media/File:A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Acorn_RISC_Ma...
BBC Micro Bot - 1000 Tweets of Code https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/ "BBC Micro bot runs your tweet on an 8-bit computer emulator."
It's a senseless design defect in what otherwise looks to be a splendid little unit.
If I end up with one of these, the first thing I'm gonna do is cut a little base-plate to glue it to, which extends behind the unit and has places to secure the HDMI cables (and maybe some other goodies as long as I'm at it), to prevent exactly the torque we all know happens.
Everything else is too big (DVI) or old and big (VGA)
My father is a teacher and I had this idea to let his students use Raspberry PI with TVs but this is perfect for them.
As far as I know, they're not a billion dollar company yet they keep innovating by making better Pi's and continuously upgrading the builder/user experience.
Congratulations to Upton and team!
That the hardware and software engineers at Raspberry Pi Trading can keep innovating and producing such amazing products, astounds me.
For educational purposes, the same problem exist today: however, kids will not have a space HDMI screen with a micro HDMI cable.
The replacement screen that most people have is different: it's a smartphone, as there are more smartphones than TVs.
So a "notch" or receptacle on top on the keyboard, to secure a smartphone into place, would be helpful: the use case would be powering the 400 from the smartphone AC adapter (kids may not have a spare adapter matching the pi4 power requirements), plugging the phone into the 400 using a USB cable to keep the phone charged, use the phone as the screen - without it falling out and breaking, or hanging by a cable.
Android being finicky, you may not be able to have autodetection/USB gadget mode, but a remote desktop solution would go a long way.
It is not possible at the moment, given the 400 power requirements, but newer/more powerful AC adapters will eventually be more common.
This leaves the notch, which you may want to consider in the next revision
Nowadays, leading billion dollar tech companies often come out with upgrades that highlight being a few microns thinner and camera resolution without really launching actual innovative products or without enhancing the user experience.
Thank you.
Anyway, if they make the board available separately, there can be a huge ecosystem of interesting cases for it.
When I was younger, I was lucky enough to have an Amiga Commodore 500+, and I read all the included literature cover to cover, over and over again. I have a lot to thank those manuals for!
EDIT: It's available for free online as a PDF, https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/beginners-guide-4th-ed
I would have also though it would cost less but I guess integrating it directly is even cheaper.
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-compute-module...
[2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-400-tear...
I'm curious - can one buy that one board ?
It is an odd form-factor that I have not seen a raspi use in the past (long and rectangular) - is it only sold as part of these keyboard units ?
I'm so glad about Raspberry Pi popularity. There are many superior hardware platforms but having one that's really popular massively speeds up prototyping when most modules and sensors have libraries written for it, and you know you are testing them on the same hardware on which they were developed.
What would I change?
It's a pity that the keyboard is connected using a flip-up ribbon, rather than internal USB. Although I can see why the target market (education) just prefers an all-in-one computer, this also means that the RPi 400 can't be used as a keyboard for other computers. Therefore I'll still need to carry a keyboard around.
There will be software options for virtual USB host (e.g. shameless plugs for the EspUSB which uses WiFi, or KeyMouSerial which uses serial) but in practice, those wouldn't be as easy for most hackers. There's also no F12 key, which is needed for system configuration on some distros.
The two Micro-HDMI ports are quite small and close together (especially when using a 3-way micro-mini-full size HDMI adaptor).
Like Apple, there's no headphone jack. Also no built-in SD reader, so I'd still need to carry a USB card reader (unlike my laptop, which can go directly from camera SD cards to HDMI on a projector).
Final nitpick: if this keyboard is intended for young people, their hands are smaller, so full-size keys are actually less comfortable. (believe it or not, I've even seen keyboards intended for children that have extra-large keys). A design with smaller keys that could fit in my large pocket (e.g. TI-84 sized device) would be preferable.
What the RPi Foundation has done is an excellent feat of engineering, and they should and will be rewarded by the market for their innovation. It's a great product. I just still see some room for future improvements.
