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Hardware

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Promises Better Performance, Starts at $25 (venturebeat.com) 136

Posted by msmash from the miniature-computers dept.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is adding a new device to its suite of miniature computers for industrial and enterprise customers. From a report: The charity today unveiled the Pi Compute Module 3+ (CM3+), successor to the two-year-old Compute Module 3 (CM3). The Pi Compute Module 3+ comes in four variants, starting at $25. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is derived from the CM3 board but offers better thermal behavior under load. That's possible because of the Broadcom's 64-bit BCM2837B0 application processor, which was also used in last year's Raspberry Pi 3B+, and 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM. The difference between the four variants resides in their storage limits. The CM3+ Lite does not offer a built-in eMMC Flash, whereas other variants include 8GB ($30), 16GB ($35), and 32GB ($40) of eMMC Flash. These eMMC flash chips are more reliable and robust than normal SD cards, the foundation claims.
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Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Promises Better Performance, Starts at $25 More

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Promises Better Performance, Starts at $25

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  • Impressive (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:28AM (#58033658) Homepage Journal
    The Raspberry PI line is the most impressive thing coming out of computing in the last 10 years. Of course, people will say "you can get better specs...Orange Pi...blah blah blah", but Raspberry PI is organized and has the entire chain figured out.

    • Re:Impressive (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:56AM (#58033782)

      The best thing about the Raspberry Pi is really the fact that has basic IO communications allowing people with basic Electronics Skills to be able to make rather complex devices. In a world where everything is soldered and shipped as a black box unit. Having a device which will allow us to make such a device ourselves is welcomed.

      Now the Rasberry Pi, is good for a prototype system, I would recommend Arduino microcontrollers for more of a complete job (depending on its complexity) but the microcontrollers are cheaper and often offer the power for a lot of jobs.

      • Exactly. The reason it is the most impressive thing in computing in the last 10 years is that it brought back a resurgence of learning about electronics that was lost since the early days of personal computing. It is accessible to (almost) everyone.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        I would recommend Arduino microcontrollers for more of a complete job

        Consider the Pi something that can be used together with some Arduinos provide higher level control or management layers or more advanced/flexible business logic, network-enablement, or reporting.

        Microcontrollers are great for interfacing or driving outputs/displays/etc from systematic logic rules or simple Output switching operations,
        but the logic has to be done in a low-level language that requires a compile and reprogramming process

      • Re:Impressive (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@worf.ERDOSnet minus math_god> on Monday January 28, 2019 @04:05PM (#58036226)

        The best thing about the Raspberry Pi is really the fact that has basic IO communications allowing people with basic Electronics Skills to be able to make rather complex devices. In a world where everything is soldered and shipped as a black box unit. Having a device which will allow us to make such a device ourselves is welcomed.

        Now the Rasberry Pi, is good for a prototype system, I would recommend Arduino microcontrollers for more of a complete job (depending on its complexity) but the microcontrollers are cheaper and often offer the power for a lot of jobs.

        No, you can get boards to do all that.

        The biggest reason the Pi is successful as it is is simply down to the community. The Foundation has cultivated a community and maintains that community, which is why they have such longevity.

        You can get better boards easy, but they lack the community around them - software support and others are lacking, so many of these boards simply die on the vine. But a community offers support and a forum for doing "cool stuff" so support remains.

        It's like Arduino - it's popular because it has a huge library and a huge amount of support and coimmunity as well compared to just regular microcontrollers.

        It's these communities that let people take a Pi or an Arduino and get started doing stuff, get help and plenty more.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Not really. The need was clearly there at the time it took off. Unfortunately, it was filled by these people with a really badly engineered joke. I mean, no native Ethernet, sound is crap, critical part of the SoC datasheet is unavailable (gpio characteristics, e.g.), they do not know elementary things like naked chips being sensitive to light, don't even get me started about the insane boot-chain, etc. The whole thing screams "amateurs".

      • You do get that its spearheaded by a Broadcom employee, right? You do realize that Sony was manufacturing the boards, right? How many amateurs do you know who can get Sony to fab parts for them?
    • I'm just curious, which IDE works with Raspberry Pi?

      • The Pi works as a Linux system running Raspbian distro.... so emacs is there. What else would you want? ;)

  • entertainment center (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:30AM (#58033668)
    Has Rasberry Pi upped their game in terms of sound quality yet? Also can you play HECV on a raspberry pi? These are the things that are keeping me from making one into an entertainment center.

    • Re:entertainment center (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bobrick ( 5220289 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:36AM (#58033694)
      Google will tell you in a split-second that the Raspberry pi doesn't have HEVC hardware decoding but the Orange Pi does. Apparently there are good results on the software side with Raspberry up to 720p, not so much with 1080p.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The Pi doesn't have sound output, not really. It's got PWM. If you want sound you need to add your own DAC.

