Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions

martinpeck.com

246 pointsmartinpeck144 comments

One of my main concerns about the use of a raspberry pi as a desktop PC is microSD card write lifespan. microsd cards were not meant to be used as the boot disk for a live operating system. The amount of times you can write over one sector on them, and the write wear leveling algorithms, are much worse than even a $45 consumer grade SATA3 interface SSD.

Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that?

I would say that a huge percentage of failures I have seen of raspberry pis, when people attempt to turn them into low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months.

something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.

Yep, same problem with eMMC on Tesla's Tegra board. Solution: mount /var/log and other such partitions as ramdisks :)

That's really scary and a poor choice that something which is probably buried deep in the car, and costs thousands of dollars to remove and replace, is a soldered onboard flash drive which will fail from constant use.

I'd be surprised if tesla didn't have embedded systems engineering responsible for this thing, and indeed even flash memory experts on staff, who are intimately familiar with all of the design problems of flash memory write wear leveling. And they went ahead and send that design to production anyways?

It is quite embarrassing for them; Flash write endurance is something that most new graduates are aware of.

There's an NHTSA investigation into the incident, but on the bright side, Tesla did remediate it in newer models...by using chips with twice as much eMMC memory to push the failures farther out.

Compared to other luxury cars, Tesla's cars have a lot of issues and design problems you wouldn't normally see. I'm not surprised that those problems extend into the internals of their cars, as well.

I believe they avoid socketed chips due to vibration issues. Definitely should have upped the physical capacity to distribute the writes, though.

I have a 5 year old model S and I ran into this failure. My car was about 4.5 years old, it was about 6 months after the initial 4 year warranty expired. I'd struggled with deciding to get an extended warranty or not - of course now I insist everyone should get one. They very generously let me purchase an extended warranty at repair time and let me use that toward that repair.

That was a really stupid design decision of course for Tesla to use the emmc in that way. I love my car but that was a bad day when the problem hit me.

It's been a great car even with a few problems (had one of the door handles replaced). Mine will be 6 years old soon, I will probably wait till it's about 8 years old for replacing it.

On the other hand, I have a friend with an 8 year old model S and he had no extended warranty and he hasn't had that problem.

Where do you save the log on a reboot or power loss?

I'm absolutely not an expert on this, but you ideally provide a sufficiently large amount of storage area, with a flash memory controller, that over the expected (20 year plus hopefully!) lifespan of the product, the amount of periodic daily writes can be evenly distributed, and will not exceed the individual cell write lifespan.

Some people who have intentionally done torture test writes on consumer grade SSDs have discovered the actual cumulative TB writes that a $50 to $100 SSD will take before ultimate failure. From back in 2015: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

One drive failed at 700TB written. If you were to write 2GB per day in an industrial/embedded application nonstop for 20 years, that is considerably less data than 700TB.

With teslas that have a persistent LTE data connection for the car, you also have the option of doing something like 300KB of file upload per day to a remote server.

> If you were to write 2GB per day in an industrial/embedded application nonstop for 20 years, that is considerably less data than 700TB.

Specifically:

  $ units
  You have: 2GiB/day * 20yr
  You want: TiB
  * 14.267273
  You have: 2GiB/day * 20yr
  You want: 700TiB
  / 49.063334

14TB total, or about one fiftieth of your quota.

Either you attach dedicated storage for it or you send the logs elsewhere using a network-mounted /var/log or using a syslog daemon on another host.

I have a reverse-ssh tunnel + script to upload the logs to my home server on demand. If the MCU crashes or reboots unexpectedly, I would lose those logs.

Ironically, my system for downloading the logs writes them to an SD card on a raspberry pi.

Just stick a secondary USB drive in and do your log writes there. Then your SD card won't have the wear and tear.

Write lifespan can be improvement if you make some similar as this: /dev/mmcblk0p1 on /var/log.hdd type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro,commit=600) /dev/zram0 on /var/log type ext4 (rw,relatime,discard)

Because zram is compressed ram disk: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/...

