Really want to like these (400/500 and the 4/5 generally) but - at least where I am - the pricing makes them hard to consider when the N100 is so cheap, sips power and (for my use-cases, anyway) lets you dodge any Arm-related compatibility issues.
Is the gui any more usable on Rpi5? I haven’t even bothered with trying Pi5 because I got a 16GB/256GB N100 for $120. The 500 could be fun for kids tho.
Its definitely getting more usable with each generation but still not at the performance level during general use as an old i5 mini pc or N100. It always feels to me that there's a bottleneck with the Rpis that hold it back more than the cpu benchmarks suggest.
In my experience memory is very slow on the RPis... I'm talking factor if 10 improvements by getting rid of copies.
For video decoding on the GPU, processing on the same GPU memory in place and then displaying takes significantly less work than decoding on the CPU copying to the GPU and doing the rest their and most of the time is in the copy.
I sourced a 16GB Optane in the 2242 form for $20, but if you get a full size adapter the 2280 Optane is less than $5 on eBay for a 16GB Optane drive that will run the heavy Raspbian image with plenty of room and swap.
david@liqueur:~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p2 13G 4.8G 7.3G 40% /
david@liqueur:~ $ swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/var/swap file 204784 0 -2
Sure the adapter introduce a cost, but even a used Optane drive is going to have better reliability, in addition to the mentioned performance, than a new SDcard; so pay $5.
Not sure - I haven’t tried the 5 and my 4 (8gb SKU) no longer has a desktop environment on it. I put it on the wall next to the tele for use with VirtualHere (low-latency controller connection) on Ubuntu for a Moonlight game streaming setup. Which I think is an excellent use-case for it (although wildly over-provisioned on RAM).
Yeah I was thinking of the 500 in the context of a good kid’s machine. The portability is definitely a plus, although if you’re having to pack a display and a power cable anyway, I think I would (and will, since I happen to be looking for something right now) just go with a Beelink S12 or similar. The kid can do some light gaming on it then, too. The 400 keyboard doesn’t look particularly nice to type on either, tbh.
I bought a 400 mostly to support them and I like the designs the PI team does. It felt a bit underpowered as someone with a powerful x86 fedora desktop, but it reminds me of the 'cheap enough to let a kid play/break it' hand-me-down computers I grew up with. I wish I had more time to tinker around, build a 'cyberdeck'.
Give Alpine Linux (RPi version) a try. I mostly moved away from RPis but wanted to try it anyway and was suprised of how small and efficient it is, just like on other platforms; musl makes a ton of difference.
Too bad they have ready images for the RPi but none for other ARM boards; that would be a godsend.
I also got a 400 for my kid. It was an ok experience, but I had reliability problems. Just wouldn’t turn on consistently! This made it frustrating for the kid to engage with even though he enjoyed it when available.
I think the problem was a compatibility issue between the Pi’s video output and the old TV I was using as a monitor. I used a fresh micro HDMI to full HDMI cable as a direct connection, but still took a lot of fiddling to get it on.
Now I’m building a full sized PC for him. We built a KBDcraft Adam keyboard for it together, which he really enjoyed https://kbdcraft.store/products/adam
The presence of a GPIO connector in a keyboard format computer is basically the entire point of the Raspberry Pi 400.
You can consider the Pi 400 to be a very particular love letter to the BBC model B, with the GPIO port providing the kind of physical computing access provided by the "Tube" port.
I think the frustration was probably that it seemed like, to them, many more people would potentially benefit from not having to have a video adapter on the SBC in a keyboard form factor, and an adapter potentially to full-sized pinout on the GPIO headers, than having to have an adapter for video, and the full-sized GPIO pins, since most people are likely not buying the keyboard form factor as a headless device.
> since most people are likely not buying the keyboard form factor as a headless device
A big part of the aim was simply to provide a nearly-all-in-one device for educational computing.
Physical computing is part of the school curriculum in the UK, mainly starting in Key Stage 2 (7-11 year olds, though there's some in Key Stage 1, as well).
This device exists in a very particular market space where for example the CrowPi laptops sell quite well. But it has been made by team of people who are influenced by the BBC Model B and the profound impact it had.
