Raspberry Pi - Who's gonna have a dabble?
Discussion
outnumbered said:
...
Contrast with Raspberry Pi, that has big investment in the platform software, and you can run the latest release on the original 2012 Pi.
Not sure that's true any more.Contrast with Raspberry Pi, that has big investment in the platform software, and you can run the latest release on the original 2012 Pi.
I don't think you can even run the latest Raspian on the early Pi Zero?
I have a few old Pi's which I wanted to test, so I tried just getting the latest release and firing them up.
Things like the web browser just don't work.
Not that you'd ever choose a Zero for web browsing, but it can be handy to find something and download it without using another computer.
It was always slow, but now it doesn't 'just work'.
I think you can still do stuff with old Pis, but you need a higher level of knowledge than was the case a few years ago when I first bought a Zero.
I was annoyed that you have to drill in to the documentation a bit to find out that they don't really care about the old Pi any more, it would have been better to just say 'get a 3B or better'.
I have a Pi based music player and a Pi4 as a general desktop machine, I've done a bit of coding with GPIO but it's not my thing really.
The camera is good fun.
Other than that, I prefer lower level toys like Arduino.
OutInTheShed said:
Other than that, I prefer lower level toys like Arduino.
Yeah I've got mileage with Ardunios than the PIs. Flight sim controls, weather station that's half finished. Did much about with some IoT stuff eith the little hoard with WiFi built in. Forgot what they are called. That was a little frustrating as a I bought a bag of them from Aliexpress and a lot didn't work. OutInTheShed said:
outnumbered said:
...
Contrast with Raspberry Pi, that has big investment in the platform software, and you can run the latest release on the original 2012 Pi.
Not sure that's true any more.Contrast with Raspberry Pi, that has big investment in the platform software, and you can run the latest release on the original 2012 Pi.
I don't think you can even run the latest Raspian on the early Pi Zero?
I have a few old Pi's which I wanted to test, so I tried just getting the latest release and firing them up.
Things like the web browser just don't work.
Not that you'd ever choose a Zero for web browsing, but it can be handy to find something and download it without using another computer.
It was always slow, but now it doesn't 'just work'.
I think you can still do stuff with old Pis, but you need a higher level of knowledge than was the case a few years ago when I first bought a Zero.
I was annoyed that you have to drill in to the documentation a bit to find out that they don't really care about the old Pi any more, it would have been better to just say 'get a 3B or better'.
I have a Pi based music player and a Pi4 as a general desktop machine, I've done a bit of coding with GPIO but it's not my thing really.
The camera is good fun.
Other than that, I prefer lower level toys like Arduino.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-sys...
outnumbered said:
I think the tendency is for many of these SBCs to run some lashed up distro that's specific to the hardware, and the manufacturer never or rarely updates it subsequently, so you might find in a couple of years you don't have a driver for various things you might like to plug into it, or lack any security updates.
Contrast with Raspberry Pi, that has big investment in the platform software, and you can run the latest release on the original 2012 Pi.
Very much this.Contrast with Raspberry Pi, that has big investment in the platform software, and you can run the latest release on the original 2012 Pi.
If you consider your time free, then any old SBC might seem like great value - "It's 2x faster at DMA than the Pi don't you know!". However, when the new Docker release you need won't run & you have no idea which of the 16 revisions of nominally the same hardware you actually have - good luck to you.
The Pi is a (British - yay!) success story for good reason.
outnumbered said:
OutInTheShed said:
outnumbered said:
...
Contrast with Raspberry Pi, that has big investment in the platform software, and you can run the latest release on the original 2012 Pi.
Not sure that's true any more.Contrast with Raspberry Pi, that has big investment in the platform software, and you can run the latest release on the original 2012 Pi.
I don't think you can even run the latest Raspian on the early Pi Zero?
I have a few old Pi's which I wanted to test, so I tried just getting the latest release and firing them up.
Things like the web browser just don't work.
Not that you'd ever choose a Zero for web browsing, but it can be handy to find something and download it without using another computer.
It was always slow, but now it doesn't 'just work'.
I think you can still do stuff with old Pis, but you need a higher level of knowledge than was the case a few years ago when I first bought a Zero.
I was annoyed that you have to drill in to the documentation a bit to find out that they don't really care about the old Pi any more, it would have been better to just say 'get a 3B or better'.
I have a Pi based music player and a Pi4 as a general desktop machine, I've done a bit of coding with GPIO but it's not my thing really.
The camera is good fun.
Other than that, I prefer lower level toys like Arduino.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-sys...
The upside is old pi boards were almost worthless a while back, changing hands for small change on ebay, I bought a few for stock.
