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What gets in the way of your Raspberry Pi project?

cstanton

For those following along, it's become a bit of a daisy chain...

It's been about 10 years since the Raspberry Pi was released to the world, and I remember everyone being excited. It was a mixture of miscommunication, promises and new technology. An affordable embedded computer that was the size of a credit card. A lot of heated debate about open source and availability, and plenty of marketing. It hit off very well, and everyone clamored to get one, and somewhat still do, and support it. With open source libraries, packages and Linux, quite the contrast to similar boards released around the same time - I think it says a lot when someone has a project and decides 'no, this is how you do it' and leads with a direction and decision and doesn't leave it open for the herd of cats.

Still, a lot of people I know have a collection of Raspberry Pi, and the meme goes 'Yes I have one, it's sat in my drawer collecting dust, I don't know what to do with it' or 'I use it for my media server... and that's about it'. While using a Raspberry Pi as a media server is not a bad thing, it's rather justified (and frankly has spun off a lot of similar products since) it's not the only thing to use a Raspberry Pi for.

Now there's a lot of accessories available, a lot of example code (like other microcontroller boards) but there still must be something about it that trips you up when creating that project. Is it limitations with the hardware? (it is mostly 3v3 after all) or is it the physical size of it? (the compute module, pico and zero start addressing this) well right now it's obviously the availability (or lack) of it, but we can't address that right now, so let's focus on what we do with it when we have one.

We're looking at expanding our content and what we ask from Raspberry Pi (Foundation/Trading) to govern our campaigns and content on the Community, and I'm interested in what you need help with, so reply and let us know, regardless of knowledge level or what you've been doing.

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  • Hi Christopher,

    Interesting topic, I feel the Pi is very usable now (after so many iterations). From my perspective, the Pi 3B+ is a great all-round platform. The Pi 4 introduces a few small issues, for instance, the power requirements are a bit harder to fulfill, and the registers changed and so not all code is compatible. However, these are small things. My list is small (although I can come up with a very long list of improvements, I don't think they are significant, so these are just three that I think are worth highlighting.


    1. A decent GPIO library for C, or an article on how we should do it with C at good speed.. There is WiringPi, but it's not seen much attention in recent years. I still use my own I2C library, but I can do that, others might not be able to.

    2. A power supply with a cable longer than 1.5 metres, or with a figure-8 mains connector so that we can extend it ourselves with a replacement mains cable. I can't be buying a trailing mains extension cable for each Pi. None of the options on the Farnell website solve this problem for me.

    3. Better, refreshed pinout diagrams. Some of the current ones are not very good. Also, worth showing how to wire a USB UART connector to the Pi, so people can troubleshoot their network issues if the Pi isn't connected to a keyboard/monitor. I don't or extremely rarely have any Pi's connected to a keyboard/monitor so I have no comments in that area.

  • in reply to shabaz
    shabaz said:
    A decent GPIO library for C, or an article on how we should do it with C at good speed.. There is WiringPi, but it's not seen much attention in recent years. I still use my own I2C library, but I can do that, others might not be able to.

    I don't often hear of people using C on the Pi, majority use Python, perhaps that's why GPIO libraries in C are not getting much attention?

    shabaz said:
    Better, refreshed pinout diagrams. Some of the current ones are not very good

    What's missing from them?

  • in reply to cstanton
    cstanton said:
    I don't often hear of people using C on the Pi

    Wave there are. It's not often a subject for posts here, but I'm trying to make a difference: Sound and Vibration Measurement: MCC172 DAQ Hat for Raspberry Pi - C development: /technologies/test-and-measurement/b/blog/posts/sound-and-vibration-measurement-mcc172-daq-hat-for-raspberry-pi---c-development

  • in reply to cstanton

    WiringPi isn't receiving attention because there were many commercial users who wanted the WiringPi author's time and harrassed him and didn't stick to the license rules, according to the WiringPi page. I believe there's definitely demand but requires more resources than an individual to create and maintain such a library - in some ways similar to BeagleBone, I wrote a C GPIO library but I don't have the resources to maintain it.

    Regarding pinout diagrams, some don't show which pin is which, because they don't show the Pi. I know that pin 2 is at the corner of the Pi, but it's not clear (the Pi has a square pad, but impossible to see when it is in a case). (Really this is a fault of the silkscreen, but since we can't change that, the pinout diagrams should accommodate). Also, most of the pinout diagrams are upside-down (with the Ethernet and USB connectors facing you (but when you're wiring up a project, the last thing you want is those cables coming toward you - the Pi would be either in landscape, or with the Ethernet+USB connectors facing away). It sounds minor but it's really irritating because trying to count out the pins upside-down and not getting left-to-right pins mixed up either, is just a risk (I created my own right-way oriented pinout diagram as a result, and don't use the ones on the Internet). Mine doesn't meet all needs either, it's a bit simple, but meets 90% of my needs:

    image

    Also has anyone noticed, the text on the Pi Pico is upside down too, when you orientate that correctly : ) 

    image

  • in reply to shabaz
    shabaz said:
    Regarding pinout diagrams, some don't show which pin is which,

    Okay, I ask because I maintain:
    /products/raspberry-pi/w/documents/4317/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-default-gpio-pinout-with-poe-header 
    And I'm always open to adjustments/improvements :) 

    I hadn't considered making one for the Pico, not having one on hand hampered that one Smiley

  • in reply to cstanton

    I've been using this one that I created, you're welcome to use it or improve on it, I don't like the colours, needs a graphical touch : ) 

    The black outlined assignments are the defaults for MicroPython I think, or something like that (been a while since I drew this, I've forgotten!).  It would be nice to rotate by 180 degrees but then the lettering on the board will be upside-down, so I don't know if that's good to do or not.

    image

  • in reply to cstanton

    Ah.. yes I feel a rotation on that would be better and with a context image showing the orientation of the pins on the board, the actual pinout and graphics is really good, nice style. That looks nice for printing too.

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