The 3B+ was probably the high of the raspberry pi. It is still pretty much unrivaled in terms of idle power consumption and energy efficiency (or at least i have not seen any other SBC that got below 0.5 Watts on idle) on the consumer market.
But i have trouble investing further into them.
They do not post any update guides for newer Debian releases and basically only support new deployments.
It looks like they are abandoning their older products. vcgencmd for example is still broken on the 3B+. Since they “fixed” it for the 4B. See github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1224
I agree that the 3B+ was the best Pi but for other reasons:
The Pi 3B+ had the perfect balance between performance and price with the performance being good enough at the time.
Design flaws at launch. Remember the Pi4 CC1 & CC2? POE getting pulled from the market?
Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.
They put big customers first and let everybody else starve during the shortage. This forced me to alternatives and I have to say they work just as good and cost less.
Jacking up retail prices: Even Intel x86 is now cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.
Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.
Was not even thinking about that. Implementing USB-PD is so easy these days. Basically just putting a chip there who handles the PD and then a step down(or whatever) converter which they already have anyway. (See ebay USB PD trigger for implementations)
That is so dump.
Talking about hardware flaws, i think they even fucked up the USB-C implementation on the PI 4. They put the resistor on the wrong pins or somthing. Dont remeber exactly.
I think operating at 5V input might be a technical constraint for them. Compatibility revisions for existing hardware are a lot more difficult if the input voltage is 9x higher. Addressing that isn’t as easy as slapping a buck converter on the board.
Not saying requiring 5A was the right call, just that I can see reasons for not using USB-PD.
We are not talking about 9 times higher. 3A at 9V would be enough.
I am currently looking in the Docs and it is really confusing. It states that the PI 5 has a PMIC on board but still saying it boots up only when the 5A is present… So not sure what is going on here.
And looking at the PD 3.1 standard it looks like 5V 5A is actually in the spec in the new Version…
They now require a special power supply for it to work else it just crashes under load. Their use of USB C is insanely confusing because it doesn’t work with any normal USB C psu.
This power supply costs 15 bucks which conveniently isn’t included in the price. Also a heat sink that costs 6 bucks.
Also they stuck with micro hdmi which sucks. (even more special accessories needed)
The required accessories almost cost as much as just an old pi.
I hope the community jumps over to Rockchip based boards soon. Pi has taken the communities open source efforts and spit in their face.
Risc5 is also interesting but that seems to be a far bigger task since it need recompilation of a lot of existing stuff
Is there a RasPi alternative that’s competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.
I could say the Orange Pi 5, however Orange Pi’s ports currently tend to only work with specific accessories which they already wrote drivers for themselves. It’s not like they’re blocking other devices, but just like how RPI still needs a lot of work to support GPU’s with drivers, Orange Pi probably needs even more.
The integrated GPU is pretty good though.
Most alternatives to RPI use a Rockchip such as the RK3566 for mid range and RK3588 for high end stuff.
There’s also the new cheap 15 bucks LuckFox Pico with Rockchip RV1106 with a small NPU for AI projects, kind of a Pi Pico alternative.
Thank you for your recommendation. I’ve looked at some of those SoCs and they’re impressive but none of them do what I’m looking for. I want to make a graveyard for my old GPUs, but without the power overhead I have right now with them configured as essentially a mining rig that’s folding proteins instead of guessing the hash. I understand that the potential power saved by using ARM or RISC over x86/64 is a few dozen watts at best and chosing an SoC over a desktop platform hamstrings any opportunity for scaling, but it’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time. It doesn’t have to be practical.
Whenever I am doing different projects I go with RasPi alternatives. I agree they’re cheaper and superior.
Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it’s so sad what’s become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.
Yeah power seems like such a small thing but for an SBC it’s a pretty big deal.
The power usage is also pretty crushing for it the Pi’s usage in hobby Robotics. Finally we have some computing power but now it’s unusable because how are you going to get 5V5A from a powerbank? We could power the Pi4 from a decent USB C supporting powerbank, But this is no longer the case for the Pi5.
If they supported “normal” USB PD then at least a powerbank with quick-charge support (9v3a) would work and give you the same total 25W wattage. And the PD USB chargers would have been way cheaper because 9v3A get mass produced. This 5V5A is some Apple tier of “propriatary” standard and I really wonder why they did it.
I refuse to admit 5v5a is USB PD. This is like USB3.1gen2by4 Rev 9001
USB PD was meant for
15w = 5v3a
30w = 9v3a
45w =15v3a
60-100w = 20v3-5a
Phones that wanted to do it different made up their own name with blackjack and WOOX charging. I don’t need the Pi foundation single handedly screwing this up.
Even the recommended 5V3A supply for the Pi4 is non-standard and requires you to either buy the official power brick or wade through a sea of sketchy Chinese knockoffs that may or may not deliver their rated power. I don’t understand why they haven’t explored alternative connectors or slapped a voltage regulator on the board in order to use a 12V supply. 5V5A USB is just ridiculous. USB only makes sense when you’re using universal requirements, but this might as well be a barrel connector as you can’t use any normal USB charger with it.
I’m assuming it’s like the Nintendo switch USBC lead which technically is standard but doesn’t really work to charge anything else. but at least you can use normal USBC leads to charge the switch so it’s not too bad.
Such as? I’ve been looking to buy one recently. Are there any you could recommend for an amateur that wants to host totally random small services on a microcomputer?
I’m not the one you replied to, but I bought an Odroid when it was difficult to get a pi. I wouldn’t say it’s in the same category. It’s bigger, more expensive than normal pi prices and more powerful. It’s probably perfect for what you’re looking for. Where you might run into trouble is if you have very tight power consumption requirements or plan to use add on boards.
Yeah I am loving all these micro Linux computer options. Not much bigger than a raspberry pi but it’s a full computer. If you need gpio you can hook up an Arduino through USB and connect super easily. The one I have been using even has an integrated video card. All for around $100 and they are always in stock lol.
I was thinking more along the lines of battery powered operations. I can stick a Pi, a car battery, a solar panel into a weather proof box and set it in the woods if I needed to.
It’s just an example, but you can pull an old car battery from the junkyard and they have better temperature extremes. NiMH from a wrecked hybrid is also a good option for durability.
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