News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:20PM (#26438158)
They are the premier ARM platform anyway, but the real problem is that a 5W CPU is too slow to work with, unless you write everything minimalistic from scratch!
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by jandrese on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:57PM (#26439466)
It really depends what you're doing. The 5W CPU in the Pi is more than adequate for a lot of tasks. Heck, I wrote papers using Libreoffice on the original model Pi.

The Pi4 is powerful enough to run web browsers comfortably, which was a problem on the original Pi. Office programs run no sweat. You can even do light development work.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by 72deluxe on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:38PM (#26439962)
Yes I have switched to using a Pi4 8GB as a desktop machine running WindowMaker and it's speedy as can be. Am using a USB3 SSD but booting from /boot on the SD card, which then loads the main system from the SSD. Can happily do C++ work on it or RDP to a Windows machine.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by posterboy on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:33PM (#26438316)
Millions of smartphones running on ARM would disagree.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:04PM (#26438758)
I meant work as in compiling work, when you are used to 65W X86 the ARMs stand no chance. My 3D MMO engine compiles in 2 seconds on my Windows PC but it takes 10 seconds on Raspberry/Jetson, enough that I decided to build a 45W Atom computer to try the inbetween... with 25W CPU and 20W GPU!

Even if that would mean I have to "port" the engine to linux/X86. Until now I just had windows/X86 and linux/ARM!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by xmodem on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:12PM (#26438843)
> when you are used to 65W X86 the ARM stand no chance.

My m1 mac says hi! :)

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:18PM (#26438928)
Yes, it says hi and then when you want to upgrade the disk/RAM you can't. And when it breaks you can't fix it and Apple sells you another one for bazillion dollars. And you have to use Metal instead of OpenGL. That's when I say goodbye until they reverse engineer the GPU and port OpenGL to it! :D

Now I didn't even mention the App store tie in and how you need to sign the binaries on Apple hardware and how they poach 30%, but you get the picture.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by antiterra on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:35PM (#26439149)
You just moved the goalposts to another planet. Your initial comment was about wattage and ARM performance.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by kube-system on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:39PM (#26439976)
Not to mention that plenty of x86 hardware has also ditched socketed components.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lostlogin on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:00PM (#26439490)
> And when it breaks you can't fix it and Apple sells you another one for bazillion dollars.

I’f you’re lucky enough to live in a country with consumer protection laws (NZ is one), Apple will fix if for you for 3-4 years. So you pay the fortune you mention and then a bit more to cover this feature.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by nkellenicki on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:43PM (#26439253)
None of that is even remotely related to your initial point.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lucian1900 on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:51PM (#26440112)
OpenGL is a legacy API. Metal, Vulkan and Direct3D 12 are the APIs that can actually saturate modern hardware.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:16PM (#26440375)
Really those APIs bring nothing useful to the table.

OpenGL (ES) 3 with VAO was the last feature that really moved any interesting goalpost (to reuse that phrasing since we have a tree structured comment field to move those around) for games.

Most new protocols are just job security.

Edit: Also calling something that just released in hardware (OpenGL ES 3) legacy is kinda weird.

Maybe wait a decade or two?

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lucian1900 on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:23PM (#26440432)
Performance is very useful. OpenGL’s design precludes it.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:54PM (#26440778)
Now I can reply to your comment (what is going on hn, why is there a timer on the reply button the deeper you get?)

Performance with the low level APIs are not something that competes with OpenGLs higher level API, they are complementary; eventually there will be OpenGL drivers written in Vulkan!

That said, I have yet to meet anyone that can give me a practial example that affects gameplay where Vulkan (or Metal/DX12) makes a difference!

Also last but not least fragmentation is bad, I rather support OpenGL (ES) 3 on all platforms than port to those 3 new APIs.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by the-dude on Friday March 12, 2021 @04:37PM (#26441284)
Timing is what is going on. If you want to reply directly, click the timestamp.

edit: the timer is there probably for flamewar prevention. Maybe for general discussion quality too.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lucian1900 on Friday March 12, 2021 @07:44PM (#26442784)
Sure, OpenGL can be implemented on top of the native efficient APIs.

The biggest problem with OpenGL is the state. It severely affects CPU usage and limits parallelism options. The second problem is poor handling of buffers.

