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A cheaper, smaller Raspberry Pi 3 is now available
- akoster 8y agoLink from raspberrypi.org site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-product-raspberry-pi-3-model-a/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-product-raspberry-pi-3-...
- melling 8y agoIntel should lend a hand in getting Thunderbolt 3 on one of these: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/intel-to-make-thunderbolt-3-royalty-free-in-bid-to-spur-adoption/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/intel-to-make-thunde... Smaller devices could use a smaller and faster port.
- kristofferR 8y agoIntel still hasn't made Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free, despite their promises. It's beginning to look like an outright lie at this point.
- nerdponx 8y agoWhat about USB-C?
- ken 8y agoThat's the physical connector used by Thunderbolt 3.
- tantalor 8y agoI gave up on using raspberry pi after it destroyed several expensive micro SD cards. The device is amazing, but the dependence on brittle micro SD is a deal breaker for me. I just want to boot over USB with no micro SD. Have they solved this issue?
- Theizestooke 8y agoI had a similar experience with my raspberry pi, and the only alternative I found was to use a banana pi with sata.
- FredFS456 8y agoYes, https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... You can also PXE boot without an SD card, which may be best for file system durability.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- moftz 8y agoYou still need an SD card in there but all it needs is a bootloader and a config file that allows booting from USB. You can make the /boot partition read only so there's no chance of it being screwed up. SD cards do suck but at least they are cheap enough now that you can keep some low capacity ones with bootloaders installed on hand.
- noonespecial 8y agoNo longer true. I've got several 3s as NAS's running exclusively off their USB drives.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago> You still need an SD card in there Not true anymore.
- wolrah 8y agoPi 2 requires a permanent SD card as its built-in bootloader does not support network booting. It does not support USB booting. Pi 3 B has support for both USB and network booting in its bootloader, but they are disabled by default. They are turned on by modifying some OTP configuration bits, which is a permanent change. Once set the SD card is no longer required. Pi 3 B+ has network and USB booting enabled by default. Presumably Pi 3 A+ will support USB booting out of the box, who knows it it'll also support USB ethernet adapters for PXE.
- epynonymous 8y agoseems like only 1 usb port compared to 4, no ethernet port, half the memory of the 3 b+. to me this competes more with the pizero
- tjoff 8y agoSeems like a good fit for something like a 3d-printer, for which the pizero was a bit slow. But I will always miss wired ethernet.
- epynonymous 8y agoanother complaint of the pizero is the mini-hdmi, i dont own a single one of these cables, i think you're right in that the pizero cpu is much slower
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoIt's just not practical to put a full size HDMI socket on a tiny board like that.
- gh02t 8y agoOoh, that's a really good point. I have a Pi2 running Klipper and Octoprint driving my printer, this would be a good upgrade...
- 51lver 8y agoPretty sure the 4 usb ports and ethernet were all being fed from one root usb controller port via a hub and usb ethernet bridge. You can easily add what they removed if you need it, or pay the $10 extra for the bigger board.
- coob 8y agoDoes anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC?
- mlevental 8y agoi think such a thing would simply be impractical from a line of business perspective: if I'm going to spend the time/money developing a great soc I'm not going to give it away at cost (which would lead to never recovering dev costs)
- nordsieck 8y ago> Does anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC? This might be your best bet. https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ You're going to have to work harder if you want to use IO pins, but it claims it comes with some. > One 40-pin Low Speed (LS) expansion connector UART, SPI, I2S, I2C x2, GPIO x12
- jandrese 8y agoI occasionally have a fantasy about Apple putting their latest A-X chip on a SBC form factor for $50 and open sourcing the drivers and letting people go nuts with it. It's one of those things that will never ever happen because we don't live in a perfect universe.
- downrightmike 8y agoMaybe for $1000, everything closed source and locked down.
- jandrese 8y agoI thought the monkey paw on that deal would be that the SBC comes with only a single USB-C port for all of its I/O, including power.
- imtringued 8y agoThere are SBCs with recent SoCs but when they cost 200€ you are better off by getting a x86 CPU that has sata, pcie, usb3 and is widely supported by Linux distributions. They also aren't very attractive from a software freedom standpoint. Why give up decades of work on open source GPU drivers and then be forced to use a vendor provided Linux distribution? Intel ME and AMD PSP are not a valid threat if you're forced to run proprietary code that may be backdoored on your SBC anyway.
- emilfihlman 8y agoThe sd card is the biggest weakness of all SBCs. EMMC, wireless and some way to connect a camera (usb or CSI) would be perfect.
- FactolSarin 8y agoThis. I wonder how much it'd cost for them to just add a bit of on-board storage.
