Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by heresie-dabord 552 days ago
I too have been excited about news of the Pi 500... I like it! I don't "run my house" (or NASA-level outdoor light displays [0]) with Raspberry Pi devices but I use the Pi 400 and an R.Pi 4 phatty as interchangeable workstations booting from a single external NVMe that I swap.

The R.Pi 500 has 8GB RAM (phatter than the Pi 400) and a much better thermal profile than the non-kb R.Pi 5 because of the mainboard design and heatsink.

As others have said, some opportunities for the R.Pi 500 may have been missed, such as M.2 or even a backlight for the keyboard. (Project: power an LED light from GPIO!) But the TDP, performance, and 8GB RAM are excellent features. And it's a portable system with keyboard ^_^

My ideal R.Pi would be using Display Port instead of HDMI but then the SOC (which has built-in HDMI) would be a different proposition. [1]

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/this-dazzling-rasp...

[1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=61566