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News 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 launches as first Wi-Fi-enabled board

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 29 Feb 2016.

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  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Gareth Halfacree, 29 Feb 2016
    #1
  2. GiantKiwi

    GiantKiwi What's a Dremel?

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    Meh. Still uses a mere 1 Gig of ram, even $30 android devices coming out of china are on 2GB nowadays.
     
    GiantKiwi, 29 Feb 2016
    #2
  3. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    It's a limitation of the BCM283x's memory controller. The only way they're going to get more than 1GB on the next board is by shifting to something else - and that may have a knock-on effect when it comes to backwards compatibility.
     
    Gareth Halfacree, 29 Feb 2016
    #3
  4. Byron C

    Byron C Multimodder

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    How they can continue to cram so much into $35 never ceases to amaze me. Needless to say I ordered one immediately.

    This...

    ...I did not know.... That's pretty awesome; being able to go straight to a USB hard drive will be very damn handy indeed. Native PXE support will also be damn useful for many.

    This however...

    ...Is the more exciting news IMO. I've started to look more and more at the possibility of using the compute module for projects, instead of the Pi Zero or ripping components off a 2B in order to reduce space. I'm setting up an electronics bench at home and I plan to have a reflow oven - being able to get a cheap board from OSHpark and reflow it at home opens up a lot of options. The Compute Module was long overdue for an update, especially with RS selling the CM devkits at £35 - let's hope that price doesn't go up!
     
    Byron C, 29 Feb 2016
    #4
  5. towelie

    towelie How do I Internet!!

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    @GiantKiwi
    They are designed for people learning to code. 1GB is more than enough
     
    towelie, 29 Feb 2016
    #5
  6. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    I can guarantee the Pi 3 Compute Module devkit won't be £35. You're forgetting that RS and Farnell *used* to sell the original Compute Module kit for £80, before they realised no bugger was buying it...
     
    Gareth Halfacree, 29 Feb 2016
    #6
  7. Byron C

    Byron C Multimodder

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    True, but I was kinda hoping that the original CM devkit/IO board would be a "one size fits all" approach, and that the pinout on differing versions would not change drastically (if at all). If a new interface board is needed then I've no doubt that it will not be ~£35. That'll be a bit of a kick in the teeth to my plans, but the devkit is only a one-off cost.

    Even if the CM3 devkit/IO board will be different and more expensive, the original CM is still a relatively powerful thing for its size.
     
    Byron C, 29 Feb 2016
    #7
  8. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    You won't need a new break-out board, but if you don't *have* an existing break-out board you're going to be paying £80 again. (If you are one of the dozens of people who did buy the original CM, though, you'll be fine with what you've got.)
    The Pi Zero basically killed the original CM for me. More powerful and a fraction of the price, and you don't have to arse around with SODIMM connectors. For industry, the news that element14 will make you a custom Pi based around your own requirements also did for the CM: why design around the outdated CM when you can just design around the far faster Pi 2 and add whatever components or connectivity you need?

    A Pi 3 CM could change that, but it'll have to be priced carefully - and even then it'll likely only fill the gap between hobbyist and medium- to large-scale industrial. We'll see.
     
    Gareth Halfacree, 29 Feb 2016
    #8
  9. Byron C

    Byron C Multimodder

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    I'd planned to get one anyway and I'll still probably do that. As of now a complete CM devkit is still available on RS for ~£35.

    You know what? I find the SO-DIMM connector makes things far easier! Rather than having to design some way to interface to the GPIO header, USB socket, and HDMI socket on a custom PCB, I can have everything routed through to one single connector. Sure it's fiddly, but I don't plan to solder it by hand. A microcontroller hooked up to a toaster oven makes for a fairly capable reflow oven so I don't have to try and solder all...those...pins...by hand (I tried soldering 50-pin FFC breakout board by hand recently - it was... a disaster). PCB traces for differential USB & HDMI signals should be an interesting challenge, but it's all a learning process.

    Reflow SMD soldering is within my grasp, but a custom-designed Pi2 is not! :)

    "We'll see" is probably the best anyone can hope for at the minute :).
     
    Byron C, 29 Feb 2016
    #9
  10. Atomic

    Atomic Gerwaff

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    But they will have nowhere near the support or existing community that the RPi has.
     
    Atomic, 29 Feb 2016
    #10
  11. Byron C

    Byron C Multimodder

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    And that is something that can't be bought.
     
    Byron C, 29 Feb 2016
    #11
  12. Kylevdm

    Kylevdm The Mod Zoo Podcast Host

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    I almost bought one but am holding out for getting my hands on a zero instead. The CM does not really have a market if you are designing custom breakouts then you have the skill set to just integrate a uController into the board you design anyway.
     
