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A lot of these Wall wart power supplies are pretty much the most terrible bottom-rung china crap you can put together without having everything catch on fire immediately, so I wouldn't directly blame the Pi. Even power supplies that claim to be "stabilized" (and that should be the minimum for something like a Pi, power supplies which are for recharging things like most smartphone supplies are are usually not adequate as there voltage stability is not such a big and important factor) are often pretty terrible. Hard to find a good power supply, and it can be difficult to counter a lovely power supply, depending on what the requirements are. It can be helpful sometimes to make the power supply cable as short as possible, easy to do with a little soldering. I had a Pi when the hype was at it's height, one of the early 512 MB models. Even though I didn't go in expecting a lot, I still was pretty disappointed at the rather terrible performance. Now the market is swamped and the Pi 2 is out and I don't know what's what anymore. What is the best device to buy right now in the price range of about ~50$. (or a bit more?) I mostly just want a Linux I can have running 24/7 without wrecking my power bill and can ssh/telnet (via serial) into to run some console applications and database things of varying complexity. I don't really expect any advanced desktop or multimedia performance and just want as much processing power as possible for little cost. Or is it still not worth it to do anything with cheap ARM SBCs in that regard? Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 01:52
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Jamsta posted:Raspberry Pi 2 VS Orange Pi VS Banana Pro I think it's funny how it's cheaper to have one of the other two shipped halfway around the world than to buy an Rasberry Pi 2 from a german retailer. I'm really mixed up in what I'll do here.
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Mar 7, 2015 14:44
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You can try Linux in viritualization too (if you even have a somewhat modern system) there's no sense to buy an extra computer for that if you are too lazy to set up a dual-boot system. I hear this "learn Linux" argument often and I think it's not really a good use for the Pi as it won't really give you the experience of a "proper" computer doing things you'd like to do nowadays with a computer, especially if you just want to set up X and have a "windows-clone" experience with browsers, libreoffice and such. It just hasn't enough performance for that. If you just have to set up a second computer to "learn linux" it's probably a better idea to get an old PC. (Just not too old, as Linux and the applications surrounding it are not as lightweight as some people make you want to believe. especially as soon as you get to X) That being said, if you just want a small computer that can run linux 24/7 without wrecking your power bill, you probably won't get a better watt/performance/price ratio. If you really want to learn what this operating system is all about I'd forgo the entire X-Server thing and do everything you want to do with it in the console, even run the thing headless and just remotely connect via SSH. Coming from a Windows/Mac-User background, you'd be surprised how optional a mouse can be in 2015 if you really get into the OS and the philosophy behind the most useful console only applications.
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Mar 15, 2015 21:20
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The problem with "garbage tier" x86 stuff is that it usually eats a lot more power than something like a Pi, and in many countries (including the one I live in) energy is so expensive that it is a very real consideration for something you want to run 24/7. That's the real reason why it's barely worth it anymore to recycle old computers into homeservers. The computer might have been (almost) free - but the electricity bill they will run up in sometimes, two years (and yeah, I'd like a fire-and-forget sever live longer than that without permanently having to fiddle with it) will get you something newer, better and less wasteful. While ARM computers might be relatively weak for what they cost, you usually won't get that processing power-to-watts ratio with x86. If one isn't enough In doubt it *might* even be cheaper to just run two ARMs instead of one more powerful "conventional" x86. (even for platforms that were meant to be primarily energy saving and have very impressive idle numbers, a computer usually doesn't just sit there and idles all the time, because if it would, you probably wouldn't need it running. Then also you still have to add the peripherals and their various inefficiencies. The real energy consumption recorded over time under real circumstances is often significantly higher from what you'd take from the advertisement blurb, especially because it's easy for mainboard- and power supply manufacturers to skimp on the power infrastructure in hardware revisions without anyone really noticing) I was very wary regarding the Pi 2 after I was disappointed with just how slow and borderline useless the original Pi was doing normal computer stuff, but I'm pretty happy with the Pi 2 as headless server fulfilling several functions for me, including music- and video streaming. The quadcore setup really helps with server roles. The trick to get the most of it is running it as barebones as possible and writing your own stuff instead of relying too much on sometimes bloated solutions for some things. (If you're a newcomer to Linux, don't always believe the widespread and often repeated myth Linux software is inherently "more lightweight". It can be just as bloated and useless as the worst windows-targeted stuff) When my Pi is very busy, it sits around ~1.4-1.6 load average with about maybe 30-40% RAM in use. That's at stock speeds. I can live very well with that. Of course it always depends on what you need. Also whoever thinks something like external wiring and making actual LEDs blink pretty colors is the same than having the same kind of thing abstracted on a computer screen obviously never did anything with bored and testy kids around afternoon after a long school day in any capacity. That being said, you really can do all of this with a normal computer. I've been using parallel ports as GPIO before I even heard the expression "GPIO". Granted, this is probably a mess to do with with modern computers and operating systems but I'm sure you could come up with similar fiddling solutions via USB and some microcontroller. The question is if that'd be cheaper and easier than just buying a Pi and fall back on all the documentation that's there. It's probably easier and a lot less time consuming and demanding for a school to just buy a bunch of Pis. It doesn't even really matter if a computer can do it in that case. Regardless, it is a pity that modern computers are just so closed up black boxes where it's very hard to follow what's going on. I would have a lot of a harder time with "learning computers" (not only clicking on some symbols, actually understanding how it works on a lower level) if my first computer would've been an i5 instead of an Amiga.