- harperlee 8y agoThe now defunct CHIP computer costed 9$ and had on-board storage, so there you have a cap.
- makomk 8y agoThat used raw NAND flash, which is kind of nasty. I'm not sure they ever quite got it working right before they went under.
- mattthebaker 8y agoRaw NAND is highly preferable to SD or USB drives. You can at least have wear leveling in the OS/FS. SD/USB are bad because most have dumb controllers and just rewrite a page when it changes. Raw NAND is also consistent and meets datasheet specs, whereas SD you never know what you are getting.
- harperlee 8y agoWhat do you mean? I have two of them which work flawlessly...
- nickpsecurity 8y agoQuick glance at Microchip shows, all in quantities of 5k units, $1.02-$2.28 per unit for 1Mb ROM, $0.36 for 1Mb flash, (if aiming for $1) $0.96-$1.10 per unit for 16Mb flash, and highest is 64Mbit at $1.95-$2.18 per unit. Memory is cheap if your product is popular or can share a big order with someone(s) else. Since not a hardware guy, I don't know if PCB design or packaging cost goes up significantly for adding a 1Mb ROM or flash. I doubt it, though, given these kind of memory chips get used in dirt-cheap boards. Albeit with lower amounts of storage usually given those board try to minimize costs.
- cabaalis 8y ago> Plus, like its sibling, the whole board is certified as a radio module under FCC rules, which will significantly reduce the cost of conformance testing Raspberry Pi–based products. The problem I encountered was not FCC testing of the device, but that I could not mass-manufacture my pi-based prototype because the chips required huge bulk quantity purchasing to be feasible. We had to develop a brand new device based off beaglebone that was more available for a run of 10-50k. (I'll never do that again, either..)
- styfle 8y agoThat’s a good point. The Pi is really meant for quick prototypes or teaching students, not enterprise work.
- Ixio 8y agoThe linked blog post https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-product-raspberry-pi-3-model-a/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-product-raspberry-pi-3-... has more info and is interesting. In it they say "Back in March, we explained that the 3+ platform is the final iteration of the “classic” Raspberry Pi", I've tried finding the corresponding blog post but didn't have any luck. Does anyone know where I can read more about this ? I'm interested in hearing more about their need for "new core silicon, on a new process node, with new memory technology".
- happycube 8y agoBasically they're reached the limits of what you can do with a 40nm process within (well, mostly) the power/thermal limits of USB microB with a basic heat spreader. While the ARM A53 cluster would almost certainly be available in smaller nodes, the uncore has sort of outlived it's welcome anyway.
- StudentStuff 8y agoThis line of chips from Broadcomm can only support 1GB of Ram, a hard limit for what type of applications one can put on it. Meanwhile, other SBCs have mainline kernel support now and boast 2GB or even 4GB of Ram.
- rb808 8y ago1 USB port should be the standard. the 2x2 port connectors are huge. Is there a mini RJ45 connector yet? That would benefit from shrinking too.
- brod 8y agoI think a "Thunderberry Pi" version with 2 thunderbolt ports instead of power, usb-a and rj45 would be really sweet for hobby purposes and provide a neat way to learn more about that tech
- Technetium_Hat 8y agoUnfortunately a thunderbolt controller is far out of reach for a US$25 SBC.
- ben174 8y agoSeems we could probably lose the RJ45 at this point.
- jedieaston 8y agoSchools (at least around here in a pretty good school district) have terrible Wi-Fi, and if the school supports BYOD then the APs are commonly at capacity. It’s much easier to use Ethernet if you want to get some Pis for a classroom, since the teacher can just hook them up to a switch and not have to think about whether the Wi-Fi is good, sharing PSKs (or having every kid log in to 802.1x), making sure that the devices all get on the same subnet so that its easy to communicate with them, etc. And the Pi is aimed at schools, so that is what they will think about. Especially in lower-class areas I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have Wi-Fi on the entire campus (although in the US, we have eRate to help with that).
- garysahota93 8y agoThis board has been extremely versatile and super affordable for a long time now. I'm really happy they made this new version. I think it's sleek nature will absolutely come in handy in some of the projects that I am going to be working on in the future. Great job!
- kumarvvr 8y agoHas anyone used an RPi for commercial products?? Im interested to use it for a project that I want to spin off commercially. Just curious.
- rbirkby 8y agoAlthough the 3a+ is great, the ram is underwhelming. Would love a “3a+ Master” with the exact specs of the 3a+ but with 2GB RAM.
- Narishma 8y agoNot possible. The SoC only supports up to 1GB of RAM.