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I'd been interested in Raspberry Pi(s) since they first came out, and instead of buying a mid-range laptop for around $300, I think I'll do the Pi thing for a hundred or so.

They bundle these Starter Kits together with a first-times reference book, and that extra cash difference would be available for rehabbing the Transport anyway.

There's a couple of good things that may come from this;

- Challenging my Technical Know-how

- Experimenting it's use as a Media Playback Device (might be useful in building Media Center for non-Tech people...)

- Hands on w/ other branches of Linux than the Ubuntu based stuff I'm used to,

and so on. Who knows what kind of trouble, I mean Fun I can get into...

Linkies section, cause I'm posting from a small cell phone:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/ra ... 4-model-b/

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/ra ... sktop-kit/

The Pi and its ilk can be a great deal of fun, and/or frustration. I've done a couple of projects so far: a Pi 2 (I think it was) as a streaming music player for my bedroom system, and a Pi-like board called a La Frite which runs some SDR software for coherent-SDR direction finding.

The biggest practical hints I can offer are: buy a good 5-volt power supply for it, and good fast reliable-brand SD cards. Bad power supplies and bad memory cards seem to be the two biggest sources of trouble for Pi users. Cheap (e.g. Amazon and eBay) supplies and cards are often very problematic... the cards are often counterfeit and/or unreliable.

Good point re: Quality Bits, one if the reasons I'd thought to go with the OEM kit- it's got pre-qualified stuff to get started with.

Dave wrote: ↑Wed Mar 11, 2020 7:19 pm Cheap (e.g. Amazon and eBay) supplies and cards are often very problematic... the cards are often counterfeit and/or unreliable.

Well, when i bought the Surface {on which i am currently typing}, i bought a 128-gig Micro SD card to be its "D: drive" at BestBuy {at the same time i bought the Surface}. I don't remember the brand, but i do recall it was a Well Known And Reputable Brand.

I kept having trouble with downloads and saves. Checkdisk and other utilities said there was nothing wrong with the card.

Eventually, just as an experiment, i plugged in a 64-gig card i had lying around.

VIOLA! The trick she was done!

So i bought a store-brand 256-gig card at MicroCenter for $32 ... and it worked perfectly and has continued to do so reliably.

and good fast reliable-brand SD cards

Buy Samsung or SanDisk.

SD cards were originally designed for cameras. In that usage, you see large contiguous blocks of data being accessed all at once. In video recording the "all at once" fades out but it's still large contiguous blocks. And their speed ratings are based on that usage. (Unfortunately, what is often quoted in advertisements is sequential read speed, where what matters in camera usage is sequential write speed - usually rather slower.)

But in something like a Raspberry PI, what matters is random write speed. In randomly sized, and generally small, blocks. ALL SD cards are slower in this usage than in sequential large-block writes, but how much slower varies wildly.

Some years ago I had an (original version) Nook Color booting full-Android off a microSD card (rather than the stripped-down and crippled version of Android that came with the device). Of the (then) commonly available brands I tried, only SanDisk cards were reliably fast enough to not cause crashes.

It took a while but I found a recent benchmark comparison of SD cards that includes random writes (most such articles focus on the large-block-sequential camera usage). Unfortunately, Samsung and SanDisk are practically the only cards tested. Here it is. And here (scroll down for small-block results) is a much-older (2011) test that covers a wider range of manufacturers.

Well, I dun'd it.

I went by Central Computer on the way home last night and bought a small 'kit';

- Raspberry Pi v4, w/ 4Gig RAM

- OEM 5v/3A power supply

- a couple of small heat sinks

- a very thin 'book' entitled ; oh wait, it's just a Quick Start Guide...

There were a couple of ways to go, including a white and red case, but I'm going to ala carte the next few bits.

Oh, and I picked up a quick 32G SD card, SanDisk brand, but I don't have the full Specs w/ me at the moment.

I need to finish downloading the OS image tonight...

Funny you should mention that...

It just happens that I've been thinking on the possibility of getting a Pi to use as a NAS, what with 8TB external USB 3.0 drives going for less than $200...





Meanwhile, I followed your links, then some other links, until I reached this:

ToP 10 Raspberry Pi Projects 2019

Isn't it interesting that the connectors now take up more space than the actual computer?

The Raspberry Pi is a VIC (very important computer)... it has... connections...

True, but it's a bit risky to deal with it. Attitude issues.

It has a chip on its shoulder, you see.

At least, you know you can trust it. It's not hiding anything...

One might say that the Raspberry Pi is the epitome of WYSIWYG* computing...



* Come on... do I really need to spell it out? Fine, then. WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get...

lake_wrangler wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 12:37 pm At least, you know you can trust it. It's not hiding anything...

One might say that the Raspberry Pi is the epitome of WYSIWYG* computing...



* Come on... do I really need to spell it out? Fine, then. WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get...

. Argh!, Haunted by the based Monochrome Macintosh, he slipped into a fuge state... gibberish mumbeled from under his breath...

Update: I've been able to download the Minimal OS installer @ 400meg.

There are two others, both w/ Desktops, the third also including pre-loaded Apps as well.

Something like 1G & 2.9G in size, respectively.

With all the places shut down these days, it's hard to find the Big Pipelines to download from yet still avoid exposing other folks to possible contagion.

Update:

With all of the running around and places closing in the past week, I've had trouble getting the new SD card loaded w/ an OS.

Just now redownloaded a minimal version (Desktop YES, full Apps Suit NO), and we'll see if this one is a good download or not.

[edit] - I'm stalled for a min due to unrelated 32Bit temp laptop file copy/save errors...