    Kylevdm, 29 Feb 2016
    #12
  13. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    The Zero is lovely.
    The Raspberry Pi isn't a microcontroller; it's a microcomputer. Big difference: you can't run a (decent) web browser or game of Quake III Arena on a microcontroller, and you can't do (decent) real-time control and sensing on a microcomputer. Different devices for different jobs, innit?
     
    Gareth Halfacree, 29 Feb 2016
    #13
  14. Parge

    Parge the worst Super Moderator

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    Gareth! What's the go to OS for this these days? I've not had a pi since the first one and I'm a bit out of the loop.
     
    Parge, 29 Feb 2016
    #14
  15. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    Whilst Gareth is orders of magnitude more knowledgeable on these things than I am, surely it depends on what you intend to do with it?

    That said, iirc there are Debian and Fedora versions for the Pi, some spins of Kodi/XBMC... or if you want to go all Internet-of-Thingsy and/or are a masochist* - Windows 10 IoT Core Edition...

    *impression i got based on friends giving it a go... it works but it's slow and the same results can usually be achieved with much less grief with another o/s...
     
    RedFlames, 1 Mar 2016
    #15
  16. Byron C

    Byron C Multimodder

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    What Gareth said:

    I can't run a desktop Linux stack, or an arcade emulator, on a microcontroller. Personally I'm more interested in portable gaming, and I can't run MAME on an ATMega328.

    I'm not Gareth, but I'd say Raspbian, the official distribution, if you want a general purpose computer. OpenELEC or Rasplex for media centre duties (depending on whether you have a plex media server), and RetroPie for retro emulators.
     
    Byron C, 1 Mar 2016
    #16
  17. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    I just started to develop stuff with my first gen, first batch Raspberry Pi B. This RPi3 is really tempting. But I'll hold out for model A, with built-in wifi and the same GPIO ports, I don't really need a full featured B.


    As a firmware (FPGA, not phone software) engineer by trade, I find programming (in C using wiringPi lib) for RPi to be unpredictable. The GPIO timings are waaaay too inaccurate if the processor is ever so slightly busy.

    Does this new one with quad-core improve GPIO timing accuracy?
     
    wyx087, 1 Mar 2016
    #17
  18. Byron C

    Byron C Multimodder

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    Mr Halfacree may be better positioned to answer the question of GPIO timings, but it's my understanding that if timing is critical then a Pi will always be inferior to a microcontroller (or FPGA in your case) unless you're working with the bare metal. It's just the nature of the beast: it has to run a multitasking, multithreaded operating system as well as your code, whereas an FPGA or a micro will do what you tell it to do, and only what you tell it to.
     
    Byron C, 1 Mar 2016
    #18
  19. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    If you're experimenting, Raspbian is the official distribution and therefore the first to get Shiny New Features (like OpenGL, rather than OpenGL ES, support). If you're media-centring, then you're going to want OSMC. If you're building gadgets and for some bizarre reason think the Windows APIs are the way forward, Windows 10 IOT Core. If you want a fully-featured Linux desktop, Ubuntu MATE.

    I'd definitely go Raspbian, though, unless you have very specific requirements.

    Sort of, in that there's more CPU grunt to play with. In my benchmarking, I tested this out by writing a bare-bones Python program which uses RPi.GPIO (not the new GPIO Zero) to toggle a pin on and off. That's all it does: no input, no processing, no waiting. Sticking a frequency counter on the pin, I found the Model B+ (itself a minor improvement over the original B) could hit 59.66KHz; the Pi 3 hit 344.4KHz. That's maxing out one CPU core, naturally - but with the Model B+, one core is all it has; the Pi 3 has another three to deal with whatever else is going on.

    Naturally, you'll get better results 'cos you're programming in C and don't have all the Python overhead there - but you'll still see a great improvement.

    That said, if proper timing is your thing then the Pi is the wrong tool for the job. You need something that can do hard real time operation. If you're wedded to the Pi for other reasons, try expanding the system with a co-processor: there are lots of boards out there that add a microcontroller (usually ATmega 'cos Arduino) to the GPIO header so you can run your hard real time stuff on the microcontroller and your cycle-hungry stuff on the Pi. Best of both worlds, innit?

    Alternatively, if you're an FPGA bod, why not get a board with an FPGA in it? I'm a big fan of the Parallella: two ARM cores, 16 Epiphany cores, and a Zynq FPGA with up to 80,000 logic cells and 220 DSP slices right there on the board. S'not as cheap as a Pi, and the Zynq's ARM cores are a bit weedy, but you're getting a one-stop board for learning to program for ARM, Epiphany, and FPGA.
     
    Last edited: 1 Mar 2016
    Gareth Halfacree, 1 Mar 2016
    #19
  20. GuilleAcoustic

    GuilleAcoustic Ook ? Ook !

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    The POCO C++ nice crossplateform C++ plateform (x86, Raspberry, etc): http://pocoproject.org/

    Really worth a try.
     
    GuilleAcoustic, 1 Mar 2016
    #20
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