Raspberry Pi 5

The blog post says they're releasing a M.2 hat in "early 2024"

Fwiw I bought a sleeve for my M.2 SSD and it plugs into usb3 with very little slowdown. It gets 500MiB read and 1.2GiB write. Haven’t measured vs native M.2 to compare, but it’s fast enough that I’d be surprised if the pi were blocked waiting for I/O vs native M.2. And native M.2 comes with increased manufacturing complexity.

Same with orange pi5 and 5b. Having an option for a faster and reliable storage is amazing. SD cards are great when you prototype or need just enough storage to netboot a device, but past that it is limiting.

This would limit you to just connect SSDs. Their solution opens up more versatile access to other PCIe devices.

The CM4 exposes a PCIe 1.0 x1 (Not sure about the revision) lane and can boot from an NVME SSD. It will be nice to have this capability on the Pi 5 with all of the other connectors (except for audio.)

I recommend booting Pi 4 and Pi 400 from external (USB) NVMe in an enclosure.

On a CM5, a lite or one with eMMC would suffice in combination with NVMe. I have CM4 with eMMC and use SATA w/them.

> A NVMe compatible M.2 M Key connector

Yeah. The Lichee Pi 4A has one of those under the board, it's really useful.

I wouldn't even blink if they completely jettisoned the MicroSD slot, these have proven to be a giant PITA over the years (slow, unreliable, etc...)

I really don't understand why they would miss that.

Meanwhile in reality when nvme drives die in like 6 months… ughhhh

You can get some rather large USB sticks these days. Amazon is awash with 928Gb units for about £10 which are probably not the best. A 256GB or 512GB from a known brand is around £30-50. There are several USB ports on a Pi and you can always boot off a SD card.

Finally, if a network is available then network boot and use NFS or whatever.

The RTC is a cool addition and long overdue. At work I have three Pi 3s with GPS hats and aerials acting as stratum 1 ntp servers. The hats have a RTC included which is handy after a reboot. My use case is "reasonably accurate and stable time" so sub milli second is good enough, I'm not too fussed about nano seconds! I want logs to correlate and desktop clocks to be reliable.

> I guess that is fair, especially with inflation nowadays.

The accumulated inflation in the US since June 2019 is c. 17%.[1] This means US$ 55 in June 2019 is "worth" c. US$ 64.35 today. So it seems that you get a 4GB Raspi 5 for c. 7.25% less today.

The "US Real Average Hourly Earnings" have increase by ca. 22% in the same period, from US$ 27.75 to US$ 33.82.[2] So an average person needs to work c. 12% less to buy a 4GB Raspi 5 today.

However, I think the issue is more complicated: There is inherent deflation in electronics, which is included in the inflation rate. you can observe it when looking at the current price of a 4GB Raspi 4 at Amazone, which is c. US$ 67. So if the introductory price for a Rapsi 5 is really going to be US$ 60, you get something better for more than 10% less now.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/realer_07112019.ht... and https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm

My gripe is that the original Pi cost $35 at launch and while they have made a better Pi...They have not made a Pi at that price ever again, even accounting for Inflation. Furthermore, increased power consumption and features have added big price jumps to the required Accessories. Now you need miniHDMI adapters rather than more common HDMI, you need cooling, you need more expensive power adapters. a fully set up Pi 1 was simple USB, SD, and HDMI All possible in a $50 budget or less if you had some stuff. Now you are $90 in to run it.

$60 for the model with 4GB of RAM and $80 for 8GB.

It's mentioned in Eben Upton's blog post (linked from the announcement):

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/

Not to mention it now requires a new PSU. Before you could use your standard $5 (android) phone charger at (5W), then you had to buy a 15W one and now a 27W.

To whoever thinks pi's are cheap, you can get more functionality out of a used laptop for less money, but probably worse specs and probably x86.

Engadget has the price at $60 for 4gb and $80 for 8gb.

https://www.engadget.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-uses-the-company...

The value proposition is there for me. I bought a "BMAX B1 Plus" for about 70$ including shipping from AliExpress. It's as small as 2 or 3 CD cases stacked together. It is a fully fledged PC that comes with windows 10 (no support for windows 11 but LinuxMint and other distro work well too), an hdmi cable, and a clever mounting bracket to attach it to the back of a monitor. It is passively cooled, pulls about 4 Watts. Biggest downside is the power supply with a cylindar connector. I use it solely to connect to my main PC using RustDesk and it is great for that.

> No word on price.

They link to multiple regional reseller sites [0], where prices are available. I see €73.90 (€60.08 pre-tax) for the 4GB version and €97.50 (€79.27 pre-tax) for 8GB in Poland.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/resellers/

Raspberry Pi 5 4GB - US$60.00 (EAN 5056561803319)

Raspberry Pi 5 8GB - US$80.00 (EAN 5056561803326)

„ PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals“

I wanna see somebody hook up a GeForce card over to that 1x pci express. Play some Crysis using Box86.

Until my home automation got complex enough to justify a faster, more capable machine, I ran all my home automation stuff on an RPi.

I use RPIs as "data collection" units. I have one RPi outside with a cheap SDR to pick up all the neighbor's weather stations, which I dump to a MQTT queue and use to populate weather data in my home. I use another to collect GOES satellite images.

I have 3-4 RPis that act as "Digital Ham Radio Hotspots", basically bridging my local ham radio via the internet to other stations. I use an RPi 4 as my "to-go" computer when I do ham radio in the woods. I use an iPad as a screen, and it works just as good as a laptop.

I have an RPi sitting in my garage as a second nameserver. The primary nameserver is in the house "data center".

I have an RPi plugged into my stereo receiver as a streaming device that lets me stream audio from my phone to the stereo.

I have 4 RPis connected togehter in a k3s cluster, for fun. IT doesn't work great. :)

I have two PiKVMs. They are truly awesome.

... I think that's it.

One is monitoring my trash bins in the backyard and generating visual output of emptying times, current location of the bins, alerts if they are still in the backyard but are scheduled to be emptied tomorrow (in which case I need to move them to the street in the front). This has been running on a Pi with Bluetooth (monitoring uses BLE beacons) for over five years now, with very little maintenance necessary.

