Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that?
I would say that a huge percentage of failures I have seen of raspberry pis, when people attempt to turn them into low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months.
something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.
Because zram is compressed ram disk: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/...
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
Theoretically the Pro Endurance cards are slower than other Samsung SD cards. But in my usage, I've not noticed a difference in I/O versus the one Raspberry Pi 4 that I've got with a "regular" microSD card.
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/memory-c...
Judging by how often people talk about the feature online (or how often they enquired about the delay in implementating it on pi 4 - it's been possible with the 3 forever), a lot.
> something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.
This is a not entirely uncommon but very badly thought out feature suggestion for the pi that comes from technical people who aren't the target audience and don't understand the target audience for the pi. It'd be an okay feature on the Pi compute module.
First things first, though: if you're really worried about storage reliability on these things (or anything), please stop prefacing your hardware suggestions with "cheap."
> low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months.
If you're trying to get this much value out of the thing, using either a legitimate, brand name USB ssd (not something cobbled together in a cheap enclosure), an industrial SD card built for embedded applications, or network booting are all good options.
Consumer grade sd cards are... cheap. It's not such a problem for a lot of the Pi's applications. I'm happy to use cheap sd cards to boot Pi 3s that serve as music players while using a Samsung T5 on the Pi that serves the music, for example (and on a development system).
What would be the cost implications of adding SATA support for a Raspberry Pi?
And keep in mind that nowadays the price point of a fully kitted raspberry pi is already close to 100$.
Better option: if you use SD, use 2 and monitor.
>> something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.
As nice as M.2 would be, AFAICT it's not supported by the SoC which is what allows these things to be so inexpensive. Go with USB then.
IMHO an AMD APU could be under clocked to not need a fan, and would allow things like M.2 in a keyboard form factor. That might be amazing but would probably cost 2x to 3x the price. Also, at the higher price people would then complain about the keyboard.
BTW I thing SFF designs and keyboard computers should have a couple USB or SD on the top to make it easy to plug in storage devices.
If you're so inclined, you can buy microSD cards with better endurance ratings than typical consumer SSDs.
https://www.westerndigital.com/products/embedded-removable-f...
I'd be surprised if tesla didn't have embedded systems engineering responsible for this thing, and indeed even flash memory experts on staff, who are intimately familiar with all of the design problems of flash memory write wear leveling. And they went ahead and send that design to production anyways?
Per the ONS composite price index, £1 in 1981 is worth £4.42 today. So the equivalent cost of a Raspberry Pi 400 in 1981 would have been £15.15. (Alternatively buying a new ZX81-equivalent in 2020 would set you back £309.)
Seriously, this thing is ridiculously cheap. Really demonstrates where 40 years of Moore's Law has taken us!
That does seem like a miss for an otherwise decent platform. HDMI out support is fine, but since this setup is quite portable, exposing a headphone jack seems obvious. I suppose bluetooth is the expectation now?
http://www.crazy-audio.com/2014/07/sound-quality-of-the-rasp...
If I was on the design team for it I could eventually come around to being fine with it.
I'm a bit more disappointed there is no usable usb c - and we could use these usb c-3.5 adaptors almost everyone has now.
Between Bluetooth headphones, HDMI out to the screen, HDMI audio splitters and $5 USB audio dongles, it really is a fine design choice - especially given that the RasPI’s analog audio out circuitry is low quality to begin with.
There are some third party raspberry pi 4 cases that support m.2 via an internal USB 3.0 adapter [1].
Considering they designed a custom PCB for this product, adding a native M.2 or SATA is a reasonable feature for something designed to replace a desktop PC
[1]: https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...
Besides, the device is $70. A $10 32GB eMMC chip would be a far more reasonable ask at this price point if greater reliability is desired.
Have you seen the compute module though? It exposes a PCIe slot via a separate I/O board. At first I assumed there was some free lanes, but now I see it doesn't exposea usb 3.0 ports, only 2.0.
Still, I would rather have a dedicated bus for storage with usb 2.0 rather than usb 3.0
[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?varia...