Or for those using journald, use Storage=volatile in /etc/systemd/journald.conf and then `systemctl force-reload systemd-journald`. Remove /var/log/journal to get rid of the old persisted logs.

>> Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that?

>> something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.

As nice as M.2 would be, AFAICT it's not supported by the SoC which is what allows these things to be so inexpensive. Go with USB then.

IMHO an AMD APU could be under clocked to not need a fan, and would allow things like M.2 in a keyboard form factor. That might be amazing but would probably cost 2x to 3x the price. Also, at the higher price people would then complain about the keyboard.

BTW I thing SFF designs and keyboard computers should have a couple USB or SD on the top to make it easy to plug in storage devices.

> Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that?

Judging by how often people talk about the feature online (or how often they enquired about the delay in implementating it on pi 4 - it's been possible with the 3 forever), a lot.

> something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.

This is a not entirely uncommon but very badly thought out feature suggestion for the pi that comes from technical people who aren't the target audience and don't understand the target audience for the pi. It'd be an okay feature on the Pi compute module.

First things first, though: if you're really worried about storage reliability on these things (or anything), please stop prefacing your hardware suggestions with "cheap."

> low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months.

If you're trying to get this much value out of the thing, using either a legitimate, brand name USB ssd (not something cobbled together in a cheap enclosure), an industrial SD card built for embedded applications, or network booting are all good options.

Consumer grade sd cards are... cheap. It's not such a problem for a lot of the Pi's applications. I'm happy to use cheap sd cards to boot Pi 3s that serve as music players while using a Samsung T5 on the Pi that serves the music, for example (and on a development system).

> If you're trying to get this much value out of the thing, using either a legitimate, brand name USB ssd (not something cobbled together in a cheap enclosure), an industrial SD card built for embedded applications, or network booting are all good options.

Better option: if you use SD, use 2 and monitor.

> First things first, though: if you're really worried about storage reliability on these things (or anything), please stop prefacing your hardware suggestions with "cheap."

What would be the cost implications of adding SATA support for a Raspberry Pi?

And keep in mind that nowadays the price point of a fully kitted raspberry pi is already close to 100$.

As far as the BOM, you're asking the wrong guy, but someone upthread mentioned that it'd have to run off the usb, which is one of the reasons why you'd have to wonder what the point really is.

One very real cost would be the increase in size to the PCB and everyone's cases. Plus, we could talk about how external sata just isn't very good as a user experience, while usb is.

I haven't shopped for really cheap storage hardware lately but I question that there's really an area where sata could be a cost win.

> And keep in mind that nowadays the price point of a fully kitted raspberry pi is already close to 100$.

There's a really wide variance there, though - you can get a lot done for under $50.

Industrial-grade SD cards seem to be the way to go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776344

They'll still fail fairly regularly if you have regular power outages (a reality in many IoT systems). Speaking from experience with several industrial card brands. Also they're as expensive as just buying a USB or even full SSD drive.

While the pi gets better and better this is still meant for the classroom rather than the enterprise user. Apple moving to arm will help with docker image availability however you’d need faster clock speeds and a lot more ram to be use for local development.

Upton talks about enterprise usage in https://www.hackster.io/videos/774 but as a thin client. I got the impression they are pretty interested in that market.

>One of my main concerns about the use of a raspberry pi as a desktop PC is microSD card write lifespan.

If you're so inclined, you can buy microSD cards with better endurance ratings than typical consumer SSDs.

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/embedded-removable-f...

I still have issues with the high endurance cards. Bought two identical high endurance 128GB's for Pi4's. After 1 day of use each (with minimal writes beyond installing RPi OS), GParted could resize one partition, but the other failed due errors that couldn't be repaired with fsck.

Did you use another filesystem than what they came with? Possibly you overwrote the section where the sdcard stores some important data. Check out this page: https://superuser.com/questions/381208/how-can-i-format-an-s...