      The Compute Module is even more basic. It doesn't have any USB ports even, let alone HDMI. It's basically a CPU card that you need to add to your own system. It's a nice product, with long term availability and decent support which is actually a really big deal for smaller companies. It's a huge improvement of most existing System-on-Module offerings.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:34AM (#58033682)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Too bad they don't have an industrial temperature range version (-40 to +85C)

    • Re: industrial temperature range (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Type44Q ( 1233630 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @10:00AM (#58033814)
      How about radiation-hardened models for cubesats?
      • Just NO. Rpi is a great little learning tool, but it has no place in space. Its not worth the rocket fuel to lift it to orbit. Get a real SoC for missions like that.

        • I believe there were five on the station (two of ours, three we only recently found out about) until a couple of weeks ago. Now I think we're down to three (our two plus one other). Ours are used to run the Astro Pi program in partnership with ESA:

          https://astro-pi.org/ [astro-pi.org]

          • Hello Ebon! I totally forgot about Astro-Pi, and i even looked into building a replica from the plans a while ago...Love RPi Foundation, keep up the good work!

        • it has no place in space

          No, of course not. But will it??

          Stop thinking statically; the RPi is evolving.

  • what about better IO? more then 1 usb for all?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Naa, that would require going to a sane SoC instead of the 3rd rate Broadcom crap they are so in love with. I recommend buying an alternative from some people that actually understand electronics.

    • Personally, I want mill spec storage and operating specs before all that. Heck, I'd settle for automotive spec stuff.

      I have a number of applications where extended temperature operation is pretty much necessary, but I'm not able to use the Pi because it doesn't work very well at say 100 C or at -20 C. What are these applications? Well think automobiles and entertainment for the back seat, providing data service though a small network in the vehicle, one that includes Bluetooth hands free operation of phon

      • It's hot in Texas, but I've never been able to bring a pot of water to boiling water just by putting it in a truck...

        • It's hot in Texas, but I've never been able to bring a pot of water to boiling water just by putting it in a truck...

          Yea, but you can get to nearly 180 degrees F in there pretty quick in the Texas Sun on the hotter days. One needs a bit of additional headroom to actually operate in such conditions, which is why the "automobile" standard runs from -40 to 125 C.

  • flash cards (Score:3)

    by Kludge ( 13653 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:48AM (#58033748)

    These eMMC flash chips are more reliable and robust than normal SD cards, the foundation claims.

    I have found that SD cards, when used for an OS filesystem, tend to have pretty short life spans. This has led me to
    1. Make very regular backups. If I do any significant modifications to a filesystem on an SD card, I dd the whole SD device to a backup file.
    2. Recently I have been using Samsung's high endurance SD cards. More expensive, hopefully they survive longer.

    • The other thing that helps is to use log2ram as it seems to reduce writes quite a bit.

    • Re:flash cards (Score:5, Informative)

      by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @10:02AM (#58033822)

      You just need to format them correctly. Throwing "defaults" EXT4 on is bad juju for an SD card. (It does wasteful read-erase-write operations, which kills the card prematurely.)

      What you need to do, is discover what the erase block size is of that SD card, and then abuse the raid features of EXT4 to create aligned disk structures with that erase block size.

      See also this page. It's very informative.

      https://thelastmaimou.wordpres... [wordpress.com]

      These baked on eMMC cards have smaller erase unit sizes, and so they translate better to "defaults" EXT4 disk structures, and so last longer and give better performance. Removable SDCards have larger erase unit sizes, because they are intended to live inside a camera that throws lots of sequential data down in a huge burst, not tipple at the cup like a traditional disk drive does.

      When you create a filesystem with these extended attributes, the linux caching system changes its behavior so that disk writes are atomic with the stripe and stride. (It *IS* intended for efficiency with a RAID controller, which has to do wasteful stripe reads and writes to accomplish the task. Functionally, a large SDCard is a hardware RAID0 device, where the large erase unit size is derived from the stripe size.) This GREATLY improves throughput on reads and writes, *AND* **VERY GREATLY** improves write life.

      As always, don't be a chump; disable disk swap space, and use zram instead. Your SDCard will thank you.

  • These people really do not know how to design hardware. I wonder where they messed up this time because they have no clue what they are doing. That hole piece of hardware screams "amateurs".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cito ( 1725214 )

      Eben who is one of the founders, works for Broadcom

  • One thing I loved about the Intel Edison was the seamless support for LiPo batteries. Of course, Intel is as fickle as Google when it comes to killing off good products, so the Edison is no more, much to my disappointment.

    With the caveat that I'm a SW guy, and only an amateur HW tinkerer, I tried for a very long time to prototype a decent charging/step-up converter that could be tacked on to the compute module. Never got anything stable, and in the end ran out of time. (I suppose I could have lifted Spark

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