Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

The Pi ecosystem is coming apart at the seams. Talk about falling off a pedestal.

By the time you buy everything you need to make a Pi 5 even remotely usable and reliable today, you'll have spent as much as a small form factor PC. What do you need?

  1. Special power supply - Yes, it's USB-C but it requires a high amperage 5V supply instead of accepting a higher voltage like most USB-C stuff
  2. Active cooler - Pi 5 throttles immediately without it; it's not an optional component
  3. NVMe Expansion HAT - Seriously why the fiddly little PCIe header? Put an NVMe slot on the bottom and let people adapt *that* connector
  4. RTC Battery - At least put a damn capacitor on the board
  5. Enclosure - I'm halfway expecting the pi foundation to print some dashed cut lines on the cardboard box so they can say it comes with a case =]

At the end of this you get a system that can run ... raspbian

Not like the Pi Foundation couldn't have contributed to uboot or the upstream kernel or anything before thier hardware was released. Pretty much nothing released for "Raspberry Pi" runs on a Pi 5 at this point in time.

They better try to salvage something before putting out the expected CM5, but I'm not expecting much.

They seem to be obsessed with desktops, and ultra high performance homelab NASes.

They could have just use any old less powerful chip, like, whatever has at least 3B performance is fine, and used the money saved for stuff we actually need.

Maybe ditch those awful micro HDMIs, it's kind of a nasty connector and USB C exists.

Onboard lithium charging is a few cents. Better yet, onboard LTO charging, but it seems nobody does that yet. Why just stop at an RTC battery when you could have a few minutes of real backup power to help stop SD corruption?

While you're at it, add an onboard I2C FRAM or battery backed SRAM.

Instead of NVMe why not hire a few devs to go around fixing stuff that can't run well from the SD card?

> They seem to be obsessed with desktops, and ultra high performance homelab NASes.

I don't know how you reach that conclusion; the network connectivity of pi's suck (especially pi5) and out of the box they do not support any traditional storage except for a couple of external usb drives.

The use as a low cost desktop is a primary mission statement of theirs, so I don't really read that part as a criticism though. I think it's probably the only thing it really does well.

Agree on your other points though. Other vendors have made lots of headway in the SBC markets in the years that Pi hasn't been able to ship product. I'm sorry in a way that they have not achieved their lofty goals, but in another way I'm not sorry because they really have been fucking it up bad for the last few years.

The raspberry pi is still a great and easy way to control GPIO lines. IMO that's it's strength, it was never a particularly capable desktop computer or server for any kind of load. The raspberry pi was underpowered compared to a "real computer" when it came out and that's still fine for many applications.

A hundred and fifty bucks to control some non 5v tolerant gpio pins; no it’s not actually great at that. The RP2040 is great at that.

The power supply is becoming less special over time. My first result for "usb c power supply" on amazon is a $25 anker 317 that supports PPS and will do 5 amps at any voltage. Not that that's an amazing price, but the feature is spreading.

But I agree that the price to get a happy Pi is pretty harsh compared to a tiny PC.

I don't have Pi 5 to check this, but from what I've read, it does not support PPS. And such support is required; otherwise, even with a source that supports PPS, the connection will behave in a non-PPS fashion.

Apparently, cable quality is also demonstrating itself to be a significant factor in the Pi 5 power supply environment.

Regarding both these points:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/497

What??

Then how the hell does it negotiate the power and know if it's attached to 3A or 5A?

Well, as it turns out, although a lot of stuff out there implies that the Pi uses USB-PD, it actually doesn't negotiate anything; it's just a dumb 5V peripheral. It can measure its own power (current/voltage) and has a current limit setting that the PMC will use to adjust clocks, etc. and alert on overcurrent conditions. If you hook up a higher amperage supply you have to change your boot config to the higher current limit. Everything is on you to make it work its weird not-quite-standards-compliant way.

The "Official Pi 5 USB-C Power Supply" is USB-PD compliant and as it is advertised as such in conjunction with the Pi5, I think that is where the confusion originates

I thought the boot config was just an override.

The things I've been searching in the last few minutes suggest that the Pi can negotiate 5A but only if the power supply explicitly offers it as a PDO, which almost nothing does.

But even if that's right, it's almost as bad as not doing PD at all.

Edit: The documentation states "If the Raspberry Pi 5 firmware detects a supported 5A-capable supply, it increases the USB current limit for peripherals to 1.6A, providing 5W of extra power for downstream USB devices, and 5W of extra onboard power budget."

It also confirms no PPS, but it's not entirely dumb.

That may indeed be correct at least in some circumstances; maybe it at least works with some capability of the offical supply. In my experience I have had to use usb_max_current_enable=1 and PSU_MAX_CURRENT=5000 to get it to shut up and work.

Here's the thing though; the simple fact that we have to even have this discussion because the Rpi5 continues to be super damn weird is enough evidence for me that the platform has jumped the shark. I don't know whether to blame Broadcom or the Pi Foundation, but the Pi 5 suuuuuucks. Man, I wanted to love it though; it's the only board I have even been been able to buy from them in the last FOUR YEARS

Agreed, I'm very annoyed it doesn't support PPS. A whole host of issues made me buy a small pc instead recently and the price difference was negligible.

What is "high" amperage here ?

I find it hard to believe that it can be worse than RPi 3, which could try to draw up to 15W => 3A under the highest loads, while USB 2 could officially only go up to 2.5 W = 0.5A at 5V, resulting in countless corrupted SD cards. (15 W being the minimum maximum for USB C.)

5V 5A. Buck converter? Never heard of it apparently

I have been happily using my Raspberry Pi 400 as my main home computer for years.

The tooling for light software development and hobby embedded hardware development has been great so far.

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