If you have a home NAS, you can netboot the raspberry pi. I have five or six pis around my house doing different things, and they all netboot.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

This is what I've done with mine, and it works a treat. Never having to worry about uSD card lifespan or troubleshooting why my Pi won't boot randomly is fantastic, and I cannot recommend it enough.

I use Samsung Pro Endurance microSD cards [1] in most of my Raspberry Pi 4s. My RPi devices don't see the wear and tear of my main computers, so I can't speak with authority on the matter of durability. But anecdotally, I have had none of the microSDs fail or show any evidence of degradation.

Theoretically the Pro Endurance cards are slower than other Samsung SD cards. But in my usage, I've not noticed a difference in I/O versus the one Raspberry Pi 4 that I've got with a "regular" microSD card.

[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/memory-c...

I've been using log2ram [1] which helps my sd cards survive longer than otherwise.

[1] https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

Coincidentally, the bare Raspberry Pi 400 sells for £67, and the original Sinclair ZX81 (my first computer, back in 1981!) sold at launch for £70, with 1Kb of RAM.

Per the ONS composite price index, £1 in 1981 is worth £4.42 today. So the equivalent cost of a Raspberry Pi 400 in 1981 would have been £15.15. (Alternatively buying a new ZX81-equivalent in 2020 would set you back £309.)

Seriously, this thing is ridiculously cheap. Really demonstrates where 40 years of Moore's Law has taken us!

And of course the Raspberry Pi 400 has 4 GB of RAM, so up by a factor of 4.000.000.

"The 400 doesn’t have an audio-out."

That does seem like a miss for an otherwise decent platform. HDMI out support is fine, but since this setup is quite portable, exposing a headphone jack seems obvious. I suppose bluetooth is the expectation now?

I agree. A headphone jack would make so much sense.

USB audio dongles are super cheap. You can get 2 of them for about $10.

If I was on the design team for it I could eventually come around to being fine with it.

Yes, but it's "yet another" dongle for this machine which is meant to be an easy to use all-in-one friendly to beginners. Them using micro HDMI is already bizarre seeing as there's loads of room for a full size port and most people will need a dongle/adapter here, but not including an audio jack is crazy, seeing as the proper Rpi4 does have one!

You would also want a dongle that has a driver already bundled with the OS. Not sure if that's typical or not. Probably unlikely that the dongle itself comes with a suitable ARM/Linux driver.

I'll say you're fine again having done this a few times already. It's always just worked

I add my voice to the chorus of complaints about dongles, but for the record you could also use an inline HDMI audio extractor which is invisible to the OS and requires no drivers for sure. They are also very cheap.

Hardware in linux tends to just work

Thanks to all the contributors out there <3

USB audio devices are standardized (just like flash drives, as USB mass storage, and keyboard/mouse, as HID respectively), so you don't need device-specific drivers for most of them.

Yes, but this isn't a USB audio device. You need to be able to select and control an HDMI audio output for this to work.

What "this" are you referring to? The grandparent post is talking about USB dongles as a workaround, which in my experience work very reliably.

Oh. Either that post was edited or I misunderstood - I thought they were talking about an HDMI dongle with 3.5mm audio jack for audio extracted from the hdmi. But yes, indeed, a USB audio dongle should "just work".

I don't think HDMI audio extractors need a driver, either. The first one I could find claims compatibility with all kinds of source devices. It's probably entirely invisible to the source. I don't how know about HDMI DRM, but that's not a problem for the RPi.

They don't, but they can be finicky. Most can only extract audio if it's specifically sent as stereo, if the source sends audio as encoded 5.1 stream then most don't know how to decode that. So you will need support for being able to chose the output format over hdmi, which is where I imagine the difficulty in the RPi will start.

That makes a lot of sense, I guess it's either that or the adapter would have to somehow modify the EDID display capabilities to get the HDMI source to output PCM audio (or whatever the splitter accepts) only.