Another one runs the home automation hub (Homematic plus some addon stuff). Also very little maintenance, basically just doing backups and an update a year or so. Has been in place for several years as well. I often forget that this thing exists at all, as it just chugs along quietly, never needing reboots or anything. Even the updates are unnecessary unless I want to use some new sensor or actor that the old hub software doesn't yet know about.

And then there are two Pis connected to TVs in the living room and kitchen which run OpenELEC/Kodi for media center tasks. Started doing this when the first RPi came out and frequently used back then, these Pis are rarely used these days, as most streaming now involves commercial streaming services and is done via FireTV sticks. But I still have a private library for the occasional exception of stuff that's not offered on any commercial service, and that library is accessed via the Pis. Fortunately, aside from a reboot every few months and very rare updates, these Pis are also very low maintenance.

Discovering DietPi was kind of a game changer for me. I had the original Pi 1b that basically sat in a drawer after the first month I got it.

I went over to a friends house last year that had a more modern Pi and they had a PiHole on their home network. It was pretty amazing being able to block ads on my phone near totally and not just in Firefox. New Pi's were completely impossible to find but my friend said give DietPi a shot. The benchmarks on my Pi after installing were complete crap, processes took minutes that took a few seconds on the more modern Pis, but AdGuard Home worked flawlessly.

It sent me down the rabbit hole of Tailscale everywhere, self hosting what I can, getting a NAS, and just opened up to me how simple it is to set up these kind of services now that are accessible everywhere.

I recently was able to get a Pi 4 (one week before the Pi 5 announcement of course) and am looking forward to a setup where I can run services that need hard drive access on my NAS and hosting the quality of life apps on the Pi.

I've been using one for https://pikvm.org/ and it's been a rare case of "the Raspberry Pi is neither ridiculously overpowered, ridiculously underpowered, or even beat out by any off the shelf solution at all let alone at the same price or point". It's literally the best IP KVM I've ever used or owned. The use case is almost a perfect match for the exact hardware capabilities of the Pi: hardware encoding, video input, gigabit network (with Wi-Fi alternative, which has saved me a few times), GPIO, USB OTG, the hat system, open source web KVM software which doesn't suck ass and sit untouched for 13 years with endless security vulnerabilities piling up.

Things I've used mine (plural) for at various points in time, in no particular order: Wireguard & ssh entrypoint into my home network. Pi hole. Kodi. Calibre ebook server. Orchestrating turning on/off IP-based lightbulbs or plugs (since I'm too cheap to get a gateway for ZigBee/Threads/$IOT_protocol) - automatically turning on my Christmas lights at sundown daily after querying an API for my local Civil twilight time was good fun. "NAS server" connected to a cheap 5-disk USB JBOD device. Hosting a low-intensity crawler that ran into blanket IP-range black-listing issues when hosted on cloud-providers. Hosting a Gitea/Forgejo server: I no longer star projects on Github - I mirror them locally and keep them synced, storage is really cheap now. Periodical syncing my backups from NAS to cloud. As a digital "tape recorder" for broadcast radio using FM receiver, aux cable, and USB sound card. Twitter Spaces recording for time-shifting conversations I wanted to listen to later; I beat Twitter's "record" feature to the punch! Twitter crawler/archive bot for a niche community.

Wishlist projects: getting alerted when my home loses electric service or internet connectivity, using UPS and LTE modem. "Calendar dashboard" site that displays the household's schedule for the day on a tablet/jailbroken kindle. A lazy-loading reverse-proxy Caddy API server that will keep the connection open while it turns on my workstation in the background if it's off. Archiving tweets using mitmproxy to passively scrape Twitter's API responses while I use the official mobile client.

Basically anything that I wanted to automate and was not demanding on compute would get assigned to a Pi.

I think the Pi 5 would be well positioned to be a free, OSS media box. Android TV and Google TV are very popular today, along with Roku, Apple TV, etc.

I installed PiHole and noticed that every single click of my Roku remote gets sent to Roku’s servers. PiHole blocks this of course, but there was nothing I could do to disable this telemetry on the Roku device itself.

Google TV is slightly better - there’s options to adjust targeted ads, and an “app only” mode, but there’s still usage and other data sent to Google. Also you can’t use it at all if you don’t sign in with a Google account.

I haven’t used other platforms.

But I would like to see an easy to use, easy to configure, OSS streaming box. Now that this can do 4k60 and HDR, it might just work for things like Netflix, Plex, and other services.

Right now the best products on the market for high-bitrate streaming are Apple TV and Nvidia Shield Pro. I wonder if the RPi 5 can compete with that?

I have 4 pi4's running HiFiBerryOS. They connect to my Roon VM. I can group them together & they will play the same song in sync.

I have a pi4 running OSMC with the Plex addon attached to my television.

I've got about a half dozen Pi 0 W's with addon sensors that inform my Home Assistant of the temp, humidity, PM2.5 level, and CO2 levels in each room.

I just ordered a CM4 to run the PiKVM board for my homelab server.

I also plan to monitor and water my plants using Pi 0 W's.

I just ordered a Pi4 for running BirdNet, to identify birds in my area.

I would also like to work with ChatGPT to identify people and/or birds around my house.

When the Pi 2 was new, it was one of the few single board computers that properly supported fractional frame rates, which are often needed for smooth video playback. (Many films are encoded at 24000/1001 fps rather than exactly 24 fps, for example.) I assume the newer models still support this, since they're still built around VideoCore chips.

A faster model would allow decoding at higher resolutions and frame rates, even when the codec in use doesn't have direct hardware support.

With the PCIe support in this new model, it could also make a decent home file server.

I run my Christmas light show software (https://github.com/FalconChristmas/fpp) with a Pi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlxaA-ca6S0 :)

I have a Pi3 running pihole/dhcp for my home network, and 4 Pis as part of my home k3s cluster (along with 3 cheapo nucs). Yes it's overkill but I'm in infra and I learn a lot from it.

The cluster runs nextcloud, collabora, plex, longhorn storage, deluge, nzbget, some custom projects I built to sync my bank accounts with my finance software and to sync photos from Signal chats to my nixplay frames, backups for my NAS, Grafana/Prometheus/Loki, netdata, etc.

