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Good luck writing software for one of those N100 boxes only to find out they're sold out and you now need to extend the code for new model over and over.
by k_bx 2y ago
Good luck writing software for one of those N100 boxes only to find out they're sold out and you now need to extend the code for new model over and over.
- bluGill 2y agoN100 is standard x86. Write generic code that runs on a generic linux kernel and you won't have to worry about if this is a N100, N200, AMD, or even something weird like a 30 year old RS6000. Well if you need GPIO you have to worry a little, but you are forced to spend an extra day to support a generic GPIO framework instead of directly writing to PI pins - that extra effort means you don't care. Even in embedded where you have contracts to ensure the same hardware will be available for a decade everyone has moved that way because eventually the hardware you rely on goes out of production and so you need to support new hardware.
- k_bx 2y agoThat's great. Now what about motherboard and all the peripherals? I have to add special code when I port from rPi4 to rPi5, code like this (in Python) for some GPIO logic: chip = None try: # rpi5 chip = gpiod.Chip("gpiochip4") except FileNotFoundError as e: # rpi4 chip = gpiod.Chip("gpiochip0") Now imagine having to support whole zoo of N100-based machines from different manufacturers? With Raspberry Pi, you can always expect to just buy more of your rPi device. I've seen people rely on Orange Pi only to find that it's out of stock and they need to port their code to rPi now.