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Raspberry Pi 3 Brings Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (i-programmer.info)
mikejuk writes: Details of the next in the family of the successful Raspberry Pi family have become available as part of FCC testing documents. The Pi 3 finally includes WiFi and Bluetooth/LE. Comparing the board with the Pi 2 it is clear that most of the electronics has stayed the same. A Raspberry Pi with built in WiFi and Bluetooth puts it directly in competition with the new Linux based Arduinos, Intel's Edison and its derivatives, and with the ESP8266 — a very low cost (about $2) but not well known WiFi board. And of course, it will be in competition with its own stablemates. If the Pi 3 is only a few dollars more than the Pi 2 then it will be the obvious first choice. This would effectively make the Pi Zero, at $5 with no networking, king of the low end and the Pi 3 the choice at the other end of the spectrum. Let's hope they make more than one or two before the launch because the $5 Pi Zero is still out of stock most places three months after being announced and it is annoying a lot of potential users.
I'd rather see faster IO than built-in wireless. I can easily add a dongle for wifi or bluetooth if I want it, but the current architectural constraints mean the Pi's not a great board for a low-end, low-power file server.
Can they instead get direct communication to the ethernet port, not that shitty solution over USB?
It's not just the ethernet-port that is over USB, but it and all four of the USB-ports are all connected to a single, internal hub, meaning they all share the 480Mbps bandwidth. That's kind of crappy, would be nice to have it more like e.g. my Orange Pi PC is, ie. it has 3 USB-ports that are all fully capable of the 480Mbps -- no internal hub, whatsoever, and no sharing of bandwidth -- and the ethernet-interface is actually connected directly to the SoC, too. Though, unlike you, I would definitely want built-in WiFi and I heartily welcome that in RPi3.
As an aside, I wonder if RPi3 will finally bring HEVC-support with it. It's one of those things I care a lot about.
No. Most people don't give a shit about that for what they are using this for. The nice thing about the ecosysytem today is that if you have a list of must-have features, you can find something that works for you. Complaining because you want high-end performance and networking in what is and has always been a low end part is just retarded. Pick the right part for your application and if it costs a few dollars extra there is a good reason for it.
The Pi is a general-purpose device that's pretty cheap and therefore accessible to a lot of people willing to do reasonably simple things.
Considering what you get for your money it's actually pretty good.
If you use it for one thing at a time it's pretty decent. And it's a great platform to learn embedded solutions on. Also realize that a lot of embedded devices out there are a lot more constrained than what the Pi is.
If you want something cheaper you can go for the Atmega, but then you lack a lot of the features offered by a real OS.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Well, the only thing I miss in the Pi2 is an audio in connector, not the end of the world though since I can use an USB sound card instead.
What I have used it for so far is to set up an APRS digipeater/igate and as a controller for a radio repeater with subtone control.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Then list them. Otherwise we don't know about them. As soon as I have looked into the alternatives I have realized that everyone of them have some shortcoming.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Now if only the Orange Pi had software that used its four procesors and was stable
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Because they're cheap and have decent performance for their cheapness. I don't actually give a flying crap about I/O speed. About the only thing I wish it had was a variant with two of those USB-Ethernet dongles built in, wifi built in, and retaining at least a couple USB ports. If I need multiple Ethernet ports, I've been attaching dongles anyhow, so why not build them in? The benefit is the device is that it is dirt cheap. I have a number of them in service in manufacturing acting as web servers for performing specific tasks (mostly for flashing microcontrollers and loading configurations on boards that cost 3-50 times as much). Sure, I could put a cheap desktop in there, but we're talking a massive increase in cost and physical size (I do use one of these where I/O would be a problem with a RasPi). It's all about using the right tool for the job...
no there are a bunch of suckalicious unsupported "rasberry pi killers". Topping the list is the Orange Pi, which has great specs and non working software.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Most users don't need the I/O headers either. Many people don't need the wired Ethernet. The Raspberry Pi is a compromise device, but it's a pretty good compromise. And the high volume keeps the price down more than saving on any single piece of hardware.
The primary design goal of the Raspberry Pi is still a cheap general purpose computer people can use for learning and education. That's why it has an HDMI port, and that's why Bluetooth (keyboard, mouse) and WiFi also make sense.
No, there aren't. You can't list 10 in that price range that outperform it.
Pi2 makes a great Kodi system but falls short on 1080i/p. It needs just a bit more power hopefully this new Pi will do it
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
This argument always breaks down when the person making it is asked to provide actual alternatives.
It also breaks down when you look at actual use cases. For many people, compatibility and ecosystem are far more important than performance. My use case: A classroom full of 4-6 graders, and a bunch of SD-Cards, electronic components, and prototype boards. The RPi "just works". It boots Linux, there are lots and lots of online tutorials, sample code, and projects that kids can do. The only other board that comes close is Arduino, and we use those too, but it can't do the same high level stuff as a RPi, such as running a webserver.
I'm pretty sure the Pi's Ethernet network interface is stable. I have been managing a fleet of them.
There is a whole list of other potential problems. Did you remember to opto-isolate your I/O? and place RC snubbers or free-wheeling diodes on the loads? I have seen many an embedded project go wrong with inductive kick-back problems.
