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Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
- tyingq 6y ago"The 400 doesn’t have an audio-out." That does seem like a miss for an otherwise decent platform. HDMI out support is fine, but since this setup is quite portable, exposing a headphone jack seems obvious. I suppose bluetooth is the expectation now?
- fludlight 6y agoMany (most?) HDMI monitors have an audio-out jack.
- ansible 6y agoUnfortunately, most new TVs don't have a 3.5mm audio jack these days.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoBut they do have speakers.
- martinpeck 6y agoI agree. A headphone jack would make so much sense.
- kristopolous 6y agoUSB audio dongles are super cheap. You can get 2 of them for about $10. If I was on the design team for it I could eventually come around to being fine with it.
- gambiting 6y agoYes, but it's "yet another" dongle for this machine which is meant to be an easy to use all-in-one friendly to beginners. Them using micro HDMI is already bizarre seeing as there's loads of room for a full size port and most people will need a dongle/adapter here, but not including an audio jack is crazy, seeing as the proper Rpi4 does have one!
- ranit 6y ago> and most people will need a dongle/adapter Micro HDMI to HDMI cable is included in the kit.
- tyingq 6y agoYou would also want a dongle that has a driver already bundled with the OS. Not sure if that's typical or not. Probably unlikely that the dongle itself comes with a suitable ARM/Linux driver.
- kristopolous 6y agoI'll say you're fine again having done this a few times already. It's always just worked
- gruturo 6y agoI add my voice to the chorus of complaints about dongles, but for the record you could also use an inline HDMI audio extractor which is invisible to the OS and requires no drivers for sure. They are also very cheap.
- iso947 6y agoHardware in linux tends to just work
- m-p-3 6y agoThanks to all the contributors out there <3
- lxgr 6y agoUSB audio devices are standardized (just like flash drives, as USB mass storage, and keyboard/mouse, as HID respectively), so you don't need device-specific drivers for most of them.
- gambiting 6y agoYes, but this isn't a USB audio device. You need to be able to select and control an HDMI audio output for this to work.
- stock_toaster 6y agoI think it has bluetooth too, so that could be another possibility.
- bloopernova 6y agoUSB audio would also be an option, but I agree, a lack of audio out for headphones or a headset seems like an error of judgement.
- tbronchain 6y agoConsidering most phones already ditch the audio jack, I'd say it's not so surprising? I'm a bit more disappointed there is no usable usb c - and we could use these usb c-3.5 adaptors almost everyone has now.
- butz 6y agoThat's a bummer. I was planning to connect CRT TV to it through composite, that was passed through headphone jack.
- cesarb 6y agoI personally suspect that removing composite output was the real reason for removing the headphone jack. From what I've read, to enable composite output on the Raspberry Pi 4 you have to enable a special setting on config.txt, which when enabled slows down some of the clocks so that it can produce the correct frequencies for the composite output to work. Not having composite output removes the need for that wart.
- vaccinator 6y agoA portable computer like this is probably more likely to be plugged in a TV, like at hotels.
- tyingq 6y agoNot everyone likes their hotel porn going through the speakers :)
- vaccinator 6y agoThats why they invented the mute button :)
- davidhyde 6y agoThe on-board sound quality on the raspberry pi line has traditionally been quite poor so you probably want a dedicated sound dongle anyway especially if you are using headphones. This is an article about the model b+. It's an older version than the 4 but explains the problem just as well since the 4 still uses PWM instead of a DAC. http://www.crazy-audio.com/2014/07/sound-quality-of-the-raspberry-pi-b/ http://www.crazy-audio.com/2014/07/sound-quality-of-the-rasp...
- philistine 6y agoYou’re giving me flashback to the whole Game Boy line, who always had a buzz in the headphone jack until the DS finally properly isolated the sound.
- rootsudo 6y agoAnd why some ipods still are $$$ because of DAC.
- kingosticks 6y agoThe hardware hasn't changed much but the software has tremendously and stuff from 2014 isn't relevant. Do you think the current implementation (sometimes known as audio_pwm_mode=2 but it is the default firmware these days) is still poor? I've found it's fine for everyday use and listening to music. I think a line-out would have been fine for people to use.