I wonder if it doesn't already need to do that for non-audio-capable HDMI sinks. (My first HDMI monitor didn't have speakers or even a headphone jack, and as far as I recall, the source computer could tell this somehow and wouldn't offer to send sound to the monitor.)

I use one to hook up my PS4 to my DVI-D KVM (my current monitor only does DVI-D and VGA), works fine and it's entirely invisible to the game console.

> and most people will need a dongle/adapter

Micro HDMI to HDMI cable is included in the kit.

> meant to be an easy to use all-in-one friendly to beginners

Unlike the "normal" Raspberry Pi this device has a fairly focused use case that you have summarised well here. It is designed to be plugged into an HDMI TV and used as a PC, with the great bonus of a cool GPIO connector. You make some choices and you make some sacrifices to meet cost and space targets. This also isn't an iPhone that costs $800.

As for fitting the HDMI on, there isn't loads of space for a full size port. I'm not saying it would be completely impossible but it would be challenging. Have a look at the photo of the board in this post:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/designing-raspberry-pi-400/

The non obvious thing looking at that photo is that the keyboard slopes back so you only have height at the front. Non-micro HDMI are surprisingly deep, without CAD looking up parts and looking up parts I can't tell if just wouldn't fit at all, but you certainly wouldn't be able to get much behind it. Note also that they couldn't work out a way to sensibly route the USB to the other side - it's clearly a busy board.

> This also isn't an iPhone that costs $800

Which coincidentally _also_ needs a dongle to connect to an analog speaker...

I think it has bluetooth too, so that could be another possibility.

USB audio would also be an option, but I agree, a lack of audio out for headphones or a headset seems like an error of judgement.

Considering most phones already ditch the audio jack, I'd say it's not so surprising?

I'm a bit more disappointed there is no usable usb c - and we could use these usb c-3.5 adaptors almost everyone has now.

That's a bummer. I was planning to connect CRT TV to it through composite, that was passed through headphone jack.

I personally suspect that removing composite output was the real reason for removing the headphone jack. From what I've read, to enable composite output on the Raspberry Pi 4 you have to enable a special setting on config.txt, which when enabled slows down some of the clocks so that it can produce the correct frequencies for the composite output to work. Not having composite output removes the need for that wart.

A portable computer like this is probably more likely to be plugged in a TV, like at hotels.

Not everyone likes their hotel porn going through the speakers :)

Thats why they invented the mute button :)

The on-board sound quality on the raspberry pi line has traditionally been quite poor so you probably want a dedicated sound dongle anyway especially if you are using headphones. This is an article about the model b+. It's an older version than the 4 but explains the problem just as well since the 4 still uses PWM instead of a DAC.

http://www.crazy-audio.com/2014/07/sound-quality-of-the-rasp...

You’re giving me flashback to the whole Game Boy line, who always had a buzz in the headphone jack until the DS finally properly isolated the sound.

And why some ipods still are $$$ because of DAC.

The hardware hasn't changed much but the software has tremendously and stuff from 2014 isn't relevant. Do you think the current implementation (sometimes known as audio_pwm_mode=2 but it is the default firmware these days) is still poor? I've found it's fine for everyday use and listening to music. I think a line-out would have been fine for people to use.

Apple, Samsung and others have eliminated the audio jack (for different reasons) and there was a lot of outrage but the bottom line is: acceptable Bluetooth headphones can be bought for about $10-$25 now, and are widely available.

Between Bluetooth headphones, HDMI out to the screen, HDMI audio splitters and $5 USB audio dongles, it really is a fine design choice - especially given that the RasPI’s analog audio out circuitry is low quality to begin with.

Bluetooth introduces (even more...) latency, which isn't always acceptable.

This is not a gamer machine at $70.

Yes, Bluetooth introduces a tiny bit of audio latency, which is perfectly acceptable for 98% of all use, and 99.9% of RasPI 400 uses. For the rest of the cases, use one of the other RasPI400 options, a RasPi 4 or a Razer laptop.