I also run an entertainment company and we use a Pi Zero to control our onstage LED lights via presentation remote or wifi as a fallback.

I keep thinking of other things to do with them, but this is already enough to maintain in my "spare time".

I have a Pi 4 running Pi-hole and connected to a 4TB USB hard drive running a Samba server with a bunch of media. It’s on my Tailscale network so I can access the files away from home, and use it as an exit node if I’m abroad and need to access stuff as if I’m in the UK.

I don’t need to transcode anything so it’s been more than sufficient for me, and if I start to run out of storage I can just hook up more drives.

It also has about a terabyte of PS2 games because a softmodded PS2 can play games off a Samba server rather than the DVD drive. Niche, but very cool imo

I don’t know how serious this is, but I have one in a waterproof box in the backyard and one in the garage to run the irrigation for my garden, etc. They work well enough that I often forget they’re there. There’s another in the office closet running a dynamic dns script and that’s there to use as an ssh tunnel and such.

I use it professionally all the time. I work with arm a lot, and during the testing of customer software that is compiled for arm, I need an arm based Linux os to run and test on. rpi is the obvious choice. I'm very happy with the 4s performance, so I don't require the 5, but I'll still get one.

I also use another one for retro pi, which I imagine will benefit from the increased performance..

lastly, I have a small handheld Bluetooth keyboard with a track pad I use with a pi4 with a 3.5in screen hat and battery pack. the overall size and weight is much less than any laptop I have ever come across, and I use this when I go to cons. (although I'm looking at plantecom to replace this)

Three years ago, my new home came with smart features such as a connected front door lock and thermostat and a wall panel with a sim connected to alarm.com. The intro period ran out, and I didn't want to pay anything ongoing, so I bought a z-wave usb controller and set up HomeAssistant on my old Pi2. With some effort to get everything working in docker with a cloudflare tunnel, I am back to being able to monitor and control my smart home from anywhere.

I'm not feeling compelled to get a more powerful pi. In fact, I'd be more inclined to buy the pi zero or several of them, but they were always impossible to find in stock when I was interested.

I’ve got one of mine showing album art for music I’m playing[1], one with an e-ink display that shows which subways are leaving soon near me, one running Homebridge for a variety of sensors[2], one for WireGuard and Pi-Hole, and one to run Klipper/Mainsail for my 3D printer. I guess these are all tinkering as well but they’ve basically been running 24/7 for a few years now!

[1] https://github.com/aaronhktan/rpi-albumart [2] https://github.com/aaronhktan/vesta

A RPi 4 sits near a Teensy 4.1 in a difficult to reach LED installation: its only purpose is to wirelessly re-flash the Teensy firmware in case of updates and for eventual future features. The Teensy is driving ~15k RGBW LEDs.

I’ve owned many Pis through the years. Always for personal/hobby stuff, but they have been workhorses all the same.

I ran a Pihole server on an ancient 1A for several years. It was considered underpowered but worked great. I’ve run Homebridge services which was a great way to integrate various IoT stuff into HomeKit that lacked native support. I’ve since moved these things onto other hardware to consolidate things (not because of anything inherently wrong with the Pi).

For about a year now I’ve been using a Pi as a BLE data collector to slurp data from a weather station I have on my deck. That being said, the onboard Bluetooth on the 3 and 4 is pretty awful in my experience. I needed to use an external dongle to make it reliable.

For over a year I used a Pi 4 to run multiple SDRs to record and rebroadcast trunked police/fire scanner traffic. I eventually had to retire it for that purpose when the trunked system changed to digital and the Pi just couldn’t keep up with the workload anymore.

Those were all applications that I ran for months/years at a time using Pi hardware. I’d consider them “serious” even though they weren’t anything impressive or enterprise-worthy.

Other things I’ve done with them are use them as emulation stations. Even older Pis are more than capable of emulating 8 and 16 bit consoles without a hitch. Their compact size makes them portable and easy to plug into a TV and work with a Bluetooth controller.

I use my RPi4 as a small server having multiple docker containers behind a Traefik proxy. The largest applications are probably my Nextcloud and my Photoprism instance.

The Photoprism instance holds about 114.000 pictures which I took over the past 10+ years and includes features like face recognition and browsing by location. I quite like it and find it super impressive that such a small device can run such a powerful application with that amount of data.

Teams in the FIRST robotics competition community use the Raspberry Pi for computer vision. There's an open source program called Photonvision that provides an easy way for talented high school students to set up CV. Some of the better teams use Orange Pis or mini PCs for this purpose (and some of the best teams have fully custom solutions), but a Raspberry Pi is a lot easier to set up and is cheaper (even at $60). Also, my understanding is that the architecture of the RPi4 CPU/GPU allows for GPU acceleration of classical CV algorithms without copying (and that feature is integrated into Photonvision), so this hardware upgrade will probably make the Raspberry PI perform on par or better than more expensive options, while being easier to setup.

And two MIPI camera ports is also really nice for this application, because the new advancement in FRC is to use April Tags included with the field for full field localization. For this purpose, I've heard you get better results with global shutter MIPI cameras than USB webcams, and having multiple cameras is good for always seeing an AprilTag.

I use one for each of the following. None of which I think are terribly novel anymore:

- Octopi - PiHole - Grafana/Prometheus for my local network (I push Speedtest results, ping results, among other things to it) - home-made SNES/NES minis

I’m excited to try using the new Pi for a more comprehensive option for a retro arcade including many games that didn’t run very well for me last time I tried. (I instead used a home-built small PC)

My pi 4 runs a wide variety of small services for me. Most important is my vaultwarden instance, which is securely accessible everywhere that I go via tailscale. The pi also runs HomeAssistant for my smart home stuff, pihole to block ads, and a resilio sync server. I’ve got a bunch of other small stuff as well that I rarely use. Like “your-spotify” which stores and tracks stats for my entire Spotify history.

I want to also possibly make it a media device? I have it physically located behind a tv, just because I already had Ethernet wired there, but it isn’t hooked up to the display yet, and I haven’t figured what to do with it if I did hook it up. Not sure if that would overstress the cpu. Can’t have my dns crashing if I’m watching a video.