- beagle3 6y agoApple, Samsung and others have eliminated the audio jack (for different reasons) and there was a lot of outrage but the bottom line is: acceptable Bluetooth headphones can be bought for about $10-$25 now, and are widely available. Between Bluetooth headphones, HDMI out to the screen, HDMI audio splitters and $5 USB audio dongles, it really is a fine design choice - especially given that the RasPI’s analog audio out circuitry is low quality to begin with.
- jacquesm 6y agoBluetooth introduces (even more...) latency, which isn't always acceptable.
- beagle3 6y agoThis is not a gamer machine at $70. Yes, Bluetooth introduces a tiny bit of audio latency, which is perfectly acceptable for 98% of all use, and 99.9% of RasPI 400 uses. For the rest of the cases, use one of the other RasPI400 options, a RasPi 4 or a Razer laptop.
- pta2002 6y agoIn my experience, bluetooth audio latency has made watching videos completely impossible, extremely annoying to be hearing something and not seeing the lips of the person moving the right way.
- Adverblessly 6y agoIIRC both VLC Player and mpv allow you to set a keyboard shortcut for increasing/decreasing audio-video delay and are capable of streaming directly from YouTube (and I believe any website supported by youtube-dl). I use mpv and whenever I get audio latency from my headphones* I just adjust in the player. * - It seems like there's some adaptive algorithm where they start off at 0ms latency but if they experience one hiccup they increase to 250ms-300ms and then another hiccup causes them to jump to 500ms. This is also why a keyboard shortcut that let's you adjust the exact a-v delay value is useful beyond just setting the value once.
- jdietrich 6y agoI just don't think a headphone jack justifies the BOM cost, given that most HDMI displays have a headphone output and Bluetooth headphones and speakers are commonplace.
- beervirus 6y agoWhat does it add, 15 cents?
- jakuboboza 6y agoSo i have Pi-top the Raspberry pi 3 Laptop. It wasn't expensive or anything. Keyboard is fine, touchpad is fine. But when i boot on it GUI and start VScode things works but starting a chromium on top of that brings a warm feeling to you... and it is not a metaphore. In general Pi 3 was a bit too slow. With Pi 4 everything could be "fast enough". I'm waiting for more devices like this. But I prefer the format of a little bit more expensive Pi-top than keyboard i need to plug to monitor. For this I would elect to buy naked Pi 4 and keyboard I would like and just wire everything together. If you wanna do stuff on it imho Keyboard feeling good is important.
- Theodores 6y ago> I own several Raspberry Pi computers (1, 2 and 3)... All of them sit in a box, unused. I’ve played with them, then put them away. Part of that is because the performance hasn’t been that great, but the form factor is a major factor. It feels like the Raspberry Pi 400 has the power I need (for casual projects), and comes in a form factor that I can happily leave plugged in on my desk. Amazing how the addition of a keyboard changes things, with the keyboard being a great box. The snazzy design is definitely a further add that lures me in to wanting one. I too have Pi's in boxes, unused. What I would like is a backlit keyboard version. I am already spending £100 on keyboards so this is achievable. I would program mine so that the keyboard appeared over bluetooth to my main computer from where I would ssh into my Pi to do things like run a web server. For a long time I have wanted to do local development of web projects on a separate box so there is a clear break between client and server but everything is local.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DebtDeflation 6y agoI wish the keyboard had a touchpad built in to eliminate the need for a separate mouse.
- pmontra 6y agoAlso my thought. I'd like a touchpad below the space bar, as on my laptop. I saw some wireless keyboards with a touchpad where the numberpad is. I found some bluetooth touchpads on Amazon, they cost at least about half the price of the Pi 400.
- techplex 6y agoI don't blame them, Linux touchpad drivers are horrendously bad. I can imagine a young person tryin to learn to use the pi400 and them getting frustrated because the touchpad is hard to use. I wonder if there are any studies that show a mouse is easier to learn than a touchpad or vise versa.