In my experience, bluetooth audio latency has made watching videos completely impossible, extremely annoying to be hearing something and not seeing the lips of the person moving the right way.

One of the elements in your system is either very old or borked.

I have an AppleTV4K, and everything is perfectly synced with at least 3 brands of Bluetooth headphones - an 3-year-old eKids one, a 1-year old TaoTronics one, and a 2-year old nameless one.

In the early PlayStation 2 days, many flatscreen TVs (both Plasma and LCD) had delays that made games like Guitar Hero unplayable, so the games added a latency estimation/calibration setting you could use; My 12 year old Onkyo HDMI receiver has a special "eliminate latency in game mode" setting which disables some processing features and reduces sound latency by 50ms or so.

It's not that there were never problems; But anything made in the last 5 years or so, especially using BT4/BT5, should not have these issues.

Edit: just tried with an 8 year old or so JBL Clip I found lying around, and it does have ~100ms latency (estimated, not measured). But the newer ones don’t have it.

IIRC both VLC Player and mpv allow you to set a keyboard shortcut for increasing/decreasing audio-video delay and are capable of streaming directly from YouTube (and I believe any website supported by youtube-dl).

I use mpv and whenever I get audio latency from my headphones* I just adjust in the player.

* - It seems like there's some adaptive algorithm where they start off at 0ms latency but if they experience one hiccup they increase to 250ms-300ms and then another hiccup causes them to jump to 500ms. This is also why a keyboard shortcut that let's you adjust the exact a-v delay value is useful beyond just setting the value once.

Many (most?) HDMI monitors have an audio-out jack.

Unfortunately, most new TVs don't have a 3.5mm audio jack these days.

But they do have speakers.

I just don't think a headphone jack justifies the BOM cost, given that most HDMI displays have a headphone output and Bluetooth headphones and speakers are commonplace.

What does it add, 15 cents?

I would consider using this for serious work if they had added support for 2.5 or m.2 drives.

There are some third party raspberry pi 4 cases that support m.2 via an internal USB 3.0 adapter [1].

Considering they designed a custom PCB for this product, adding a native M.2 or SATA is a reasonable feature for something designed to replace a desktop PC

[1]: https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...

There aren't any free PCIe lanes on the SoC, so even if they added a bridge chip for a SATA / M.2 SSD it would have to be connected over USB.

Besides, the device is $70. A $10 32GB eMMC chip would be a far more reasonable ask at this price point if greater reliability is desired.

that's interesting. curios: are these two comparable in terms of speeds: eMMC and NVME/M2SSD ? or am I confusing among oranges and apples?

They are in completely different ball parks. M.2 drives can easily saturate a usb3.0 link, emmc not so much.

eMMC tops out at 80-100 mb/s, NVME is an order of magnitude faster usually.

I see, thanks.

Have you seen the compute module though? It exposes a PCIe slot via a separate I/O board. At first I assumed there was some free lanes, but now I see it doesn't exposea usb 3.0 ports, only 2.0.

Still, I would rather have a dedicated bus for storage with usb 2.0 rather than usb 3.0

[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?varia...

I can't find the PDF of the starter book, although they say in the announcement it should be available. (Edit: found it https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/beginners-guide-4th-ed )

I learned programming from the handbook of my ZX Spectrum. If the Pi would come with a similar book it would be fantastic.

Maybe there are other books that fill that niche for the Pi?

In general I find it very hard to get my kids coding (especially as their English isn't good yet, and many languages don't have German documentation). There are some fancy books, but it turns out there are a lot of details in coding that most books can't cover.

I'm about to take up the journey of learning a programming language.

What books would you recommend? What are the names of these "fancy books" you mention? And lastly, do you think there are websites that teach programming languages better than books, such as DataCamp, CodeCademy, SoloLearn, etc.?

What would be your recommendations?

