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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:
    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.

    Powering the Pi 4 is still an issue. I need to power it with a 5A or so Mean Well power supply which also powers the other electronics from my project.

    A Pi 4 can draw 3A, which is too much for the pin headers and I also did not find a suitable USB-C power cable with 18 AWG wires. The only option is to buy the official power supply, cut off the wire and throw away the electronics.

    See also this thread: community.element14.com/.../exploring-alternate-methods-for-providing-dc-power-to-raspberry-pi

  • in reply to gpolder

    Agree, definitely an issue. I did something similar recently too, I used a Mean Well supply with a barrel plug, and used a chassis-mount barrel socket, wired to a piece of USB-C cable (I bought and cut a USB cable). That is nicely powering a Pi 4 in an enclosure.

    I couldn't find 18 AWG USB cable either, but the Mean Well supply has very thick wires, so I figured a short length of thinner USB-C might be ok, since I only used 10 cm approx between the Pi and the barrel socket.

  • in reply to gpolder

    Would PoE not be an option? 2 birds with one stone then :-)

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