I think the whole pi thing was a mess during covid, trying very hard to flog the few products they could actually supply and fending off complaints from people who couldn't get what they needed.
Raspberry pi 5 delivered yesterday (yay!). Big question: will it actually drive two 4k HDMI monitors properly? The 4 struggled if the image on the second screen was complicated and/or too white. First, things get a bit green-dotty, and if the image becomes more challenging, the HDMI starts dropping in and out until windows are minimised or moved to reduce the image complexity on the second monitor. Seems fractionally worse when being used as a Citrix remote desktop client.
Googling for "why green dotty HDMI" comes back with pages of useless "duh, power supply" and "duh, hdmi cable" comments and zero explanations of why its green dots instead of red or purple and how and why HDMI communication degrades.
If anyone here actually knows how HDMI works and can shed any light, it'd be very much appreciated.
Googling for "why green dotty HDMI" comes back with pages of useless "duh, power supply" and "duh, hdmi cable" comments and zero explanations of why its green dots instead of red or purple and how and why HDMI communication degrades.
If anyone here actually knows how HDMI works and can shed any light, it'd be very much appreciated.
ATG said:
Raspberry pi 5 delivered yesterday (yay!). Big question: will it actually drive two 4k HDMI monitors properly? The 4 struggled if the image on the second screen was complicated and/or too white. First, things get a bit green-dotty, and if the image becomes more challenging, the HDMI starts dropping in and out until windows are minimised or moved to reduce the image complexity on the second monitor. Seems fractionally worse when being used as a Citrix remote desktop client.
Googling for "why green dotty HDMI" comes back with pages of useless "duh, power supply" and "duh, hdmi cable" comments and zero explanations of why its green dots instead of red or purple and how and why HDMI communication degrades.
If anyone here actually knows how HDMI works and can shed any light, it'd be very much appreciated.
HDMI is just an interface.Googling for "why green dotty HDMI" comes back with pages of useless "duh, power supply" and "duh, hdmi cable" comments and zero explanations of why its green dots instead of red or purple and how and why HDMI communication degrades.
If anyone here actually knows how HDMI works and can shed any light, it'd be very much appreciated.
If the second HDMI works OK when the system is not loaded by the first HDMI, then there's probably nothing wrong with the physical electrical interface.
HDMI is a bundle of digital transmission lines.
I would suspect the processing which puts the data on those lines is more likely the problem.
Based on my Pi4 experience, I would absolutely suspect the power supply.
If it's anything like the Pi4, you want a power supply towards the top of the allowed voltage and short fat wires.
Personally, I probed the voltage rails on the GPIO connector and didn't like what I saw.
I have a scope as well as decent voltmeters.
The other thing which causes electronics to slow down and error is temperature. Is the chip getting a bit warm? Does it work for a while until it's warmed up? In industry in the old days, we would blast it with freezer spray to see if the errors went away, but this can break things due to thermal shock. Putting the volts up does rather work against keeping the chip cool of course.
Can you find the internal chip temp as you can with an Intel i5 or whatever?
As may be clear from a few posts above, I don't claim to be a Pi expert, but I have worked in industry and been involved with a lot of broken stuff....
I don't know what production test these things see in the factory, or what they are actually spec'd to do.
Is yours a bit limp or are they all like that?
Reading https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspb... , it says
"An updated VideoCore hardware video scaler (HVS) is capable of driving two simultaneous 4Kp60 HDMI displays, up from single 4Kp60 or dual 4Kp30 on Raspberry Pi 4."
So the 4 should support dual 4K at 30Hz..
WRT testing, there's a 15 minute factory tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2C4lbbIH0c which I think includes some QC information.
"An updated VideoCore hardware video scaler (HVS) is capable of driving two simultaneous 4Kp60 HDMI displays, up from single 4Kp60 or dual 4Kp30 on Raspberry Pi 4."
So the 4 should support dual 4K at 30Hz..
WRT testing, there's a 15 minute factory tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2C4lbbIH0c which I think includes some QC information.
Pi 5 8GB arrived today, got it set up and its much, much snappier than the Pi 4 with an overclock, pi 4 always used to stop and have a think for a bit and never got to the bottom of it, is more like using a desktop.
Had two years of the old Pi 4 (400) 4GB, think will last longer with this as it just lifts it over that performance threshold so you dont ever think about the fact you are using a pretty pared back machine with this but the pauses were always there to remind me on the 4.
Had two years of the old Pi 4 (400) 4GB, think will last longer with this as it just lifts it over that performance threshold so you dont ever think about the fact you are using a pretty pared back machine with this but the pauses were always there to remind me on the 4.
