4 ms·

I certainly don't understand why so many jumped on a bandwagon of a SBC which was basically an obscure GPU with some accidentally attached ARM cores, on an I/O

by megous 5y ago

I certainly don't understand why so many jumped on a bandwagon of a SBC which was basically an obscure GPU with some accidentally attached ARM cores, on an I/O starved SoC design, that still doesn't have a useful opensource bootloader even after 8 years or so,... when much more interesting, more open, and chepaer alternatives started appearing rather quickly after the first Rpis.

geerlingguy 5y ago
IMO, it comes down to the support and ecosystem. Even though it would be nice to have something more open than Broadcom's chips, the corporate/foundation backing of the project, and the broad adoption after those first few revisions (coupled with the fact that Pis are still some of the cheapest options around) means that someone can come into the ecosystem blind and not have to spend hours or days just figuring out how to get an OS running on the darn thing. And then the fact that you can still run a supported modern OS on an almost 10 year old board... that doesn't seem to happen with other SBCs (most are basically shelved after a couple years), and you end up running ancient OSes on them or obscure community-driven OSes that break in a hundred different ways.
- megous 5y ago
  There are a lot of boards that have mainline u-boot/Linux support, don't need neither any wonky 4MiB binary firmware which does who knows what, nor any vendor specific tools to control basic things like HDMI, or CPU frequency, and just work for years with any arm based distro. Personally I think it's just a better marketing.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    You don't need vendor specific tools. Especially not on the pi 4 but even before that. The RPi foundation stayed on a 32 bit distro with the proprietary graphics stack forever due to some silly fear of breaking.. something (?) or whatever but mainline linux has been able to manage everything about graphics and display with the vc4 drm/kms driver for ages. CPU frequency has of course been controlled by a mainline kernel driver for ages – heck that's supported in all of the BSD OSes as well.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    That wasn't my experience, pre-raspberry-pi. There were projects, sure - but they rarely sold in large volumes. That meant not many paid developers. And if you had a problem you'd be lucky if someone online had even experienced the same problem, let alone found a fix for it. Every chip vendor seemed to have their own kernel fork with their own patches, and didn't much care to get them upstreamed. And of course, their kernel would be ancient - they're selling it for things like automotive infotainment systems which don't give a shit about security. Want to attach, say, a battery-backed RTC to your SBC? I hope you know the difference between a dtc and a dtbi. And even if someone else has been nice enough to get the same part working on their SBC, just because a TI processor needs the line 'dmas = < 0x21 0x1c 0x00 0x21 0x1d 0x00 >;' doesn't mean you can copy that to a Freescale processor and expect it to work. More than once I brought SBCs that came with a connector for a MIPI camera - but no camera available, and no software either. You want a camera? Plug in a USB webcam. And let's be honest: If you want features like wifi and hardware h264 support you're going to be dealing with wonky binary firmware anyway.
    - megous 5y ago
      I'm writing about '2-years-post-raspberry-pi' period when a plenty of "clones" started popping up. I say clones in quotes because they mostly shared just a form factor and started innovating pretty quickly with both form factor and features.
  - forty 5y ago
    You can boot your rpi to mainline uboot (it does not remove the wonky firmware though :) ) I feel wonky firmwares are pretty common in the arm world though (and in other worlds too)
cillian64 5y ago
Because I can google “How to drive addressable LEDs from Raspberry Pi”, for example, and find a lot of example projects and blog posts and not have to reinvent the wheel. It’s inelegant for sure, but great for prototyping or duct tape projects where you want to stand on the shoulders of others and just get something working quickly.
- megous 5y ago
  You can google the exact same phrase and just use the Rpi solution/code on any other Linux based SBC, because gpio has a standard userspace API on Linux. All you change is pin mapping at most. Though yeah, if you don't care about the SBC capabilities at all, and your goal is to just drive some LEDs from Linux, you can just as well buy whatever is familiar to you, regardless of any shortcomings.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    The addressable LEDs aren't typically just bit banging GPIOs. There's no clock line with common protocols in the space like the WS2812, and they're very susceptible to jitter. Twiddling GPIOs from user space is basically a non starter. I've had success though with using the MOSI line from a SPI master and carefully crafting the bit pattern and timing to get the waveform I want. It takes some manual work though, more than what you get from user space.
