+1 for Rodney

Also, on the 10k ft. view. I am less concerned about any of the hidden details 
until it affects me. Cost and performance first. Is it cheap and does it do 
what I need? If not, Can I up the cost on something else? Or Should I consider 
the time to dig into the ability to make the low cost device do what I need 
with lower level customization. Unless I am designing anything with volume, 
it's usually not a big factor. So if the Rpi has performance issues, I look to 
other devices in most cases. I have found Rpi to have great value in this area 
and it does alot. But there are alternatives that have obvious advantages like 
my Rock64 that I use to run Mango SCADA application. But cost goes up. Also at 
the time I bought it Rpi did not have 4GB mem, which I needed for this 
application. 

So for me the article is good, because I like to understand technology, but I 
have not really run into it causing me an issue. I try what I am attempting and 
if performance lags, I try something else. The cost of all these things are so 
cheap compared to my time frame of computing development. I just moonshot it 
with that whopping $80 Rpi. My dad bought us an Apple IIe for about $2000, 
which is about $4000 equivalent today. Yea, perspective, it's a thing `,~)

John Vaughters



On Friday, January 15, 2021, 11:23:38 AM EST, Rodney Radford via TriEmbed 
<[email protected]> wrote: 





Personally I think the closed GPU on the Raspberry Pi gets a bad rap. Yes, the 
GPU is closed source (nothing the Raspberry Pi guys can do about that as it is 
not their choice),.

It is true that it is responsible for mounting the SD card and starting up 
Linux, but the way I look at is that it takes the place of the BIOS and 
bootloader on a standard PC system. Like the BIOS, it opens up the boot device 
(SD card), loads the bootloader. The main difference is the bootloader is also 
part of the GPU code so it does make it more difficult porting other systems to 
it, but not impossible.

After that, the code runs on the Linux side of things with it being in control 
with the GPU handling graphics, as expected, and monitoring voltages and 
temperatures, with the ability to directly write to the display for battery and 
heat issues.

You can modify the Linux code and you can create custom device drivers for it, 
so I don't see it as a closed system any more than a PC is running Linux with a 
'closed' BIOS.



On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 11:12 AM jonathan hunsberger via TriEmbed 
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Maybe not a lot of fully open options in the "sbc running Linux" category 
> yet, but..
> BeagleV recently released on RISC-V.  At $150 it's not really a RPi 
> replacement, but could lead to proliferation of similar solutions at lower 
> cost.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 1:10 AM Mauricio Tavares via TriEmbed 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 10:17 AM Pete Soper via TriEmbed
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Here are some criticisms of RPI that this list will hopefully take as 
>>> constructive. Some good tech details that many of us may have been unaware 
>>> of.
>>>
>>> https://ownyourbits.com/2019/02/02/whats-wrong-with-the-raspberry-pi/
>>>
>>       I was not aware of the everything-goes-through-gpu-blob aspect
>> of the Rpi4. What are the alternatives? I was looking at the Rock Pi,
>> especially the N10 for some applications, and then started wondering
>> if it has as much closed source stuff as the Rbpi.
>> 
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