Only one concern: I own one of the keyboards (they also have a US layout) and they’re not bad, but the right cursor key fails to register sometimes. So let’s hope they tweaked the build quality a bit in that regard.
Context: I run a Java Minecraft server (for my son who plays Java edition from Linux) with GeyserMC (which allows Bedrock clients to connect and play) so my son's friends can join from tablets and Wii's. It would be cool to be able to play from pi's.
Oh wow thank you for mentioning this, I had no idea this existed!
If you drop the plugin into the plugin folder of your mc server (recommended server is paper) it should work after a restart.
- External keyboards are super cheap, there is wide variety of designs to choose based on personal preferences, while when integrated in computer you are stuck with one design.
- Keyboards are vulnerable to destruction by toppled cup of tea, so it make sense to not put full computer inside.
- It is easier to manipulate with keyboard when there is only one cable coming from it instead of 5+ cables.
- When moving between places, it is easier to take smaller brick than keyboard-sized computer, while keyboards are interchangable and widespread enough to get one at destination.
This is clearly not true for this kind of keyboard computers, they require monitor a and power like ultra small form factor PCs or other desktop PCs. So my point is that i do not see any advantage for them to outweight disadvantages of such setup.
Edit: per https://youtu.be/3A7pQN5W08E it supports USB OTG, so it sounds like the answer is yes!
You can buy the connector here: https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/products/1362374/?grossPrice=...
I agree with you though. RPi appeals to people with a wide range of skills. There are lots of programmers who want to use Pi to get more electronics knowledge, and RPi foundation could make that a bit easier for those people.
(EDIT: I don't understand why parent has been downvoted. A lot of similar devices do use newer more specialised connectors and it can be hard to work out who makes and supplies the connectors.)
I spent many hours playing with it. Once I discovered the User I/O port, I realized its true power. It wasn't a powerful computer on its own, but the fact that it could easily interface with the real world gave it abilities that the PC clones of the era didn't have.
This Raspberry Pi PC reminds me of that VIC-20. Like the VIC-20, it's got a User I/O port and encourages tinkering. Unlike the VIC-20 I had, this is a modern computer that can be used for everything that we expect a modern computer to do.
I hope this encourages a new generation of tinkerers!
I guess Python is the modern BASIC? I feel like what it's missing is an easy to use graphics package for drawing lines, circles and other basic shapes (kind of like the JS canvas, but more oriented towards beginners). I wonder if there's a pip package that does this well (and doesn't require installing a bunch of dependencies)?
I'm also thinking this computer could be further made easier to use for beginners by having a kind of breakout board that plugs into the GPIO and has written labels, makes it easier to connect things (screw terminals?).
That video ad is Steve Jobs-level excellence.
Glamour is mightily hard. I don't even try it when doing products. Apple's pulled it off a few times.
We had talking and braille notetakers (basically our equivalent of PDAs), years before the rest of the world heard about such devices. They've been falling out of fashion lately, mostly because they're so expensive, compared to cheaper but slightly worse alternatives like laptops. If we could make one based on a Pi 400, though, it would probably be way cheaper than anything else on the market, and way more powerful, considering we can put Linux on it.
You can probably power it from a USB battery pack quite nicely.
Just curious, what kind of software can these run? Does it have a functional web browser? Can it run GMail? Google Docs?
Nobody is shipping to Brazil anymore. I used to buy from Modmypi (great customer service and shipped to Brazil!), but then The Pi Hut took over.
Oh well, sooner or later Aliexpress with have it.
However, for schools and institutions (especially in low income realities) this 60% difference might be the differentiating trigger.
Although some of the first personal computers, e.g., the ones advertised in the back of Popular Science, did not come with software, that flexibility did not last and bundling/pre-installation became a corporate strategy. User choice of OS is something no "Big Tech" company today will ever allow. Their business relies on being able to make this choice for the user and all the power that control over the OS allows. Imagine buying a computer without a Microsoft, Apple, Google or Amazon OS pre-installed.
If so, that might imply a pi 4 board release some time soon, which would be nice.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1752436#p...