bigiain 5y ago
$35 (At least that was the "Holy fuck, really? I gonna get one of those" thing for me.)
sneak 5y ago
> when much more interesting, more open, and chepaer alternatives started appearing rather quickly after the first Rpis Like what?
- megous 5y ago
  I liked Orange Pi PC's. $10-$15 for much more umph than much more expensive Rpi 2b that was all the rage at the same time. No special firmware needed for anything, everything open, real SoC user manual available, not the lol thing broadcom released, schematics, etc. Very nice linux-sunxi community with large and detailed wiki.
justin66 5y ago
If you're actually interested in figuring this out for yourself instead of attributing it to "marketing," compare and contrast with the situation of the Beaglebone boards. Those came out several years prior to the Raspberry Pi, get plenty of PR and press, have received really good updates through the years, have the direct backing of a major manufacturer, are very open, and have a more conventional SoC design. In short, we're talking about stuff that failed to hold back the Raspberry Pi onslaught even though it existed years before the Pi and even though it addresses the stuff you said you care about. Basically, Pi users want different things than you want, and the Pi people were pretty good at delivering those things. I assume the attention to early education in addition to hackers and makers, and somehow persuading or inspiring some hackers to work on a Debian armhf port with user-friendly features at a time when most people already wanted armhf to just go away and die, were decisive. Those were what really set the Pi apart and served to bring in more and more developers and users. After that's it's a virtuous cycle of more and more content creation and enthusiasm surrounding the platform.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Anecdotally, Beagle had zero marketing compared to the Pi. Only hardcore geeks had heard of it, whereas when the Pi came out, "normies" wowed at this "cheap credit card sized computer!" that they saw on the news. In schools and workplaces, you could find plenty of people who had heard of the Pi or even had bought one, but they'd never heard of the alternatives. Plenty of people literally think the Pi was the first SBC too. And Pi quickly ended up on the virtual shelves of mainstream electronics stores (along with the Arduinos); the alternatives never came (the only one I remember seeing is the Asus Tinkerboard which I guess has all the marketing power of Asus behind it so that's not too unexpected), and you still have to shop for them on Ebay/Ali*/whatever.
  - justin66 5y ago
    > Anecdotally, Beagle had zero marketing compared to the Pi. Only hardcore geeks had heard of it, whereas when the Pi came out, "normies" wowed at this "cheap credit card sized computer!" that they saw on the news. I remember those times, and I'm not sure how to quantify this stuff, and it's not like I know about marketing in general. But... I'm not sure the Pi had more marketing. I'm very sure it had more effective marketing. It seems to me like there are probably some lessons there if somebody wanted to dig into it. I mean honestly, the Pi guys were like a handful of Cambridge people with no money and an in with Broadcom in the beginning. I'm pretty sure I found out about the Beagle from none other than Texas Instruments. It seems to me like the one-offs, clones, and general other stuff that came after Pi and Beagle are deliberately targeting the Beagle-type people rather than the Pi-type people, and there are just fewer of those people. All the industrial sales of Pi hardware suggest that once you've grown the user base beyond a certain point, you can target the Pi-type people all day long and the hackers and industrial customers will hop on board because they value the volume of what you're producing.
ArgyleSound 5y ago
Which ones? I'm only aware of boards that aren't anywhere near the £5-35 price class the Raspberry Pis inhabit, and even then there's just absolutely nothing like the third party ecosystem that the Pis have.
14u2c 5y ago
> chepaer alternatives started appearing rather quickly after the first Rpis. I'm not so sure about this. The value is incredible for what you get and the quality of the ecosystem. The original Zero W was $5 and the new Zero W 2 in the article is $15. That's cheaper than a knock off Arduino board. They are honestly so cheap I have a hard time not picking up yet another one every time I visit the store.
- megous 5y ago
  Orange Pi PC did cost just $15 Orange Pi One $10 Much better deal than comparable Rpis at the time. (Rpi2)