It hardly matters, anyway. Vulkan, D3D 12 and Metal are very similar and almost always used indirectly through a game engine that can take advantage of them.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:31AM (#26445283)
I'm writing my own 3D MMO engine from scratch, so it does matter to me: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449

Unity and Unreal are so bad. I mean compile for 30 minutes? To use them is to have technical debt way beyond what is healthy.

So why can't you make OpenGL stateless? It seems to me multithreading is really bad on the new APIs too, you'll have to trash memory with a bunch of buffers that then gets submitted by one thread causing motion to photon latency!

RdR2 had like 10 frames of lag! Completely unplayable.

I prefer direct/forward rendering one one thread and make the graphics simpler instead. Graphical fidelity is not important to make a fun game, just look at Nintendo.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lucian1900 on Saturday March 13, 2021 @02:19PM (#26449128)
If your graphics are atypically simple, it hardly matters.

For the vast majority of games that compete on graphics, you need to use modern APIs to take advantage of modern GPUs.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:06PM (#26449985)
Sure, but I also out-scale all other engines both server and client:

http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=579711216639635462

My server is the first MMO system to handle 10.000 concurrent action players on one machine: http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html

You have to pick your battles.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by 72deluxe on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:39PM (#26439982)
10 seconds? What disk were you using?

How will you ever get those 8 seconds back??

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:27PM (#26440479)
It's almost never a IO bottleneck, the amount of code is too small for it to be IO.

8 seconds x 1 million compiles = 92 days!

When you code action games you want to iterate quickly to make the controls and physics as good as possible.

I made a .dll/.so hot-deploy system to be able to work effectively, so I can hot-deploy the game in <1 second on the Raspberry but then on the PC I do it in 100 microseconds!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by mattnewton on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:38PM (#26438404)
I think that kinda proves the parent comments point, since all the apps were re-written for mobile.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by posterboy on Saturday March 13, 2021 @01:04AM (#26444391)
No, not everything requires a complete rewrite. The browsers for example benefit from code reuse. The UI is another matter. Wrapping and rewriting is a given on the system side, though.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by gegtik on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:34PM (#26438345)
are you saying phones are running general purpose OS and apps?
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by u678u on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:38PM (#26438405)
yes. Browser, youtube, video calls, docs, games, there isn't much they can't do.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by tasogare on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:19PM (#26438954)
They can’t be used for local development, so hard to consider them a general computing platform. They are more akin to consoles than PC.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by entropicdrifter on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:01PM (#26439508)
Thonny runs well on my Pinebook Pro, so in that case comparably wimpy ARM based Linux machines can be used for things like Python development even with an IDE.

It just depends on how heavy-duty what you're trying to do is. Scripting in general runs fine on my ARM SBCs. The real trouble is if you've got something that you need to recompile every time you make a change and you don't have a cache set up.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by detaro on Sunday March 14, 2021 @08:24AM (#26454727)
The tooling isn't particularly nice, but on Android it is clearly possible.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by posterboy on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:34PM (#26439133)
If I wanted to programm I could get a shell on a server for example.

Now touch screen keyboards are a different problem.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:22PM (#26440428)
When I see truth being downvoted I try to upvote, hn would be a better place if people learned to upvote, the high karma downers are really toxic.

You need a keyboard and mouse to be productive, case closed!

Edit: see the toxic high karma downers even got to this one!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by 3np on Friday March 12, 2021 @06:01PM (#26442020)
Meta commenting on comment voting is against the HN guidelines and tends to get downvoted. Please review them again.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Sunday March 14, 2021 @08:20AM (#26454708)
Jesus christ this place is toxic by design.

I bet you the high karma people click on your profile to see how much karma you have before they push you down.

Eventually the HN database will leak, it's inevitable, I'll make sure to grab a copy then.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by 3np on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @08:10AM (#26489936)
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by posterboy on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:33PM (#26439122)
Abstractly speaking, yes. I notice the limitations on mobile of course, but you cannot deny the potential.

I'm barking up the wrong tree, am I? sorry for the misunderstanding

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by TaylorAlexander on Friday March 12, 2021 @07:06PM (#26442501)
It’s got plenty of speed to drive my autonomous GPS guided solar powered open source farm robot!