I'm using currently 4:

- One pi4 for my homemade 3D printer (a Voron)

- One pi3 for a homemade eInk clock/weather station (here I could've gotten with sth much cheaper like an ESP32, but the Pi is so convenient)

- One pi zerow 2 for a homemade eInk radio

- One pi4 I just bought for home automation (homeAssisstant)

I have a pi running to continuously collect data from my home, temperature, lights, gas usage, electricity usage, weather, etc. It runs Benthos to get all the data (MQTT + http), and stores everything in Postgres.

I used mine along with the 7" touchscreen as a live photo frame connected to a google photos album when my mother was ill from Alzheimers.

but, but, but ... the RPi is meant for tinkering, isn't it?

I got an RPi2 connected to a GPSDO acting as time server. Another RPi2 controls test&measurement gear via GPIB (there are GPIB hats, but I happen to have already an USB adapter from Agilent) and TTL PPS input and trigger output for synchronization. A RPi2 is plenty of computational power for those applications.

Three sitting around. They make very convenient small servers. One (a RPi4) has substantial mass storage and is a backup and media server. Another (an RPi3) is an RSS reader service and web proxy for some internal stuff. And the third (RPi3) servers for occasional experiments and what-ifs.

I'm still using a first gen Raspberry Pi Model B to run an adblocking DNS server (github.com/0xERR0R/blocky), and PiVPN (Wireguard). For the most part, it works great except apt-update occassionally maxing out the CPU/RAM which causes my services and sshd to be killed.

i have a raspberry pi zero wifi thats running syncthing and has a few of my syncthing folders/nodes on it. i already have a NAS that acts as the always-on node for all my syncthing folders, but if that is ever down for maintenance or whatever then the pi zero is sort of a backup that will keep syncthing things

i have another running kodi so i can access jellyfin that's on my NAS

pi-hole for network wide ad blocking

currently setting up one to act as a storage location for the restic backups from my NAS instead of having to store them with some storage provider like backblaze. i will be installing tailscale on it as well so i can leave it in a friends house and hopefully be able to reconnect to it even if they move house in the future

I wrote my own irrigation controller with a web front-end on a pi3 and have used it for ~7 years.

Deployed a Qt app to dozens of pi4-based machines for doing clock-in/out and generating various PDFs in to support the business I was working for.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ to run Steam Link to stream games from my desktop computer upstairs to the TV in the living room. I managed to connect some XBox series controllers to it using Bluetooth by installing xpadneo drivers.

I think it would be really good to give to children so that they can have their own computer for £100. It’s like the modern equivalent of a C64 but also completely capable of being a desktop for everyday use.

Use mine as a RoonBridge running RoPieee

Did you read the blog post? :)

"One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5 feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface. Intended to support fast peripherals, it is exposed on a 16-pin, 0.5mm pitch FPC connector on the left-hand side of the board.

From early 2024, we will be offering a pair of mechanical adapter boards which convert between this connector and a subset of the M.2 standard, allowing users to attach NVMe SSDs and other M.2-format accessories."

You can netboot a Pi. Every Pi in my house netboots. I have a whole bunch of them. Some play games, some play videos, some play music, and a few other minor things. Because they all netboot, you can change what each one does by renaming a file on the server and then rebooting it. It's great.

This device has a PCIe 2.0 x1 connector now, so NVMe drives should be usable now.

The Compute Module 4 series have been able to support eMMC chips, so I don't see why they wouldn't continue with the 5 if/when it shows up

FWIW, I boot my Pis almost exclusively from USB. Not that that's... great in terms of speed or reliability, but it's something.

Reducing logging, logging to ram and writing to the sdcard once a day helps longevity a lot, especially with quality sd cards.

99% of the time it's the verbose logging of application servers that is the culprit of sdcard failures.

https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

Agreed. I recently had the rather unpleasant discovery that when samsung called their SD cards “high endurance”, they actually meant 3-6 months, and that half of the video on my dashcam was missing.

I've recently stumbled upon a SBC with a M.2 slot... Then promptly closed the tab, to stop the temptation to get another shiny dust collector. But they exist.

NVMe SSDs are so cheap now that you are literally wasting your time by not using them.

I haven't had much trouble with the SD cards. The thing is, writing to them all the time means your chances of corrupting the filesystem is higher (like any filesystem). I would try to make the filesystem read-only as much as possible. There are settings for this.

It would be nice if there was just an improvement to reliability and speed of SD cards. I’ve used SBCs with eMMC built in (non-removable) and using them is a lot more complex compared to just flashing a new SD card image as needed. Based on the forums it takes a lot more effort for support as well, so from this point of view I’m not surprised raspberry pi has kept as cards as the main option.

I've had some really cheap cards fail but have mostly had better luck with name brands.

One of the things I do is to configure hosts to use the overlayfs (read only fileystem) where appropriate and that helps to reduce wear on the SD cards.

I don't use then where I want a responsive system and use USB/SSD or NVME/SSD instead.

If an sd card is too slow and too unreliable for you, considering the full price of a raspberry pi (including case, fan, psu etc) you might be better served by some intel based small computer, like a thin client or some small form factor computer (hp, dell, lenovo have many models, that can also be acquired super cheap on ebay and similar).

With the 3 and newer you can boot from USB drives instead of SD cards. It’s a bit of a faff to set up but it works great.

I had to do this when I was doing some long-running I/O intensive operations and it was basically killing the SD card storage.

You can take a look at orange pi 5 plus. It has M.2 for WiFi and M.2 for SSD, both PCI-E. It's in $100+ category though.

I have not broken a "max endurance" SD card yet. But they're pretty expensive.

Interesting. Did the earlier Raspberry Pi Broadcom SOCs not have an IOMMU? If they did I would have expected the 5 to be compatible with older ones.

There's also a writeup: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspb...

Is there any high end 5/7nm SBC? Phone chips don't seem to escape the phone market.

Side note, lowering the process means smaller wires and more susceptibility to ESD. I've never vacuumed a Pi 4, but also haven't lost any to it in countless sketchy mounting points. That might change on the 5, GPUs built on 10 nm and lower just die if you touch them wrong.