Sure, and I'm not advocating for removing the GPIO, just that it seems like "make the GPIO require an adapter, and allow full-sized video without one" might service more use cases without an adapter, since I propose that more people want to use the Pi 400 with video than want to use it with GPIO.
I'm not saying the latter isn't a significant fraction, I'm just saying I think almost nobody buys the keyboard form factor device not to use the video with it.
I'm not sure why this got downvoted. HDMI isn't that large, and needing a specialty adapter for an otherwise useful device isn't good. I'd gladly pay the extra $0.30 or whatever for the full size port. Instead I have more future landfill sitting on the shelf - a dedicated weird port to regular HDMI cable. Thanks guys.
Please put a pointing device on the 500. They make the 400 as tiny as possible, then waste the smallness by making you burn a bunch of desk space by adding a mouse.
I wonder if they will. I can't imagine anything trackpoint-like -- too expensive -- but it's not impossible they'll put a trackpad in.
The Pi 400 is small because it's meant to be aimed at the young. But young children are good with clicking buttons and poor with fine dexterity; they will likely do better with mice.
A clip-on trackpad to go alongside it would be nice, though.
I'm not really the target market but I am hoping a Pi 500 will tick all the right boxes to use as a cheap computer in a space-constrained workshop.
Really want to like these (400/500 and the 4/5 generally) but - at least where I am - the pricing makes them hard to consider when the N100 is so cheap, sips power and (for my use-cases, anyway) lets you dodge any Arm-related compatibility issues.
Is the gui any more usable on Rpi5? I haven’t even bothered with trying Pi5 because I got a 16GB/256GB N100 for $120. The 500 could be fun for kids tho.
Its definitely getting more usable with each generation but still not at the performance level during general use as an old i5 mini pc or N100. It always feels to me that there's a bottleneck with the Rpis that hold it back more than the cpu benchmarks suggest.
In my experience memory is very slow on the RPis... I'm talking factor if 10 improvements by getting rid of copies.
For video decoding on the GPU, processing on the same GPU memory in place and then displaying takes significantly less work than decoding on the CPU copying to the GPU and doing the rest their and most of the time is in the copy.
The SD card disk slows things down a lot. The rpi 5 lets you use a PCIe disk.
I sourced a 16GB Optane in the 2242 form for $20, but if you get a full size adapter the 2280 Optane is less than $5 on eBay for a 16GB Optane drive that will run the heavy Raspbian image with plenty of room and swap.
david@liqueur:~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p2 13G 4.8G 7.3G 40% /
david@liqueur:~ $ swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/var/swap file 204784 0 -2
Sure the adapter introduce a cost, but even a used Optane drive is going to have better reliability, in addition to the mentioned performance, than a new SDcard; so pay $5.
Not sure - I haven’t tried the 5 and my 4 (8gb SKU) no longer has a desktop environment on it. I put it on the wall next to the tele for use with VirtualHere (low-latency controller connection) on Ubuntu for a Moonlight game streaming setup. Which I think is an excellent use-case for it (although wildly over-provisioned on RAM).
Yeah I was thinking of the 500 in the context of a good kid’s machine. The portability is definitely a plus, although if you’re having to pack a display and a power cable anyway, I think I would (and will, since I happen to be looking for something right now) just go with a Beelink S12 or similar. The kid can do some light gaming on it then, too. The 400 keyboard doesn’t look particularly nice to type on either, tbh.
I bought a 400 mostly to support them and I like the designs the PI team does. It felt a bit underpowered as someone with a powerful x86 fedora desktop, but it reminds me of the 'cheap enough to let a kid play/break it' hand-me-down computers I grew up with. I wish I had more time to tinker around, build a 'cyberdeck'.
I’ve found that the Plan9 operating system flies on Pi3 and Pi4; if you have any interest in using Plan9 you could check it out.
Give Alpine Linux (RPi version) a try. I mostly moved away from RPis but wanted to try it anyway and was suprised of how small and efficient it is, just like on other platforms; musl makes a ton of difference. Too bad they have ready images for the RPi but none for other ARM boards; that would be a godsend.
