A NVMe compatible M.2 M Key connector (like the Rock 5 Model B [0] has) would have been really nice. I'm starting to accumulate old but good, yet small in storage space terms NVMe's which I'm no longer needing, but which would be perfect for a Raspi. Even if the PCIe bus were an older generation and not as performant as the NVMe.
The microSD card slot is really great to have, to get up-and-running, but once it's clear which function the board will serve, being able to move over to a directly connected old NVMe would really be a benefit, also in terms of reliability. These microSD cards scare me, yet I make full use of them.
Finally having a battery backed RTC on it is really great news.
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.
In addition to the ability to adapt M.2 slots into PCIe via an inexpensive adapter, there is a growing ecosystem of M.2 cards for most of the things you'd use a PCIe card for. USB controllers, SATA controllers, Ethernet controllers, FPGAs, even display adapters.
It would not limit you to just SSDs, the m.2 connector on the rk3588 devices generally exposes 4 pcie lanes and an adapter to make this a full pcie slot is already available. So really an m.2 nvme connector is the best of both, you can turn it into any other pcie connector you want via an adapter, but you can just put an nvme ssd directly on the board without a hat.
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.)
YIL a Pi 4B can run from a directly connected USB/NVME SSD. I've been using USB/SATA SSDs and all I have tried require a powered hub. Do note that I don't just just boot it up and proclaim "It boots - ship it"[1] I thrash it with various disk benchmarks and stress tests to be absolutely certain the SSD does not disconnect due to insufficient power.
[1] I suppose this is the H/W equivalent of the S/W engineer's proclamation "It compiles - ship it!" And I guess this dates me since S/W is pushed rather than shipped these days.
Sorry, can you elaborate? Is the death rate of NVMe drives known to be significantly faster than that of other types of drives? I hadn't heard of this.
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.
Those are almost certainly 8 to 32GB drives that are modified to report a higher capacity. They are scams that hope your return window expires before you try to load them up with a lot of data. Nobody can profitably manufacture flash drives for less than the wholesale price of the flash chips.
FYI I believe all of those ~1TB $10-20 USB drives on amazon are scams- basically set up to trick your computer into showing a terabyte of disk space available, but not actually having that much available if you try to write it all. I was in the market for "largest reasonably priced usb drive" earlier this year and ended up with a 1 TB usb drive for about $80.
Flash storage like USB sticks is a crude comparison to an SSD or NVMe with cache and a controller capable of parallel operations.
A USB flash drive is like a dumpster. Big bandwidth when the lid is open but it’s got poor performance for fetching and storing lots of things all the time.
An SSD or NVMe is more like a rolling auto tool chest. Same big metal box, but much more performant for complex and numerous read and write loads.
Or to use a computer analogy: SSD is like a hard disk, USB flash is like a tape drive.
No word on price. When Raspberry Pi first launched, this was the prime feature of the thing. Can we expect same price as the Raspberry Pi 4? (at the respective RAM level)
So the 4 GB model is 60$, which is 5$ more than the 4 GB model of the Raspberry 4 when that was launched: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-... . I guess that is fair, especially with inflation nowadays. So they stay true to the idea of making this available for cheap.
> 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.
Amazon is not a good place to get prices from for a comparison. All the enshittification has ruined the prices. As it forces prices up outside Amazon too even outside prices are not useful. To do a proper comparison that doesn't include changes forced by Amazon IMO you need to look at non-US non-Amazon non-Amazon-sellers prices and work with those. Quite annoying really.
> 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.
Included in that 17% figure is the price increase for e.g. corn, rent and steaks.
Why should the change in price of either of these things be relevant to the price of a Raspberry Pi?
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.
I don't see how this is true. $35 in 2012 is roughly $47 today. You can get a pi zero 2 kit today including the adapters, case, and PSU, for $49.95. Just the PSU, which the original didn't come with, is worth more than the $3 difference.
Besides, both the pi 3 and the pi 4 were $35 at launch, so they were actually beating inflation when they were launched.
Sure, if you want the raw board and nothing else. I spent $100 for a starter kit that had an enclosure and some heat sinks. It came with a controller for a retropi installation too which was a nice touch.
Not to mention it now requires a new PSU. Before you could use your standard $5 (android) phone charger at (5W), then you had to buy a 15W one and now a 27W.
To whoever thinks pi's are cheap, you can get more functionality out of a used laptop for less money, but probably worse specs and probably x86.
The standard charger is 2.5W, not 5W, and RPi3 will happily run from that, for RPi4 2.5W is somewhat marginal, but it will still work. I suspect that RPi5 is going to be somewhere around 3W (non-PD USB3).
The official RPi specs intentionally overblow the power consumption in order to provide an buffer for powering whatever ridiculous stuff people may hang off the USB ports.
