A cheaper, smaller Raspberry Pi 3 is now available

I gave up on using raspberry pi after it destroyed several expensive micro SD cards. The device is amazing, but the dependence on brittle micro SD is a deal breaker for me. I just want to boot over USB with no micro SD. Have they solved this issue?

Theizestooke• 8 years ago

I had a similar experience with my raspberry pi, and the only alternative I found was to use a banana pi with sata.

FredFS456• 8 years ago

Yes, https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

You can also PXE boot without an SD card, which may be best for file system durability.

moftz• 8 years ago

You still need an SD card in there but all it needs is a bootloader and a config file that allows booting from USB. You can make the /boot partition read only so there's no chance of it being screwed up. SD cards do suck but at least they are cheap enough now that you can keep some low capacity ones with bootloaders installed on hand.

noonespecial• 8 years ago

No longer true. I've got several 3s as NAS's running exclusively off their USB drives.

Florin_Andrei3• 8 years ago

You still need an SD card in there

Not true anymore.

wolrah• 8 years ago

Pi 2 requires a permanent SD card as its built-in bootloader does not support network booting. It does not support USB booting.

Pi 3 B has support for both USB and network booting in its bootloader, but they are disabled by default. They are turned on by modifying some OTP configuration bits, which is a permanent change. Once set the SD card is no longer required.

Pi 3 B+ has network and USB booting enabled by default.

Presumably Pi 3 A+ will support USB booting out of the box, who knows it it'll also support USB ethernet adapters for PXE.

bipson• 8 years ago

SD-card corruption is a real problem on RPi (see OpenHAB forums). Supposedly the SD-card driver is not the greatest which together with the system's design makes writes fail silently. This cost is half a day once, since we did not understand what was going on with a config not being persisted over reboots.

Mounting root read only and only writing explicitly through the "ro/re" scripts helps a lot and should be the default IMO.

The biggest issue some people have with RPis though, is their hackish software, e.g. the kernel. This has become better apparently, but it always was a shame that you couldn't just run a generic kernel/distro.

I had good experiences with the BeagleBoneBlack, they come with eMMC and quite a few smart additions (e.g. a power button). Twice as expensive though.

stdclass2• 8 years ago

That one bit me really hard today.

We're using hundreds of raspberry's as digital signage devices and before deploying them I checked a few of them and found out that sometimes the source files of the app were empty.

After a lot of headscratching and googling we boiled it down to a write delay to the SD card.

If you do echo "test" > test.txt and power off the device like 5 sec. after, and power it on again, there was a file called test.txt with 0 bytes.

I'm still baffled how something like this can be a common problem especially since raspberry pi usage is so widespread

bsder• 8 years ago

Twice as expensive though.

Except that you don't need to buy an SD card. Or a special 2.5A power supply. And you can access the it solely over USB so you don't need to hook up an external keyboard, mouse, and HDMI to get it running headless. And you can actually get the chips and their datasheets for the BBB. etc.

But, hey, the RPi is half the price, man.

kup02• 8 years ago

May not be related to your particular issue, but many instances I have seen where people report SD corruption were due to running the Pi off of USB hub/port power only (essentially underpowered) instead of from a wall plug -> USB power adapter.

Been running daily for a couple of years now as a Pi-hole with no SD corruption (3B+ model). Still using the same card as I had in the beginning as well (Samsung Evo)

H1Supreme• 8 years ago

I have two that run all the time, and have been for over a year. I access them strictly via SSH, and they're always plugged into the wall. So, you may be on to something.

That said, I do agree with OP's dislike of SD cards. I've had more than my share go bad in other devices.

giobox3• 8 years ago

This is indeed an issue, many usb 2 style chargers only provide 500ma per port, the Pi 3 is recommended for use with 2.5A power supplies. The official FAQ calls this out as well.

Even many wall chargers don’t provide this - the standard one shipped with an iPhone that many people likely have isn’t powerful enough either.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/faqs/

learc83• 8 years ago

About 5 years ago, I was running a startup that had Raspberry Pis (we really need a better plural) deployed to numerous customers, and SD card corruption was a big problem. If I remember correctly the problem generally happened when there was a power loss during writes to the SD card.

I ended up creating a RAM disk and only writing to that. Once every 5 minutes or so I would flush anything that needed to be permanent to a partition on the SD card. And once every hour I'd save anything really important to an s3 bucket. SQLite also performed much better running in memory than it did directly from on the SD card.