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Aug 19, 2015 22:23
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My Pi 2 does torrenting together with OpenVPN and it it hits the configured speed limit of about 10 mbit/s fairly often which is more than enough for how little I use it. load average is about ~2.5 in these cases, with one core being hit harder as openVPN only uses one core, the weak point here would be the connection stalling because openVPN is maxing out that one core it uses which means it can probably not be pushed much farther than that on the Pi2. (at least not with one openVPN instance) E: Also routers don't run on magic, they're just computers too. Lots of routers actually have specs that make the Pi 2 look like a supercomputer. The only thing that really cripples the Pi 2 there is USB and no direct in-hardware support for some things. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 07:46
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A thing I stumbled over once because of me mis-configuring I didn't immediately figured out (tricked myself a little there) was the Pis 2 entropy pool constantly being sucked dry because of encryption and a WLAN connection being a lot slower than it should be as a result. The Pi 2 does have a hardware RNG and there's little reason not to use it, especially if you run the Pi headless. I'm pretty sure all distros made for the Pi specifically already cover all that in the default configuration already but hey, it tripped me up once.
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Nov 12, 2015 08:17
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The ARM thingies are still unbeatable on the Wattage/processing power ratio tho. I don't know, personally I get good mileage out of my Pi2 for my server tasks (honestly server sounds almost like to big a word, I'd rather call it auxiliary computer or something) you just gotta know the limitations.  It depends on what you need. A particular system really does not have to be the theoretical best as long as it just practically works for your application.That being said, I also still use my old (bought when they were all the rage, it was quite similar to the ARM rage now) MSI Wind U100 (Atom N270) Netbook (expanded with 2 GB and a bigger heatsink so the fan doesn't really need to work often) to look up stuff quickly or look at PDFs/Texts or write something. (and while Tablets exist, real keyboards are just so much nicer in every way) Works perfectly, and ~17 Watts under load with the screen on is not too shabby either. Later generations improved on the power consumption, especially when idle. For something that runs occasionally only though and is mostly hibernating, +/- 3-4W really do not matter. The CPU is pretty aged at this point (still 32 bits even) and already wasn't exactly a monster when it came out, but still higher clocked and faster per Mhz than the ARM cores in the Pi. Chipset doesn't have any kind of hardware acceleration for Videos etc. though. This is on Arch with Openbox as window manager, Worker as file manager, feh for images and Atril for PDFs. A bit oldschool but quite snappy, with a setup that minds the performance of the machine you could probably make a thing like the Liva fly even for Desktop usage. The tools are all there. You can pick up a Netbook like this used for less than a Pi costs, and here you don't only get the computer but also the screen and the keyboard and the harddrive ...but I'm also a dinosaur that is happy as long as it can run emacs, so YMMV.
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Nov 19, 2015 16:49
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mod sassinator posted:Yeah the newest Baytrail and Skylake processors are monsters though, some only using 5 watts which is equivalent to the Raspberry Pi. If you just want to serve files, have a super versatile HTPC, etc. you really want an Intel processor. The Pi can do it to screw around and learn from but you'll quickly hit its USB bus limitations. The numbers I found for the ECS Liva earlier mentioned were about 3,7W when Idle and 12 Watts under load. They are pretty good. For comparison to that Atom Notebook I named, it uses up to 13 Watts when idle, which is due to the fact that the screen when on uses quite a bit but also due to the fact that it just isn't that energy efficient. (come on, it's about 7 years old at this point, the intel GPU is still dedicated) You'd still need to beat the Pi on it's price and also on the power consumption, but it's not that much of a difference and most of all, with the Intel you'll get a lot more performance. Still quite happy with the Pi 2 tho.
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Nov 19, 2015 23:18
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That really is cheap. Too bad these things cost around 160-180 euros where I live, if you get them at all. They don't really seem to be in the market here in germany which frankly is quite odd. Also yes, start a thread about these x86 architecture mini PCs, they're quite interesting.
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Nov 20, 2015 05:17
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How many of you are building stuff like ECUs for cars though? In such application circumstances you're usually straight in the Realm of ASICs/FPGAs/microcontrollers anyways. That stuff is ARM country (at the very best) and will be for the future for aforementioned reasons. You do not want any added complexity in such applications there, already alone for liability reasons, especially in products where people can get injured or die when they run into some unforeseen problem. Some complex OS with a 2 GB RAM overhead you just will not find there. Also remember that lots of embedded computing in industrial settings still depends on "ancient" technology like 68k (also RISC) and only in the recent years has seen a switch, mostly because the supply situation of spares is becoming very complicated. A company recently started to produce an 100% pin-for-pin-ready-to-drop-into-old-designs compatible 68020 clone, there's enough need for these old CPUs that it is worth it. New designs are expensive and in stuff like commercial aviation.. forget about it. You don't just go and "change" things there.
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Nov 21, 2015 07:47
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The CPU seems to be quite a bit faster from benchmarks shown, how well that translates into real-world performance remains to be seen I guess, but I'm pretty sure it's noticeable. I'm currently still quite happy with my Pi 2. The "10x faster" is in relation to the first Pi though and I honestly find it a bit of a cheap shot to use that wording, the performance difference to the Pi 2 is about 50-60% faster. (as per their word) The Pi was often compared to the C64 and such in it's early days, kinda takes you back to the old days too when there's a new one coming out that makes the old one clearly obsolete every few months, doesn't it? At least this time around it doesn't sting as much financially. So how many of you just bought a Pi 2?
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Feb 29, 2016 20:22
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I wonder if openvpn would see any improvement since the Pi 3 has an armv8 CPU. There are quite a few people using them for torrenting in combination with a VPN and that'd be quite interesting. I think the upsides of a Pi are that it uses very, very little power (sadly very relevant in some countries  ) and room and yet still can run linux, I wouldn't get one for performance or as fully fledged Desktop and they're still quite far away from that. I also do not think they're great for "trying out linux" actually quite the contrary, you'll probably get out a lot more of them if you already know quite a bit about linux. There are these ARM SBCs with SATA and Gigabit Ethernet, how well do they handle themselves in real situations that actually cause significant traffic? I'd imagine more cpu bound stuff would choke the CPU out long before the bandwidth is saturated. Anyone has any good links or even a thread on these cheap ARM-based SBCs with reviews and stuff? I find the SNR-ratio regarding them to be terrible.
Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Mar 1, 2016 |
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Mar 1, 2016 13:44
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Browsing is in it's own league regarding desktop usage anyways, that's where all the lower powered machines fall flat somewhere, also a bit depending on your browsing habits. Of course it's an important thing a modern desktop should be able to do.
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Mar 1, 2016 17:40
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The only way to use the Pi 2 as a Desktop computer is with very lightweight apps. If you don't even start up X and just do stuff with console-based applications like emacs etc.. it's quite usable as a typewriter but I don't think that's for Dads. As fishmech posted, your father will be served much better with an cheap x86 based product. These tiny ARM SBCs simply aren't there yet.
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Mar 7, 2016 01:55
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mod sassinator posted:I have a Chromebook with 2GB of memory and it flies when browsing the web. Windows 10 on similar hardware is absolutely horrific, but with a lightweight OS and desktop it's perfectly fine. You can't have 20+ tabs open but it's fine for normal desktop use. This. If you go kde or gnome on linux then yes it will be lovely and bloaty, but if you pick the right software carefully things will be fine. I've been using openbox and a collection of very lightweight software on my old atom netbook with 2 GB of RAM and it boots up in seconds and quickly checking out a wikipedia link, looking at a PDF or watching a youtube video is no problem. Wouldn't do stuff like trying to browse imgur or the aforementioned 20 tabs though. I have a similar lightweight setup on my 5820k with 16 GB of RAM and not counting VMs and stuff, if I just generally browse around even with many, many tabs in firefox open, I barely go past 3 GB of memory usage. If you don't just blindly install some distro everyone else installs but carefully pick your software, you can have a very snappy experience with linux, even on older machines. This sort of customization and "having options" is like the biggest thing it has going for it in desktop usage and it's a pity not many people make use of it at all.
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Mar 8, 2016 17:36
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Mantle posted:http://www.makershed.com/products/raspberry-pi-model-b-8gb Very decent Risc OS system, especially if you'd like to play some old games.
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Mar 9, 2016 00:07
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I've been using gentoo for years but isn't it incredibly slow on a PI to compile all the packages? Why not arch? Seems to be a fair compromise. (even though arch's pacman is a little too simple sometimes for my tastes)
Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Mar 12, 2016 |
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Mar 12, 2016 21:52
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Well as someone who's been using gentoo for I think it's about ten years and is still on his first gentoo installation (but third computer) and has been using arch only for the Pi - arch linux arm has the same philosophy to not came laden down with crap (although systemd is the default and I never bothered trying to force anything else in, but it's not so bad and certainly not the end of the world like some people say) and gives you a fairly simplistic package manager called pacman. (not as complex as emerge/portage, also a lot more stupid, but usable) The package landscape (didn't try any inofficial repos) at least with arch linux arm feels like gentoo would feel like if you had a lot more unmasked, but with slightly less breakage. I don't know how else to explain it. Sometimes there are a few odd choices in what's gotten compiled into some programs and what dependencies get pulled in as a result and that needs some adjustment coming from gentoo, but overall it's fairly okay. (with some stuff that works in console but also has X support for example, there are then two different packages) I like it, and the transition effort when you come from gentoo is fairly small. Also pre-compiled packages of course. Helpful on Platforms which do not have a lot of power, like the Pi. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 00:28
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I have my Pi running off a computer screens integrated powered USB hub which also actually has Ports rated for that kind of load. As that screen and it's power supply is built very well I don't feel particularly bad about leaving the monitor in standby at all times when I'm not using it. I also have the Pi connected to the same Hub and use the Hub at the same time for the Pi's HD and it also has a card reader if the need arises. Never had stability problems, the Pi crashing or USB dropping out in over a year. A lot of these wall-wart power supplies are put together very badly and I wouldn't be surprised if instability of Pis is mostly to be pegged on them. Most of them are build for charging battery-backed devices and might deliver very unstable voltage if there's a sudden shift in load. (For smartphones and charging batteries this also really does not matter all that much) Sadly a good power supply is hard to tell from the outside. Also remember that a normal USB 2.0 port is rated for 500 mA. That is probably not enough for the average Pi. That most ports you find on Hubs etc. will happily deliver more is not because the Hubs are built so well, but because the chinese love shaving off cents in production by leaving parts out that aren't essential for function. Such a cheap hub might also have, suprise, a lovely power supply. E: Also cheap and lovely USB-Cables. Keep at least the cable feeding the Pi as short as possible. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Mar 17, 2016 |
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Mar 17, 2016 00:29
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Not what you're looking for but I got a 4.3" LCD screen (normally for parking cameras) with composite input for about 8 eurobucks off aliexpress. I know there are other solutions especially for the Pi but I just didn't wanna put a lot of work or money in it, I just wanted a tiny screen that'll display some numbers and is easy to just glue to something. I had no expectations and even though it's only composite I was very pleasantly surprised and it's very good for my use. All I wanted to say is that I wouldn't write off the chinese sellers or the reviews, especially considering that everything that has "Rasperry Pi" attached to it's name on eBay, amazon etc. is often the same cheap crap that comes from China, just at a price premium.
