March 12, 2021
Ever since the Pi 2 model B went to a 4-core processor, disk IO has often been the primary bottleneck for my Pi projects.
You can use microSD cards, which aren t
horrible, but. well, nevermind, they re pretty bad as a primary disk. Or you can plug in a USB 3.0 SSD and get decent speed, but you end up with a cabling mess and lose bandwidth and latency to a USB-to-SATA or USB-to-NVMe adapter.
The Pi 4 actually has an x1 PCI Express gen 2.0 lane, but the USB 3.0 controller chip populates that bus on the model B. The
Compute Module 4, however doesn t presume anything it exposes the PCIe lane directly to any card it plugs into.
February 26, 2021
Well now I have
actual enterprise SAS drives running on a hardware RAID controller on a Raspberry Pi,
and it s faster than the fastest SATA RAID array I set up in that other video.
A Broadcom engineer named Josh watched my earlier videos and realized the ancient LSI card I was testing would not likely work with the ARM processor in the Pi, so he was able to send two pieces of kit my way:
A Broadcom-designed reference Universal Backplane following the SFF-TA-1005 standard
After a long and arduous journey involving multiple driver revisions and UART debugging on the card, I was able to bring up multiple hardware RAID arrays on the Pi.
Raspberry Pi Foundation, the company responsible for the famous homonymous microcomputer, has just launched an exciting new product: Pico, a microcontroller board in the mould of the well-known Arduino.
The difference is that this launch is much cheaper: while an Arduino Micro (simpler version) costs US $ 18.40 (about R $ 98 in the direct quotation and without fees), the Raspberry Pi Pico was launched for the modest US $ 4 (or R $ 21).
Alternative to the Raspberry Pi is so cheap and better than the original.
The idea is that the maker and DIY community (“do it yourself”, in English) can have fun with the device in their electronics, robotics and IoT projects. Again, Pico is not a computer, but a “brain” designed to control other devices – LED lights, sensors, LCD screens, etc. – from a code programmed by the user. In this case, this sign works with C and MicroPython languages, which are very friendly for beginners.
December 22, 2020
After buying three wireless cards, a new WiFi router, optimizing my process for cross-compiling the Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi, installing Intel s WiFi firmware, and patching Intel s wireless driver to make it work on the Raspberry Pi, I benchmarked the EDUP Intel AX200 WiFi 6 PCIe card and got
1.34 Gbps of bandwidth between the Raspberry Pi and a new ASUS WiFi 6 router.
This is my story.
The never-ending budget-busting project
Have you ever started a project that should take a couple hours with a fifty dollar budget, and realized at the end you spent a whole month on it and spent close to a thousand bucks?