Memory prices climb 500 % in 12 month

I bought a cute little Dell pc a couple of months ago.

It was $1099 from Amazon.

Last week I ordered three more. For $750 each. I didn't expect the price to drop.

Not all reviews are positive!

Not even a DVD slot... Last big PC I assembled myself, got a nice mobo, case, power supply and some PCI cards, harddisk. Has a LG M-Disc burner BD rewriter.

It is still on the table as I have many many many disks. Runs Slackware Linux. But last time it was powered on was month ago... The other one I have is even older, has a satellite card, special audio card, has a dual boot option, runs grml Linux. I has a windows boot option I think I used that for some scanner driver...

Raspberries do all I need now, have 5, 4 are on 24/7, 3 on UPS, one spare as backup.

A Raspberry 4 including SDcards and stuff costs about 160 USD here:

Bigger SDcards are indeed getting more and more expensive.

I really like it. It's small and light and runs Spice fast.

I can plug in a DVD reader if I need to read a DVD, which is very rarely.

I finally figured out what that tiny pocket on my jeans if for. Memory sticks.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I do have an USB 3 1/4 inch floppy drive. No more 5 inch floppy drives here....

floppy

Was it not you talking about long time storage a while back? M-Disc

I did a search for an USB M-Disc + other formats reader / writer, seems to exists. This seems interesting, no more PCs needed, just plug it into the Raspberry USB hub.

Sure, you need a nice looking one:

A Raspberry 4 including SDcards and stuff costs about 160 USD here:

But I am not sure you ltspice users software runs or can be made to run on a Raspberry Pi? I never use it but for some...

I find Raspberries overpriced. I have bought a Chinese Mini PC for equvalent of about 70 Euro. 6GB RAM, dual core CPU, 64 GB buitin M2 SATA flash disc. This is rather low end PC, but probably still faster than Raspberry Pi 4. And it runs Linux with satisfactory speed. This one I use instead of laptop as I have monitors at places where I want to use it.

Normally I work with desktop that I bought shortly before Trump got elected (predicting that prices may go crazy once he is in power). In a sense I could use older computer or the mini PC, but new desktop saves me time, it can do in 1 minute what the old one did in 8 minutes (and mini PC would need 20 minutes).

USB sticks are around 20 cents per gbyte on Amazon. Still crazy cheap.

Sure, but what I like about the Raspberries is the I/O pins

I have connected all sort of stuff to that, made 'hats' as they call it. In the old PC days I used the par-port :-) https://raspberry.tips/en/raspberry-pi-gpio-pinout

I never had a speed limitation problem using Raspberries. Doing some nice stuff with it. But sure some math problems ;-) or whatever may take a lot of computer power.

Anyways humans went to the Moon and back with far less hardware and software what's so difficult now?

The whole thing is getting bloated day by day, in physics (fusion power crap) in electronics > hundreds of computer languages to say 'Hello world' needing Giggle-bytes, in math divide by zero takes a lot, In politics: an ego-maniac nut-case destroying the US, Where will it go? Much of computer related / solvable stuff I can do with a simple micro. And astro, the models of what we call 'Universe' are worse than 'the Sun orbits the Earth' from medieval times.

So... with luck if we are not all obliterated in a nuclear war, maybe hundreds of thousands of years from now some of the Einstein crap and string theory and other nonsense will be replaced by simplicity But then there is AI now, needing ever more computing power, but leaving ever more out of people's capability to understand..

All for the money? Sure it is nice to be able to ask AI online about some subject and get a good reply in seconds saves some time googling. And if you do not like driving yourself ask your car to take you to ? wherever, like a taxi.

Anyways full circle , GPIO I/O is nice for hardware designers.. make 'hats'. I have made some that carry all sorts of chips, like pressure sensor, compass, attitude, Even my Microchip PIC programmer can be driven from my Raspberry GPIO.

Did Trump invent AI?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Did you forget about tariffs?

For pins I have smaller boards. I still have 2 original Raspberries and a few Chinese boards. Slightly less powerful than new Raspberries, but still a lot of compute power.

And actually, for driving pins "less powerful" boards like Blue Pill have better performance. It is hard to get microsecond accuracy on a Pi class board, timers on Blue Pill give single clock resolution and bit banged I/O is not much worse.

Flight to Moon requires more computations than human could do during flight, but very little at computer scale.

OCR (at least one that I use) needs serious compute power. Firefox has almost decent translator, but it needs a lot of CPU too. Compiling larger piece of software takes a lot of time. And in research computations demands are essentially unlimited, when we have more compute power we try bigger problems.

BTW: one can train small neural networks on a home PC, but that could take a lot of CPU power too.

Using Blue Pill I have made rectangular wave generator which generates arbitrary frequency up to 1MHz with edges accurate to single CPU clock (at 72 MHz CPU clock). And high resolution frequency counter (accuracy is probably limited by quality of oscilator on the board). Due to on board LED Blue Pill can not go to really low power, but if you disconnect the LED CPU itself can do useful work at say 10uA. I do not see how one could do something like this with the Pi (Pi-s work fine for relatively slow and undemanding stuff and when enough electric power is available).

The Raspberry Pi Pico cpu, the RP2040, clocked at 200 MHz, can make a

It also has internal user-programmable hardware state machines and PLLs and PWM generators and uarts and SPI things.

Dual core ARM, 75 cents.

Here's our test board:

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

RP2040 is a nice micro. But the "Pi" in name of the board is only marketing, this is different class of boards than normal Pi class boards.