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Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now from $35 | USB3, Gigabit Ethernet, 1.5GHz Quad Core, Upto 4GB RAM
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- Title
- Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now from $35 - Raspberry Pi
- Published
- Jun 24 2019
- Word count
- 2594 words
Here are the highlights:
"The Ethernet controller on the main SoC is connected to an external Broadcom PHY over a dedicated RGMII link, providing full throughput. USB is provided via an external VLI controller, connected over a single PCI Express Gen 2 lane, and providing a total of 4Gbps of bandwidth, shared between the four ports."
Reported speeds over ethernet of 900+ mbps.
Geeze, this is killer. My main issues with using a RPi as a workhorse was that network throughput is shared with external storage (Or other USB devices).
Have networking offloaded from the USB bus makes this tits now.
Serious question: what do you guys use these for? I got one, initially to be used as a home cinema, but I gave up on the project and it's been collecting dust ever since. I could use it as a home router, but I have a little dedicated server in the cloud (similar hardware) which I think is far more useful there.
A year or two ago when I was quite skint, my laptop died a glorious death and I was reduced to just my smartphone. After a while, a friend took pity on me and got me an ASUS Tinkerboard. Basically a rPi on steroids (at the time, at least)
These little machines are surprisingly capable when it's all you have. I think its what most kids should start their computing with to be honest since it's way more hands on. Plus I've got a theory that the longer someone goes before getting into the nitty gritty of computing, the more they just write it off as voodoo (like i do with linear algebra or w/e)
As for practical applications though; I don't really have any either. After I got a real laptop again I toyed with setting it up to act as a PiHole (network wide adblocker), but gen 1 tinkerboards have this annoying voltage dropping reset issue, so I can't actually use this one for any 'server'-y things unfortunately
I've wanted to use it for a few niche things like a DIY nest doorbell, sitting next to my intercom listening for anyone to call while I'm out. Even thought about making some interactive holiday decorations at some point. But all the 'cool' things I can think of are so infrequent that I can't really justify any of them.
Two uses for this sprung to mind immediately for me:
PiDash, I currently have a PiDash set up to display gauges and do tuning on a Megasquirt based ECU (tuning my own custom cars). This should do so much faster.
Old People PC - My father, my friends' parents, grandparents, etc. don't need a tower, don't need a laptop. They just want something that'll work for youtube, facebook, and email. Take the 4gb version of this, slap on Win10 for ARM, lock it down, and slap it on the back of a monitor for the cheapest, simplest, easiest AIO PC possible for this group of people.
I've used a RPi 3b as my desktop for over half a year and must say it was actually a great learning experience. I learned to love command line interfaces and look for alternative solutions, e.g. instead of using Chromium to watch YouTube videos I've found omxplayerGUI.
But my favorite thing was when I found out about software compiling, e.g. I found eureka doom editor, a level editor for Doom 1/2 and then basically used that to create levels for Doom 2. Or PCSX reARMed, a PSX emulator originally written for the Pandora handheld, but also works on the RPi(I think it's even included in libretro) and eDuke32, a source-port of Duke Nukem 3D. I always thought compiling software is like black magic, but it turned out that most compile scripts basically tell you what you're doing wrong or what packages you have to install first.
I've also used a DHT22 sensor to monitor my room's temperature and humidity and then put together a python script that displays those values in a .svg file using pygal and played around with a LED dot matrix which I used as a binary clock.
But somehow I've ran into the same problem that you described in your post, once I got ahold of a new PC, I stopped using my little RPi 3b for anything practical, I mean I installed Kodi on it and hooked it up to my TV for a while, but that's it.
I use these things as servers for everything. My greenhouse (water, barrel filling, soil monitoring, airflow, humidity) runs off Orange Pi, on my work we have ancient CNCs modded with Orange Pis in order to use them with modern software and add features like probing, my security cameras also run on these, and one is a youtube player for an old TV. Most of the things I do with them can be done with Arduino or ESP8266 boards, but they lack multitasking and capability to run a server with, say, a telegram bot on them and also maintain a 3G internet connection. These things made more for IoT progress than anything else IMO.
Speaking of Pi's and esp8266's just reminded me of CNLohr and his efforts to get the vive running on a raspberry pi, with some esp8266's acting as localizers? (it's been a while since I checked it out)
If you haven't gotten a glimpse of him yet, prepare for a very hacky rabit hole haha
I have one running Pi-hole, a DNS-level ad-blocker.
