> the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions
FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.
If you're trying to get maximum performance out of it all the time, you will want a heatsink and fan. If you want to run some Python scripts in a Linux environment or even if you're doing heavy work and waiting longer is not a problem, you don't need extra cooling.
> and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port)
This hasn't been true in 10 years.
Powering something off of any old USB port means it would have to fit within the 5V 500mA basic specification, which the Raspberry Pi 3 exceeded long ago.
> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python
It was never a microcontroller by any definition of the word.
Raspberry Pi foundation has released microcontrollers that run MicroPython in a very user-friendly format https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/m...
What's the point of doing so though? If you're doing this, you're obviously using the wrong device. If all you need is to run some python scripts in a Linux environment, you should use a Pi 3 or Pi 0w2.
Agree with your other points.
Most light workloads are very bursty. When you type a command or click on something you want latency to be low. Having the overhead to get it done quickly at the full clockspeed is good if you are latency sensitive.
Throttling has become a bad word. Some feel compelled to avoid it at all costs, doing things like buying big coolers and running synthetic benchmarks to avoid it. Unless you're doing sustained workloads where you need all of the performance, allowing a little throttling is fine.
I'm going to replace it before then.
Do heat cycles mean that the device only lasts half as long as it might if it were kept at some constant ideal temperature? A third as long?
If so, then...so what? The tinkerers using these things aren't broadly concerned about these things. We're all out here running our real-live desktop, laptop, and pocket computers with bursty loads, dynamic clocks, and dynamic heat anyway, and these things are generally doing just fine. We aren't driving space ships with this stuff; it'll be alright.
I insist that there is no merit to holding a lowly Raspberry Pi board to a higher standard than we hold everything else.
Furthermore: If perfection is necessary for some kind of application, then maybe starting with a <$100 hobby SBC isn't the best move. It might be time to look within for a better pathway.
(Disclaimer, I work for raspberry pi ltd, not views of employer etc.)
> It was never a microcontroller by any definition of the word.
I think the poster means people treat the R-Pi like an MCU that runs Python. The Arduino was popular at the time the Pi came out but limited. Once the Pi landed, it quickly filled the gap and the Arduino's popularity diminished to the point where it's now a corporate Pi clone.
I and many other people very much used it like a microcontroller.
Theoretically, devices like the iPhone have lower power consumption than that and loads of performance features like recording 4k 120fps video.
Of course, an iPhone costs much more than a RPi, and has much better economies of scale, so they’re not truly comparable.
iPhones use cutting edge (expensive) manufacturing processes for their chips.
They also have batteries inside to cover the power demands while doing intense work like recording 4K 120fps video.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. The Raspberry Pi is not in the same class of device as an iPhone.
In practice most USB wall warts will happily provide 2 amps or even more with no overcurrent protection at all. The 500 mA limitation, at least outside of ports on computers (where you'll maybe get a prompt on Windows and macOS), is theoretical.
They need to stick within limits to avoid liability (and avoid arseholes blaming them on forums).
Someone would get a problem with their computer or TV, and then blame Raspberry Pi (or create a problem).
The problem with the Pi5 is that they use weird profile, 5A/5V, that requires special charger. Most 5V chargers are 100W and beefy. If they hadn't cheaped out on power circuits, they could have used normal 30W charger. They should come out with new version that fixes that.
5A/5V what are they smoking?
The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers.
The company didn't sell its first microcontroller until years later in 2021 with the Pico, by which point we already had Pi 4. I do though think its a real shame prices for the SBCs have risen as they have.
Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.
Mate you know full well it was multiple things... Marketed to education as an actual computer, to the maker demographic as a microcontroller, as a way to learn coding but also robotics etc
>Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores blah blah blah
Same applies to thinking of them as SBCs
Pre-Beagleboard-and-Pi, if you wanted an programmable thing to work with GPIO, you used an Arduino or a BASIC Stamp, or just a plain old PIC. But they wouldn't run a real OS.