Exactly what I did with my original raspi…. Gave it to my son, and he used it to learn about over clocking.
See: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/10/cyberdecking-raspberry-pi-400-o...
I also got a 400 for my kid. It was an ok experience, but I had reliability problems. Just wouldn’t turn on consistently! This made it frustrating for the kid to engage with even though he enjoyed it when available.
I think the problem was a compatibility issue between the Pi’s video output and the old TV I was using as a monitor. I used a fresh micro HDMI to full HDMI cable as a direct connection, but still took a lot of fiddling to get it on.
Now I’m building a full sized PC for him. We built a KBDcraft Adam keyboard for it together, which he really enjoyed https://kbdcraft.store/products/adam
Oh my, I'm hyped. Been waiting for that for a while. I mean, for my kid (at least officially) .
I would gladly overpay if there will be an 8G version, as it would make it a nice set - decent spec plus decent passive cooling out of the box.
> decent passive cooling out of the box
We should hope so, pi 5 dumps a lot of heat, it might need a passively cooled aluminium case plate so it doesn't throttle
I believe that's exactly what pi400 had and expect new cooling should be even more massive if rpi5 is the base of this computer.
Initial support has just been merged in the Raspeberry Pi's linux kernel repository.
Will there be full size HDMI or will the cabal that forces them to use mini/microHDMI keep its hold on the 500?
I never got why they left the waste of a GPIO connector on the 400 and forced you to have to adapt the video outs.
The presence of a GPIO connector in a keyboard format computer is basically the entire point of the Raspberry Pi 400.
You can consider the Pi 400 to be a very particular love letter to the BBC model B, with the GPIO port providing the kind of physical computing access provided by the "Tube" port.
Aren't the GPIO pins, like, the one thing that differentiates the Pi from any other micro PC?
waste of a gpio connector?
that's the whole point for a lot of us, otherwise we'd just use one of the billion other SBCs.
If the requisite is "I need an sbc to jam into a keyboard that has a modern vid-out" there are plenty of small SBCs and massive keyboards.
I think the frustration was probably that it seemed like, to them, many more people would potentially benefit from not having to have a video adapter on the SBC in a keyboard form factor, and an adapter potentially to full-sized pinout on the GPIO headers, than having to have an adapter for video, and the full-sized GPIO pins, since most people are likely not buying the keyboard form factor as a headless device.
> since most people are likely not buying the keyboard form factor as a headless device
A big part of the aim was simply to provide a nearly-all-in-one device for educational computing.
Physical computing is part of the school curriculum in the UK, mainly starting in Key Stage 2 (7-11 year olds, though there's some in Key Stage 1, as well).
This device exists in a very particular market space where for example the CrowPi laptops sell quite well. But it has been made by team of people who are influenced by the BBC Model B and the profound impact it had.
Sure, and I'm not advocating for removing the GPIO, just that it seems like "make the GPIO require an adapter, and allow full-sized video without one" might service more use cases without an adapter, since I propose that more people want to use the Pi 400 with video than want to use it with GPIO.
I'm not saying the latter isn't a significant fraction, I'm just saying I think almost nobody buys the keyboard form factor device not to use the video with it.
I'm not sure why this got downvoted. HDMI isn't that large, and needing a specialty adapter for an otherwise useful device isn't good. I'd gladly pay the extra $0.30 or whatever for the full size port. Instead I have more future landfill sitting on the shelf - a dedicated weird port to regular HDMI cable. Thanks guys.
Please put a pointing device on the 500. They make the 400 as tiny as possible, then waste the smallness by making you burn a bunch of desk space by adding a mouse.
I wonder if they will. I can't imagine anything trackpoint-like -- too expensive -- but it's not impossible they'll put a trackpad in.
The Pi 400 is small because it's meant to be aimed at the young. But young children are good with clicking buttons and poor with fine dexterity; they will likely do better with mice.
A clip-on trackpad to go alongside it would be nice, though.
I'm not really the target market but I am hoping a Pi 500 will tick all the right boxes to use as a cheap computer in a space-constrained workshop.
Please don't, that's added cost that 90% of us don't need.