Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?

A Former User

@deckingman said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

@CaLviNx Just a long shot as I run stand alone myself and know diddley squat about RPi's but is there a possibility that the problems might be due to not shutting the RPi down cleanly? If you already have measures in place to do this, then just ignore this post. But there have been a few discussions about simply "pulling the plug" on the RPi when shutting down the printer (which is what I thing the default behavior is) and that not necessarily being good thing to do.

You might be on to something there, I currently just flick the power switch to off.

I have just purchased a number of power modules with latching relays that I will see if I can wire them in such a way as to add the required functionality to allow me to power everything down in a more elegant manner.

I am severely considering pulling all the Rpi's from the Duet-3's as I have noticed a huge improvement in start-up times of the D.W.C. in standalone mode, This alone seems a very good reason to spend the time running a few extra ethernet cables from the hub in my workshop to the printers.

The SBC comes across as a very good idea in theory but in practice I dont "yet" a very good use case for it.

dc42

@CaLviNx said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

I am severely considering pulling all the Rpi's from the Duet-3's as I have noticed a huge improvement in start-up times of the D.W.C. in standalone mode, This alone seems a very good reason to spend the time running a few extra ethernet cables from the hub in my workshop to the printers.

In my experience, a Pi takes between 30 and 60 seconds to boot up. That's the cost of running a heavyweight operating system (Linux) and getting the facilities and flexibility that it provides. Whereas a Duet boots up in less than a second, unless there are delay commands in config.g.

The value of the RPi will increase as more plugins become available that need the facilities provided by the Pi.

arhi

@CaLviNx powering off RPI (or any other SBC) can lead to SD card corruption but that's about as bad as it can get. There's no way to kill anything by turning the power off. Now I can't confirm the situation where you power it from the DUET3, will DUET3 when you yenk the power off maybe send some spike on the 5V rail for the SBC and kill it, or wil the 5V rail start to go slowly down and that affects rpi badly (dunno why it would but..) but just removing power from the RPI cannot kill it, it can only corrupt the SD card (but even that is very hard if you are running XFS or EXT4)

deckingman

@CaLviNx said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

The SBC comes across as a very good idea in theory but in practice I dont "yet" a very good use case for it.

My thoughts exactly. I still have an RPi bolted to the machine but it isn't wired up (and hasn't been for 15 months or so). I might change my mind if and when I see some benefit that will outweigh the extended start up time.

A Former User

@dc42

I honestly never considered it until I ran the board in standalone mode, it really opened my eyes.

As for the use case of the SBC, The key words are "in the future" but currently the feature set in the here and now does not warrant putting up with such an extended boot time delay.

jens55

@CaLviNx said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

@jens55

I'm sorry but did you actually read my initial post?

As from your reply It appears you didn't.

I already said the following:

<
I only use the 3b+ over the 4 because the lower power consumption allows me to power the pi from the Duet-3
<

And anyone who has been on the forum for any length of time will know there was previously a discussion started by myself with regards SD cards, where the end result concluded in me purchasing a bulk quantity of Scandisk "industrial" cards which have proven to be reliable.

I have Rpi's around the house running my security system and hvac systems and those are all running fine with no issue, its only since linking the Rpi to the Duet that things have gone pear shaped.

There is zero need to get your knickers in a knot! I simply threw out some information that you might or might not have considered.
Yes, I did read your post (twice, possibly three times) and although you said that you were powering the pi from the duet, you failed to specify exactly how you did that - hence my suggesting that the 5V rail might not have sufficient power.
While I have been on this forum for quite a while, I have better things to do then follow every post - I scan the new post subject lines and on occasion something catches my eye and I respond. I rarely research the past posts of an individual poster so the fact that you bought a raft of industrial cards is unknown unless you mention it. Further, unless you mention that you are actually USING those industrial cards, I can not assume that yu are not using a card that came out of a gumball machine!
In summary, while I know that you are facing a frustrating issue (been there, done that, have the T shirt), I would suggest that you might think about not shooting the messenger.
BTW, while not explicitly mentioned (my bad), pulling the plug instead of doing an orderly shutdown is the same as a power problem .... which you have admitted to.
I stand by my post about your issue being power related and not related to the pi itself.