by megous 5y ago

geerlingguy 5y ago

IMO, it comes down to the support and ecosystem. Even though it would be nice to have something more open than Broadcom's chips, the corporate/foundation backing of the project, and the broad adoption after those first few revisions (coupled with the fact that Pis are still some of the cheapest options around) means that someone can come into the ecosystem blind and not have to spend hours or days just figuring out how to get an OS running on the darn thing. And then the fact that you can still run a supported modern OS on an almost 10 year old board... that doesn't seem to happen with other SBCs (most are basically shelved after a couple years), and you end up running ancient OSes on them or obscure community-driven OSes that break in a hundred different ways.

megous 5y ago
There are a lot of boards that have mainline u-boot/Linux support, don't need neither any wonky 4MiB binary firmware which does who knows what, nor any vendor specific tools to control basic things like HDMI, or CPU frequency, and just work for years with any arm based distro. Personally I think it's just a better marketing.
- floatboth 5y ago
  You don't need vendor specific tools. Especially not on the pi 4 but even before that. The RPi foundation stayed on a 32 bit distro with the proprietary graphics stack forever due to some silly fear of breaking.. something (?) or whatever but mainline linux has been able to manage everything about graphics and display with the vc4 drm/kms driver for ages. CPU frequency has of course been controlled by a mainline kernel driver for ages – heck that's supported in all of the BSD OSes as well.
- michaelt 5y ago
  That wasn't my experience, pre-raspberry-pi. There were projects, sure - but they rarely sold in large volumes. That meant not many paid developers. And if you had a problem you'd be lucky if someone online had even experienced the same problem, let alone found a fix for it. Every chip vendor seemed to have their own kernel fork with their own patches, and didn't much care to get them upstreamed. And of course, their kernel would be ancient - they're selling it for things like automotive infotainment systems which don't give a shit about security. Want to attach, say, a battery-backed RTC to your SBC? I hope you know the difference between a dtc and a dtbi. And even if someone else has been nice enough to get the same part working on their SBC, just because a TI processor needs the line 'dmas = < 0x21 0x1c 0x00 0x21 0x1d 0x00 >;' doesn't mean you can copy that to a Freescale processor and expect it to work. More than once I brought SBCs that came with a connector for a MIPI camera - but no camera available, and no software either. You want a camera? Plug in a USB webcam. And let's be honest: If you want features like wifi and hardware h264 support you're going to be dealing with wonky binary firmware anyway.
  - megous 5y ago
    I'm writing about '2-years-post-raspberry-pi' period when a plenty of "clones" started popping up. I say clones in quotes because they mostly shared just a form factor and started innovating pretty quickly with both form factor and features.
- forty 5y ago
  You can boot your rpi to mainline uboot (it does not remove the wonky firmware though :) ) I feel wonky firmwares are pretty common in the arm world though (and in other worlds too)

cillian64 5y ago

Because I can google “How to drive addressable LEDs from Raspberry Pi”, for example, and find a lot of example projects and blog posts and not have to reinvent the wheel. It’s inelegant for sure, but great for prototyping or duct tape projects where you want to stand on the shoulders of others and just get something working quickly.

megous 5y ago
You can google the exact same phrase and just use the Rpi solution/code on any other Linux based SBC, because gpio has a standard userspace API on Linux. All you change is pin mapping at most. Though yeah, if you don't care about the SBC capabilities at all, and your goal is to just drive some LEDs from Linux, you can just as well buy whatever is familiar to you, regardless of any shortcomings.
- monocasa 5y ago
  The addressable LEDs aren't typically just bit banging GPIOs. There's no clock line with common protocols in the space like the WS2812, and they're very susceptible to jitter. Twiddling GPIOs from user space is basically a non starter. I've had success though with using the MOSI line from a SPI master and carefully crafting the bit pattern and timing to get the waveform I want. It takes some manual work though, more than what you get from user space.

