pcie nvme ssd on raspberry pi?

[steelo]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

A "toy" is something that serves to educate or entertain. Other general purpose tools are cheaper for the use case, or there are better tools specialized for the use case. 

 

You can build a PC chassis from Lego (toys) or wood, glass, or 3D print one, but none of these materials are actually appropriate for a a complete PC chassis, yet you can.

- Lego is probably too expensive, and not thermally stable enough to use

- Wood is probably cheaper than a typical case, but the tools needed to carve one aren't things people typically have

- Glass requires tools and skill make by yourself, and most people don't have these tools or skills.

- 3D printing requires tools and perhaps skill.

 

Most people would buy a pre-made chassis, and just customize the case (eg powdercoat or painting a metal chassis) if they didn't like the color it came in.

 

The RPi has always been a more general-purpose toy than a tool, as you will typically find people use them for things that they're not well suited for.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/different-uses-raspberry-pi/

 

 

Like the three repeated ideas there are either using it as a general purpose computer, or using it as a camera/video recorder. There are better tools for doing this, clearly. So you have to think beyond "make something that already exists".

 

By that definition, a smart phone would be considered to be a 'toy' Yes, you can buy the latest smartphone to play games and put apps on it, but in the end it is just a 'toy' to, as you say...entertain. They do have semi-useful productivity apps, but in the end it is nothing but a stopgap measure for when you can't be in front of a 'real' PC. In other words, it's not the best tool for the job - it is a workaround.

 

Anyways, let's just agree to disagree here...

[Kilrah]

35 minutes ago, mahyar said:

well RPI is a toy but there is a lot more to it rpi for with a bit of oveclock can easily be used as a office pc

If you don't value the time you must wait for it to do things, sure...

 

Again it can do it, but is not a good choice for it.

[mahyar]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

If you don't value the time you must wait for it to do things, sure...

 

Again it can do it, but is not a good choice for it.

it is i used a pi zero for a month as a desktop it was ok but pi 4 has a lot more power 

[steelo]

10 minutes ago, mahyar said:

it is i used a pi zero for a month as a desktop it was ok but pi 4 has a lot more power 

I tried a rpi0 for a while running Raspberry Pi OS and it was pretty painful, especially if I needed to open chromium. I do have it on a rpi3 and it's definitely usable when I don't feel like booting up my PC. I believe a rpi4 is about twice as powerful as a rpi3, so it absolutely could serve one well as a desktop for office type work and light tasks.

 

 

[Kilrah]

10 minutes ago, mahyar said:

it is i used a pi zero for a month as a desktop it was ok but pi 4 has a lot more power 

You're really satisfied with very little. 

A Pi3+ would take 2 minutes to open Thunderbird for me to look at my emails. Pi4 still needs 15-30sec, simply not acceptable. Opening and scrolling webpages in chromium is ridiculously frustrating. 

 

I've got a Pi2 that runs an ADS-B station, perfectly fine for that. A 3B that powers octopi in my 3D printer, a bit slow but works. Anything else I do needs more power.

[mahyar]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

You're really satisfied with very little. 

A Pi3+ would take 2 minutes to open Thunderbird for me to look at my emails. Pi4 still needs 15-30sec, simply not acceptable. Opening and scrolling webpages in chromium is ridiculously frustrating. 

firefox is good better than chromium and with an good boot drive its a very acceptable pc 

[Kisai]

48 minutes ago, steelo said:

By that definition, a smart phone would be considered to be a 'toy' Yes, you can buy the latest smartphone to play games and put apps on it, but in the end it is just a 'toy' to, as you say...entertain. They do have semi-useful productivity apps, but in the end it is nothing but a stopgap measure for when you can't be in front of a 'real' PC. In other words, it's not the best tool for the job - it is a workaround.

 

Anyways, let's just agree to disagree here...

A smartphone is mostly a toy. Unfortunately it's a toy with a valuable communication feature that is rarely offered in a stand-alone tool in the last 10 years. 

 

A smartphone:

a) Makes voice calls

b) Takes pictures, but not good pictures

c) Takes video, but not good video

d) Can use the web browser, but the experience is awful unless the website is designed to serve a "touch-friendly" mode by which then desktop users must suffer with infinite scrolling usability issues.

e) Is often valued for it's physical size rather than battery life

f) Is often valued for it's appearance rather than functionality

 

I can go on. Most devices designed primarily to educate or entertain are toys, but the point I was originally getting at is that devices like the RPi have no use-case that makes them a better option than just owning the tools.