Pre-Beagleboard-and-Pi, if you wanted an embedded Linux box, you used a WRT54G or a Soekris or an old laptop. But getting GPIO out of them was a PITA. (And often involved lashing an Arduino to the side.)
The Beagleboard (released in 2008), could finally do both. It had gobs of I/O and first-class support for it under Linux. It was pretty affordable. Then the Raspberry Pi came out in 2012, with a similar amount of GPIO, but demolished the price point to where it made sense to use it in place of a microcontroller.
That's really the magic of the Pi. You can keep one cheap gizmo around, and use it to solve (a large fraction of) two classes of problems. It doesn't fully replace everything a PIC or a PC can do, but it replaces an awful, awful lot of them.
In this amazing world full of such inexpensive choices, it seems so bizarre to me to demonize any of them. They're all excellent in some way, and it's OK that there's more than one.
This isn't football, handball, American politics, or Highlander: There can be more than one. It's OK.
There have also been times when Pi's were cheap enough and x86 idled so power-inefficiently that you'd save money over a reasonable time horizon if you couldn't run your old laptops at full throttle.
Absurdly extreme example, but at one point I decided to replace a couple (maybe 3) RPi's with a single old Dell rack server off Ebay plus replaced my router with one running pfsense. I knew it would be mostly idle, that thing had 2 Xeon processors to replace 3 cheap ARM processors.
Between the 2 rack servers, my power bill went up by enough to buy a new Pi or two every month. It was like $80/month extra in power bills.
I suspect Espressif has mostly taken over that market now
Maybe you could do this with a ESP32 but it's easy on linux where you can use all the normal tooling and filesystem drivers.
ESP32 hardware is much better than they used to be.
Not everything needs to be under Linux monoculture, thankfully.
As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)
Is that a good idea? Well, not really.
Many years ago, I measured performance per watt of the original Raspberry Pi when they were still relatively new. The performance per watt lagged behind even a beefy Intel box since the original Raspi was so slow that it destroyed any gain it got from using so little power.
EDIT: One set of benchmarks I found as an example: https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Performance-Per-Watt
They've never been particularly cheap, in a performance-per-dollar sort of way. Used machines from eBay, yard sales, and old broken laptops (that still compute!) have always been better. (They usually come out OK when new is compared to new, though, which is IMHO the only valid comparison.)
Those comparisons were never very favorable.
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The parts where it shines are: Small; they come in two sizes, and those sizes are small and smaller. That was new, but it's been cloned all over the place.
Built-in GPIO that's meant for people to actually-use and tinker with. That was new, too, but it's also been cloned. (Also: These days, anyone can plug a cheap Pi Pico into any PC with USB and get a fairly intense amount of GPIO to goof with.)
Standardization, and the appliance-like behavior this can enable. Lots of folks, including kids of all ages, just download pre-built images and swap SD cards like they would cartridges in a Nintendo. That's not for me, but it's pretty neat.
Community. They've still got a lot of momentum by being first at these roles. That's good. It helps newbs (who at this point may have never had anything resembling a "real computer" to play with ever before in their lives) to get started.
Low-power enough: It's not ideal when chasing tiny Watts for battery or small solar power, but you probably won't notice it on an electric bill (and despite the bizarro-world cooling rigs people put together, a passive heatsink really is good enough to keep it running in-spec).
but there is very little reason to use a rpi over other sbcs if you have a remote idea what you’re doing beyond hobby use
If you don’t specifically have a project where you need the GPIO pins built in, I struggle to understand the use case proposition of a raspberry pi compared to a typical x86 mini PC or even just grabbing a think client desktop like a ThinkCentre.
Almost everything that is unique to a Pi compared to an x86 mini PC seems like it makes more sense with an ESP device.
When the Raspberry Pi was $35 and it ran a desktop OS and the cheapest alternative that did that was 5x the price that use case made sense.
The ones I find on Lenovo's website don't seem to get any cheaper than $649.
Or do a search for “mini PC” on aliexpress.