Is 4 GB The Limit For The Raspberry Pi 4?

June 25, 2019 by Jenny List 138 Comments

So you’ve rushed off to your favourite dealer in Raspberry Pi goodies and secured your shiny new Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe you’re anxiously waiting for the postie, or perhaps if you’re lucky enough to live near Cambridge you simply strolled into the Pi shop and bought one over the counter. You’ve got the best of the lot, the 4 GB model, and there’s nothing like the feeling of having the newest toy before everyone else does.

A scan of the Pi 4 user guide, with a tantalising 8GB at the bottom.

You open the box, pull out the Pi, and get busy. The instruction leaflet flutters to the floor, ignored and forgotten. If you’re our tipster [Eric van Zandvoort] though, you read it, notice something unexpected, and send a scan to your friends at Hackaday. Because there at the top, in the regulatory compliance information that nobody reads, is the following text:

Product name: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB + 8 GB variants.

It’s not the lack of an Oxford comma that caught his eye, but the tantalising mention of an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4. Could we one day see an extra model in the range with twice the memory? It would be nice to think so.

There are a couple of inevitable reactions when a new product comes out. First, everyone who has just bought the previous one will be upset, and second there will always be a group of people who say “Ah, don’t buy this one, wait for the super-duper upgrade model!” We’d like to suggest to anyone tempted into the latter group that this news should be no reason not to buy a Raspberry Pi 4 at the moment, because the prospect of an 8 GB variant should come as a shock to nobody.

It makes absolute sense that the Pi people will have equipped their SoC with as much address space as they can get into it, and equally as much sense that they will have fitted the final products with whatever memory chips keep it within their target price point. If you cast your mind back you’ll know that this isn’t the first time this has happened, early boards were shipped with 256 MB of RAM but later upgraded to 512 MB as the economics made it possible. Those with extreme knowledge of Pi trivia will also know that the original Model A was announced with 128 MB and released with 256 MB for the same reason.

There’s another question, would 8 GB make that much difference? The answer depends upon what you are doing with your Pi 4, but it’s worth remembering that this is no high-end workstation but a single-board computer with a stripped-down Linux distro for experimenters. You may be disappointed if you are pushing the limits of computational endeavour, but the majority of users will not be taxing Raspbian on the 4 GB model even if they install Chromium and open up all their favourite bloated social media sites. Perhaps we’ve become conditioned by the excessive demands of Windows on an x86 platform and forgotten just how powerful our computers really are. After all, as the apocryphal Bill Gates quote has it, “640k should be enough for anyone“, right?

We can look forward to an 8 GB Pi 4 then at some point in the future. We’d put our money on next year, since 2020 is a leap year and 2020-02-29 will be the Pi’s ~~2nd~~ 8th birthday, it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to speculate around that date. But don’t bet on it, save your money for buying a 4 GB Pi 4 right now.

Small Lightsail Will Propel Cubesat

June 24, 2019 by Al Williams 19 Comments

If you read science fiction, you are probably familiar with the idea of a light or solar sail. A very large and lightweight sail catches solar “wind” that accelerates a payload connected to the sail. Some schemes replace the sun with a laser. Like most things, sails have pros and cons. They don’t require you to carry fuel, but they are also maddeningly slow to accelerate and require huge sails since there isn’t much pressure produced by a star at a distance. So far not many real spacecraft have used the technique, IKAROS was the first back in 2010. However, this month should see the launch of a crowdfunded cubesat that will use a solar sail to move to a higher orbit.

The 5 kg satellite built by Georgia Tech students is about the size of a loaf of bread. Once in orbit, it will deploy solar panels and a square solar sail nearly 20 feet long on each side. Despite the nearly 350 square feet of area, the sail is less than 5 microns thick. You can see more details about the mission in the video below.

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Raspberry Pi 4 Just Released: Faster CPU, More Memory, Dual HDMI Ports

June 23, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 260 Comments

The Raspberry Pi 4 was just released. This is the newest version of the Raspberry Pi and offers a better CPU and more memory than the Raspberry Pi 3, dual HDMI outputs, better USB and Ethernet performance, and will remain in production until January, 2026.

There are three varieties of the Raspberry Pi 4 — one with 1GB of RAM, one with 2GB, and one with 4GB of RAM — available for $35, $45, and $55, respectively. There’s a video for this Raspberry Pi launch, and all of the details are on the Raspberry Pi 4 website.

A Better CPU, Better Graphics, and More Memory

The CPU on the new and improved Raspberry Pi 4 is a significant upgrade. While the Raspberry Pi 3 featured a Broadcom BCM2837 SoC (4× ARM Cortex-A53 running at 1.2GHz) the new board has a Broadcom BCM2711 SoC (a quad-core Cortex-A72 running at 1.5GHz). The press literature says this provides desktop performance comparable to entry-level x86 systems.