I bought this book for my son (elementary school), but it is in German: "Programmieren mit Python® - supereasy".

I would have preferred JavaScript, but had not immediately found a kid friendly book I liked (in German).

As for recommendations, the Pi Getting Started Book does have chapters about Python and Scratch, maybe it is a good start (see free download link).

I still like good books to learn a programming language. Also, good online documentation in a language is important imo. I still like the original Java tutorial from Sun/Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/

I know a teenager who has taught himself Java development from YouTube videos, which YouTube suggested to him.

I think it is important to have a project and be dedicated to solve it. What is it you want to do?

To give an example of an early issue we encountered: I wanted to write a simple program with my son, that asks for your date of birth and computes the number of days since your birth. But dates were not a subject of our python games programming book, so we had to read the online API documentation to figure out how to parse dates and compute time differences. Not too hard, but I think it requires dedication.

In a similar way, I think books or tutorials can never cover all sorts of issues one might encounter, so a lot of patience and dedication is needed to eventually master the coding.

For kids, I liked Micro:Bit, and if you are German, I would recommend the "Jugendwettbewerb Informatik" and accompanying tutorials.

> I own several Raspberry Pi computers (1, 2 and 3). Most of them are the Model B format, but I have couple of Zeros too. All of them sit in a box, unused.

Same for me and most people I know who have bought an rpi. Buy it because it seems like a cool toy and then stick it in a box and never use it for anything.

This seems like a much more practical and useful package for most people, especially the full kit with all the connectors and such you need included. Just hook it up to a hand me down / cheap TV and you’ve got a very capable little computer. If this had come out when my kids were younger, learning Scratch and getting into Minecraft, I’d have been all over it.

If you say so, but I doubt I’ll buy an rpi again, with or without a built in keyboard. I had a look at project ideas when the 400 was announced and realised there was nothing I wanted to do, and for most of the projects you can buy a premade solution cheaply. I guess I’m not their target audience.

Mine was catching dust for years, then I bought a Arcade 1UP, modded it and it's now the core of it.

I did use my A as irc bouncer for a while. Then I stopped. rpi curse

If you're looking for a fun use for your shelved rpi, I can recommand installing a retro-gaming distro such as recalbox (https://www.recalbox.com/) or retropie (https://retropie.org.uk/).

I installed recalbox on a rpi3, and it runs nes/snes fine, and even some n64 games. On occasions I brought it along when visiting friends, and plugged it into the TV/projector with a couple of joysticks. It has been a blast!

All in all I'm very happy with my small on-the-go arcade machine.

thats always the suggestion, but every computer and laptop can easily emaulate all those things+ more.. I see no reason to use a rasp for that

This is always where I struggle as well.

I can bring two old corded Xbox 360 controllers with my Surface Book 3 and play pretty much any console game on an emulator. My SB3 has an HDMI dongle that I got with my SB2, so I just struggle to see the point.

I bought an SNES Classic, and it sits in the box because I can emulate all those games, plus more, with better graphical quality and more features on SNES9x.

Other usable ideas could be as an "Internet Radio" listening device if you can cobble together a descent front panel display and software stack.

Another could be some type of a Twitter ticker tape display for your front room.

Sure you can indeed. For me the compactness of the rpi was a plus however. Since you don't need a dedicated screen or a keyboard (recalbox interface is tailored for controllers), having only to carry the small rpi makes it more convenient and more suited to this use in my view.

Of course, if it's to play at mainly at home then I agree it's not as interesting.

Your buying it wasn't in vain as it allowed the RPi 400 to be made. Without people buying it would have petered out.

> I own several Raspberry Pi computers (1, 2 and 3)... All of them sit in a box, unused. I’ve played with them, then put them away. Part of that is because the performance hasn’t been that great, but the form factor is a major factor. It feels like the Raspberry Pi 400 has the power I need (for casual projects), and comes in a form factor that I can happily leave plugged in on my desk.

