Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Space Gopher posted:

The problem is, after you give kids this "$25 computer to practice basic programming on," they still need another computer to run dev tools, not to mention a monitor or TV for the Raspberry Pi itself.

Why do you need another computer? It runs Linux, it has HDMI out, it has USB. You can plug it into an HDTV, mouse and keyboard and develop right on the board.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2012 18:34

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 14:27

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Install Gentoo posted:

And if you have all that already, you probably also have a computer they can use already.

Especially in an education environment, although I don't know maybe your school just bought HDTVs for every student instead of computers.

HDTVs are a) cheap these days (because all TVs are HD) and b) already in a lot of people's homes, even people who don't own computers (or don't want to let Junior use them), so effectively free. At that point your 'all that' is a $5 mouse and a $5 keyboard, which is pretty trivial compared to a computer.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2012 19:11

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Space Gopher posted:

One of the big attractions for this is "feel free to gently caress it up, you can just restore it!" You know, from that other PC you have. Not to mention, it'd sure be nice to teach people to use modern programming tools, rather than just saying "well print() statements were a good enough debugger for me..."

How is restoring from a PC any more simple than 'pop out the SD card and put one with a fresh image in'? And, uh, why are you talking about Visual Studio when we're talking about programming on an ARM Linux device?

# ¿ Mar 5, 2012 21:30

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Space Gopher posted:

It is that simple. If you have another PC handy.

Or, you know, just a box full of SD cards.

You also seem to be rather narrowly focusing on school labs for some reason. You've got some valid points in that regard, but when the thread title say 'your kid's Commodore 64' I'm thinking more like where most of us got our Commodore 64s - as presents from our parents. This thing is a much easier 'oh hey I can get this for my kid for Christmas' proposition than a full-on PC of his or her own.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2012 21:41

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

My Rhythmic Crotch posted:

Does anyone know how difficult programming the GPIO will be? I will find this much more interesting if the GPIO is easier to work with than it "normally" is in Linux.

http://brew-j2me.blogspot.com/2010/03/linux-accessing-gpio-from-user-space.html

doesn't look all that bad to me, but I imagine someone will provide nice Python wrappers and suchlike specifically for the Pi if they don't exist already.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 16:33

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

DeaconBlues posted:

I bought a second hand Rpi2 from eBay about 4 months ago and it's been languishing in a drawer.

I had it running and got bored of trying to get WiFi working on it (Edimax EW-7811UN) and it's been sitting around a while.

Last night I dug it out and tried flashing Raspbian Jessie (2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.img) to the SD card and it's giving a quick green flash but nothing's appearing on port 22. IIRC I had it working with the official Wheezy distro when I last used it and I seem to remember it being a bit temperamental with booting but I put that down at the time to the WiFi adaptor drawing too much power.

I've tried both Jessie and Wheezy a few times but neither are booting. I've tried both with and without WiFi to eliminate that and tried two MicroSD cards: both the same model by Samsung (16GB Evo class 10) but no joy. I'm also using a better power source from Amazon that was described as being OK for a Pi.

Is it my choice of SD card or could it have an intermittent fault and someone's sold it? Is there a foolproof boot image out there that I could flash and if I get it booting is there a package to flash any firmware on the Pi2 itself?

Obvious question, can you stick a monitor on it and see what's happening?

# ¿ Nov 17, 2015 17:54

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

TVarmy posted:

In Unix-style systems, hardware devices are represented as directories, but that's a different abstractio

As (special) files, actually.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2016 14:55

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

https://github.com/elinalijouvni/OpenLeap

Some guy has at least figured out how to get the raw data stream off it.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2016 16:11

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Paul MaudDib posted:

The SoC has other unfortunate side effects - Broadcom is one of the worst companies on the planet in terms of getting access to drivers and documentation. It's virtually impossible to do, and there are significant parts of the drivers that are closed-source and inaccessible to anyone outside of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. And the Raspberry Pi Foundation doesn't have the manpower or the talent to fix the problems by themselves. It took almost two years after the Pi's launch for them to get the USB stack to stop dropping frames when running at USB 2.0 speeds - which is a major problem for a device that uses USB as a system bus. The community is more than willing to help but they can't fix closed-source binary blobs.

But, as it happens, the Pi GPU is about the only mobile GPU that is actually fully documented. The only competition there is Adreno which was reverse engineered. Give props to Broadcom, that puts them way ahead of ARM, Imagination Tech etc.

# ¿ May 23, 2016 17:15

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

fishmech posted:

Only as of like 2014, and then only after it'd been on sale since at least 2009.