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May 2, 2016 08:57
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Around these parts I've seen used single core Pis going for ~ 10 € (including shipping and sometimes some accessories, like a case) depending on where you live and what you need exactly that might be the better deal, especially considering they have a network interface while the zero doesn't. An old Atom might even be better for some Linux usage scenarios even if consuming a bit more energy. The single core Pis aren't really good general purpose computers, except if you run them with RiscOS. No matter how accurate the comparison with the PII is (I find comparing so vastly different things in real life circumstances a bit more difficult than that) the PII will feel snappier with 90s era software than the Zero will ever feel with current era Linux software, that's for sure. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 16:22 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 16:19
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Or don't bother with X and anything graphical and only use emacs and plain text. Half-serious because I know many people feel it's an archaic piece of software but if you're willing to learn you get features by the boatload and it runs very well under such circumstances. If that's too much, just use any other text editor. Nothing wrong with plain text. You can even install some framebuffer console like kmscon (fbpad, fbterm, consoled etc.) or something and get your fancy fonts and your 256 colors without X. Install a mouse server like gpm and you also get a mouse cursor. Don't install gentoo though. install gentoo If you basically just want a modern electric organizer or a machine for creative writing free of distractions, a computer that doesn't do the internet well or at all works wonders sometimes for productivity. If you want a computer to write and print letters with for your dad this wouldn't be a good setup. Still use my old atom netbook in a similar way and to look at .pdfs. I don't use it everyday though. Still quite decent for that and even enough to open the odd website like wikipedia or something. Works well for me but I could understand if that isn't for everybody. Only bad thing is that such a Netbook has and needs a fan, if it was silent it'd be perfect. The Wind U100 had a cheap piece of thin sheet metal as a heatsink, back when this thing costed €300+ you could get proper custom metal heatsinks and I installed one which really brings the usage of the fan down, still runs quite a bit though. One of those days I'm gonna get one of those cheap chinese King* SSDs and see what that does. They're not quick but the Netbook isn't either. Even an early N270 Atom is quite a bunch faster than a Pi Zero though. The advantage with an netbook is that you get a complete computer if you buy one, with the Pi you still need all that stuff like a screen, a keyboard etc. (if you wanna use it as a desktop and don't want to share that stuff with your main desktop if you have one) and it adds up. Quite surprisingly last time I looked at these old netbooks they were like ~50€ on eBay so they have actually gone up in price a little, I remember distinctly a time when they were like 10-20€ if people even bothered bidding. I'm not sure they're worth that anymore, that would really heavily depend on the condition. It's a bit like with the the old core2duos you could find for a while for free at the side of the road and nowadays not rarely go away for ~100€. (which reaaally surprises me as you can get much more recent stuff close to that price range) Nobody just throws away old computers anymore. The only thing where the Pi really stands out in all these rough comparsions is power consumption. Even though this also is relative and a computer which can finish a given task quicker might, while drawing more power to do so momentarily, save power over the long run. If you just want a computer that's there 24/7 the Pi (or ARM based stuff in general) will be very hard to beat in that department, though. That's what they have to do as smartphones after all.
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May 18, 2016 07:32
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eschaton posted:Running software of the day, I bet you'd actually prefer the Pi. The Pi2 would have been a hardcore workstation then too. (Give a Pi a try with NetBSD.) Does it support multiple CPUs of the Pi now? Last time I ran this everything was a bit shaky.
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May 18, 2016 08:06
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eschaton posted:The NetBSD site at least claims that NetBSD 7 supports it. I haven't booted NetBSD on my Pi2, only FreeBSD. (I've booted NetBSD 7 on my SPARCstation 20, though, and it's not appreciably slower than Solaris 2.5.1, SunOS 4.1.3, or OPENSTEP 4.2 on the same system…) With all these older Computers usually memory bandwidth and the whole infrastructure around it becomes the issue before everything else does. If you can't shovel the instructions into the CPU fast enough that'll cause delays. I'd also almost certainly bet that Pi vs PII benchmarks don't take that into account and that the Pi probably fares a lot better there in real usage scenarios. CPUs ever going to be as fast as the memory it accesses, especially if we only have precious little local cache. (Even though the PII already has an usable amount of cache) If you'd apply modern technology to these old CPUs you could probably squeeze out quite a bit more performance already by combining them with faster RAM access. Of course nobody does this, what for? doctorfrog posted:I never wrote more than I did 20 years ago with an amber screened Brother Word Processor with a daisy wheel printer piggybacking it. I saw one of those, (Brother WL-1) it went in better hands than mine because I wouldn't have had any Idea what to possibly do with it. I bet if you looked around you could probably get one of those cheap even though they're probably a maintenance nightmare. I have an old NEC dot matrix Printer I got in '87 I'd not give away for anything. It's ridiculously reliable and the ribbons for it are so dirt cheap and available that I don't even bother refreshing them myself with ink. I see it often pop up, basically how to use something like the Pi with Office Suites. I bet this no-distraction thing is an idea quite a few people have with the Pi. With such a basic setup like I talked about it would probably do quite well. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 10:30 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 10:28
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Chas McGill posted:A dedicated word processor is exactly what I want to make. It's a bonus if it can't handle going online etc. The only connectivity I'd like would be automatic Dropbox upload every X minutes. It should manage if it's lightweight. WYSIWYG stuff like libreoffice usually isn't. I'm not gonna start about LaTeX.  Even though it's still quite popular I think.fishmech posted:so anyway if you're really going to build a full size arcade cabinet, respect yourself and get one of those cheapy NUCs or similar x86-64 devices and modern integrated or discrete graphics chipset. it will run MAME way the gently caress better than the Pi will, and be way more compatible. I can only underline this, really. The Pi is very bad at this. Even those very cheap ITX boards with soldered on CPUs will do much much better and they don't even cost that much more. I have no idea how the Pi got so popular for emulation. doctorfrog posted:I'd just like a simple, light audio (MP3) player for it as well. Something that I can just SSH into and control would be fine, outputs through HDMI, which feeds into my sound system. User friendly for command line use pretty much a must. cmus is very lightweight, console-based and nice. It also has lots of features. Also there are cheap hardware floppy disk emulators that make the system they're connected think they're connected to a disk drive when in fact they're writing to usb sticks or sd cards. If you ever feel like resurrecting the old days. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 04:49 on May 19, 2016 |
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May 19, 2016 04:44
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If you want to do more than solder some cables invest into a good soldering station though, else you won't have any fun.