I learned programming from the handbook of my ZX Spectrum. If the Pi would come with a similar book it would be fantastic.
Maybe there are other books that fill that niche for the Pi?
In general I find it very hard to get my kids coding (especially as their English isn't good yet, and many languages don't have German documentation). There are some fancy books, but it turns out there are a lot of details in coding that most books can't cover.
What books would you recommend? What are the names of these "fancy books" you mention? And lastly, do you think there are websites that teach programming languages better than books, such as DataCamp, CodeCademy, SoloLearn, etc.?
What would be your recommendations?
I would have preferred JavaScript, but had not immediately found a kid friendly book I liked (in German).
As for recommendations, the Pi Getting Started Book does have chapters about Python and Scratch, maybe it is a good start (see free download link).
I still like good books to learn a programming language. Also, good online documentation in a language is important imo. I still like the original Java tutorial from Sun/Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/
I know a teenager who has taught himself Java development from YouTube videos, which YouTube suggested to him.
I think it is important to have a project and be dedicated to solve it. What is it you want to do?
To give an example of an early issue we encountered: I wanted to write a simple program with my son, that asks for your date of birth and computes the number of days since your birth. But dates were not a subject of our python games programming book, so we had to read the online API documentation to figure out how to parse dates and compute time differences. Not too hard, but I think it requires dedication.
In a similar way, I think books or tutorials can never cover all sorts of issues one might encounter, so a lot of patience and dedication is needed to eventually master the coding.
For kids, I liked Micro:Bit, and if you are German, I would recommend the "Jugendwettbewerb Informatik" and accompanying tutorials.
Same for me and most people I know who have bought an rpi. Buy it because it seems like a cool toy and then stick it in a box and never use it for anything.
I installed recalbox on a rpi3, and it runs nes/snes fine, and even some n64 games. On occasions I brought it along when visiting friends, and plugged it into the TV/projector with a couple of joysticks. It has been a blast!
All in all I'm very happy with my small on-the-go arcade machine.
Amazing how the addition of a keyboard changes things, with the keyboard being a great box. The snazzy design is definitely a further add that lures me in to wanting one. I too have Pi's in boxes, unused.
What I would like is a backlit keyboard version. I am already spending £100 on keyboards so this is achievable. I would program mine so that the keyboard appeared over bluetooth to my main computer from where I would ssh into my Pi to do things like run a web server. For a long time I have wanted to do local development of web projects on a separate box so there is a clear break between client and server but everything is local.
Unless you're teaching your kids & grandparents how to sysadmin linux and don't think they want to watch any videos online (browser support for accelerated video decoding remains a giant disaster on linux), then sure? And also that they want a desktop instead of a laptop.
It does word processing, browsing, printing etc, extremely well. Streaming (Netflix etc) is indeed troublesome, at least directly.
Anything else? Maybe an Intel processor, Windows, a built in battery and a hinged screen that folds down over the keyboard. Are we getting there yet?
For this I would elect to buy naked Pi 4 and keyboard I would like and just wire everything together. If you wanna do stuff on it imho Keyboard feeling good is important.
I wonder if there are any studies that show a mouse is easier to learn than a touchpad or vise versa.
I found some bluetooth touchpads on Amazon, they cost at least about half the price of the Pi 400.
Also, make the case easy to open with screws...
I for one ordered one (and am playing with it right now) because it's an incredibly low barrier way to dogfood some software projects on arm. I'm loving it, it's very different to an arm laptop, it's got more of a console feeling which is great :)
It's somewhat similar to some all-in-one PCs where I think they don't look too bad, if only they came with a video input port so that you can use it as a display for other devices, or simply as a monitor should the PC part become obsolete some day.
From what I can gather, this is however not a built-in feature of the Pi 400 and will probably require some tinkering (which might be an interesting project in and of itself).
I also understand that the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goal is to offer this product at a certain price point, and that even though many of the wishes for additional features you can read in the comments here and elsewhere are each not unreasonable by themselves, every part that is added comes at an additional cost, and that they usually decide against it if it's something that is only used by a small fraction of the user base.