Sure, but we're talking about 'why don't they switch to a different SoC for the Pi 4'. This is a reason why.

# ¿ May 25, 2016 11:57

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

fishmech posted:

It isn't though. There was no full documentation to the public for multiple years that the Pi was using the SoC. It has no bearing on it.

We are now in the year 2016 where that documentation exists. If they keep the same family of SoC for the Pi 4 that documentation will continue to exist, be useful and relevant. If instead they switch to a SoC with eg a Mali GPU then we go from having a documented GPU with the potential for fully open-source drivers for everything to one that is not documented and can only be accessed via a binary blob. I'm not sure why this is unclear.

# ¿ May 25, 2016 15:33

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Paul MaudDib posted:

And it's worth noting that the Pi's GPU still needs binary blobs to run - what Broadcom released in 2014 was the OpenGL/shader stack but that's still just another shim to another layer that's still only available in blob form. And again, the GPU on the Pi actually starts up the CPU, not the other way around, so that's kind of a big deal.

Err, no, there's machine-code-level documentation for that stuff, look, here's someone using it here -

https://petewarden.com/2014/08/07/how-to-optimize-raspberry-pi-code-using-its-gpu/

The bootloader is currently closed-source, but there is enough info out there for it to be replaced, and here's someone else working on that here -

https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

Edit: as for an open 3d driver, that's this -

https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/VC4/

I admit Intel is as good from that point of view, I hadn't considered their mobile stuff, but if you want open, well-documented graphics on ARM VideoCore is genuinely currently your best bet.

feedmegin fucked around with this message at 16:46 on May 25, 2016

# ¿ May 25, 2016 16:31

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

fishmech posted:

But that is again irrelevant, because by using the SoC for years before any large scale public documentation was out, the Pi foundation indicated they don't require public documentation to use an SoC. And you still need a bunch of binary blobs even with all this documentation for this chipset, so it's not even providing the benefit you seem to think they're relying on.

I'm not saying they are relying on it. I'm saying it would be good for us, the consumer. I would assume the reason they're doing it is maximum backwards compatibility.

# ¿ May 25, 2016 19:39

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Hadlock posted:

Pi 3 really is ideal though, it's 64 bit and arm7hf so drat near anything on x86 will compile for it. Docker technically will run on 32 bit, but only 64 bit is formally supported.

Source: actively converting our product to containers

The CPU is certainly 64 bit capable, but I thought distros are still only running a 32 bit kernel (something about interfacing with the video hardware), or has that changed?

# ¿ Aug 8, 2016 14:51

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Twerk from Home posted:

Isn't the primary driver of this open source reasons? They really don't want a GPU that needs a binary proprietary firmware blob.

If it were, or if it becomes so, they'd be going with an Adreno because those have been reverse engineered and there actually is an open source driver for them.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2016 12:57

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

mod sassinator posted:

I haven't used it but Intel's Yocto project is meant to build custom linux distributions and has support for the Pi: http://www.jumpnowtek.com/rpi/Raspberry-Pi-Systems-with-Yocto.html

Or just take a Raspbian image and overwrite /sbin/init? :shobon:

# ¿ Apr 13, 2017 23:22

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

ante posted:

yeah, there was a weird "windows 10" that wasn't actually and was maybe just a sensor platform extension that tied into actual windows 10 when they released it?

I dunno, I know someone who tried it out at the time and said he liked it for sensor stuff, but other than that i'm completely unqualified to answer that

There was a version specifically designed for Internet of Things app development. Don't expect to run, like, Internet Explorer as an end user or anything.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2018 19:33

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Cojawfee posted:

I don't know about the pi4, but the older ones kind of suck because the USB and ethernet have to share bandwidth so transfers will be slow.

Also, pre-4 it doesn't have the good, fast version of USB.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2020 17:19

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 14:27

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Pham Nuwen posted:

Anyone know of speech recognition software which is light enough to run on a Pi 3 (512MB of memory)? I'm just looking to do a modest set of pre-programmed commands, with one of them being "ship whatever I say next up to a more advanced speech recognition API, if we have network".

I remember playing with a program called "cvoicecontrol" way back in like 2003, where you'd speak each command a few times and it did a surprisingly good job, but of course that software's been abandoned for like 15+ years.

I used to work on something like this in my last job, on a Pi no less for prototyping - basically custom audio software hooked into something like Amazon Alexa. You might have some luck googling 'wake word detector' which does exactly this - recognises a few set phrases (like, say, 'Alexa') at which point you can stream whatever you hear after that to the cloud service of your choice.

Edit: I know we looked at https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-porcupine/

# ¿ Jan 17, 2024 18:07

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