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May 27, 2016 18:59
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Somewhere on the fan there should be a print how many amps it needs, if not then what voltage it is and how many watts it consumes. Then you would only have to calculate Watts / Voltage to get the amps. USB 2.0 is specced for 0.5 Amps or 500 mA maximum at 5V, although the Pi can apparently supply past that on it's ports. No idea what the Pi's GPIO header is specced to deliver at maximum but you can probably google it easily. If it's a very small fan it's probably a 5V fan to begin with, there's a good chance a 12V fan won't be able to start with 5V. (although some can)
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Jul 2, 2016 16:49
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It's a bigass assumption but I'm just going to assume the fan is some +5V noname 40x40x10mm china deal if it came with a Pi case. Blacknoise makes very nice tiny fans (Noiseblocker series) if you wanna get air out of cramped spaces, they are expensive for their size though. The nicest fans besides that are from Noctua and Papst imho. I use them everywhere because life is too short to be annoyed by noisy fans that also fail eventually, because good quality fans also have a *very* long life. That also means you can save a lot of money on them if you buy them used, because people don't like buying used fans because of their experiences with low quality fans. But enough about that. If you don't plan to overclock the Pi 2 you don't need a fan IMHO. Mine is in a case with no holes besides those for the ports and the temperature is nowhere near critical, even under load. EDIT: fishmech posted:There's nothing printed on the fan, but It's from this kit: http://www.eeekit.com/3in1-starter-kit-for-raspberry-pi-3-model-b-board/ which claims the fan is 5V 0.2 amp. so that should be fine? Yes it should (even from the GPIO pins) but seriously with that case I'd just skip on the fan, there's nothing even covering the parts that get hot so I'd say it's not needed at all. (if it doesn't keep the case together or something and if you don't overclock and even then really, or you have crazy ambient temperatures, don't know about that) Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Jul 2, 2016 |
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Jul 2, 2016 17:54
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Man, that seems way too small and too cheap to be so powerful. Ever put that thing to it's limits?
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Jul 16, 2016 01:51
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I ordered an Orange Pi One as I'm looking for something small and cheap with GPIO I can set up in an area where there is a small but real risk it might get destroyed. Man, about 12 eurobucks and faster than the Pi 2. Absolutely crazy. I know the official support is poo poo but as soon as I can get some flavor of Linux running on it to the console, I'm golden. It even has hardware accelerated encryption in the SoC which last time I checked is about to be supported. Wonder how fast that is. What a time we live in.
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Jul 22, 2016 08:15
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In places where such restrictions exist, try moving the VPN port to port 443 and set it to TCP, this is not ideal but makes it harder for them to detect exactly what kind of traffic it is. (port 443 is also used for HTTPS) If the analytical methods are sophisticated enough, this can be detected though. Some providers also offer tunneling of VPN through SSL/SSH, this can also be used to hide VPN traffic but not many VPN providers support it. Both make general transmission more inefficient and cause more overhead so only do if really necessary. Are you using dhcpcd or systemd.networkd for managing your network connection? You can only use one. Make sure openvpn starts after the network is up, openvpn really likes to puke all over itself if there's any problem with the connection.
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Jul 28, 2016 14:12
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Be aware that these old notebooks don't use lithium cells but NiCd/NiMh based ones, both of which are pretty toxic and corrosive (with NiCd being banned in most consumer electronics at least in the EU by now as a result) and will with a very high probability have leaked if not in regular usage by now. These old LCDs also have slightly different requirements regarding power and their power infrastructure, also adapting the keyboards of them to work properly with something like a Pi might be a lot of effort. I doubt it will be worth the effort or will give you a pleasant result. Never really got why people want to put the Pi into cases of other things, the results pretty much always look pretty ghetto and even if not it's all kinda pointless, Now one of those Pi-powered smart mirrors, that's one project that I find personally interesting and would do if I had a use for it. but that's just my opinion, no offense meant. These old computers, contrary to more modern ones, you can usually repair with normal hobbyist tools and some knowledge, it's often just a question of the amount of effort/money you want to put into it. I once had a thread about old computer repair in this very subforum but it sorta died. If you ever need help with any repair of such ancient stuff, feel free to hit me up via PM. - For other people that might not have heard of it, there has been some serious improvement to the Pi's analog audio output through an experimental option in firmware which can be enabled via config.txt setting: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=136445. The thread didn't seem to get much response and I found it more or less on accident while googling for ideas to make the sound bearable so I'm posting it here. I'm no audiophile but I couldn't stand the Pi's sound quality either, especially the distortion and hissing was pretty noticeable and annoying. With the stated setting in that thread, all these problems are gone and I'm perfectly fine with my Pi 2s sound output, even for listening to music and movies. (but as I said, I'm not picky so YMMV) The setting apparently is still experimental as some people have problems with it. I guess it's patches like this that give the objectively not-that-well equipped Pi the edge over better but less supported products.