OutInTheShed said:
ATG said:
Raspberry pi 5 delivered yesterday (yay!). Big question: will it actually drive two 4k HDMI monitors properly? The 4 struggled if the image on the second screen was complicated and/or too white. First, things get a bit green-dotty, and if the image becomes more challenging, the HDMI starts dropping in and out until windows are minimised or moved to reduce the image complexity on the second monitor. Seems fractionally worse when being used as a Citrix remote desktop client.
Googling for "why green dotty HDMI" comes back with pages of useless "duh, power supply" and "duh, hdmi cable" comments and zero explanations of why its green dots instead of red or purple and how and why HDMI communication degrades.
If anyone here actually knows how HDMI works and can shed any light, it'd be very much appreciated.
HDMI is just an interface.Googling for "why green dotty HDMI" comes back with pages of useless "duh, power supply" and "duh, hdmi cable" comments and zero explanations of why its green dots instead of red or purple and how and why HDMI communication degrades.
If anyone here actually knows how HDMI works and can shed any light, it'd be very much appreciated.
If the second HDMI works OK when the system is not loaded by the first HDMI, then there's probably nothing wrong with the physical electrical interface.
HDMI is a bundle of digital transmission lines.
I would suspect the processing which puts the data on those lines is more likely the problem.
Based on my Pi4 experience, I would absolutely suspect the power supply.
If it's anything like the Pi4, you want a power supply towards the top of the allowed voltage and short fat wires.
Personally, I probed the voltage rails on the GPIO connector and didn't like what I saw.
I have a scope as well as decent voltmeters.
The other thing which causes electronics to slow down and error is temperature. Is the chip getting a bit warm? Does it work for a while until it's warmed up? In industry in the old days, we would blast it with freezer spray to see if the errors went away, but this can break things due to thermal shock. Putting the volts up does rather work against keeping the chip cool of course.
Can you find the internal chip temp as you can with an Intel i5 or whatever?
As may be clear from a few posts above, I don't claim to be a Pi expert, but I have worked in industry and been involved with a lot of broken stuff....
I don't know what production test these things see in the factory, or what they are actually spec'd to do.
Is yours a bit limp or are they all like that?
ATG said:
HDMI is indeed just an interface, but some knowledge of how that interface works could shed some light on how it might degrade if, as you suggest, its chip isn't receiving adequate voltage when the rest of the device is going flat out. I would have thought the onset of green dots would be diagnostic, but I can't find any info. Ho hum!
I dooubt it's an HDMI issue, more like a video processor issue.HDMI port 1 works OK at full speed on its own?
HDMI port 2 works OK at full speed on its own?
Both at full speed, it breaks?
You swap cables and monitors, same outcome??
That's (probably) either the video processing running out of speed or the line drivers wanting more current than the chip can source.
It's not the cable or the physical sockets etc.
You could get a scope and look at the waveforms on the various lines, you might see the amplitude full under the load of the second screen.
But you'd need a better scope than mine, it's gigabit data over 3 pairs basically.
The three pairs are RGB, so maybe it's just the green signal which is failing first.
Wikipedia has a fair bit on the HDMI, DVI, TMDS interface if that helps.
Different monitors may have slightly better or worse data receivers, different cable hardware might make a problem better or worse.
Shorter cables are usually a better idea....
But if everything meets the standard it should 'just work'.
Can you make the problem better or worse by loading up the processor?
It's possible your particular Pi5 is weak, among other things a port could be static damaged.
ISTM, Pi has a history of being fussy about power supplies, so a better/different PSU is something to try.
Other than that it looks like a fault in the Pi.
Which could be hardware ( I understand 'slow' and 'damaged' and 'out of spec') or software. Maybe there is something going on in software which fouls the video before it even gets near the video driver.
So, if you don't have a spare Pi to try, then you could avoid your family over xmas trying different builds of OS and other stuff I freely admit to not understanding very much.
There must be enough of these things in the wild now that others have either had the same problem or just do what you're trying to do with no issues?
Part of the reason I like Arduino is because they are so cheap you can buy more than one at a time!
I have spent a long time trying to get a sensor chip to pass data, only to find it was a duff chip.
OutInTheShed said:
I dooubt it's an HDMI issue, more like a video processor issue.
I would agree - possibly overheating?OutInTheShed said:
You could get a scope and look at the waveforms on the various lines, you might see the amplitude full under the load of the second screen.
But you'd need a better scope than mine, it's gigabit data over 3 pairs basically.
The three pairs are RGB, so maybe it's just the green signal which is failing first.