I guess I did write the code from scratch, but it’s just Python, nothing fancy.

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:39AM (#26445348)
You should be able to drive that with a Zero no?

Where is the battery? Lead-acid or Lithium?

What does this even do, I see no arms, cutters or anything?

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by TaylorAlexander on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:03PM (#26449962)
It could be done with a zero with C++ I would imagine. IIRC the zero is 700mhz single core. I’m using a Pi4 which is quad core 2.XGhz. Our current Python code uses 20-50% (I forget exactly) of each core. I’ve not made any attempt to optimize, and most of that is probably object serialization for IPC which could be improved (for eg with shared memory).

No battery. It runs directly off of solar power with a supercapacitor bank to provide peak currents. Power draw while driving walking speed on level ground is 20-30 watts with the latest drive system (not shown in the video). Solar panels are 8 100 watt panels.

The project is a work in progress. We just open sourced everything and wanted to start building a community of interested followers who would like to see our progress and share ideas. I do mention this in the blog post but I realized afterwards that understandably a lot of people just watch the video and don’t get the full picture. But we’re adding a vision system now and tools will come in the future. We’re solidifying the base vehicle right now which is what you saw in the video.

Feel free to ask me here or join our community at the first link I shared if you have any more questions!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Sunday March 14, 2021 @08:10AM (#26454661)
No the 4 is 1.5GHz, it would melt at 2+GHz!

If you code Python then you really have missunderstood what tools are available.

My recommendations: C or Java.

You need a battery if you want to be able to predict work, we had a whole month of cloudy weather last year!

I missed the video, I'll check it now.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by ClumsyPilot on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:44PM (#26439270)
Whats this obsession with ysing raspberri pi for work? It makes no sense, PI doesnt ecen have proper cooling. Get an Intel Nuc if you want a miniature PC, at least it has all the ports, disks, etc.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lostlogin on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:57PM (#26439462)
That’s a vastly more powerful machine, 8-10x the size when counting the brick, and way less fun to hack about with. I love my Nucs but the Pi is better.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by foobar33333 on Friday March 12, 2021 @10:16PM (#26443583)
The nuc is better when you want to use a PC for real work. The pi is better for when you want to drive random sensors and displays as well has general tinkering. I'd hardly call one better than the other.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by jandrese on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:58PM (#26439477)
The NUC is literally 5x the price of a Raspberry Pi.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by sam_lowry_ on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:38PM (#26440591)
Hm... A Celeron NUC without memory and disk starts at around 130$, IIRC.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by u678u on Saturday March 13, 2021 @10:51AM (#26447342)
Which is about 5x the price of raspberry pi. I get your point though, I actually have a pentium nuc.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by ClumsyPilot on Sunday March 14, 2021 @01:43PM (#26457131)
But you also need storage / Sdcard, mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc.

Im embedded/Iot none of that matters, but if we are talking about work, using PI makes no sence when compared to even an old laptop form ebay.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:14PM (#26440348)
For the pi you need these heatsinks: http://move.rupy.se/file/pi_4.jpg

The NUC is an ok alternative with the (for modern unavailable) Streacom NCX cases.

I'll use the Raspberry when the KWh is $1, until them I'm trying to move to Atom.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by tlavoie on Friday March 12, 2021 @05:55PM (#26441962)
Aluminum heat-sink cases work well too.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:37AM (#26445320)
Yes if they look like the Streacom NC1/NC2... but all the cases for the Raspberry have bad design.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by tlavoie on Sunday March 14, 2021 @12:34AM (#26453051)
OK, I'll bite. How do, "all the cases for the Raspberry have bad design"?

I have one of these Flirc cases: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4553. It looks fairly nice, acts as a heat sink, so my Pi 4 chugs along fine without having to throttle even when using all cores.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Sunday March 14, 2021 @08:06AM (#26454641)
I'm talking subjective aestetic design.

Look here to understand: https://streacom.com/wp-content/uploads/nc1-wy-025-000-b.jpg

THAT is good design, comparatively everything released for the Raspberry looks like turds.

The Flirc in particular has 2 major flaws: It has a plastic lid on the top?! And it has the logo, things that have to put their name on their product always have bad design. The design should be the logo!