You'd be surprised how low-end the average chip with ARM core(s) is.

process node only matters that much when you are dealing with the latest system architecture. whether you compare with rockpi's offering or with apple, A76 is a design from 2018.

Cant wait for first 2 to 8 GB ram swap hack. Power button is nice, but implementation in custom PMIC once again means its unrepairable https://hackaday.com/2023/03/24/dead-raspberry-pi-boards-pmi...

You can see 1GB and 2GB jumpers in the photos, so it seems reasonable to expect these models to show up eventually.

while i was personally working with 512 mb with my rpi all this time, i wonder if there is a point to having only 1/2 gb with the new soc.

even if you run the sbc headless and never touch the gpu, you risk starving the threads for things where it would be an upgrade over the previous models.

How cow! You can buy them?!

Genuinely curious: why does their announcement upset you so much?

Most of the tech world announces products, executes a marketing strategy and then releases stock into the market.

You make it sound like someone left you standing at the altar. You didn't know it existed an hour ago. If you were on a long vacation, it might have released before your return. Why get angry?

Any board based on StarFive's JH7110 is currently best in this regard, I think. Datasheet & reference manual for this SoC is available.

Especially their VisionFive 2 board. I've even downloaded a schematic for it (although older revision than actual board I have). And they're pretty good about upstreaming drivers.

That said: what you probably care about is documentation for integrated peripherals (esp. GPU), and existence of open source, mature drivers for those.

RPi is very good in this regard. Afaik the only binary blobs there is some GPU/SoC firmware, and (maybe) some boot code.

RPi's in general are very well supported & documented, and its software ecosystem is very mature compared to anything RISC-V based.

Could you pinpoint what you think is lacking there?

Other ARM based boards may offer more bang/$. Likely at the cost of documentation or driver support (Beagleboard being an exception).

What do you mean with vague information? There is an entire blog post describing the product: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/

I was lucky enough to get early access to the Pi5[1]. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

[1] Youtube Video on the RPi 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_QPM9xV_sw

Beaglebone (from Texas Instruments) is more open, but still not as open as you'd probably like. Still, its a better balance than what Rasp. Pi organization has (more documents are available on AM335x, open-hardware for Beaglebone Green and reference designs, full chip specifications and the like). Beaglebone isn't really "more expensive", as much as its just "lower specs at the same price" though.

The "most open" are MPU chips and their associated "System on Module" boards. This isn't quite a SBC, but its easier to use than a BGA. These SoMs are very poor from price/performance perspectives, but instead serve as reference designs and/or prototypes to the $8 or $9 chips. The overall expectation is that you're "supposed" to be building your own PCBs eventually, so the SoM are kind of just a prototyping aid.

Most SoM provide 100+ pins from the chip as well, meaning you absolutely have to build a PCB to use them. However, 2-layer boards solder very easily to a SoM with castilliated edges (even with a hand-soldering iron)... albeit with a bit of flux and technique and practice. Its just the easiest way to deliver the most-pins of customization in the smallest space. So a relative beginer should be able to boot an SoM. The most difficult routing and Power-Delivery-Network details are already solved on an SoM, you just gotta apply power and build out the final interfaces / connectors.

Take the ATSAMA5D27-SOM1, 104-pins in a 40x40mm form factor. $50 from Mouser for 500Mhz and 128MB RAM (though fully open source and fully documented at linux4sam, and processor manual, U-boot process and everything). But the underlying SiP (MPU + DDR2 RAM) is like $15... while the MPU alone is like $8 and 128MB of DDR2 RAM is only like $3.50 in practice. Since in mass-production, you'd probably have a custom PCB anyway, that's the most expected use case. https://www.linux4sam.org/bin/view/Linux4SAM . I'd say that Microchip / Atmel's MPUs seem to be the best documented that I've found, but are unfortunately the lowest specs. Still, they also have some of the lowest power-consumption (like 200 mW or something), so really they're in a low-power class of their own. Still Linux though.

------------

STM32MP1 is the MPU from ST Micro. Like the Microchip SAM-MPU series, the STM32MP1 is available in SOM, SiP, and "raw" MPU form. Except the SOMs are like $100+, the SiP is like $50+, while MPU is $10ish.

-------------

I know NXP has a huge line of MPUs. I haven't researched them yet though.

---------------

I think all the hardware designers at this level just "assume" that their customers, if they care about "open source", are probably making their own PCBs.

If someone "just" wants a SBC (like the Rasp. Pi), there's not much point in publishing a ton of documents. People can just boot the Rasp. Pi and start messing with Linux.

-------

I got no experience with this yet. I'm just curious and am thinking of a simple MPU layout project ever since I discovered that OSHPark has 6-layer boards and KiCAD supports BGAs in practice. Overall, these lower-power lower-end MPUs fill a different niche than a Rasp. Pi ever would. But I feel like there's enough overlap that these might scratch your "open source" and "fully documented" itches.

Olimex produces fully open boards, but noting RISCV based which is capable of running Linux yet AFAIK.

Perhaps something from pine64?

So dramatic lol

> Is there any reasonable option with software support that comes even close to what RPI offers? I don't want an SBC where I have to use some strange back ported, super old, kernel with little to no chance of getting updates.

aarch64-wise, not quite yet I think, but I have hope for the RK3588. https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

> Maybe I should just go for an X86 board? Lattepanda Delta, or Khadas Mind whenever that's released. Not even that more expensive.

Yeah, x86-64 would certainly be a safe choice if you have the budget for it. I'd add ODROID-H3/ODROID-H3+ to this list.

Pine64 makes SBCs with the same goal as their PinePhones to get mainline Linux on them. That effort expands to many boards that use the same SoC. So the rk3399 used in the PinePhone. Their newer board uses rk3588 which isn't completely mainlined yet. But I think these are the best bet for software support.

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...

You could also get a framework laptop mainboard with a case: https://frame.work/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case

> "normal" USB-C power

I have no idea what kind of USB-C PSU one can call "normal", but allowing higher voltages would be really good.

> Interestingly the Pi 5 has moved most I/O like Ethernet, USB, MIPI and GPIO into a custom I/O controller chip called the RP1.

