It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
N100 mini PCs are where it’s at these days anyways. Unless you need the GPIO pins or are running some weird niche configuration, you’re better off grabbing any N100, they’re cheaper too.
GPIOs are the easy bit. You can get those no issue on x86. It’s I2C and SPI that are the issue with x86. You can get the buses sure, but all the device drivers are Device Tree based. You can’t just throw in Device Tree overlays on x86.
Idk, with I2C if it’s not something that needs a kernel level driver, there usually isn’t a problem with interacting with it from user space, for example basically all RAM RGB controllers are I2C and OpenRGB has no problem with them. I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever used an I2C device tree overlay for an RTC.
Also I2C/SMBus is present everywhere on x86, like some graphics cards expose it through their HDMI ports, even some server motherboards have a header for it; but for GPIO I’m unaware of any motherboards that expose it, so good luck researching the chipset and tracing out the pins.
Only a fraction of it is RTCs. What is in the Pi overlays folder is from everything. Not even all the DT I2C RTCs. There is loads of ADCs, DACs, IO extenders, all sorts.
It’s really annoying you can’t do DT on x86 Linux. It’s a bit of a gap in the platform. It would make Linux ARM based developer’s lives easier.
These should all work without kernel drivers. For example, here’s a user space python library for ADS1*15 ADCs, or Nuvoton MS51 IO Expanders. Unless you need very specific timing or require the kernel to know about it, you shouldn’t need a kernel driver.
I look for broken but working sff/tiny deals. Scored a sweet i5 7500 /16gb system for $100CAD. Just had a broken audio port I was never going to use.
The fool you will be revealed to be once I complete my Ethernet Over Audio implementation.
Oh boy, you’ve got a lot of protocols you can borrow for your OSI layer 1. ribbitradio and the telephone modem spec.
I just want you to know this is one of my favorite comments of all time.
It is I! USB-C-MAN! Begone with you foul villain!
Isn’t that just a telephone modem?
No, silly, that’s Audio Over Ethernet! /j
PIs are kind of screwed from N* on the higher power end and ESP32 (or similar high power micro controllers) the lower end.
It’s become an underpowered middle player no one needs.
It was good while it lasted. PI3’s for $30 we’re amazing.
Added benefit of most using low power intel CPUs
They’re not actually lower powered, they just have a TDP limit set.
E.g. A 8500 and 8500T will idle at the same power consumption, but the 8500T has a TDP limit set.