Amazing how the addition of a keyboard changes things, with the keyboard being a great box. The snazzy design is definitely a further add that lures me in to wanting one. I too have Pi's in boxes, unused.

What I would like is a backlit keyboard version. I am already spending £100 on keyboards so this is achievable. I would program mine so that the keyboard appeared over bluetooth to my main computer from where I would ssh into my Pi to do things like run a web server. For a long time I have wanted to do local development of web projects on a separate box so there is a clear break between client and server but everything is local.

I wonder if an after-market website for selling or giving away your old RPis makes sense. I run a k3s on RPi3, but I have a few RPi2 spares which can be used for small side projects.

Craigslist? EBay?

Does anyone know if there's any projects underway to make a mechanical version of this? I would pay a lot of money, and I know several internet communities that would crowdfund DIY or prebuilt versions within instants.

Do you mean a mechanical keyboard?

Is this thing suitable for kids and grandparents? Every other platform seems to abuse them with bloatware.

if they would want to watch Netflix, Prime, etc streaming videos: please check the support for those (some DRM sutff, IIRC)

Not at all. Chrome OS would be a better fit there.

Unless you're teaching your kids & grandparents how to sysadmin linux and don't think they want to watch any videos online (browser support for accelerated video decoding remains a giant disaster on linux), then sure? And also that they want a desktop instead of a laptop.

Of course a "ASUS CHROMEBOX 3-N018U" runs over four times the price, so you could just buy three pi and toss them as the flash card fails and still save money.

There's no shortage of chromebooks in the $250-300 range which then also include a display, narrowing the price difference drastically.

Of course there's also used options, which is also a good option for ipads and such that would still be a much better option than this for a non-techy user.

The Rpi 400 looks fun, but it's a tech toy for hobbiest electronics usage or general hackery. Not a generally good computing appliance for the masses.

Ubuntu with chrome and chromium tends to work fine, except for a bunch of copyright blocked Netflix shows.

Chrome doesn't support hardware acceleration video decode on Linux at all. There's some unofficial patches for VaAPI support if you want to carry those around, but the Pi 4 also changed decoder support and it's generally all just a messy disaster.

Low-res video can be software decoded fine, but once you start pushing 1080p or 4k it's not going to go well at all.

It works with firefox under wayland, but there are still many issues with wayland (like drag & drop often not working).

Still behind an experimental flag, though, isn't it? I don't think https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Hardware_video_... really qualifies as something I'd want to send a non-technical person through.

Fun if you're into it, incredibly confusing if you're not. Which also means amazingly ~7 years later this XKCD is still relevant https://xkcd.com/619/

Yes, especially if they are into tinkering.

It is, it’s extremely stable in use. There’s no bloatware. You have to set it up, but after it’s stable.

It does word processing, browsing, printing etc, extremely well. Streaming (Netflix etc) is indeed troublesome, at least directly.

So going through the actual comments here, what this really needs to make a compelling product is: A built in touch pad, an audio jack, a full size HDMI port (even thought the accessory set includes an HDMI cable), an M.2 or SATA connector and a backlit keyboard.

Anything else? Maybe an Intel processor, Windows, a built in battery and a hinged screen that folds down over the keyboard. Are we getting there yet?

That’s sort of the point, there’s lots of demand for a cheap laptop, there’s very little actual demand for the raspberry pi, which is why everyone is trying to morph the rpi into a laptop.

You do realise how many they have sold, right?

Yeah, I bought some of them. I use none of them. There’s more demand for laptops.

Yes. There is more demand for laptops than Raspberry Pis. However, there must be a fair amount of Raspberry Pi demand out there considering they flogged over 30 million boards and I don't think that was to try and make 30 million crappy laptops.

They’re cheap toys that seem cool but end up having little practical use. My point isn’t that they’re useless, just that they have an awful lot of potential to be useless, and a lot of the time a laptop would be better.

Personally I'd far prefer a trackpoint to a touchpad. They're much easier to get right and take up less space.