For cost-saving reasons, the I/O is located in the RP1 Southbridge (which has a larger process size) instead of the SoC. I had the opportunity to preview the Pi5 and have provided a detailed breakdown of the RP1's components [1]. In summary, what I/O functionalities does the RP1 manage? Essentially, it handles almost all of them.

[1] https://youtu.be/q_QPM9xV_sw?si=dq-EEUp2u05-KrhM&t=252

I’m surprised they are only claiming 2-3x performance improvements for this vs. the four.

The four was great until I realized that they hung all sorts of stuff off the same bottlenecked USB controller.

I’d think moving them to PCIe would net much more than 2-3x real world improvement.

Good, then the price of second hand RPi4 will go down as it has been ridiculously expensive (even though I'm settled, still makes me happy for other people).

I'll wait for a CM module before I consider to replace my CM4 fleet, but for now I am happy with my CM4 as it is. Although I admit the ability for native NVMe is attractive. Better I/O as well!

Also, the RPi5 needs a better PSU so that is one thing to take into account.

For people for whom a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is good enough, they should opt for that instead. They're widely available and no longer ridiculous prices.

I've published a blog post now, with a bit more info and links to other content on the RPi 5 - https://blog.alexellis.io/first-impressions-with-the-raspber...

Are those results available anywhere else?

The audio jack on Raspberry Pi's has always been terrible quality anyway. Ok in a pinch but it's not a huge loss. If you want quality analog output from a Pi you need a DAC hat.

You might look into the Teensy boards. There's an audio adapter that adds a DAC and headphone jack, and there's also an audio library. The Dirtywave M8 was built on top of the Teensy stack.

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy3_audio.html

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html

https://dirtywave.com/

that definitely sounds like a whinge. raspi is fundamentally an unfinished, everything-not-included product. most use cases require some sort of dongle, hat or other adapter. an audio jack (especially in a context where you're not using an HDMI device that you can get the audio from) is much more niche than a lot of other things that aren't included on-board, like storage or POE.

if it's a trade between a built-in audio jack or a built-in RTC, i'll take the RTC 100% of the time.

So if you need 3.5mm output you need to buy some accessory? That's disappointing - reminds me of what happened with phones.

Removed the audio jack, what the?

That's a fundamental misunderstanding by the hardware designers of what Raspberry pi is.

Raspberry Pi has jumped the shark.

So I guess this means no composite out either. What a useless device this has become

The RP1 has one PIO core (4 state machines) https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/...

I stand corrected!

The Foundation is not the same as Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. While the Foundation is hardware-agnostic, they have a particular fondness for the Raspberry Pi.

> Arduino on the other hand, and them open sourcing the hardware means very cheap but less powerful SBCs from companies in China.

You probably don't know that the Raspberry Pi Pico is now also produced in Africa (I only learned last week). It offers better value for money compared to the ATMEGA328P. Additionally, Raspberry Pi is actively supporting the development of hardware manufacturing skills in Africa.

Raspberry Pi always felt more commercial than Arduino with a stronger focus on a branded range of products than providing a template for others to copy. We've even come to the point where it's no longer the cheapest option for what it provides at the same form factor. There are usually cheaper options with similar or even superior hardware even for things like the Raspberry Zero.

for most countries (besides the uk and the us afaik), getting an rpi almost often meant paying more than the "$35" sticker price, despite accounting for taxes.

in the past, what would have been the prices in South Africa in your experience? for me, usually the final price would have been a 50% mark up minimum.

times are tough, right?

PCIe 2.0 x1 can do 4Gbps, that should be more than plenty for any NAS - especially considering the ethernet port is 1Gbps.

I'm also posting some additional benchmarks to my GitHub sbc-reviews repo: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21

The Pi400 would be a perfect first computer. It runs faster than the Pi4 and doesn't get hot due to the colossal copper heat spreader inside it.

It really is a BBC B modern equivalent.

I really like the form factor, if only there would be some off-the-shelf options for a mechanical keyboard version ..

I know there are plenty DIY projects for this (and the cyberdeck scene is a rabbit hole that I do not dare to go down), but it would be nice something more easily available.

The Amiga 500, then 30 years later, the Raspberry 500.

I'd buy one. Probably more.

I was going to post to ask how it was likely to compare with the current crop of RK3588 boards that are marching towards decent mainline support, but this link already answers this to some extent. It looks like it's faster on some benchmarks, slower on others, but basically in a similar ballpark?

Because manufacturing... Otherwise you have to CNC the whole thing and it makes it really expensive.

I think it should be "The art of buying single-board computers and never running them once". I think the "once" is needed in the case of computers. They are as machines not directly comparable to books...

A book, like any media, fulfilled its initial purpose after it has been "consumed" - anything else (looks nice, feels nice, smells nice) are physical, subjective qualities attached to it. You might even buy it solely for these physical qualities, but that's besides the point.

A machine has its purpose in its usage, and that usage requires known resources that should not be carelessly wasted. I personally buy them to enable a utility for myself and have fun discovering it. It fulfilled its initial purpose even if it was powered on just once.

Even those single-board computers that were put to "good use", as building blocks for new devices (eg. [0]), are still not in use the whole time.

[0]: https://www.creativeapplications.net/objects/paragraphica-co...

"raspberry pile"

I have about 10 unused Raspberry Pis, so I collected unused monitors as well, and now run a mini code club in my local school. The school's laptops are all locked down to the point that running Python on them that this was the easiest way to provide a Python dev environment.

Because every machine you use requires maintenance whereas NextDNS [1] costs 2 EUR/month. The time wasted on maintenance alone is worth more, add to that the electricity bill.

Examples: I also use one with OpenWrt (though I'd prefer OPNsense on it), and I use one as PiKVM. I use one with a portable HackRF (3D printed case), batteries included. I use two with Pimoroni Enviro+, and I have a fun Turing Pi 2 homelab/miniNAS with 3 CM4s (one Jetson Orin Nano). I got two RPi4's one at my mother in law, one at my mother, allowing a VPN connection for tech support and also running Jellyfin with old content for them.

Personally, I still enjoy my Pi's (and no not all of them are on and used 24/7) however I also very much enjoy Proxmox and VMs. But the Proxmox machine is a Xeon... (HP MicroServer 10 Gen 10) the fan is loud af and difficult to replace with say a Noctua due to HP ingeniousness.