Four differential pairs (three data, and one clock). The clock is always on its own pair, but I recall seeing that the other three pairs can be used for any of the colours (and synchronisation signals), so TDMS0 isn't necessary always red, for example (I was looking at implementing an HDMI encoder in an FPGA at the time).But you'd need a better scope than mine, it's gigabit data over 3 pairs basically.
The three pairs are RGB, so maybe it's just the green signal which is failing first.
It would be really difficult to use a normal scope; you'd almost certainly need something that can do digital capture and analysis - it would depend on how the signal is coded (from memory, DVI is simpler than HDMI).
J4CKO said:
Pi 5 8GB arrived today, got it set up and its much, much snappier than the Pi 4 with an overclock, pi 4 always used to stop and have a think for a bit and never got to the bottom of it, is more like using a desktop.
Had two years of the old Pi 4 (400) 4GB, think will last longer with this as it just lifts it over that performance threshold so you dont ever think about the fact you are using a pretty pared back machine with this but the pauses were always there to remind me on the 4.
That’s good to know, thanks. Mine is under the tree Had two years of the old Pi 4 (400) 4GB, think will last longer with this as it just lifts it over that performance threshold so you dont ever think about the fact you are using a pretty pared back machine with this but the pauses were always there to remind me on the 4.
. Last Pi was a P4 8GB which was an-between experience - amazing that a single-board computer can do all this but not quite usable as a desktop replacement. Looking forward to trying the 5Digger said:
Just asking
Instead of firing up a PC & occasionally changing the output display to a 65" LG OLED I was thinking of a small connected device direct to a spare HDMI input on the LG for basic web browsing but guess the default Pi 5 Linux install & web browser would work just fine?
I am trying out twister os that allows you to have a windows style front end along with being able to switch to a mac or Linux style front end.Instead of firing up a PC & occasionally changing the output display to a 65" LG OLED I was thinking of a small connected device direct to a spare HDMI input on the LG for basic web browsing but guess the default Pi 5 Linux install & web browser would work just fine?
https://twisteros.com/
Digger said:
Just asking
Instead of firing up a PC & occasionally changing the output display to a 65" LG OLED I was thinking of a small connected device direct to a spare HDMI input on the LG for basic web browsing but guess the default Pi 5 Linux install & web browser would work just fine?
Having given Windows for ARM a go in a Parallels VM on my Apple M2 Mac, the only thing it seems useful for is running Office for ARM. And I have Office on the Mac, so not really seeing any point. None of the Windows-specific software that I use runs on ARMInstead of firing up a PC & occasionally changing the output display to a 65" LG OLED I was thinking of a small connected device direct to a spare HDMI input on the LG for basic web browsing but guess the default Pi 5 Linux install & web browser would work just fine?
mikef said:
J4CKO said:
Pi 5 8GB arrived today, got it set up and its much, much snappier than the Pi 4 with an overclock, pi 4 always used to stop and have a think for a bit and never got to the bottom of it, is more like using a desktop.
Had two years of the old Pi 4 (400) 4GB, think will last longer with this as it just lifts it over that performance threshold so you dont ever think about the fact you are using a pretty pared back machine with this but the pauses were always there to remind me on the 4.
That’s good to know, thanks. Mine is under the tree Had two years of the old Pi 4 (400) 4GB, think will last longer with this as it just lifts it over that performance threshold so you dont ever think about the fact you are using a pretty pared back machine with this but the pauses were always there to remind me on the 4.
. Last Pi was a P4 8GB which was an-between experience - amazing that a single-board computer can do all this but not quite usable as a desktop replacement. Looking forward to trying the 5So impressed with this new PI 5, you are in for a treat !
J4CKO said:
mikef said:
J4CKO said:
Pi 5 8GB arrived today, got it set up and its much, much snappier than the Pi 4 with an overclock, pi 4 always used to stop and have a think for a bit and never got to the bottom of it, is more like using a desktop.
Had two years of the old Pi 4 (400) 4GB, think will last longer with this as it just lifts it over that performance threshold so you dont ever think about the fact you are using a pretty pared back machine with this but the pauses were always there to remind me on the 4.
That’s good to know, thanks. Mine is under the tree Had two years of the old Pi 4 (400) 4GB, think will last longer with this as it just lifts it over that performance threshold so you dont ever think about the fact you are using a pretty pared back machine with this but the pauses were always there to remind me on the 4.
. Last Pi was a P4 8GB which was an-between experience - amazing that a single-board computer can do all this but not quite usable as a desktop replacement. Looking forward to trying the 5So impressed with this new PI 5, you are in for a treat !
Today's experiment is to try to get fan speed control working with ubuntu.
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