That mostly solved the problem, but I still shipped every unit with an extra SD card and instructions on swapping it out just in case.

zck• 8 years ago

...Raspberry Pis (we really need a better plural)...

Raspberry Tau comes to mind. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_(geometry)#Tau_proposals). It could mean just two Raspberry Pis, or I guess any amount more than one.

XCSme• 8 years ago

Raspberry Piss sounds fine to me.

1000units• 8 years ago

They are Raspberries Pi.

wanderer2323• 8 years ago

Raspberry Pies

robotmay• 8 years ago

Urgh we have a fleet of Pi units and this is a common issue for us, particularly in buildings with dodgy power supplies. I've got a Beaglebone Black to test out as a gradual replacement, as that has enough built-in storage for us to use.

zemnl• 8 years ago

Where I work we have many PI 1 and PI 3 in our facility. They have been running for almost 3 years, 24/7, 365 days a year. We got a few instances of corrupted cards so, about 6 months ago, in order to reduce writes on the cards, we decided to reduce logging done by our software running on them, and they have been working perfectly since then.

acdanger• 8 years ago

Curious, where do you work? I’ve not come across anyone else using RPIs at work.

KindOne• 8 years ago

Consumer grade SD cards are crap. Try some industrial grade.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776344

pulse7• 8 years ago

First: Your SD cards are most probably not destroyed, but have corrupt file system due to the unsafe shutdown. Second: You can boot from USB with no micro SD with latest firmware. RPI will look first for SD card and then try to boot from USB if no SD card is found. You can even set a one-time-programmable (OTP) bit to skip SD card lookup.

andyidsinga4• 8 years ago

yep -- I've had this exact issue on zero w - corrupt FS, but not physically destroyed.

mrguyorama• 8 years ago

You can also do PXE boot too

forinti• 8 years ago

I have several pis and never lost a card except for two I broke because I opened the case without taking them out first.

naikrovek2• 8 years ago

Folks have associated corrupt SD cards to overclocking, all the way to stating outright that overclocking will corrupt your SD card 100% of the time, if used long enough.

So, if you're overclocking, don't do that if you're using SD cards.

With Pi firmware newer than late 2016 (if I recall) you can write a file to an SD card that sets a bit in NVRAM somewhere telling it to boot to USB from that point onwards, and then you can operate without that SD card or any other going forward. Thumb drives are usually faster and more durable than SD cards.

Florin_Andrei3• 8 years ago

My internet router / firewall / VPN / DHCP / DNS at home is an RPi 3 booting from a USB drive permanently plugged into it. Google search how to do it.

heywire• 8 years ago

Somehow I've been super lucky. I've got a Pi B+ that has been running nonstop in my garage for years as a security camera. It doesn't have any kind of battery backup, though power outages here are pretty rare. I've also got a rev 1 model B set up with an RTLSDR dongle to log readings from my gas meter. Same situation.

monochromatic• 8 years ago

Why would USB boot be less brittle? Seems like if you have a dirty shutdown, the same problems should crop up.

alkonaut• 8 years ago

I built a pi into an arcade cabinet and switch it off via a power switch only bevause I felt it would be easier to just replace cards now and then than to make some soft-shutdown signal from the switch or similar. After thousands of cycles I still have no issues with it. Could it be that when only running emulators the system just doesn’t write much and without writing the there isn’t much corruption?

forty• 8 years ago

What I do with my RPi 1, is to put the rootfs in a USB drive and have the SD card read only, with only kernel on it. This has always been possible.

tau255• 8 years ago

I had many problems with my RPi2 not booting after reboot. I had to unplug it, get SD card out, fsck and clean dirty bit and hope that it would boot. Got to making backup image every week.

I had some unstable power (not affecting any other home electronics) and was looking in some UPS hat but opted to go security DVR way. Bought 7Ah battery and 70W buffer PSU[1] and DC-DC 12V to 5V supply[2].

Could not be more happy. Random problems with SD cards are gone. Only thing to add is some battery voltage sensing to gracefully shutdown RPi in case of longer power outage.

Thus, I can tell that many problems with RPi may come from inadequate PSU.

Rotareti• 8 years ago

If you need UPS you can put a simple USB battery between the charger and your Pi. Works like a charm. My Pi has been making hourly backups of 3 machines in my home network without a single reboot/intervention for 347 days.

abawany• 8 years ago

I believe the Alpine Linux install for the RPi runs in memory with ability to call `lbu_commit` to update the SD card. I haven't tried it yet but hopefully will have it going by tomorrow.

alinspired• 8 years ago

look into changing power supply, RPI is quite picky

epynonymous2• 8 years ago

seems like only 1 usb port compared to 4, no ethernet port, half the memory of the 3 b+. to me this competes more with the pizero

tjoff• 8 years ago

Seems like a good fit for something like a 3d-printer, for which the pizero was a bit slow.