Thus the Pi 400 has a 1.8 GHz default clock, while the Pi 4 model B has a 1.5 GHz clock.
Note that I just checked my Compute Module 4, and it also has the C0 revision of the chip... so it's interesting the Pi Foundation chose to keep it at the default 1.5 GHz.
It might have to do with the fact that the Pi 400 has a massive keyboard-sized heatsink attached to the SoC in the unit!
Could you plug it in a monitor directly through USB-C, so that you could have display and power (and possible access to the hub of the monitor) through single cable?
I didn’t know that Raspberry Pi had these.
I will definitely be ordering one.
I do already own a newer Raspberry 4 with 4Gb of RAM and the massive heat sink is a must! These things run WAY hotter than the Raspberry Pi 3’s.
There are heat-sinking cases made of aluminum made by third-party’s that dissipate the heat almost as well as the turbo fan setups.
I think that in the future, we might be comfortable bringing around our tablets and connecting them wirelessly(or wired) to monitors at our home, office or PC cafe, and do presentations, code, etc.
This is almost possible today with tablets.
This keyboard almost achieves this vision, but it doesn't provide you with a screen, so it's not possible to show anything while you're on the go... Though I wonder if someone could do some work with keyboard-and-headphones only?
EDIT: Carry an android tablet, and this keyboard, with a battery pack, and you can show the keyboard's view onto the android tablet: https://youtu.be/PZLEUOG9k4Y . It might be nice
https://keyshorts.com/blogs/blog/37615873-how-to-identify-ma...
I also, look at the various books that they sell on the Raspberry Pi site, and worry that they’ll be out of date pretty quickly.
If anyone has recommendations for educational materials or projects that I could help my niece with, I’m sure others on this thread are looking for similar ideas. This new all-in-one device really feels like a well timed gift with lockdown and holidays.
Out two latest Scratch pathways are:
https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/pathways/look-after-your...
and
https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/pathways/protect-our-pla...
Which are designed to provide a progression in Scratch.
[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/10/27/chuwi-larkbox-pro-mi...
Welp, who's gonna solder one up first?
I wonder what signals are on the J5 connector...
I'd be ordering one of these tomorrow if it had these features - still, I expect it will sell very well as-is, so I'm really hoping they come out with a new version at some point!
Obviously I wish it was a cool programmable ergonomic custom mechanical keyboard, but this is a great start on it's own.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family#Newer_XL_ma...
Wouldn't it be fun to ship cartridge games again?
Or I guess a more useful device would be a laptop. A chromebook equivalent but powered by rasberry pi and is hopefully kid-proof rugged
I really like how this is the same thing, and cheaper than the ZX Spectrum ever was.
I'm also concerned this doesn't mention much about how accessible the internals are. Can a kid crack it open?
Meanwhile, totally digging the nostalgia factor. Probably won't buy one, but damn I'd love one
My 5yo son has fun with an external keyboard connected to an old Android tablet. He learns to type and write basic math and words.
I'd like him to jump to the next step. I was contemplating buying him a monitor and a mouse to plug in an old Raspberry with linux distro for kids.
I've been buying Asus monitors for years, and I just bought that one specifically for hooking up tertiary computers like Pi's.
The 80s systems with this form factor mostly didn't have mice, and the joysticks were just as lap-able as the keyboard.
That said, this was a timely move, and should only help them get folks up and running.
I got a full RPI 4 kit for my team for the holidays last year, and getting it all assembled and running was a huge hurdle for technical adults who've never used linux/built a computer.
I like retro computing and while the RPi can do that, doing it in hardware is even better.
However, now that it's released, maybe it can be disassembled and reconnected for that one, if it fits...
Slap on a customized linux system, configure it to load a WebAssembly PWA from a predefined server and you have edge computing on the cheap.
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-ZenScreen-MB16AC-Portable-Monito...
Setting it up on my MacBook Pro required the 'DisplayLink Manager' util to be installed, but otherwise it just works and doesn't need a second power source.