I did notice the operating system tends to freeze when accessing the SD card. I wasn't clear if that was because the SD card layer was doing a lock on the operating system, or it was just a lock on my application, which was waiting for I/O. For one generation, we added an automatic reboot cron-job to reboot the Pi's periodically. This was to overcome some issues with USB WiFi communications. I don't think this is needed with the latest Raspberry Pi's.
On the whole, the Raspberry Pi has been one of the best embedded platforms that I have worked with. I can give pages of creative bugs/issues with some of the other industrial micro-controller products. If the Raspberry Pi had a fast disk (SATA) interface and built-in WiFi, I would be very happy.
The Raspberry Pi is designed for broad pedagogical support. It's not for hackers or nerds. It's to introduce school kids to hardware. It's a cheap package with a support organization behind it so that regular people, like school teachers, can come up to speed with it enough that kids get exposed to it.
It has never been intended to be a hacker's platform, nor a low-cost SBC for 20-70 year olds to use.
Actually, Orange Pis were heavily overclocked and overvolted by Steven and whoever are behind the designs, bringing the clocks and volts down to within the range designed by Allwinner fixes stability - issues and thermals -- no need to underclock or undervolt. That said, they are selling Orange Pis and advertising with the heavily - overclocked and overvolted specs, which is kind of dishonest.
I have several Raspberry PI and none of them failed yet. They are accidentally left on for months and come up without issues if a monitor is attached There is one which has been working for years attached to a monitor and network 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is running a browser, so it is not even a server with console only. I use them all in a case and I switch off swap on the continuously working one.
I think everyone who's even remotely into hobby electronics knows what the ESP8266 is. They would also know that it has a tiny TINY microcontroller which can only run rudimentary code on it and puts it more in line with a WiFi dongle than anything else on your list.
It is capable of a whole lot more than what you give it credit for, see e.g. https://youtu.be/SSiRkpgwVKY?t... for a very neat example.
The ESP8266 isn't that tiny. It's still a lot better than the ATmega328P used on a basic Arduino and you see tons of people make projects with those. Sure it doesn't have as much I/O pins, DACs, etc but for the CPU/RAM part, it's way better.
ATmega328:
8-bit AVR RISC-based CPU running at 20 MHz (16 MHz on Arduino)
32 KiB flash memory for instructions, 1 KiB EEPROM, 2 KiB SRAM
ESP8266:
32-bit RISC CPU running at 80 MHz
64 KiB of instruction RAM, 96 KiB of data RAM
Fifteen years ago math and science students would have *killed* for the opportunity to get a PC with a Mathematica license and this kind of performance, especially when you can get the whole thing for under $50.
The Mathematica performance isn't impressive now - a normal PC will be more than 10x faster- but it's passable for simple work, and Mathematica licenses can be very expensive.
(Mathematica on the original RPi was just a gimmick, since it was really much too slow even to use the interface. But the RPi2 is a big step forward.)
And NONE of them have the community RPi does. Technical superiority is never a guarantee of success. The Rpis bigest fault is the internal busses are pretty weak, other than that its a solid SoC for the money. Nothing can touch the Pi Zero in performance per dollar, its fantastic. I have one with a 128 GB micro SD card capturing himawari-8 data every 10 minutes and displaying it on my living room TV.
Good-bye
Perfect example. For what you want to do it's 'better'. However, for my project I need to connect a NrF24L01 radio to it. This is necessary because my arduino based sensors are powered by a pair of AA batteries. If I used the GL.iNet networking I would probably have to make my sensors ESP8266 baded and transmit the data via WiFi. This would use 6-8x the amount of power over what the NrF24L01 uses and I would need to buy a WiFi access point if I didn't already have one (although that's last part is probably not much of an issue for most of us).
While the GL.iNet has better networking capabilities the RPi 2 has a quad core CPU running at 900 MHz instead of 400 MHz. Since I store the data to a SQL database and then use JPGraph to convert it to images on the web pages that I use to view the data summary the CPU is a bigger issue for me. And for $13 more I have a device that can be repurposed into a media center at a later date if I find another solution to use as a reciever/database/webserver.
Which isn't to say that the GL.iNet is a bad device. If I want to build a portable TOR modem it would be a much better choice than the RPi. 'Better' all comes down to what you are doing.
Not to be pedantic, but if the issue is that the SDcard dies that is probably more of an issue of the SDcard than the PI. I say 'probably' because it is possible for a machine to be hammering the SDCard and kill it a lot quicker but neither of my RPi's seem to do that as a normal part of operations. Of course I'm using a pair of RPi 2 and the RPi B+ might be different. Also, your specific usage could be such that you're doing a lot more access of the SDCard than I am (although since I'm running a database that is getting updates about every 30 seconds my guess is the only usage case where you are hammering the card more than I am over a sustained period is because of a programming error).
For many people, compatibility and ecosystem are far more important than performance.
Exactly. There are many alternatives to the Raspberry Pi (though I'm still not sure any can match it on cost). But none of them ship with something like NOOBS, a simple installation script that will magic on any number of very specific purpose built Linux distributions like super slim RISC, media centres like OpenELEC, just general Rasbian, (equips demonic shield with +10 fire resistance) Windows 10 IoT edition.
I didn't want to add "ease of getting started" to my wish list, because I'm still keen to know if the GP is actually capable of naming a better performing device for the same price.