But I will always miss wired ethernet.

epynonymous2• 8 years ago

another complaint of the pizero is the mini-hdmi, i dont own a single one of these cables, i think you're right in that the pizero cpu is much slower

gh02t• 8 years ago

Ooh, that's a really good point. I have a Pi2 running Klipper and Octoprint driving my printer, this would be a good upgrade...

51lver2• 8 years ago

Pretty sure the 4 usb ports and ethernet were all being fed from one root usb controller port via a hub and usb ethernet bridge. You can easily add what they removed if you need it, or pay the $10 extra for the bigger board.

coob• 8 years ago

Does anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC?

mlevental• 8 years ago

i think such a thing would simply be impractical from a line of business perspective: if I'm going to spend the time/money developing a great soc I'm not going to give it away at cost (which would lead to never recovering dev costs)

nordsieck• 8 years ago

Does anyone make a board like a Pi but with a flagship smartphone quality SoC?

This might be your best bet.

https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/

You're going to have to work harder if you want to use IO pins, but it claims it comes with some.

One 40-pin Low Speed (LS) expansion connector UART, SPI, I2S, I2C x2, GPIO x12

jandrese2• 8 years ago

I occasionally have a fantasy about Apple putting their latest A-X chip on a SBC form factor for $50 and open sourcing the drivers and letting people go nuts with it.

It's one of those things that will never ever happen because we don't live in a perfect universe.

downrightmike• 8 years ago

Maybe for $1000, everything closed source and locked down.

imtringued2• 8 years ago

There are SBCs with recent SoCs but when they cost 200€ you are better off by getting a x86 CPU that has sata, pcie, usb3 and is widely supported by Linux distributions.

They also aren't very attractive from a software freedom standpoint. Why give up decades of work on open source GPU drivers and then be forced to use a vendor provided Linux distribution?

Intel ME and AMD PSP are not a valid threat if you're forced to run proprietary code that may be backdoored on your SBC anyway.

saagarjha• 8 years ago

That would probably be the Mac Mini when it switches to ARM, and it would probably start at $500 at the very least.

lorenzhs• 8 years ago

Closest one I know of is the RockPro64 (https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=61454), iirc it starts at $59 (2GB RAM) but you need to add the cost for a PSU, eMMC, an eMMC flasher, a heatspreader, etc to that.

ac29• 8 years ago

Intrinsyc makes boards with Snapdragon SoC's, but the prices are a bit eye popping. Here's their Snapdragon 845 based one, which is north of $1000: https://www.intrinsyc.com/snapdragon-embedded-development-ki...

ridiculous_fish• 8 years ago

Odroid by HardKernel may fit the bill. Their XU4 is $59 and about 5x as fast as RPi3.

kllrnohj• 8 years ago

That's quad A15s + quad A7s. The A15s are way faster than the RPi3's A53's, but this is quite a few generations old at this point. They aren't 64-bit and lack all the ARMv8 instruction set changes.

Does that really matter much? Probably not. But if you're looking for the equivalent of a modern phone SoC it's also definitely not that.

Rebelgecko• 8 years ago

I have a Dragonboard 410c, which was based on what was a good smartphone SoC at the time. A downside was certain features like GPS and Bluetooth only worked on Android, not Linux. I realized one of the biggest advantages of the Raspberry Pi over similar and even more powerful <$100 single board computers is its huge community.

Unklejoe• 8 years ago

Check out the Wand Pi. It uses an NXP i.MX8.

emilfihlman• 8 years ago

The sd card is the biggest weakness of all SBCs.

EMMC, wireless and some way to connect a camera (usb or CSI) would be perfect.

FactolSarin• 8 years ago

This. I wonder how much it'd cost for them to just add a bit of on-board storage.

harperlee2• 8 years ago

The now defunct CHIP computer costed 9$ and had on-board storage, so there you have a cap.

nickpsecurity2• 8 years ago

Quick glance at Microchip shows, all in quantities of 5k units, $1.02-$2.28 per unit for 1Mb ROM, $0.36 for 1Mb flash, (if aiming for $1) $0.96-$1.10 per unit for 16Mb flash, and highest is 64Mbit at $1.95-$2.18 per unit. Memory is cheap if your product is popular or can share a big order with someone(s) else.