- kzrdude 6y agoI think the multitouch drivers have been really good. Been using it with a MBP 2015 touchpad, and I think that shows how good hardware helps the equation.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoEh they must either have an open spec for drivers or provide source code for linux kernel devs. I have dell laptop and the pad works great for windows and is horrible with linux which rules out hardware issues.
- HeyHoJoe 6y ago> I own several Raspberry Pi computers (1, 2 and 3). Most of them are the Model B format, but I have couple of Zeros too. All of them sit in a box, unused. Same for me and most people I know who have bought an rpi. Buy it because it seems like a cool toy and then stick it in a box and never use it for anything.
- simonh 6y agoThis seems like a much more practical and useful package for most people, especially the full kit with all the connectors and such you need included. Just hook it up to a hand me down / cheap TV and you’ve got a very capable little computer. If this had come out when my kids were younger, learning Scratch and getting into Minecraft, I’d have been all over it.
- HeyHoJoe 6y agoIf you say so, but I doubt I’ll buy an rpi again, with or without a built in keyboard. I had a look at project ideas when the 400 was announced and realised there was nothing I wanted to do, and for most of the projects you can buy a premade solution cheaply. I guess I’m not their target audience.
- keyle 6y agoMine was catching dust for years, then I bought a Arcade 1UP, modded it and it's now the core of it.
- agumonkey 6y agoI did use my A as irc bouncer for a while. Then I stopped. rpi curse
- jaster 6y agoIf you're looking for a fun use for your shelved rpi, I can recommand installing a retro-gaming distro such as recalbox (https://www.recalbox.com/ https://www.recalbox.com/) or retropie (https://retropie.org.uk/ https://retropie.org.uk/). I installed recalbox on a rpi3, and it runs nes/snes fine, and even some n64 games. On occasions I brought it along when visiting friends, and plugged it into the TV/projector with a couple of joysticks. It has been a blast! All in all I'm very happy with my small on-the-go arcade machine.
- tarruda 6y agoI would consider using this for serious work if they had added support for 2.5 or m.2 drives. There are some third party raspberry pi 4 cases that support m.2 via an internal USB 3.0 adapter [1]. Considering they designed a custom PCB for this product, adding a native M.2 or SATA is a reasonable feature for something designed to replace a desktop PC [1]: https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-4.html https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...
- exged 6y agoThere aren't any free PCIe lanes on the SoC, so even if they added a bridge chip for a SATA / M.2 SSD it would have to be connected over USB. Besides, the device is $70. A $10 32GB eMMC chip would be a far more reasonable ask at this price point if greater reliability is desired.
- tsjq 6y agothat's interesting. curios: are these two comparable in terms of speeds: eMMC and NVME/M2SSD ? or am I confusing among oranges and apples?
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThey are in completely different ball parks. M.2 drives can easily saturate a usb3.0 link, emmc not so much.
- akiselev 6y agoeMMC tops out at 80-100 mb/s, NVME is an order of magnitude faster usually.
- tarruda 6y agoI see, thanks. Have you seen the compute module though? It exposes a PCIe slot via a separate I/O board. At first I assumed there was some free lanes, but now I see it doesn't exposea usb 3.0 ports, only 2.0. Still, I would rather have a dedicated bus for storage with usb 2.0 rather than usb 3.0 [1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?variant=raspberry-pi-cm4001000&resellerType=home https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?varia...
- simonh 6y agoSo going through the actual comments here, what this really needs to make a compelling product is: A built in touch pad, an audio jack, a full size HDMI port (even thought the accessory set includes an HDMI cable), an M.2 or SATA connector and a backlit keyboard. Anything else? Maybe an Intel processor, Windows, a built in battery and a hinged screen that folds down over the keyboard. Are we getting there yet?
- HeyHoJoe 6y agoThat’s sort of the point, there’s lots of demand for a cheap laptop, there’s very little actual demand for the raspberry pi, which is why everyone is trying to morph the rpi into a laptop.
- m4r35n357 6y agoHow wrong would you like to be? Look up their sales figures . . .