[1] https://nextdns.io/pricing

Hehe I got at least three of every generation and the only one I use is a gen3 for music streaming and FIR processing.

I have no answer to your question, but I'm so glad this word exists so that it can call me out and hurt me.

I think it’s hard to generalize that into a phenomenon.

I have always bought 2 new raspberry pies with every release. I’ve used some and forgotten, unplugged some, given away some, broke some, and now they’re all used in some way.

I bought them because I knew I’ll use them. I didn’t buy any other random toys or mini computing devices (even though they were alluring) because I knew I wouldn’t use them.

There should be a name for the art of making every thing that randomly happens to some people into a phenomenon.

I was using a Pi 400 for my programming PC, basically testing out if I can sell my gaming PC after I got my steam deck. It was perfectly capable for that task, and I’d say I would be happy to use it as my primary desktop PC.

Just sold my Pi 400 after the announcement of the Pi 5, deciding the Pi 5 will be my primary desktop PC. (Also ordered a Pi 4 because I have some other plans for it, but don’t want it built into a keyboard).

Falling back onto my Pi 3 I never really used before — it’s surprisingly capable. Not as a general desktop but gets my programming done fine. Its bottleneck seems to be I/O and limited RAM.

I think for many devs that can use dev containers or codespaces is more than okay.

Would not do heavy computing on it though, eslint alone for my use cases already kills my 8 core 7700x

Na it’s too slow.

I got one and I don’t touch it. I do also have an orange pi 5 and khandas edge 2 pro. Both are miles ahead of the rpi4 and based on specs they are miles ahead of the rpi5.

> I wonder if anyone here is using RPi as a main PC? Seems to be capable of most office work with a bit of multimedia on the side. My laptop is dying and I would love to get something stationary that is low-power by default yet good enough so that the internet wouldn't lag.

Unfortunately, it is too slow to even smoothly power a desktop environment.

I mean, keep in mind that the Pi5 is a $60 device with ~$60+ of support hardware (Power supply, cable, miniHDMI to HDMI, Cooling, Case, Storage) You can get considerably more powerful mini PCs for less than a 4GB Pi5 with needed accessories that is upgradable, has further software support, and includes all of what you need to get with a Pi. Also, you are reducing eWaste.

Seriously dude, why would you even want a new aarch64 SBC when you could buy a used NUC off ebay or just use a laptop you pulled out of a dumpster?

Same as the people on Reddit claiming that Raspberry Pi has killed itself as a business because it's constantly in such high demand that it's always sold out.

That's par for the course. Raspberry Pi always receives a lot of backlash here for some reason, regardless of the news.

The point here is likely to pull the rug out from under scalpers' feet.

With the Raspberry Pi 5 out in two weeks, all the held-back inventory of older models will be dumped, prices will plummet, availability will become a non-issue.

In that sense it's a wise move.

I think it's completely acceptable so long that a legacy compatible "Pi SE" options would be available, in Pi 3 and Pi 4 form factors.

Raspberry Pi are used installed as components into third party engineered products, and Raspberry Pi brand holds no value to potential industrial customers if new products did not technologically exchange with existing such products. That is to say the exact mounting details, electrical compatibility, software compatibility, DO provide the value the "Raspberry Pi" brand offers if its competitors offered it.

What I'm saying is, if Espressif brought that new ESP-branded 32bit thing in the Pi 3 mounting dimensions and onboard eMMC and 1/5th performance at $35+9%, that kind of thing could outsell Pi 5 at this rate, and I wouldn't mind watching that happening.

It may be that whatever is currently bottlenecking RPi4 production isn't relevant to RPi5.

"Don't expect it" to "launching Q4 for individual buyers" isn't really a u-turn.

Or it's a great way to counter the shortage by instead offering a new product that uses parts more easily available. We'll see.

I'm much more surprised that they decided to launch with a GPU that would have been considered awful if it had been released with previous pi four years ago.

Quite possibly they weren’t expecting to be ready to launch in 2023 but the design/supply/capacity issues were resolved quicker than expected.

CEOs lie, thats in their job description.

My little pi CEO anecdote: Eben Upton visited local hackerspace many years ago, someone asked about Pi2 (or maybe 3) potential release date and should he wait or buy now, Eben answered they arent even planning next version. A week later Pi2 was announced.

Around the start of this year they were saying the Raspberry Pi 5 would be released next year, so it’s about a quarter or two earlier than previously expected.

Part of the reason for the separate IO chip is that it can use an older silicon process (40nm) than the main chip (16nm) which makes it easier to have robust GPIO pins.

It would likely be similar to gaming on Linux but with the limitations of ARM-only and OpenGL ES 3.1 or Vulkan 1.2. [1]

What would be more interesting is an open source micro-kernel and gaming SDK targeting Raspberry Pi.

1. See https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Linux_ARM_games

You can run PICO-8 on a Raspberry Pi today. Still a "retro" feel, but they are all new games being written for the platform. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3085

It's a really nice idea, I've had similar thoughts myself, but sadly (and strangely) I actually think the Pi is too powerful. PICO-8 and similar works so well because the limitations are severe, 3D is a massive technical achievement on those systems, whereas the RPI can run Minecraft (to my knowledge) without too much issue. It puts it in this odd space where it can do too much to bring game development back to a simpler time, but not enough to make it an actual market.

Aside from that, it'd suffer from all the same problems as PC gaming does; different monitors to account for, no standard input method, varying specs between models, etc...

I could see it working, it's just got more issues to account for than other fantasy consoles

I've made a github page if anyone wants to collaborate on this idea.

https://www.github.com/raytopianprojects/gamedev-pie

I feel like the GPU on the Pi is pretty weak. It was fine in the first model, but they haven't improved it much in subsequent versions compared to the CPU.

The Pi is an ARM chip on a board with I/O for HDMI etc. There are plenty of ARM game consoles including the Nintendo Switch

The Raspberry Pi CM4 is the main system processor for our open source solar powered farming robot called Acorn. I designed a custom motherboard for it in Kicad. We also use the Raspberry Pi RP2040 processor on our custom dual brushless motor controllers (also designed in Kicad).

