The Raspberry Pi Thread [5]

I put your camera in an anti static bag in the loot box and put it by the front door in case I'm not home when you drop by to pick it up. Carolyn knows you will be coming to get it.
The full pan tilt kit in now on my wish list for my next purchase. Might be a while before I get the cash to buy it though.
I'm really wanting to get my hands on an Asus Tinker Board. With my luck right after I buy one a new Pi 4 with similar specs will be released. I'd happily pay more for a similarly specked raspberry Pi. It is nice that they try to keep the price down, IMHO they do sometimes shoot themselves in the foot doing it though. At some point they are just going to have to realize that the next version is going to cost more. Especially if they give us what we want. I really hope they move on to RISC-V.
My wish list for a new Pi is actual real full speed WIFI / ethernet and real full speed USB. As in the two don't share the current one connection to the SOC. More RAM would be second on my list. Thats long overdue IMHO.
At this point I think they need to release something that could be used as your daily computer. Nice browsing speed etc. Right now you need a lot of patience to go on the Internet with a Pi 3. IMHO anyway.

Only reason I even looked at the tinker board is I have two ASUS desktops and an ASUS laptop here. Build quality is great IMHO. And I've had the desktops for many many years with no real issues. Only really had to replace a few fans etc. I will say that ASUS's tech support sucks though. I had a software issue on my laptop and it was painful dealing with ASUS tech support via e-mail.
If I could replace my spare desktop with a Tinker Board that would be cool. I only use that desktop for Pi stuff, its running the Pi Desktop x86 OS or what ever they call it. They get upset if you call it Raspbian lol.
The down side may be getting Hats etc working on the Tinker Board? I do believe the Tinker OS is also based on Debian? The Pimoroni installers will likely fail though. Unsupported hardware etc.

My main desktop and laptop run Windows 10. Mostly because I want to use Outlook / Office for my e-mail client. I'm not a big fan of web mail.
It is handy some times to haver a system that can access all of the partitions on a Pi's SD card. So I put the Pi desktop OS on my spare desktop PC. I don't really need a third Windows PC.
My breadboard Pi can do it also in a pinch. I just plug a USB card reader in for quick edits etc.

My neighbor just came and got her laptop. I have a feeling she will be back. It seemed really slow loading windows etc to me. I have a feeling I'll be nuking it and doing a clean install. If it comes to that she will be hunting up all the software she was using etc. I'll help her get her printers and such working again but thats about it. When I was younger this was fun, not so much now. Especially getting old hardware working with Microsoft's latest and not so greatest.

Yeah, the S has the eMMC onboard storage. Nice specs. If you don't want or need the eMMC you can get a cheaper version with the same specs.

Have you guys heard of the Rock Pi?
It looks exactly like a RasPi but it's got 1, 2 or 4GB RAM option, with USB 3.0, USB-C and M.2 SSD slot. Wow! looks like a very powerful piece of a card sized board. It is compatible with RasPi hardware accessories like a pi camera.


Here's the full specs...

Yes I have heard of it. There are lots of Pi like SBC's out there. So far I have been staying with Raspberry Pi's just so I know all my other kit will work. If I didn't already have some ASUS PC's here at home I likely wouldn't have even looked at the Tinker Board. Right now to be honest, I'm in a wait and see what the Pi 4 looks like. I don't have any cash to spend anyway lol so why not just wait it out.