Featured Articles
Announcing Pi
Technical Specifications
Raspberry Pi FAQs
Win a Pi
Raspberry Pi Wishlist
Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 71 replies
  • Subscribers 674 subscribers
  • Views 17829 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Raspberry Pi is suitable for both microcontroller applications using the Pico and computing platform applications with the Pi 4.

    The Pico is a great product for microcontroller applications and it will be interesting to see if they add to their offerings in this area.

    The Pi 4 as a computing platform is very low cost and capable as a general computing platform but I don't use it for this because I always default to using my most  powerful computer (Core i7) for computing tasks. There may come a time when Raspberry Pi's are fast enough for my main computing activities, but it is not here yet.

    The Pi makes a great platform to learn Linux or Raspberry Pi OS. This is an area where I need more knowledge to achieve reasonably efficient work flows.

    I would use a Raspberry Pi as say a dedicated MQTT server or possibly a LoRa gateway, because it is low power, low cost and could run continuously.

    I think right now it is these types of dedicated edge servers that are the "killer app" for Raspberry Pi. More focus on software support in these areas would help more people to add such devices to their infrastructure. A low cost, full featured LoRa gateway is an obvious gap in the industry right now. 

    Another pretty good application area is in specialized cameras since they have built-in camera interfaces and communications. Pushing this capability further with more software support will help expand this to a much more mainstream activity. Low cost cameras are and will be used extensively in a myriad of applications.

  • in reply to robogary

    This (Arduino Manager for Linux - Getting Started) has me intrigued, I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but I'll try it this weekend if I get some free time.

    image

  • 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
    dougw said:
    I would use a Raspberry Pi as say a dedicated MQTT server or possibly a LoRa gateway, because it is low power, low cost and could run continuously.

    Eating this in two steps Slight smile

    > dedicated MQTT server

    Yes, if it is used as an edge/gateway data collector and forwarder for sensors. Anything above that would need a scalable solution. 
    It can be a tactical MQTT platform, but a real server, it isn't.

    >  possibly a LoRa gateway, because it is low power, low cost and could run continuously

    That's easier: I agree.

  • Definitely time has been my biggest speed bump.

    I tend to use the smallest, cheapest, simplest controller possible for the task, and for my projects (which I often plan based on limited time budgets), the Raspberry pi sbc is overkill. It also requires more general setup time before the real project can begin, and in the project it needs more startup time compared to the few milliseconds an Arduino needs.

    The price of the RPi sbc is still too high to simply use for everything. The $5 pi zero and $10 pi zero w are becoming interesting though - where the price point means we don’t worry about all the wasted resources. I haven’t yet picked up either zero so I can’t fully comment yet.

    I’m not 100% sure, but I understand the GPIO pins have some limitations compared to Arduino boards. That’s also been holding me back from using them for the hardware based projects.

    I’ve been using the standard sized Pi’s for bigger projects though, like my sprinkler system that has some big complex software, and my sensors  server - also involving multiple complex software packages.

    The Raspberry Pi SBC seems to be best suited for software-heavy projects, and I don’t really do many of those, as I try to keep my hobby projects simpler than that.

    Future plans involve image recognition, which is another one of those resource-hungry software-heavy projects the Pi seems to excel at.

  • in reply to ntewinkel
    ntewinkel said:
    It also requires more general setup time before the real project can begin, and in the project it needs more startup time compared to the few milliseconds an Arduino needs.

    This just requires a few iterations, before you're able to set up a Pi very quick. On the SBC front, they are the ones that mastered this cycle.

  • in reply to dougw

    I have a Pi converted into a LoRaWAN gateway, the cost of the Pi ends up being small compared to the rest of it, mainly because the LoRaWAN gateway chipset is pricey (dual chips from memory, although most LoRaWAN gateways end up using three or more). Add in the cost of making it outdoor-capable, and a good antenna, and it is then approaching perhaps 60% of the cost of a ready-made gateway, which for home use is good, but for commercial use isn't significant because of costs of deploying (amongst other factors), so the hardware cost difference becomes negligible.