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Aug 22, 2016 22:23
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General_Failure posted:No. Same, I regret giving away my Pi 1, it would have been perfect for this. quote:Making keyboards work isn't too bad. I have an Amiga 500 that I gave a PS2 port because the desk was too small to fit the A500. I also gave it a proto boarded IDE controller mostly made of parts pulled from old PC motherboards. Still have my A2000 on my desk here for regular use and a few of my first modems lying around.  quote:I just wanted to comment on this. Is the PWM audio really that bad? I've honestly never used it. When I have needed sound I've used BT speaker or headphones. To me the concept of the RPi audio is a lot like using a PC's internal speaker as the audio output. I'd rather not. Yes, quite honestly it's bad, I don't even mean "look at these oscilloscope screenshots"-bad but you can really hear it, and I say that as as a definitive non-audiophile. To be entirely fair to the Pi though I think there are two user errors people might mistake for overall bad audio quality by design which cloud the issue: 1) The line level output of the Pi really isn't meant to drive things like most headphones directly and then countering the low volume with higher volume settings will only cause more distortion, an amp helps *a lot* here 2) If you have weird interference like for example CPU load/SD card access noise on your Pi's analog audio output with your amp then that's very probably not a quality problem with the Pis audio but a grounding issue in your setup. These can be hard to detect especially because many people are not aware they are even a thing. With the firmware option I personally find the Pi is perfectly fine for general audio. I guess for many people the point is moot anyways because they'll either use some wireless thing or use the HDMI output and then there's a DAC in their devices of choice. -- I have set up my Pi 2 with my TV I recently installed on my living room wall and a bluetooth keyboard and I'm just using omxplayer and a rather barebones arch linux install without X or any other crap. Yesterday I compiled Catacylsm: DDA for the Pi and it's oddly relaxing to sit on the couch, listen to internet radio and play a roguelike on a huge TV screen, also very stylish looking in a tron sort of way.
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Aug 25, 2016 14:51
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Don't get too hooked up on that PWM expression, it's just the way the Pi turns those 1s and 0s into an audio signal. You can hook up the Pi to everything that accepts a normal line level analog audio input. Your class D amps actually work similar and the theory of operation behind it is the same. Between what's batter and what would sound which way.. oh boy. There are forums, books and whole industries dedicated to that topic. Just try around and see what you like. It's not always about accurate reproduction of any given audio data. The Pi also has an i2s interface for hooking up to DACs who talk that. There's plenty of methods to play around with it.
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Aug 26, 2016 14:26
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RiscOS is cool in the way that it is an OS that's so simple that it is easy to grasp for one person in it's entirely and start developing. (Try that with Linux) I don't know how much exposure it got because of the Pi but the last time I checked it was still pretty much dead. Of course RiscOS is also ancient and lacks a lot of features you'd just come to expect from an OS now. Still, really makes the Pi shine, compared to some fat-assed Linux distro that is. It's so frustrating with the Pi, really. Just to see how close it comes. With power prices where I live now being about ~30 eurocents/kWh (and not dropping anytime soon with my governments' stance on some things) a low power machine I can just do all my non-gaming stuff on would be interesting, but not interesting enough to pay hundreds of euros for some low-power intel core machine that'd take years to make it a worthwhile investment vs. just using my powerful machine. (yes, these things are also a bit more expensive over here) Even on my main 5820k I use lots of console apps every day and the Pi can do all that, but falls flat on it's nose for everything a little more complicated like even light browsing or really anything graphics related. (and I don't mean "graphics" in the sense of making 3D graphics or something like that, either) The Orange Pi I bought for something else, although more impressive than I thought and pretty drat quick is also not really usable in that way. I guess most people get that sort of functionality out of tablets and such these days but I really hate those things. (Yes I'm old) So in conclusion I want a computer that doesn't use much power, doesn't really cost money and is exactly as fast as I need it. Oh also.. no fans. Maybe one day.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:30
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I've been using Openbox for many, many years now. I've often looked into tiling window managers and spend a bit more time with herbstluftwm lately, but that might even be too spergy for me. i3 did seem to look nice and have everything needed out of the box, though. I always like to go for minimalism and lean software, even if the hardware running it doesn't need it. But that's the thing. If you go for something that also has a leg to stand on performance-wise you're quickly in the realm of this not really being worth it if there's a much more powerful computer. The thing with Linux especially and browsing also is that hardware acceleration with browsers and especially video decoding is an absolute mess and I don't think there's a single browser currently that can do it for HTML5. I'm not fully up to date what the current situation is but I don't think this has changed, it's been a long-standing issue. With more powerful systems it doesn't really matter all that much even though it's ugly, but if you go really low power you'll quickly have CPU cores that sit at 100% because you tried play a youtube-vid in 1080p even though it could be done in hardware. Of course there are workarounds like with everything linux (opening the videos in an external video player) but it's all a kludge and a bit ugly, you'd really need the hardware acceleration though. On the other hand, I've seen an A4-5000 running Win10 off a cheap noname SSD and it was very responsive both in general and with browsing and even video- and picture-heavy websites were no problem at all. Win10 does seem to do very well with cheap/slow hardware in general though. Was kinda impressed with that little machine especially seeing as how badly AMD often does with just about anything. I'm not sure if that all would be really worth it. Would be a fun project though probably. Just looking how cheap and slow you can go and work around the limitations.