Then the other issue is that all RPis need somewhat tighter voltage tolerance than what is in USB specification. So it is perfectly possible that a cable between the power supply and RPi is compliant, but has too large series resistance on power lines for RPi. And well, powering RPi from random aliexpress-grade “Android chargers” is completely another bad idea.
But, you really only need the 27W supply if you need to pump a lot of power through the USB ports. It'll run just fine (even using less power) on the 15W unit with more modest loads.
The value proposition is there for me. I bought a "BMAX B1 Plus" for about 70$ 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.
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.
I am curious to know how people here use their RPIs today, and how the RPI5 might help. I have had a model 3 for many years, which I enjoy tinkering with from time to time. I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having such small, cheap computer that runs Linux and does a pretty good job of it. That said, all I do is tinker with it. I turn it on, write a bit of code, marvel that the code runs, and turn it off. I've bought a couple of hats which are fun too, but again it's just tinkering. I'm curious to know who here has found "serious" applications for their RPis.
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. :)
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?
There's no shortage of projects for this, particularly enby, jellyfin, and kodi spring to mind. The only real challenges are GPU transcoding support, app selection for integration of services like Spotify, amazon prime streaming, and netflix, and app availability on client devices like TVs.
In terms of specs a Pi4 was already beefy enough for this use case, fwiw. But the software stack is hard just because no one seems to target the "set top box“ space quite the same way. There are client/server media platforms to compete with plex, there are single.box media platforms, there are set top boxes to compete with roku, and every possible mix in between.
You could switch out the Pi 0 W's with ESP32's or Raspberry Pico W's (if you'd like to stay in the Raspberry ecosystem). They're a lot cheaper, require less power, have a smaller footprint, aren't too hard to set up and there's usually a library ready for every sensor.
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 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!
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 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.
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’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.
TBH the thing I hate most about this category of SBC is the reliance on SD cards. They are both too unreliable to trust and so slow that they often bottleneck the SBC. Buying them is often a crap shoot too, I've purchased cards batches of cards from the supposed reputable manufacturers that were all over the board when benchmarked, and rarely did they hit the claimed speed spec. I would love if there was an alternative that was not as much as a jump as those SSD flash drives or NVME drive. Maybe OS grade eMMC M.2 drives the size of those wifi cards?
"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."
As you keep spamming this here, did you read the HN Guidelines[0]?
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I did read that they were going to support M.2., and I have gotten around my issues with SD cards in the past using SSD-grade USB drives and NVMe adapters. My comment was about how crap SD cards are, and how this class of SBCs (including the PI 5) often use them as their default storage (as in, not needing an adapter or special firmware to boot). My final statement was my wish for a high speed durable storage standard that was better than SD cards without having to spend more money than the SBC itself on storage, although looking today on Amazon it seems that NVMe drives have gotten way cheaper, no idea of those are quality though.
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.
Are they using like a RAM disk then or are they mapping a network drive for storage while they're running? I've always been curious about setting up netbooting but beyond a failed experiment a long long time ago I haven't really tried.
This. I've had an always-on Pi 3 since 2016 and after countless random corruption issues from various micro SD cards, I moved to booting them from old USB2 flash drives, first an 8gb then an 16gb one. Never had an issue with them and they've been solid. I only had to mess with the flash drives when I had to do an OS upgrade.
Also, those micro SD cards were always fine after a format/partition and I can still use them in other devices just fine. I've read before that the Pi has a tendency to corrupt micro SD cards through its reader, and IIRC it's related to power issues.
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.
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.
I am aware of the write endurance problems of sd cards, but I've had numerous cards that are cooked fresh out of the box, even from 'good' manufactures like Samsung. I don't like having to do binning for the manufacturer.
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).
I'm fairly sure that none of the earlier SoCs had an IOMMU. It's of course possible that there was one hidden in the GPU or something, but nothing on the CPU side.
I think it’s notable that the chip powering the RP5 is built on a 16nm process. (The RP4 was on 26nm).
This is a nearly 10 year old manufacturing process and it’s silly to compare the performance per watt to any Intel or Arm chip on the market today. On such an old node, it’s not surprising that the power draw is so high. Of course an M2 would smoke a RP5 at a much lower power. But the RP5 is 60 bucks!
Orange Pi 5, "plus" version also has 2gen 1-lane pci-e (M.2 wifi), and 3gen 4-lane pci-e (M.2 SSD) and 2x2.5Gbit ethernet.
8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.
Alder Lake N (N95, N100, etc) is built on a 7nm class process. Many of those systems could be considered SBCs (SoC/RAM/Storage is often all on a single board). Those CPUs are low end for x86, but much higher end than a typical ARM based SBC.
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.
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.
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.
Not yet, but you can pre-order them from some vendors. The 4 and 8gb models should ship in October.
FWIW, the Pi 4 and Pi Zero W are both fairly available these days. The Zero 2 W is still in short supply, but aside from that, the shortage is basically over.