I wonder if that would still work with this Raspberry Pi 400.
That said, what are some affordable / basic screens for a RPI?
Commoditising your complacement [1]. Otherwise it wont be long before Apple ship a $399 Mac Nano. Not exactly a direct competitor, but it will surely sell like hot cakes in the educational market.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Edit: yeah, I know, it'd be more expensive, but I'd gladly pay $250+. And I also realize that cost is one way they're attempting to differentiate--it would just be nice to have the option.
Suggested improvements for Pi 400: 1. Add a couple more keys to the layout: PGUP, PGDOWN, HOME, END - these are needed for seamless web browsing without a mouse. 2. A small touch pad would be great to have. 3. A MIPI camera interface and two more USB ports. 4. LiPO battery.
...and roughly 1800 times the clock speed. One millions times the colors that the C64 display[1]. It even comes with User Port (in spirit)[2].
[1] Yes, the number of colors a home computer could display was a major selling point back then. My C64 only hat 16, my friends CPC had 32, including the rad "Bright White" which enabled stunning effects. Man, I envied that.
[2] Exposed GPIO header is super awesome and quite similar to the C64 User Port. Even more awesome was the Commodore's Expansion Port which basically exposed its bus. It think something like this would not be practically possible with today's GHz clock speeds but still this was super awesome and allowed (and required) you to even dig deeper into the internal workings of your machine.
Yes but it should have probably been a female connector to prevent accidental shorts between pins. One can plug a female connector into it to use as a cap or 3d print a cap anyway.
This is a way better option for many and should have much broader support. Aside, could make a good 1080p chromiumos option for seniors as well.
edit: build in usb3 to 2.5" sata drive would have been really nice too.
edit: that makes me think if they could release something less capable but in more friendly packages? That will probably not have enough market share to be viable.
Several years ago, as I was leaving a consulting gig in Singapore to return home, the team there gave me a Raspberry Pi as a gift. As an experiment, I used it as my only driver for three of four days (I still owned a HDMI monitor back then).
All we need now is a 16Gb RAM pack that wobbles whenever you type on it.
I got a refurbished N64 as well, works as intended.
Then I put in a Raspberry Pi with a Retropie SD card, two gamepads, a mouse, and that's all.
I didn't put a lot of effort into making it look nice, so it's basically just a bunch of cables coming out the back of the Amiga, but at first glance it's still an ordinary Amiga.
Works pretty well overall for Amiga, C64, Spectrum, Atari, and DOS games. Of course boot time is not great, and add to that the time spent navigating Retropie's menu system, it's all a bit of a hassle. It does work better than my actual Amiga for "productivity" applications because I can set it up with more memory and better networking options.
I’m going this route because I also want the flexibility to have a computer on my CRTs. If you want pure gaming, then look into MiSTer FPGA.
It might be neat to get one to turn into a C64/CoCo/etc emulation box that you "just plug into the TV" like the old days..
1) PC makers start coming out with their own keyboard computers with a similar form function within the next 12 months.
2) A future Mac Mini has this same keyboard form factor. (Perhaps with a "keyboard + magic trackpad" form factor.)
I'm going to pick one up just to have a linux box on my desk that's separate from my laptop and not a VM.
It's a little unfortunate that you can't pick a 8GB option, but 4GB is PLENTY. I remember my first RPi had 256MB!!
Today I figured that I need to setup periodic email backups from my Gmail, and guess where that cron is going! I use Windows + WSL as my home machine so having a pure Linux machine locally SSHable is a godsend.
I though of getting a Pi but I'm just doing too much with the server.
I was about to buy a rpi-zero-w with a KVM or remote into it but tbh the more powerful rpi4 sounds like a better option. It has the gpio headers and keyboard built in!
After years of programming professionally, these little things still excite me. :)
There is reason why we moved beyond the "bread case" computers. I don't see any problem that this "desktop" solves. A RPi with a keyboard would be the same price.