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/january-2023-update-ne...

The processing unit in my espresso machine died and was back ordered for 4 months, so raspberry pi to the rescue!

Is that much processing power necessary? Not even a little, but hey now it hosts its own web UI (local network only).

Firmware (Elixir, nerves): https://github.com/benwilson512/coffee_time/blob/a49814e5d8a...

I use

* 1 CM4 for a PiKVM on my desktop (my main home server uses a proprietary iLO).

* 1 CM4 as router running OpenWrt, to replace my ER-Lite.

* 3 CM4s in a Turing Pi 2, one Jetson Orin for ML. This is my homelab. The CM4 are running Dietpi.

* 2 RPi4 as remote VPN (Wireguard) endpoints to do tech support for my mother-in-law and mother. Also serves as Jellyfin server containing old movies, and jumphost for NAS backup.

* 2 RPi0 2 W with Enviro+. One indoor, one outdoor (with different, custom 3D printed casings). Runs Raspbian, will switch these to Dietpi.

* 1 RPi3 for with my portable HackRF (with custom 3D printed case). Batteries included!

* 1 RPi0 W for Pwnagotchi. Not really used anymore but too cute to break.

* 1 RPi0 W for Pimoroni grow to track water management in plants (with 3D printed case). Need to get that project moving, it is for my mother.

All my Docker containers run on my main server but I'm considering to switch to my Turing Pi 2. I got solar, so the Xeon is OK for now, but still...

Then I got: 1 RPi3B+, 1 CM4, 1 RPi2B, 1 RPi0 W. I should sell as they're right now 'Raspberry Piles'. Won't use them. To be frank I'd like to upgrade the RPi3 with the portable HackRF at some point, and once I get a 3D printer I might need Octoprint so I suppose I could use one of these machines for that.

It conttrols sensors in my desk drawers and notifies me when I have space to buy more Raspberry Pis.

Yes! I’ve used RPi SBCs for various purposes over time:

- One early RPi I bought when RPi was very new to the market. I played around with it for a while and then I put it in a drawer.

- Months later I pulled it out of the drawer and started hosting my website on it for a while. I have since moved on from using RPi at home for hosting any of my sites. Might do again at some point in time.

- I use an SBC as one of the pieces of electronics that I use for controlling over 9000 LED pixels on a sculpture for which I created the light setup and programming. The LED strips we bought are from China and were supposed to be IP65 but even so we now have a bunch of the pixels showing only red, which is bad. No fault of the SBC. Also the SBC in this installation is not an RPi. But relevant nonetheless.

- I hooked up an image sensor with a lens to an RPi and put it in a surveillance camera housing, and added PoE to it. Currently not in use but would like to deploy somewhere in the future if given the chance to do so.

- I have an RPi that I have connected a 5TB drive to in an enclosure I bought from AliExpress. This RPi I both ssh into from my phone to download things for the future, and I also run a squid proxy on it via which one of my laptops connect.

* Fileserver (SMB)

* Download agent (i.e. torrent, JDownloader, ARIA)

* Tailscale exit node

* Endlessh tarpit

* Sadly more reliable than my Mac Mini when running server workloads (lots of open SMB files crash MacOS)

And all of this at quite a low power dissipation, which is the primary expense in running a home server.

I don't do these things, but could:

* PiHole

* Kodi or Plex STB

* Add a hat and have an indoor air quality monitor or similar

- Two LibreELEC (https://libreelec.tv/) mediaplayers in house (yes, one is not enough in my big family).

- One for hosting low usage applications at home network (Unifi controller and some more).

- Octoprint (https://octoprint.org) connected to the 3d-printer.

- One on my desk for hardware hacking – mostly as just a PC with GPIO.

- Some wireless Raspberry Pi Zeros as security cameras.

I made one into a time-lapse camera and shot a five month time lapse video. Learned a good bit of computational photography in the process.

https://youtu.be/cyh0QJT0rAQ?si=Tcf-CjcD8BFZgSDq

I've got one setup at work as a display for some networked security cameras. Displays 4 concurrent 720p streams on a TV for the office 24/7. Cheaper than Ubiquiti's solution [0] as we didn't need more than the 4 streams.

At home I've got one for Home Assistant, one as a TV box because Netflix's sharing blocking check is only on smart TV apps. I've also got multiple as 3D printer controllers (klipper/octoprint).

[0] https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-cameras-nvrs/pro...

RPi 4:

  - VPN server (Wireguard)
  - Network ad blocking (Pihole)
  - DNS resolver (unbound)
  - DynamicDNS client
  All running in Docker containers.

RPi 3:

  - Home Assistant for home automation.

I also have a Pi Zero that I intend to use to drive an e-ink screen for a wall-mounted display, but I haven't set that up yet.

Previously I've also used the RPi 3 running AirPlay and hooked up to external speakers as a poor man's Sonos.

Courtesy of https://xeiaso.net/blog/gokrazy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37583234 ); a "go" link shortener, memegen, and pastebin.

I also wired up my garage remote to it, so I can hit a web page to open up my garage.

An older one as a PiHole for my home.

A Rpi3 as an octoprint server for my 3D oeubter, including canera feed.

A friend uses his as a HomeAssistant server to monitor and manage his home lights, temperature and garden watering needs.

And I have one as a nifty remote KVM (TinyPilot) that we also use for work. Connect it to the Internet and a PC and you can control that machine remotely.

Also use it as a Windows RDP thinclient.

And to tinker on electronic projects.

I use one to control my 3-D printer, with OctoPi. It also delivers a webcam feed, so I can monitor progress. Huge time-saver!

Lots of them are also going into commercial products, eg https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain... from a time of tight supply said "We spend a lot of time on backlog management. We have to balance volume demand from commercial and industrial customers with the demand we see from individuals. Right now we feel the right thing to do is to prioritise commercial and industrial customers – the people who need Raspberry Pis to run their businesses – we’re acutely aware that people’s livelihoods are at stake."

Home server/media centre, serving :

* Squeezebox music system

* Plex video library

* Homeassistant home automation

* Retropie gaming

* PiHole ad blocker (I have a second older pi running just this for redundancy)

* Running a couple of minor web services and scripts on cron jobs.