- kingosticks 6y agoYou do realise how many they have sold, right?
- HeyHoJoe 6y agoYeah, I bought some of them. I use none of them. There’s more demand for laptops.
- kingosticks 6y agoYes. There is more demand for laptops than Raspberry Pis. However, there must be a fair amount of Raspberry Pi demand out there considering they flogged over 30 million boards and I don't think that was to try and make 30 million crappy laptops.
- HeyHoJoe 6y ago
- graycrow 6y agoI don't mind to pay extra $30 if next version of the PC will have a M2 port, even USB routed, full-size HDMI, and combined audio/composite video port, same as on RPi A/B boards. Separate DAC could make nice addition. Hope that Raspberry Pi Foundation will listen to people's needs.
- moralsupply 6y agoThat and 8GB RAM, plus NVMe or PCI Express with some internal space for a hard drive. Also, make the case easy to open with screws...
- kzrdude 6y agoI'm a bit surprised that the raspi foundation made this - I would think this is the realm of build-it-yourself! Of course building it yourself is going to be more expensive than mass produced (and need very messy wiring), but you could at least get a nicer keyboard that way.
- black_puppydog 6y agoIt still exposes the gpio pins. So if you want to build something with a pi (as opposed to for the pi) then this is actually quite nice. I for one ordered one (and am playing with it right now) because it's an incredibly low barrier way to dogfood some software projects on arm. I'm loving it, it's very different to an arm laptop, it's got more of a console feeling which is great :)
- kzrdude 6y agoSounds great. I got an Rpi 4 this year, my first contact with this world. I'm happy with my tv/media box (that I also use as generic linux cli environment)
- jl2718 6y agoIs this thing suitable for kids and grandparents? Every other platform seems to abuse them with bloatware.
- tsjq 6y agoif they would want to watch Netflix, Prime, etc streaming videos: please check the support for those (some DRM sutff, IIRC)
- kllrnohj 6y agoNot at all. Chrome OS would be a better fit there. Unless you're teaching your kids & grandparents how to sysadmin linux and don't think they want to watch any videos online (browser support for accelerated video decoding remains a giant disaster on linux), then sure? And also that they want a desktop instead of a laptop.
- nelaboras 6y agoUbuntu with chrome and chromium tends to work fine, except for a bunch of copyright blocked Netflix shows.
- kllrnohj 6y agoChrome doesn't support hardware acceleration video decode on Linux at all. There's some unofficial patches for VaAPI support if you want to carry those around, but the Pi 4 also changed decoder support and it's generally all just a messy disaster. Low-res video can be software decoded fine, but once you start pushing 1080p or 4k it's not going to go well at all.
- VLM 6y agoOf course a "ASUS CHROMEBOX 3-N018U" runs over four times the price, so you could just buy three pi and toss them as the flash card fails and still save money.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
- cstross 6y agoCoincidentally, the bare Raspberry Pi 400 sells for £67, and the original Sinclair ZX81 (my first computer, back in 1981!) sold at launch for £70, with 1Kb of RAM. Per the ONS composite price index, £1 in 1981 is worth £4.42 today. So the equivalent cost of a Raspberry Pi 400 in 1981 would have been £15.15. (Alternatively buying a new ZX81-equivalent in 2020 would set you back £309.) Seriously, this thing is ridiculously cheap. Really demonstrates where 40 years of Moore's Law has taken us!
- f_allwein 6y agoAnd of course the Raspberry Pi 400 has 4 GB of RAM, so up by a factor of 4.000.000.
- jedimastert 6y agoDoes anyone know if there's any projects underway to make a mechanical version of this? I would pay a lot of money, and I know several internet communities that would crowdfund DIY or prebuilt versions within instants.
- lytedev 6y agoDo you mean a mechanical keyboard?
- walrus01 6y agoOne of my main concerns about the use of a raspberry pi as a desktop PC is microSD card write lifespan. microsd cards were not meant to be used as the boot disk for a live operating system. The amount of times you can write over one sector on them, and the write wear leveling algorithms, are much worse than even a $45 consumer grade SATA3 interface SSD. Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that? I would say that a huge percentage of failures I have seen of raspberry pis, when people attempt to turn them into low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months. something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.