In mean time I will stick with my lovely Thinkpad X60 - it have 2 Gb RAM less, old wifi, worse display options but better cpu, true-and-only keyboard, "mouse" and display build in ! It runs OpenBSD without a blink, do www stuff, even yt (but fullscreen is a challenge) - perfect for what Pi400 is advertised for.
I also have x200, x220, t420 and t430 (<- this is worst tp I ever had - PWM! And never models are all flawed). But lastly my carry around and be happy thinkpad is just x60 :)
But also this shows Pi400 is quite capable and ehmm... modern ;)
So, RPi Company hurry up that lazy nVidia !
And hope Mozilla will not kill/waste Firefox and themselves... Like they usually do when MS or G have soon be to present new, shiny browser...
Since it is modeled after computers in the 80s that were sold in a keyboard form factor, such as the Atari 400 and the Amiga 500, they apparently thought that a three digit number would hit the right note for the nostalgia they wanted to invoke.
Maybe because it reminds me of my very first computer, a Tandy 1000HX, which also had a keyboard as its case.
Have they done something different, or will it just overheat and slow down?
Form is a big deal. I expect these to be quite successful.
All things come full circle. Home computer that plugs into the TV.
Love it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=usb+gadget+keyboard
You'd still have to wait for the pi to boot, however.
Makes me wish GPIO was more available on run-of-the-mill PCs and externalized on keyboards and such.
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400/specif...
The logitech keyboards w/ the touchpad built in suck.
This just looks adorable.
I did a double take as well, and had to look it up.
However, there's a simpler reason: for psychological reasons no retailer is going to voluntarily put higher prices on their shelves than they have to, and since unlike most other countries there is no consumer protection law requiring the the actual checkout price including sales tax to be displayed, they don't.
Where did you find that price? On the official purchase page[1] the lowest price is 97 EUR (which is around $113)
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400/?resel...
I doubt the Pi 400 with a screen, battery, touchpad and integrated webcam would be able to sell in numbers that would justify the manufacturing and distribution costs.
I sort of suspect that if this is really successful, they might come out with a laptop version. That'd be nice.
Does a similar system exist today? Something you can boot a computer to and it immediately provides a kids friendly, interpreted programming environment with the ability to do graphics and sounds- but nothing else? That would be the perfect companion to this machine.
There are also other good educational alternatives that aren't entirely immersive but run well on the Pi (Scratch, Python's Turtle module, Mathematica and its interactive notebook (free on the Pi), etc.).
I don't have a use for one though. I only really use my pi4 as a Kodi box and my Pi2 is just a FTP server for my friends.
Where’s the sense of fun?
Given the origin of the raspberry pi being the old BBC and other home computers it would have been fun to have a solid computer with a full size keyboard reminiscent of the old 8 bit machines like the Acorn or the BBC micro.
The is just a keyboard. And really a missed opportunity to be something unique and fun and exciting.
This is kinda neat but nothing special. I’m not involuntarily reaching for my wallet.
I thought inspiration was.
Pretty sure affordability is a goal.
I use the RPi for tech projects like a micro PC so I need to be as small as it can be and no bigger than a smartphone.
This is thing, at that price, makes no sense when people can either get cheaper netbooks or cheaper tablets. This is basically an expensive netbook without a screen.
(I ended up on this page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400-unit/?..., which didn’t list the SD card).
Also note that the original use case was close to “The BBC micro for schools helped a generation learn software and hardware, but modern computers are rubbish at enabling that, because the software is not designed for kids and the hardware is expensive - nobody wants to risk kids bricking an expensive computer.”
"The Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit is the “Christmas morning” product, with the best possible out-of-box experience: a complete PC which plugs into your TV or monitor. The kit comprises:
- A Raspberry Pi 400 computer
- Our official USB mouse
- Our official USB-C power supply
- An SD card with Raspberry Pi OS pre-installed
- A micro HDMI to HDMI cable
- The official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide "
That's basically the existing RPi desktop kit minus keyboard/mouse (RPi, case, power supply, HDMI cable) — it does bluetooth OOB. Which you have been able to get for a long time.
So, they already did it. This is a new, extra thing.