How Long Would It Take for You to RoadTest the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (prep, testing and writing)?

From my experience, the RoadTest package of preparation, research, setup, testing/troubleshooting, blog posting, follow-up and writing the review takes me somewhere in the ballpark of 40 hours.

Ok, I'm the clown that voted more than 40 hrs. Know why ? Documentation is 50% or more of a road test. 

There is linux stuff to play with, python, pi hats, etc. I'd want to build a donkey car with it :-) There are tons of application programs to play with,  music, ML, audio, video, IOT,  so many project books with examples to try, 

What cant you play with ? 

I did too. Just installing the software and settings would take a while.

I suppose it depends on the road test though - someone testing it with an beginner Arduino tutorial might be quicker, where someone building a sensor for a satellite might need just a touch more time  

Software and settings are quite a bit easier nowadays. Agree someone road testing with some beginner projects would take alot less time, especially if mom and dad are helping with questions. 

It all depends on what you propose and how far you intend to take it. If you're going to be setting up different OSes, doing various benchmarks and power profiling, it's not necessarily going to be a quick exercise.

If you just do an unboxing ... that would be quick.

- Gough

There are many articles on this module already, so I would blog about designing and building an application that uses an RPi4. It would need to be interfaced to some electronics, include a user interface, involve development of application software, and design of mechanical cooling and packaging. When blogging about all of this is included, it adds up to be a pretty large project.

I've had some RPi4s for over a year, and I'm still testing them.  I've had some compatibility issues compiling vendor C libraries with the RPi4.

Scott

You are, of course, right. It's that ole "it depends" variable. This poll was inspired by two other polls I have previously run that more or less indicated our roadtesters are spending a lot of time on a roadtest. I wanted to see how something quite familiar to a lot of people on element14, the Pi, fared as far as total time. The bottomline is roadtests take a good chunk of time for most people. My guess is (only a guess) is that time can correlate to total number of applicants (inversely proportional perhaps), among other things. Thanks for participating.

To be honest rscasny , I would say time probably scales somewhat related to the complexity or range of possibilities availed by a product. If it's a very versatile product (e.g. a development board) or a sophisticated product (e.g. test equipment), there are many things to test and better proposals usually deliver more, so people who are serious about RoadTests will deliver a proposal that makes best use of all the time they can afford to spend on it within the two month review window. That is, easily, over 40 hours - even spending 2.5 hours each Saturday and Sunday is enough to make it to that mark.

But if the products are relatively simple or straightforward, and a simple test goal is being pursued (e.g. because that's the aim of the RoadTest), then perhaps a lower amount of time would be used.

I don't usually scale my plans with regards to the number of applicants - that sometimes factors into whether the "will I apply or won't I apply" dilemma where I may choose to pass on RoadTests where I don't see myself having a good probability or where it seems oversubscribed. But once I'm putting in an application, usually I will pitch something that does as much as possible.

Just my approach ... of course, not everyone will do things the same.

- Gough

Once upon a time, before a Raspberry Pi release we would get hold of the products early, and they would be passed to me to put through their paces. While I didn't necessarily test them to their fullest because we didn't have all of the datasheets, they were typically early engineering models with pre-release operating systems so not all functionality was there, I was able to compile linux software and run it through some benchmarks.

That would take most of the time, and sometimes a bit of back and forth with people internally and externally if I encountered any problems.

Since that'd take 4-8 hours of the day depending on the speed of the hardware and having to reformat microSD cards, that could take a couple of days to get the data, and then a bit longer to format the results into a reasonable report. So 16 to more than 40 hours can be easily realistic considering there's even more to test, and that's the electrical parts, connectivity, functionality, protocol responses, and the fact that it can run practically as a computer as well as connecting hardware to it.

There can be a lot to test and it needs a lot of scope definition - do you simply benchmark the processor and how many flops it can do? But what about the GPU and does it support the full OpenGL specification? What about the speed of SPI and utilising the clocks? Now what about the pinmux? Oh wait, there's been a firmware update, does that affect anything? Well now it can network boot and I could do with a PXELinux setup to network boot it.

Expansive and capable of a full RoadTest.