Of note, the new Raspberry Pi 4 features not one but two HDMI ports, albeit in a micro HDMI format. This allows for dual-display support at up to 4k60p. Graphics power includes H.265 4k60 decode, H.264 1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode, with support for OpenGL ES, 3.0 graphics. As with all Raspberry Pis, there’s a ~~component~~ composite video port as well tucked inside the audio port. The 2-lane MIPI DSI display port and 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port remain from the Raspberry Pi 3.

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Home Made Gears Save This Shredder

June 23, 2019 by Jenny List 16 Comments

It’s very likely that a majority of readers will have had a gear fail in a piece of equipment, causing it to be unrepairable. This is a problem particularly with plastic gears, which shed teeth faster than a child who has discovered the financial returns of the Tooth Fairy.

[BcastLar] has a shredder with a gear that has, well, shredded. He’s posted a video series over three parts that while ostensibly about fixing his shredder, is in reality a three-part tutorial on how to create custom gears using FreeCAD. While the principles of a gear are readily apparent to most observers their intricacies hide significant complexity which he does a great job of explaining. How to measure the parameters of a given gear, explaining mysteries such as pitch angle or beta, he breaks everything down in easy to understand steps.

His tool of choice is FreeCAD, and while he explains that FreeCAD has the ability to make gears from scratch the tool employed in the videos is the Gear Workbench plugin. He shows how this software removes the complexity of creating a gear, and shows the process on his screen as he creates the custom shredder part.

Finally, the process of 3D printing the gear is explained. You might ask why not machine it, to which he responds that tooling for non-standard gear profiles is prohibitively expensive. We’ve placed all three videos below the break, and we think you might want to make yourself a cup of tea or something and work through them.

Thanks [Andy Pugh] for the tip.

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New Part Day: This $10 Rocking Single Board Computer Does Everything You Want

June 21, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 74 Comments

Single board computers are great, but what we really need are cheap single board computers. Running Linux on anything isn’t as good as running Linux on everything, and all that. To that end, here is the Rock Pi S, a $10 single board computer with Ethernet, WiFi, and it costs $10.

This one comes from the boffins at Radxa, already behind the footnote-worthy Rock Pi 4, a single board computer that appears to be heavily derived from the Raspberry Pi but with a 4 in the name so it’s obviously better. It also has 4 GeeBees of RAM, so it’s got that going for it too. Their latest product is the Rock Pi S, a board that seems as though it’s taking inspiration from the C.H.I.P.. The biggest selling point is of course the price: $10 for the version with 256MB of RAM and without WiFi or Bluetooth. Various other incarnations exist with permutations of 256MB or 512MB of RAM, and with or without WiFi and Bluetooth. The highest spec variant costs $16, but is sold out at the moment.

This tiny little single board computer fills a need in the marketplace; the Raspberry Pi Zero is cheap and small when it’s available, but sometimes you need Ethernet for various reasons and a real USB A port is great to have. We’re looking forward to the builds this tiny board enables and all the fantastic creations that will come from a community so very interested in single board computers.

Morse Code Catches Google Swiping Lyrics

June 18, 2019 by Al Williams 60 Comments

We think of Morse code in terms of dots and dashes, but really it’s a kind of binary code. Those symbols might as well be 0s and 1s or any other pair of characters. That attribute is exactly what led to a sting operation a music lyric site called Genius.com pulled on Google. At issue was a case of song lyrics that had allegedly been stolen by the search giant.

Song lyric sites — just like Google — depend on page views to make revenue. The problem is that in a Google search the lyrics appear on the search page, so there is no longer much incentive to continue to the song lyric site. That’s free enterprise for you, right? It is, but there was a problem. It appears that Google — or, according to Google, one of their partners — was simply copying Genius.com’s lyrics. How does Genius know the song lyrics were copied? According to news reports in the Wall Street Journal and other sources, they used Morse code.

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Bringing Pneumatics To The Masses With Open Source Soft Robotics

June 14, 2019 by Helen Leigh 7 Comments

Soft robotics is an exciting field. Mastering the pneumatic control of pliable materials has enormous potential, from the handling of delicate objects to creating movement with no moving parts. However, pneumatics has long been overlooked by the hacker community as a mode of actuation. There are thousands of tutorials, tools and products that help us work with motor control and gears, but precious few for those of us who want to experiment with movement using air pressure, valves and pistons.

Physicist and engineer [tinkrmind] wants to change that. He has been developing an open source soft robotics tool called Programmable Air for the past year with the aim of creating an accessible way for the hacker community to work with pneumatic robotics. We first came across [tinkrmind]’s soft robotics modules at World Maker Faire in New York City in 2018 but fifty beta testers and a wide range of interesting projects later — from a beating silicone heart to an inflatable bra — they are now being made available on Crowd Supply.

We had the chance to play with some of the Programmable Air modules after this year’s Makerfaire Bay Area at Bring A Hack. We can’t wait to see what squishy, organic creations they will be used for now that they’re out in the wild.

If you need more soft robotics inspiration, take a look at this robotic skin that turns teddy bears into robots from Yale or these soft rotating actuators from Harvard.

See a video of the Programmable Air modules in action below the cut. Continue reading “Bringing Pneumatics To The Masses With Open Source Soft Robotics” →