 

A Tool is something that has an obvious purpose, sometimes that tool has multiple purposes, but it only excels at one (eg a flat screwdriver is also a pry-bar or an icepick, a hammer hammers nails but is also weapon and can be used as a lever)

 

A Toy is something that is valued for it's entertainment or educational value over it's practical purpose. Most "all-in-one" types of appliances qualify more as a toy than a tool, because while they may be able to do X-in-1 things, it's ability to do all of those is more entertainment than practical. To give an example, a food processor and/or blender is a (dangerous) toy:

Sure, you can blend food in a blender, but this specific blender is more for entertainment. Often it isn't as highly rated for food as other blenders marketed with food. The purpose of blending all these things is to show that it won't burn out like cheap blenders, but do you really want to spend $1000 on a blender, when a blender's entire primary use case is making puree? (smoothies.)

 

 

[ScratchCat]

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

A Pi3+ would take 2 minutes to open Thunderbird for me to look at my emails. Pi4 still needs 15-30sec, simply not acceptable. Opening and scrolling webpages in chromium is ridiculously frustrating. 

You might want to check the performance of your SD card, some cards provide decent sequential speeds but fall apart under concurrent writes. Take a look if the yellow indicator LED is busy while you experience the hangs.

 

From my experience chromium is quite usable on a Pi 3 if you temper your expectations and don’t open a bunch of new tabs at the same time (chromium tried to write to the cache and locks everything up). 

Don’t get me wrong, a $20 Core 2 prebuilt and an SSD will give you a vastly better experience but the experience isn’t unusable on the 3 or newer.

1 hour ago, mahyar said:

firefox is good better than chromium and with an good boot drive its a very acceptable pc 

Have they fixed the crash on launch issue? Last time I tried it the newer builds of Firefox would crash and ESR was a pre-quantum build.

[mahyar]

8 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

From my experience chromium is quite usable on a Pi 3 if you temper your expectations and don’t open a bunch of new tabs at the same time (chromium tried to write to the cache and locks everything up). 

Don’t get me wrong, a $20 Core 2 prebuilt and an SSD will give you a vastly better experience but the experience isn’t unusable on the 3 or newer.

Have they fixed the crash on launch issue? Last time I tried it the newer builds of Firefox would crash and ESR was a pre-quantum build.

i did no see any crashes at firefox so they have fixed it and a core 2 system is very subjective 

[steelo]

17 hours ago, Kilrah said:

You're really satisfied with very little. 

A Pi3+ would take 2 minutes to open Thunderbird for me to look at my emails. Pi4 still needs 15-30sec, simply not acceptable. Opening and scrolling webpages in chromium is ridiculously frustrating. 

 

I've got a Pi2 that runs an ADS-B station, perfectly fine for that. A 3B that powers octopi in my 3D printer, a bit slow but works. Anything else I do needs more power.

Maybe. I'm not sure why your rpi3 takes so long, have you tried Chromium to open your email client? It takes maybe 2-3 seconds to load the web browser on my rpi3 and then log into gmail. The only time I have issues scrolling is when a page is loaded with advertisements. Honestly though, I rarely use it for email or web browsing (unless I need to look up something for python). I agree, it's not as enjoyable to browse the web as my main PC...I mainly just code with it.

[steelo]

16 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

You might want to check the performance of your SD card, some cards provide decent sequential speeds but fall apart under concurrent writes. Take a look if the yellow indicator LED is busy while you experience the hangs.

 

From my experience chromium is quite usable on a Pi 3 if you temper your expectations and don’t open a bunch of new tabs at the same time (chromium tried to write to the cache and locks everything up). 

Don’t get me wrong, a $20 Core 2 prebuilt and an SSD will give you a vastly better experience but the experience isn’t unusable on the 3 or newer.

Have they fixed the crash on launch issue? Last time I tried it the newer builds of Firefox would crash and ESR was a pre-quantum build.

I couldn't agree more...I've had SD cards where my rpi was virtually unusable, plug in a new card and it worked just fine.

[steelo]

16 hours ago, Kisai said:

A smartphone is mostly a toy. Unfortunately it's a toy with a valuable communication feature that is rarely offered in a stand-alone tool in the last 10 years. 

 

A smartphone:

a) Makes voice calls

b) Takes pictures, but not good pictures

c) Takes video, but not good video

d) Can use the web browser, but the experience is awful unless the website is designed to serve a "touch-friendly" mode by which then desktop users must suffer with infinite scrolling usability issues.

e) Is often valued for it's physical size rather than battery life

f) Is often valued for it's appearance rather than functionality

 

I can go on. Most devices designed primarily to educate or entertain are toys, but the point I was originally getting at is that devices like the RPi have no use-case that makes them a better option than just owning the tools.