Since not a hardware guy, I don't know if PCB design or packaging cost goes up significantly for adding a 1Mb ROM or flash. I doubt it, though, given these kind of memory chips get used in dirt-cheap boards. Albeit with lower amounts of storage usually given those board try to minimize costs.

imtringued2• 8 years ago

Nowadays one can buy 128GB SSDs for 20€ + 10€ external case with USB 3.0. Having 8 or 16GB of internal storage shouldn't add more than 10€ to the overall price.

binomialxenon• 8 years ago

Yeah, I'd be happy with a board that's identical to the RPi3 but with eMMC rather than SD. Not only is SD less than reliable, it's slow.

l1k• 8 years ago

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 is just that, the SoC of the RPi3 with 1 GByte memory and 4 GByte eMMC on a SO-DIMM module. You need a baseboard though to plug it in. Either the Eval Board offered by the Foundation, or a Revolution Pi if you aim for industrial use, or some other baseboard.

cabaalis• 8 years ago

Plus, like its sibling, the whole board is certified as a radio module under FCC rules, which will significantly reduce the cost of conformance testing Raspberry Pi–based products.

The problem I encountered was not FCC testing of the device, but that I could not mass-manufacture my pi-based prototype because the chips required huge bulk quantity purchasing to be feasible. We had to develop a brand new device based off beaglebone that was more available for a run of 10-50k. (I'll never do that again, either..)

styfle• 8 years ago

That’s a good point. The Pi is really meant for quick prototypes or teaching students, not enterprise work.

Ixio• 8 years ago

The linked blog post https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-product-raspberry-pi-3-... has more info and is interesting.

In it they say "Back in March, we explained that the 3+ platform is the final iteration of the “classic” Raspberry Pi", I've tried finding the corresponding blog post but didn't have any luck. Does anyone know where I can read more about this ? I'm interested in hearing more about their need for "new core silicon, on a new process node, with new memory technology".

happycube• 8 years ago

Basically they're reached the limits of what you can do with a 40nm process within (well, mostly) the power/thermal limits of USB microB with a basic heat spreader. While the ARM A53 cluster would almost certainly be available in smaller nodes, the uncore has sort of outlived it's welcome anyway.

StudentStuff• 8 years ago

This line of chips from Broadcomm can only support 1GB of Ram, a hard limit for what type of applications one can put on it. Meanwhile, other SBCs have mainline kernel support now and boast 2GB or even 4GB of Ram.

rb808• 8 years ago

1 USB port should be the standard. the 2x2 port connectors are huge.

Is there a mini RJ45 connector yet? That would benefit from shrinking too.

ben174• 8 years ago

Seems we could probably lose the RJ45 at this point.

jedieaston• 8 years ago

Schools (at least around here in a pretty good school district) have terrible Wi-Fi, and if the school supports BYOD then the APs are commonly at capacity. It’s much easier to use Ethernet if you want to get some Pis for a classroom, since the teacher can just hook them up to a switch and not have to think about whether the Wi-Fi is good, sharing PSKs (or having every kid log in to 802.1x), making sure that the devices all get on the same subnet so that its easy to communicate with them, etc. And the Pi is aimed at schools, so that is what they will think about. Especially in lower-class areas I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have Wi-Fi on the entire campus (although in the US, we have eRate to help with that).

brod• 8 years ago

I think a "Thunderberry Pi" version with 2 thunderbolt ports instead of power, usb-a and rj45 would be really sweet for hobby purposes and provide a neat way to learn more about that tech

Technetium_Hat2• 8 years ago

Unfortunately a thunderbolt controller is far out of reach for a US$25 SBC.

garysahota93• 8 years ago

This board has been extremely versatile and super affordable for a long time now. I'm really happy they made this new version. I think it's sleek nature will absolutely come in handy in some of the projects that I am going to be working on in the future. Great job!

kumarvvr• 8 years ago

Has anyone used an RPi for commercial products?? Im interested to use it for a project that I want to spin off commercially. Just curious.

rbirkby• 8 years ago

Although the 3a+ is great, the ram is underwhelming. Would love a “3a+ Master” with the exact specs of the 3a+ but with 2GB RAM.

Narishma• 8 years ago

Not possible. The SoC only supports up to 1GB of RAM.

A cheaper, smaller Raspberry Pi 3 is now available

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