There's a huge thread about this on Hacker News today too, if you'd like even more examples: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
I set up a Pi 3 with LibreELEC for my dad as a personal HTPC. I used to use a Pi 2 for PiHole but I put ad blocking into my new pfsense router. I plan to reuse the Pi 2 for a personal HTPC.
Some people use them as makeshift NAS's but I personally wouldn't recommend it because of no SATA and the ethernet and USB are on the same bus.
I think it's OK to recommend them for the purpose with the new model since it has gigabit Ethernet on its own bus. Lack of SATA isn't really that big of a deal since you can get adaptors and enclosures for relatively cheap.
I made a CNC machine based around a Raspberry Pi, and I've made robots around similar devices.
Pihole, IRC bouncer, torrent downloader and various other things. I've also got an Odroid XU4 that functions as a NAS (gigabit ethernet, faster 8 core CPU, etc).
Retropie, mostly I have a spare 3 I keep meaning to tinker with, but can't find anything I want to do that won't require a monitor. I'll probably buy a 4 to have the beefier hardware.
Atm I have 3 Pi's running; An ancient Pi 1 running PiHole (possibly running software outdated enough to have seen both world wars), and two more modern Pi 3B+s, one running HASS.io for Home Automation + ESPHome and the other runs a LoRa Gateway for TTN.
They're quite neat for some niche applications. Since the new one is more capable, I might use it as terminal/vnc server for personal use.
At work I set one up with a couple of reed switches to detect when bathroom doors are open. The Pi then hosts a web server that reports the status of both doors so you can see what bathrooms are available from the main office space.
I use PiVPN on mine, it's a super easy way to set up an OpenVPN server that I can use when on public WiFi. Just as configurable as a proper server too - I've set mine to TCP port 443 and can use it in many more places than by default
I once set up a Pi 3 as a home minecraft server to play with my girlfriend. It kinda works but honestly, it runs quite bad and ultimately just running the server on my laptop was faster.
Now that the 4 exists I fully intend to do what I have always wanted to do with the Pi and use it to build out a proper affordable redundant storage array with ceph with each pi running an OSD and a disk. Now instead of needing to replace some server board I'll just grab a spare pi / disk depending and just slot it in. Bewm.
I use one for PiHole and other for beer fermentation chamber.
https://youtu.be/3Q01JugqedA
A hands on review from the Low Spec Gamer.
Interesting decision going with the tiered RAM pricing, I guess the stock was available and they wanted to stay competitive with comparable boards.
I have this persistent/reoccurring whish to build a very light weight TTY based Linux distro and then use it on something like a raspberry pi. The main thing missing that I've yet to figure out is a JS enabled terminal based web browser (suggestions welcome). It would be nice to have a terminal focused distro with some "sane" defaults have it run tmux, easily start mplayer using fbdev(?) for movies. Perhaps just make it as a set of configs with dependencies on other deb/rpm/nix/arch packages so that it installs more like a DE than an actual separate distro.
There's a browser out there that's just Firefox (or Chrome, can't remember) and it takes the rendered output and converts it, background/font colors, images and all, to text for display in a terminal.
Yes!
I hear
NetfrontNETSURF or something like that can render to a TTY. I believe any Qt-based application can do the same maybe?Though he or she may find it suitable for the purpose, Netsurf has an optional framebuffer front-end, which isn't a tty.
@archevel
I will have to look into both netsurf & browsh and specifically their dependencies. Software tends to pull in a lot of... well cruft. And one of my goals is to keep this slim even though disk space is virtually unlimited these days.
Browsh being based on Firefox looks promising, I should check its memory footprint.
If the framebuffer frontend for netsurf works similar to how mplayer works that would be an option.
browshlast I checked just streamed Firefox from one computer to another, so you should be good, there.elinkshas limited ECMAscript support that you can enable at compile-time, though it's less than ideal and I've no clue as to whether it'd still work with a modern version of Spidermonkey at this point.Awesome stuff. The higher memory version is much welcomed and I see myself using one for a home server one day. I currently have a pi 3 as a media server but its already at its limit.
Worth noting that you still can't use a Raspberry Pi in an entirely free way; the Pi 4 does remedy this partially, in that it requires about 50% less closed-source code as per the press announcement, but still.
Oh shiiiiit! I've been wanting to get one of these on sale to tinker with monitoring some basic stats about our space bucket veggies. Thanks for sharing!
Damn, I recently bought a Rock64. I'm guessing this new Pi has similar specs now?