Other than a few outliers, the trackpoint format is dead to 95% of the market.

I really don't care how many other people like it. Other than to a few outliers personal computing is dead to 95% of the market. That doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

+1 for a trackpoint. i ctrl+f'd trackpoint on this page, because it was the first thought i had when i saw the RPi 400

“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-zero...

So i have Pi-top the Raspberry pi 3 Laptop. It wasn't expensive or anything. Keyboard is fine, touchpad is fine. But when i boot on it GUI and start VScode things works but starting a chromium on top of that brings a warm feeling to you... and it is not a metaphore. In general Pi 3 was a bit too slow. With Pi 4 everything could be "fast enough". I'm waiting for more devices like this. But I prefer the format of a little bit more expensive Pi-top than keyboard i need to plug to monitor.

For this I would elect to buy naked Pi 4 and keyboard I would like and just wire everything together. If you wanna do stuff on it imho Keyboard feeling good is important.

I wish the keyboard had a touchpad built in to eliminate the need for a separate mouse.

Also my thought. I'd like a touchpad below the space bar, as on my laptop. I saw some wireless keyboards with a touchpad where the numberpad is.

I found some bluetooth touchpads on Amazon, they cost at least about half the price of the Pi 400.

I don't blame them, Linux touchpad drivers are horrendously bad. I can imagine a young person tryin to learn to use the pi400 and them getting frustrated because the touchpad is hard to use.

I wonder if there are any studies that show a mouse is easier to learn than a touchpad or vise versa.

I think the multitouch drivers have been really good. Been using it with a MBP 2015 touchpad, and I think that shows how good hardware helps the equation.

Eh they must either have an open spec for drivers or provide source code for linux kernel devs. I have dell laptop and the pad works great for windows and is horrible with linux which rules out hardware issues.

I don't mind to pay extra $30 if next version of the PC will have a M2 port, even USB routed, full-size HDMI, and combined audio/composite video port, same as on RPi A/B boards. Separate DAC could make nice addition. Hope that Raspberry Pi Foundation will listen to people's needs.

That and 8GB RAM, plus NVMe or PCI Express with some internal space for a hard drive.

Also, make the case easy to open with screws...

I'm a bit surprised that the raspi foundation made this - I would think this is the realm of build-it-yourself! Of course building it yourself is going to be more expensive than mass produced (and need very messy wiring), but you could at least get a nicer keyboard that way.

It still exposes the gpio pins. So if you want to build something with a pi (as opposed to for the pi) then this is actually quite nice.

I for one ordered one (and am playing with it right now) because it's an incredibly low barrier way to dogfood some software projects on arm. I'm loving it, it's very different to an arm laptop, it's got more of a console feeling which is great :)

Sounds great. I got an Rpi 4 this year, my first contact with this world. I'm happy with my tv/media box (that I also use as generic linux cli environment)

Can you connect a USB keyboard to the RPi 400?

Why not?

It should work just fine. I've plugged two keyboards at once into plenty of linux systems.

Can this be used as a keyboard for a normal PC?

I would say it's not impossible, but extremely impracticable. And since the official rapsberry pi keyboard looks just like it and is cheaper to boot...

I'd be interested in this is well, for the simple reason that this would de-clutter my desk when I'm using a desktop PC already and I wouldn't need to switch back and forth between two different keyboards.

It's somewhat similar to some all-in-one PCs where I think they don't look too bad, if only they came with a video input port so that you can use it as a display for other devices, or simply as a monitor should the PC part become obsolete some day.

From what I can gather, this is however not a built-in feature of the Pi 400 and will probably require some tinkering (which might be an interesting project in and of itself).

I also understand that the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goal is to offer this product at a certain price point, and that even though many of the wishes for additional features you can read in the comments here and elsewhere are each not unreasonable by themselves, every part that is added comes at an additional cost, and that they usually decide against it if it's something that is only used by a small fraction of the user base.

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