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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.

Parents

  • One other thing that will always help make the system more useful is to reduce boot time. Instant-on would be ideal. This may mean a slightly different hardware architecture in future products, but in the mean time, creative software might improve boot times.

  • in reply to dougw

    , to see if this is an asset, it's worth to take a measurement of time spent.
    If the device is for an end user, and should be active immediately, this is a yes.
    If the device is a development or prototype platform, where you spend the majority in help files, datasheets, compilers, aren't 3 minutes acceptable then?
    If time is money: there are SBCs and PCs that start in seconds. It 'll be a cost per minute vs cost per device discussion then.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    For me it is about how much of my life is spent waiting for computers to boot. Right now I wait for at least 3 computers to boot every day, and sometimes many more than that. It adds up to over a month of my life so far. If you multiply that by the billions of computers and users in the world, you come up to an astronomical amount of time that is wasted every day and every year. A very large segment of computer users leave them running 24/7, at considerable cost, just so they don't have to go though the pain of booting. This can cost about $5 per week in electricity which exceeds the cost of the computer over its life.

    Long boot times are not necessary as you point out - they are just accepted as okay because everyone else has been designing this way for a long time.

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  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    For me it is about how much of my life is spent waiting for computers to boot. Right now I wait for at least 3 computers to boot every day, and sometimes many more than that. It adds up to over a month of my life so far. If you multiply that by the billions of computers and users in the world, you come up to an astronomical amount of time that is wasted every day and every year. A very large segment of computer users leave them running 24/7, at considerable cost, just so they don't have to go though the pain of booting. This can cost about $5 per week in electricity which exceeds the cost of the computer over its life.

    Long boot times are not necessary as you point out - they are just accepted as okay because everyone else has been designing this way for a long time.

Children
  • in reply to dougw

    3 Pis is 9 minutes. 3 minutes if they are convicted to (edit consecutive - ow, I'm not a native English speaker, mistake) concurrent reboots.
    Part of time management is to take care that you have something to do while systems are rebooting. Else you have a luxury job.

    edit edit:
    My job as PM is glimmering trough. If you don't have time for something that can be done at any time, yet tell that you were waiting for something that takes a known amount of time, then there is time left to spend on a moment for self reflection ...

  • in reply to dougw

    People will just spend that saved time on things like Wordle Wink

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    You are right - there are always lots of things to do during wait periods, but the reason the computer is being booted is to use it for something. That something gets delayed by the boot time.

    There are many scenarios: I'm stuck in traffic and need to print something out for a presentation I'm giving at 8:00AM, I get to the office at 7:58 and now I have to wait for the computer to boot before I can print my document. I am not happy about that boot time.