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Sep 27, 2016 05:00
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if it's the same for the Pi and they didn't do some custom Pi-only thing there's no hardware video decoding in any browser in linux with HTML5. This has been broken in forever years now. IIRC at least the firefox people blame the general sorry state of X/GPU drivers. I will not say they are wrong. The trick is to open the videos in an external media player who does hardware acceleration. On my 5820k opening the videos with my antique HD6450's video decoding nets a cool ~30W in power savings (with 1080p) via letting them decode in software. I made a setup (with the openwith plugin) where I can right click links that lead to videos and just have them open in mpv. (which works with youtube-dl on youtube and lots of other video sites) It's a bit of a kludge but it works and mpv controls and window resizing is actually much nicer than any player built into a website. You also don't have to open any page to watch a video and an side-effect of youtube-dl seems to be that it bypasses geographic restrictions on YouTube. I never seriously tried browsing on the Pi so I don't know if there's some Pi thing that takes care of all that but that's what I know. General_Failure posted:What lacking features do you mean? It's single user for starters and last time I checked the memory protection wasn't really comprehensive and one program (intentionally or not) could still wreak havoc on the system.I don't know what the sate of that now is if there's really so much active development going on but I could imagine that there'll never be a proper model as that would break compatibility with a lot of things by design. Also, and that's not really the fault of the system, but there really is just very little in the way of software. For tinkering this doesn't matter but for a little bit of normal usage it kind of does. I should get a Pi Zero some day as RiscOS machine, it seems more than ample for that. quote:This is the first time in days I've turned on the PC. I leave it off to save power. See my above comment regarding the 30 Watts. I know i didn't buy a green system when i bought the "enthusiast" 5820k with six cores, but man. The manufacturers pride themselves in the low idle consumption of their CPUs/GPUs/Whatevers and honestly, that's good because computers idle a lot because of us slow humans but the truth is that a system in real situations is rarely fully idle and if it is consistenly, you might as well turn it off. It'd be alot more interesting if they could give you a Instructions/Framarate/Whatever/Watts efficiency rating, but I'd imagine that a lot of Hardware wouldn't look as good then because you'd have a span of power consumption with the same general user experience. The ARM devices would win there if they'd just be a bunch faster at roughly the same consumption.The truth of the matter also is that it's a complicated topic and I think that many people simply don't care all that much, neither in regards to their bills nor in regards to the environment. In the late 90s early 00s I ran Seti@Home on my Pentium and later P3 24/7 which was about 100 Watts and I didn't care much either because power was cheaper and also the system didn't really consume that much or made much of a difference between idle and full workload. I dread to think what some more modern systems would do to my power bill if I did that. I picked up an A4-5000 mainboard (Asrock with the APU soldered on, comes with a big honking heatsink, I think it's even exactly the same model I saw in action) for about ~45 bucks. Power supply, RAM and case I have lying around, harddrive I'll pry the cheap SSD out of my atom notebook. I wanna see how it does and if it might be enough for everyday computing, then it might get a nicer case and turn the other computer in a on-demand kind of thing. Should be faster than the ARMs at any rate. I figured I couldn't do much wrong at that price.
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Oct 2, 2016 00:03
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General_Failure posted:How did you measure the wattage savings, or was it calculated based off known consumption values. Measured it, around here you can borrow such devices for free from your utility company, but you can also buy them, they don't cost that much (around 20 eurobucks) and they're pretty accurate and will be at least in the general ballpark of what the device uses. Watching a computer triple it's power consumption when loading up a game really makes you think about consumption. (careful though, lots of these cheap meters get inaccurate at very high or low wattage because of how they're built) I found it very hard to get reliable numbers of what specific hardware components use because it varies and the manufacturers are not especially forthcoming with that information for some parts besides some marketing low idle numbers and TDP which also doesn't tell you the whole story. Power consumption in general is also why old computers who still do fine often sadly aren't really worth it anymore. Of course you can also factor cost of the computer and general energy used to produce it/get it to you(those trucks and planes and even the computers at the logistics company need energy too)/dispose of it in (if you care about the Environment) and actually still get ahead but even justifying them that way gets harder and harder with advancements. Lots of people are still very attached to their PowerPCs and if they are because they just enjoy working with what they got more power to them but you shouldn't fool yourself that you're saving money. quote:I see what you mean. I agree totally. I was thinking more in terms of usability rather than functionality. I can't really comment on memory protection beyond accidentally causing a lot of segfaults when I was working on gaining direct access to GPIO. I goofed a few pointers and misunderstood how to pass data to registers for calling SWIs. I guess it doesn't have much. Another thing that's bad for a modern OS but good for tinkerers. Well it's a big no-no for everything that's facing the internet. That being said I don't think the russians and chinese are looking into RiscOS 0day exploits that much, but hey, if that system ever got any market share I'm sure they would. quote:Might I suggest an older Pi with built in ethernet and USB ports? The Zero would be fine if you don't mind having a hub and either not having a network connection or getting an adaptor that works with it. I'm not really thinking about networking it if I do. Mostly that's the price I can justify for playing around and it's just so tiny to put somewhere. The earlier Pis at least around here haven't budged in price one bit. They sometimes do around the time a new Pi is released, but then go back to their usual price fairly quickly. Quite crazy actually. quote:Energy efficiency is always a sticky topic. I'm typing this on the small Kabini which is really impressive for the 45 bucks I paid for it. (Well, I ended up paying more, further stuff below) Small trip report here: I wanted to give FreeBSD a go after not having been exposed to a *BSD in I'd say decades, (and the short stint on the Pi) sadly the GPU isn't supported at all and for desktop usage that was a dealbreaker. I went with Gentoo (yeah, yeah I know. Force of habit really, I've been using a gentoo desktop for about a decade now) and helped the APU (which can quite hold itself on this front really) via distcc with the 5820k so that all the compiling at the beginning would go a bit quicker. Firefox, which is also such a habit-thing since the Netscape days, has become more and more