On 05/03/15 00:22, Jeremy Jongepier wrote:
On 03/03/2015 11:35 PM, Ken Restivo wrote:
After doing several Raspberry Pi projects, I'm very negative on them, and will never use them or recommend them again.
The built-in audio is crap, it's not even 16-bit.
True, it's 11-bit PWM so also not your standard DAC ;)
best use for Raspberries for me has been when I want to run audio and image
through HDMI, with some GPIO based controls connected locally with the
networking used for set-up only, or simple networked messaging for cues ...
mostly as multiple stand alone devices feeding projectors and speakers.
Also with a wolfson card for audio ... but that doubles the price and adds
several complications, but also offers quite interesting opportunities I have
only started exploring.
The power management and regulation is non-existent and sucks. Raspberry
Pi's have destroyed a half-dozen SD cards of mine. The people in the Pi
community just shrug about this. It's unacceptable to me.
Yes, I've lost a card, maybe two, out of maybe 25 Pis running here and there.
Not good. And fast cards (for hi res video) cost more than the Pi.
Bought my first RPi in the Fall of 2012 and that one, including all the
ones that came after it, have not eaten any SD card in my case. Had my
share of corrupted filesystems though but no faulty SD's.
USB is a joke on Raspberry's. I wouldn't even try to use a USB device. The
Raspberry developers solved this problem by doubling the number of USB
ports on the new B+ units... without fixing any of the problems... so now
you can have twice the fail.
The A+ is probably the most sensible model, the USB has worked for me for single
audio devices, and for sensors ... it might even be better without that LAN
chip, and for setup purposes a single USB-ethernet dongle for a whole collection
of Pis will do it.
Don't choose a Pi if USB is your interface ... they are much better for HDMI and
GPIO uses.
The implementation is not that good but I can live with it.
Ethernet is a joke; it's a USB device. To get the Pi to work reliably, I've
had to turn off USB2 mode anyway, so the Ethernet is beat-the-dog slow
too.
It is set-up, ssh, file transfer (plus maybe simple triggering and messages via
ethernet) for me ... see above
If you disable Turbo mode for the ethernet interface network is a wee
bit slower but USB performance is better.
There's no databook for the chip, last I checked. Oh sure, there's a PDF documenting a few of the features of the I/O ports. There's no actual databook, like any good CPU core or SOC would have.
That's surely a major drawback.
It is the biggest disappointment for me, especially given the sales pitch.
Freescale and others do much better than Broadcom. I've learnt a lot from the
sample code, and working through the limitations!
There's no real bootloader. Some call it a feature, I don't. There's no
built-in flash either (another thing touted as a feature that I consider a
design limitation).
there are some advantages to everything being contained on the SD card, for easy
swapping projects etc. But ... it depends.
I call it a feature, takes away the complexity of picky bootloaders like
uBoot. Flash memory is nice but apart from not having to buy a SD card
for a couple of bucks I don't really see the advantage of it. On my
Cubieboard2 I don't get any noticable performance gain when running the
OS from flash.
`
I don't consider it economical since once you add up all the things you'll
need to get it to do work, you could buy a better-engineered platform for
the same price. And the Pi is slower than many of the other platforms in
its price range.
It was in its time, and it probably helped provoke the range now available ...
having raspbian ready to go was a boon ... many others have followed now.
The community is huge, I'd call that a valuable economical asset. But
then I have no notion of how big the other communities are at the moment.
I'd instead recommend the BeagleBone Black for projects if you want a mature, well-documented platform, or any number of the new exciting ARM-based platforms coming out if you wanted to venture into something new.
I've done a few projects using the Pi over the past few years, both pro-bono and professionally, and I would not recommend the platform to anyone.
The RPi is just not made for professional use. If you need an ARM
development board for professional use I'd recommend a Beagleboard,
Cubieboard, Odroid or any other board that doesn't have the
aformentioned issues with the onboard audio, USB, ethernet,
documentation etc. But then in my experience most of these alternatives
are more expensive than a RPi.
these days the prices are quite a bit closer ... especially if you find a device
that covers all your needs without extras and dongles. And a bit more $$ buys a
hell of a lot more power and options.
as far as professional use ... whatever that means ... the Compute Module is
probably more the way to go, all the pins and none of the cheap peripherals,
probably with much better docs via NDA etc with Broadcom. Raspberries seem best
suited to setting up for a specific use than as a general purpose device, and
the price might work out very well in that case.
Sorry, I like to stay positive but my experience with Raspberry's has not been good.
I like 'm but I can imagine people really having issues with them. I
jumped the bandwagon not expecting much of it. So far the RPi exceeds my
expectations for a $35 computing device.
they really expanded the number of people playing around with this scale of
device ... that is an achievement on its own
Simon
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