bigiain 5y ago

$35 (At least that was the "Holy fuck, really? I gonna get one of those" thing for me.)

sneak 5y ago

> when much more interesting, more open, and chepaer alternatives started appearing rather quickly after the first Rpis Like what?

megous 5y ago
I liked Orange Pi PC's. $10-$15 for much more umph than much more expensive Rpi 2b that was all the rage at the same time. No special firmware needed for anything, everything open, real SoC user manual available, not the lol thing broadcom released, schematics, etc. Very nice linux-sunxi community with large and detailed wiki.

justin66 5y ago

If you're actually interested in figuring this out for yourself instead of attributing it to "marketing," compare and contrast with the situation of the Beaglebone boards. Those came out several years prior to the Raspberry Pi, get plenty of PR and press, have received really good updates through the years, have the direct backing of a major manufacturer, are very open, and have a more conventional SoC design. In short, we're talking about stuff that failed to hold back the Raspberry Pi onslaught even though it existed years before the Pi and even though it addresses the stuff you said you care about. Basically, Pi users want different things than you want, and the Pi people were pretty good at delivering those things. I assume the attention to early education in addition to hackers and makers, and somehow persuading or inspiring some hackers to work on a Debian armhf port with user-friendly features at a time when most people already wanted armhf to just go away and die, were decisive. Those were what really set the Pi apart and served to bring in more and more developers and users. After that's it's a virtuous cycle of more and more content creation and enthusiasm surrounding the platform.

foxfluff 5y ago
Anecdotally, Beagle had zero marketing compared to the Pi. Only hardcore geeks had heard of it, whereas when the Pi came out, "normies" wowed at this "cheap credit card sized computer!" that they saw on the news. In schools and workplaces, you could find plenty of people who had heard of the Pi or even had bought one, but they'd never heard of the alternatives. Plenty of people literally think the Pi was the first SBC too. And Pi quickly ended up on the virtual shelves of mainstream electronics stores (along with the Arduinos); the alternatives never came (the only one I remember seeing is the Asus Tinkerboard which I guess has all the marketing power of Asus behind it so that's not too unexpected), and you still have to shop for them on Ebay/Ali*/whatever.
- justin66 5y ago
  > Anecdotally, Beagle had zero marketing compared to the Pi. Only hardcore geeks had heard of it, whereas when the Pi came out, "normies" wowed at this "cheap credit card sized computer!" that they saw on the news. I remember those times, and I'm not sure how to quantify this stuff, and it's not like I know about marketing in general. But... I'm not sure the Pi had more marketing. I'm very sure it had more effective marketing. It seems to me like there are probably some lessons there if somebody wanted to dig into it. I mean honestly, the Pi guys were like a handful of Cambridge people with no money and an in with Broadcom in the beginning. I'm pretty sure I found out about the Beagle from none other than Texas Instruments. It seems to me like the one-offs, clones, and general other stuff that came after Pi and Beagle are deliberately targeting the Beagle-type people rather than the Pi-type people, and there are just fewer of those people. All the industrial sales of Pi hardware suggest that once you've grown the user base beyond a certain point, you can target the Pi-type people all day long and the hackers and industrial customers will hop on board because they value the volume of what you're producing.

ArgyleSound 5y ago

Which ones? I'm only aware of boards that aren't anywhere near the £5-35 price class the Raspberry Pis inhabit, and even then there's just absolutely nothing like the third party ecosystem that the Pis have.

14u2c 5y ago

> chepaer alternatives started appearing rather quickly after the first Rpis. I'm not so sure about this. The value is incredible for what you get and the quality of the ecosystem. The original Zero W was $5 and the new Zero W 2 in the article is $15. That's cheaper than a knock off Arduino board. They are honestly so cheap I have a hard time not picking up yet another one every time I visit the store.

megous 5y ago
Orange Pi PC did cost just $15 Orange Pi One $10 Much better deal than comparable Rpis at the time. (Rpi2)