unusuable (they do not care about Linux) and bloaty and was not fun to use on this Kabini at all. Very slow javascript-execution and further general nonsensical slowdowns which I can only guess my much stronger i7 just bruteforced, even though the experience wasn't always exactly snappy there either. You could sort of watch how firefox managed to choke one CPU at 100% while the others just sat there and watched, at the most inappropriate of times sometimes even. (browser just sitting there with me doing nothing) I then installed Chromium which is a difference of night and day, really. Browsing feels snappy and not much slower than on my 5820k and the load average with Chromium running is much lower. My lightweight daily programs I use work just as well here too. It's even enough for some games and emulation if you like to play the classics. If you don't mind Windows you'll also get excellent performance with Win10. I made the experience that the Kabini cares a lot about memory bandwitdh and will be affected noticeably by it, so if considering such a build it's worth it to get the fastest DDR3 memory supported possible. It's also DDR3L compatible. I ended up buying 8 GB (more than plenty) DDR3L-1600 memory. I could bump the voltage down to 1.25V and still tighten the memory timings a bit, memtest-approved and all. You can drive multiple screens but at least on this ASRock QC5000-ITX board using the Displayport and the HDMI-port at the same time isn't supported, which leaves one DVI Port and one VGA port. I have hooked it up to my 1440p Dell via DisplayPort. It's shared memory and I gave the GPU 512 MB, which according to radeontop never gets more than 75% full with my average usage. Contrary to what you can read online, it supports 1080p Vids @60 FPS in hardware decoding very well and probably can even do more on that front but I didn't look into it because it's all I need. My board is passively cooled but you want to connect a fan somewhere in the vicinity for those hot summer months, just to move the warm air away a bit. My advice is getting the biggest fan possible and just let it rotate very slowly, that way it won't make any noticeable noise at all. The fan settings in the firmware are a bit anemic, maybe there's a way to reach the IO chip from linux with the lm-sensors package (worked with my 5820k board) to turn the fan(s) off depending on temperature but I didn't look into it at all. The APU supports AES-NI which means hardware accelerated encryption. Power consumption with one fan and one SSD hovers between 19W and 24W, depending on how much the APU is doing and that number also makes sense with the available data of the components (lets ignore the power efficiency because I'm lazy), which puts it in the ballpark of a HD6450 graphics card and also undercuts pretty much every old machine you might get from eBay in that price range with comparable performance efficency-wise. I'm writing all this because people in this thread tend to go for the Pi to get a low-power computer, while there are alternatives that aren't expensive and do better. This Kabini will still race circles around every Pi while generally having much better software support and lots of perks the Pi can only dream of. (SATA, PCIe, USB 3.0 etc.) Even completely with case and anything, if you'd really go shopping I bet you could put one together for maybe ~130 eurobucks, maybe even lower if you get some parts for a bargain on eBay for example. (or still have lying around like I did) Or you get one of those crazy cheap deals you get with Newegg, I don't know, I don't have access to such things over here. Of course you have to pick your usage scenario around the available performance and pick your software carefully, but such is life with the Pi too. It's a cool, very silent and an incredibly cheap (I stayed below 90 Euros, I'm not sure what the Pi2 ended up running for me but it can't be much less) machine that I'll turn into my daily driver (and turn my 5820k into a on-demand VM/gaming/etc. server-thing and also move it somewhere else where I can't hear it) and I'm glad I bought it. You hear such things about the Pi too, while you read a lot of frustration when googling the Kabini. The reason for that is that the people are aware what they get themselves into when they buy a Pi, while many people venting about the Kabini online are frustrated because it can't do what a $2000 gaming rig does. Of course there are other computers, some better, some also more expensive. It's generally just a thing to consider that they exist.
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Oct 9, 2016 03:47
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I had one of those USB-Measuring things once, turns out the way it was designed it also acted as current limiter unintentionally. I'd be careful with the Pi/HD setups. They might not get enough power with one of those in-between and then you go chasing problems that aren't there. I have the A4-5000, it's slower even though for my usage scenario that doesn't really matter. the A4-5000 comes soldered onto the board (and with a heatsink) so in my case, the entire package was around that price. The board has a SATA controller integrated, so you get 2 SATA ports more. Also a mPCIe and a PCIe slot, an external USB 3.0 chip to what the SoC supports itself etc. etc.. Love it! Today I tried around with game streaming from the 5820k Windows VM. (with VGA passthrough) There is not a single really efficient program to do this on linux, especially for games. There's the likes of xfreerdp which supports RemoteFX of Win10 but it's completely CPU bound and doesn't even thread well so the performance is just awful. I then found out that steam can do this too (just have to run it on both machines) and it even uses hardware encoding and decoding for the stream. Although I had to screw around with the steam client a bit to make this work properly in my non-ubuntu linux, this works a lot better with the A4-5000 and an 1080p game stream is no problem, tried it with GTA5, was just like the real thing. If you do things like change resolution etc. steam will silently fall back to software decoding which is very annoying. 1440p is sadly out of the picture, even with hardware decoding the Kabini GPU just can't do it. Interestingly enough, you can just add every executable you want to steam and stream it that way and take advantage of the hardware en/decoding. Tried it with notepad.exe, works perfectly. I've never looked into using something like that but just assumed there'd be tons of software to do such things with, especially also with the Pi, but it just isn't so and what little software there is doesn't even work that well. I think my dream of moving away my 5820k where it can make noise is sadly over and I'll probably get an usb switch, it seems the simplest solution that will also work the best.
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Oct 12, 2016 02:17
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General_Failure posted:4.3 inch TFT Color LCD Screen Car Reverse Rearview Display support Auto Rear View Backup Camera Parking System Monitor I have one of those, it's surprisingly good all things considered. If you can keep the output of your source B/W by nature of the thing you get a sharper picture, but don't get too high hopes with tiny console fronts. I have been using it as a testing screen for old computers, like A500s etc.. You can also open up that particular screen and throw out the voltage regulator and then bridge it, that way you can feed it with +5V from an USB source.
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Feb 25, 2017 00:30
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