Readit News
The microSD card slot is really great to have, to get up-and-running, but once it's clear which function the board will serve, being able to move over to a directly connected old NVMe would really be a benefit, also in terms of reliability. These microSD cards scare me, yet I make full use of them.
Finally having a battery backed RTC on it is really great news.
[0] https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/hardware/5b
Now that I think about it, Linux may be caching writes, but even then double the write speed compared to the read speed seems weird.
[1] I suppose this is the H/W equivalent of the S/W engineer's proclamation "It compiles - ship it!" And I guess this dates me since S/W is pushed rather than shipped these days.
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.
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.
Those are almost certainly 8 to 32GB drives that are modified to report a higher capacity. They are scams that hope your return window expires before you try to load them up with a lot of data. Nobody can profitably manufacture flash drives for less than the wholesale price of the flash chips.
A USB flash drive is like a dumpster. Big bandwidth when the lid is open but it’s got poor performance for fetching and storing lots of things all the time.
An SSD or NVMe is more like a rolling auto tool chest. Same big metal box, but much more performant for complex and numerous read and write loads.
Or to use a computer analogy: SSD is like a hard disk, USB flash is like a tape drive.
Edit: found it here: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
So the 4 GB model is 60$, which is 5$ more than the 4 GB model of the Raspberry 4 when that was launched: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-... . I guess that is fair, especially with inflation nowadays. So they stay true to the idea of making this available for cheap.
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
If you must use average, then you should remove the top 5% from the average.
Included in that 17% figure is the price increase for e.g. corn, rent and steaks.
Why should the change in price of either of these things be relevant to the price of a Raspberry Pi?
Besides, both the pi 3 and the pi 4 were $35 at launch, so they were actually beating inflation when they were launched.
It's more like they're expanding their top line.
It's mentioned in Eben Upton's blog post (linked from the announcement):
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
Dead Comment
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.
The official RPi specs intentionally overblow the power consumption in order to provide an buffer for powering whatever ridiculous stuff people may hang off the USB ports.
Then the other issue is that all RPis need somewhat tighter voltage tolerance than what is in USB specification. So it is perfectly possible that a cable between the power supply and RPi is compliant, but has too large series resistance on power lines for RPi. And well, powering RPi from random aliexpress-grade “Android chargers” is completely another bad idea.
https://www.engadget.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-uses-the-company...
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 8GB - US$80.00 (EAN 5056561803326)
I wanna see somebody hook up a GeForce card over to that 1x pci express. Play some Crysis using Box86.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VhYEOG9LOIk
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.
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 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?
In terms of specs a Pi4 was already beefy enough for this use case, fwiw. But the software stack is hard just because no one seems to target the "set top box“ space quite the same way. There are client/server media platforms to compete with plex, there are single.box media platforms, there are set top boxes to compete with roku, and every possible mix in between.
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.
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.
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 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 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)
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.
[1] https://github.com/aaronhktan/rpi-albumart [2] https://github.com/aaronhktan/vesta
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.
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.
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.
- 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)
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.
- 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 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.
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
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.
"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."
As you keep spamming this here, did you read the HN Guidelines[0]?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmlI did read that they were going to support M.2., and I have gotten around my issues with SD cards in the past using SSD-grade USB drives and NVMe adapters. My comment was about how crap SD cards are, and how this class of SBCs (including the PI 5) often use them as their default storage (as in, not needing an adapter or special firmware to boot). My final statement was my wish for a high speed durable storage standard that was better than SD cards without having to spend more money than the SBC itself on storage, although looking today on Amazon it seems that NVMe drives have gotten way cheaper, no idea of those are quality though.
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
It's a fiddly FPC connector though, which isn't a great contributor to mechanical robustness.
Also, those micro SD cards were always fine after a format/partition and I can still use them in other devices just fine. I've read before that the Pi has a tendency to corrupt micro SD cards through its reader, and IIRC it's related to power issues.
Combined with a portable LCD, it's a low-power dev workstation on a battery. ^_^
99% of the time it's the verbose logging of application servers that is the culprit of sdcard failures.
https://github.com/azlux/log2ram
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.
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.
From the device tree [1] it looks like they've rolled their own IOMMU rather than using ARM's SMMU which is annoying.
[0] - https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/pull/5618
[1] - https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/blob/9c75e5408c01cb7c65...
Dead Comment
This is a nearly 10 year old manufacturing process and it’s silly to compare the performance per watt to any Intel or Arm chip on the market today. On such an old node, it’s not surprising that the power draw is so high. Of course an M2 would smoke a RP5 at a much lower power. But the RP5 is 60 bucks!
8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/ says "LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM (4GB and 8GB SKUs available at launch)" so maybe the cheaper ones will be coming at a later date?
Unrelated to that, the addition of a power button seems like a significant improvement over previous models.
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.
FWIW, the Pi 4 and Pi Zero W are both fairly available these days. The Zero 2 W is still in short supply, but aside from that, the shortage is basically over.