Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Raspberry-Pi”
Thoughts on the newly announced Raspberry Pi 5
Woke up this morning to many news stories that the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced (after the head of Raspberry Pi had said there wouldn’t be a Pi 5 in 2023). Interestingly, if you subscribe to the Raspberry Pi magazine, you’ll be first in line for pre-orders. After having read 5 articles summarizing all the new features ( ars technica article, very detailed hackaday article), here are my thoughts as bullet points:
- It’s awesome that you get about twice the processor speed for only $5 more than what the Raspberry Pi 4 is now selling for.
- However, at $80 for the board (with the need to buy power, case, cooling, etc) the Raspberry Pi is moving out of the realm of an impulse buy item. And, for non-tinkerers, why not buy a Chromebook?
- Somehow it has taken 11 years, but we finally have a power button built into the Raspberry Pi 5. Hurray! Supposedly, pushing it will trigger a controlled shutdown.
- Unfortunately, there is no longer an no audio out jack. I use one of my Raspberry Pis as an MPD daemon device to play music for the kids at night. In the future I would either need to get an audio hat or a set of USB speakers.
If you prefer watching a video about the new features instead of reading one of the articles above, you can watch Jeff Geerling’s video about the Raspberry Pi 5:
Switching up the hardware for the Garage IOT
Back in May, I set up my Raspberry Pi B as my garage door monitor. Unfortunately it stopped working, I haven’t investigated yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got hit with the infamous SD card corruption that was a big problem with the early Raspberry Pi boards. (I think I read it’s much less of a problem with the Raspberry Pi 4) So I decided to go ahead and switch it with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, especially since you can get it with headers from Adafruit for only $14. As a bonus, it’s got a better processor (same as the Raspberry Pi 3, I think) and built-in WiFi. It’s also got a smaller footprint, but that doesn’t matter to me for where it’s mounted. So now I’m back to having a Raspberry Pi B without a job to do (assuming the hardware is fine and it just ended up in an unbootable state. I’ve also now got a usb WiFi module for it, so maybe that’ll help me think of something for it to do. I think the Raspberry Pi rover project I got in a Humble Bundle uses a 1st gen Raspberry Pi, but I’d been thinking of using a 4th gen Pi in order to maybe do some more fun stuff with it like maybe some openCV based Computer Vision and/or machine learning.
Today in Programming: Python
I noticed that something had gone screwy with the Raspberry Pi 1B in the garage that was monitoring the garage door. I restarted it and discovered that last time I was coding and working on making it more robust if it had a temporary lapse in WiFi (so it wouldn’t crash), I’d created a little error. Fixing that error led me to realize that my new code for robustness had introduced an unfortunate artifact in that it would pass a status of “unchanged” to MQTT. So I fixed that. Code’s now in a good place. I just need to add a few more config options to make it more usable for others who aren’t me. Then I’ll make another release.
Raspberry Pi Zero W for new Projects
The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using:
- Arduinio MKR Wif i 1010 - $32.10
- Arduino MKR ENV Shield - $34.40
- 5V 2.5A power supply - $7.50
That’s a total of $74 before taxes and shipping. To get the same measurements on the Pi platform I went with:
An Update on my Roll-Your-Own IoT
As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.
Technology Growth is Pretty Awesome
[caption id=“attachment_7175” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Atmel Webserver[/caption]
It’s pretty neat how much technology has changed in the past 8 years. Eight years ago Rich West and I coded up a web server on a microcontroller ( code here) and part of my justification was that, for only $50, someone would be able to have a web server on a microcontroller. Wouldn’t that be so awesome for people without a lot of money for technology? Yet, less than a decade later, the Raspberry Pi can be had for around $50 (give or take depending on the features) and implements an entire computer, not just a web server. You can install a full Linux distro on it and do everything that a Linux disto can do (including serve web pages). I hope we can continue to grow technology like this for years to come.