 

A Tool is something that has an obvious purpose, sometimes that tool has multiple purposes, but it only excels at one (eg a flat screwdriver is also a pry-bar or an icepick, a hammer hammers nails but is also weapon and can be used as a lever)

 

A Toy is something that is valued for it's entertainment or educational value over it's practical purpose. Most "all-in-one" types of appliances qualify more as a toy than a tool, because while they may be able to do X-in-1 things, it's ability to do all of those is more entertainment than practical. To give an example, a food processor and/or blender is a (dangerous) toy:

Sure, you can blend food in a blender, but this specific blender is more for entertainment. Often it isn't as highly rated for food as other blenders marketed with food. The purpose of blending all these things is to show that it won't burn out like cheap blenders, but do you really want to spend $1000 on a blender, when a blender's entire primary use case is making puree? (smoothies.)

 

 

Quote

I can go on. Most devices designed primarily to educate or entertain are toys, but the point I was originally getting at is that devices like the RPi have no use-case that makes them a better option than just owning the tools.

I still believe you're being entirely too general here. A tool is nothing more than the sum of its parts - For example, a home or security camera is a web camera and some type of processing unit. You can often create this with a $5 pi zero and a cheap camera. Some people enjoy the customization ability rpis give them, not to mention they are dirt cheap.

 

Quote

A Tool is something that has an obvious purpose, sometimes that tool has multiple purposes, but it only excels at one (eg a flat screwdriver is also a pry-bar or an icepick, a hammer hammers nails but is also weapon and can be used as a lever)

 

What would you define a PC as? Sure it can play games, surf the internet, serve as a word processor, download, etc, etc. It is useful, but unlike a hammer, it can serve a multitude of purposes for entertainment and business purposes. With that said, you wouldn't use a PC to heat up your dinner (at least I hope you wouldn't), nor would you use a rpi to play the latest AAA game in 4k. 

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, steelo said:

I still believe you're being entirely too general here. A tool is nothing more than the sum of its parts - For example, a home or security camera is a web camera and some type of processing unit. You can often create this with a $5 pi zero and a cheap camera. Some people enjoy the customization ability rpis give them, not to mention they are dirt cheap.

Yes, but a home security camera is primarily a security camera, and most proprietary designs are designed for cloud-storage. We've been able to do disk-storage security since the mid-90's with webcameras, back when they were still 525 line NTSC models connected by composite cable. Heck, look up Jennicam, who was probably the first person to actually do what would be the modern equivalent. That was then, with hardware that was never designed for it. 

 

 

10 hours ago, steelo said:

What would you define a PC as? Sure it can play games, surf the internet, serve as a word processor, download, etc, etc. It is useful, but unlike a hammer, it can serve a multitude of purposes for entertainment and business purposes. With that said, you wouldn't use a PC to heat up your dinner (at least I hope you wouldn't), nor would you use a rpi to play the latest AAA game in 4k. 

A PC is still primarily a toy. Like a smartphone, it has one or two purposes it does well, but it's mostly used for entertainment and isn't efficiently used by people who own one. A PC has, and always has had primary utility if you go back to it's original definition of "microcomputer", where it replaced older word processors and typewriters. The Apple I was the first "toy" computer however, and it's best if you frame it in that light. Apple I was the Raspberry Pi of 1976, among microcomputers that cost $20,000, minicomputers that cost 100,000 and mainframes that cost millions of dollars.

 

Anyway, it's nitpicky stuff, and it's somewhat strange when people try to find a use-case for them. RPi's and many other similar ARM SoC's are solutions looking for a problem.

[igormp]

That's cool, but pretty useless IMO haha

 

I like to use rasps mostly as IoT gateways or small data-collection units since they're low power but still can run your regular docker and db stuff.

[mahyar]

5 minutes ago, igormp said:

That's cool, but pretty useless IMO haha

 

I like to use rasps mostly as IoT gateways or small data-collection units since they're low power but still can run your regular docker and db stuff.

well we might have RPI gaming console much sooner than you think

[igormp]

1 hour ago, mahyar said:

well we might have RPI gaming console much sooner than you think

That's not something that I find interesting, personally. Many people out there already use it as a kind of retrobox anyway, wouldn't be much different from that.

[mahyar]

29 minutes ago, igormp said:

That's not something that I find interesting, personally. Many people out there already use it as a kind of retrobox anyway, wouldn't be much different from that.

well retroboxes will get better performance too because vulkan is coming to pi in a few months so the performance will be better since pi uses opengl AND there is a project called box86 that emulates x86 programs on raspberry pi and they got steam working and some games like celeste and papers please