- freerobby 6y agoYep, same problem with eMMC on Tesla's Tegra board. Solution: mount /var/log and other such partitions as ramdisks :)
- walrus01 6y agoThat's really scary and a poor choice that something which is probably buried deep in the car, and costs thousands of dollars to remove and replace, is a soldered onboard flash drive which will fail from constant use. I'd be surprised if tesla didn't have embedded systems engineering responsible for this thing, and indeed even flash memory experts on staff, who are intimately familiar with all of the design problems of flash memory write wear leveling. And they went ahead and send that design to production anyways?
- meekrohprocess 6y agoIt is quite embarrassing for them; Flash write endurance is something that most new graduates are aware of. There's an NHTSA investigation into the incident, but on the bright side, Tesla did remediate it in newer models...by using chips with twice as much eMMC memory to push the failures farther out.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
- berryworm 6y agoI can't find the PDF of the starter book, although they say in the announcement it should be available. (Edit: found it https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/beginners-guide-4th-ed https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/beginners-guide-4th-ed ) I learned programming from the handbook of my ZX Spectrum. If the Pi would come with a similar book it would be fantastic. Maybe there are other books that fill that niche for the Pi? In general I find it very hard to get my kids coding (especially as their English isn't good yet, and many languages don't have German documentation). There are some fancy books, but it turns out there are a lot of details in coding that most books can't cover.
- cbozeman 6y agoI'm about to take up the journey of learning a programming language. What books would you recommend? What are the names of these "fancy books" you mention? And lastly, do you think there are websites that teach programming languages better than books, such as DataCamp, CodeCademy, SoloLearn, etc.? What would be your recommendations?
- berryworm 6y agoI bought this book for my son (elementary school), but it is in German: "Programmieren mit Python® - supereasy". I would have preferred JavaScript, but had not immediately found a kid friendly book I liked (in German). As for recommendations, the Pi Getting Started Book does have chapters about Python and Scratch, maybe it is a good start (see free download link). I still like good books to learn a programming language. Also, good online documentation in a language is important imo. I still like the original Java tutorial from Sun/Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/ https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/ I know a teenager who has taught himself Java development from YouTube videos, which YouTube suggested to him. I think it is important to have a project and be dedicated to solve it. What is it you want to do? To give an example of an early issue we encountered: I wanted to write a simple program with my son, that asks for your date of birth and computes the number of days since your birth. But dates were not a subject of our python games programming book, so we had to read the online API documentation to figure out how to parse dates and compute time differences. Not too hard, but I think it requires dedication. In a similar way, I think books or tutorials can never cover all sorts of issues one might encounter, so a lot of patience and dedication is needed to eventually master the coding. For kids, I liked Micro:Bit, and if you are German, I would recommend the "Jugendwettbewerb Informatik" and accompanying tutorials.
- Asmod4n 6y agoCan this be used as a keyboard for a normal PC?
- Frenchgeek 6y agoI would say it's not impossible, but extremely impracticable. And since the official rapsberry pi keyboard looks just like it and is cheaper to boot...
- jens-c 6y agoI'd be interested in this is well, for the simple reason that this would de-clutter my desk when I'm using a desktop PC already and I wouldn't need to switch back and forth between two different keyboards. It's somewhat similar to some all-in-one PCs where I think they don't look too bad, if only they came with a video input port so that you can use it as a display for other devices, or simply as a monitor should the PC part become obsolete some day. From what I can gather, this is however not a built-in feature of the Pi 400 and will probably require some tinkering (which might be an interesting project in and of itself). I also understand that the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goal is to offer this product at a certain price point, and that even though many of the wishes for additional features you can read in the comments here and elsewhere are each not unreasonable by themselves, every part that is added comes at an additional cost, and that they usually decide against it if it's something that is only used by a small fraction of the user base.
- sys_64738 6y agoCan you connect a USB keyboard to the RPi 400?