A Former User

@jens55

Respectfully and for your own sake I request you Step well back, because I will bite more than once if provoked..

jens55

There you go again .... <sigh>
I am in no particular need for entertainment at this time so I will leave you and your pi issue to work it out yourself!
Peace ! I'm outa here .... stepping well back while being reminded about the story of leading a horse to water .....

A Former User

@jens55 said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

There you go again .... <sigh>
I am in no particular need for entertainment at this time so I will leave you and your pi issue to work it out yourself!
Peace ! I'm outa here .... stepping well back while being reminded about the story of leading a horse to water .....

I'm a little confused, correct me if I'm wrong but why did you mention anything about providing an opinion on correcting what you perceive to be the reason for the issue I encountered?

I don't actually remember writing anything about asking anyone for assistance with rectification of the issue I encountered, that being so you took it upon yourself to provide a solution when not requested to do so.

The only thing I did ask for an opinion on, was if there was an alternative to the Rpi as a SBC for the Duet-3, I thought that was quite clear. Evidently not clear enough for you.

jens55

Ok, to directly address your question: No, to my humble knowledge, limited as it may be, all SBC's on the market today require a stable source of power which unfortunately seems to escape your grasp.

Hopefully that answers your question in a clear and concise way.

(remainder of post deleted it in the interests of civility)

Edit: Congratulations on being the first person that I blocked from view.

A Former User

@jens55 said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

Ok, to directly address your question: No, to my humble knowledge, limited as it may be, all SBC's on the market today require a stable source of power which unfortunately seems to escape your grasp.

And again flogging a dead horse with regards answering an un-asked question, as the ACTUAL question was about ANY SUITABLE REPLACEMENT for the Rpi NOT how much power (or the stability thereof) the SBC's Require. And still that fact escapes YOUR GRASP

Power Supply isn't (or shouldn't be) an issue which is why I never mentioned anything about power, I try to carry out my due diligence to the best of my abilities and decide what I am required to do to complete the required task successfully.

I run the same core components in all my printers, it makes things simple in numerous ways, Although I am a Mechanical Engineer, H/V electrics has always been an interest and doing things the "right-way" always been a personal pride.

So I only use the following core components

Duet Boards
Meanwell LRS-450-24 PSU’s.
E3D 40Watt hot end Heaters
Filafarm Silicone A/C Bed Heaters
Croyden SSR's
My Motors always come from Stepper-On-Line (been using them for years with good results)
Decent Quality Silicone wire

And more recently adding Raspberry Pi's to the mix

From the above I recon i'm pulling around 50 to 60 watts from a PSU rated to supply 450 Watts.

I only used The Rpi-3B+ becuase it is listed as requiring a PSU supply of around 2.5 amps,
and listed as pulling 2.1 watts max with no peripherals attached (and I dont attach anything) so the power requirements are less than the Rpi-4

Now if there is any issue with how Duet-3 supplies the SBC in the recommended way via onboard 5V rail and jumper settings to supply the SBC then that is a design fault, but I dont think that is the problem.

I did make a discovery today that i dont know if it is relevant or not.

I am building another Core-XY and its in the stage of laying out for component placement and wire routing, I pulled another new Duet 3 off the shelf to connect it to the Rpi and from having just pulled the dead one out of the other printer just a few days ago I noticed that the supplied ribbon cable on the newest board was shorter than the one I pulled the other day.

So I went for a look at the rest of the printers with Duet-3’s now I don’t know if it makes any difference but both printers that the Rpi’s died in both have the longer ribbon cables and the others that have been running with no issues all have shorter ribbon cables. All the Ribbon cables were supplied to me with the Duet-3's

The shorter cables are all about 50mm shorter

@DC42 would there be any reason for this to be a factor?

kvi94

This post is deleted!

dc42

@CaLviNx said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

So I went for a look at the rest of the printers with Duet-3’s now I don’t know if it makes any difference but both printers that the Rpi’s died in both have the longer ribbon cables and the others that have been running with no issues all have shorter ribbon cables. All the Ribbon cables were supplied to me with the Duet-3's
The shorter cables are all about 50mm shorter
@DC42 would there be any reason for this to be a factor?

We were originally using off-the-shelf ribbon cables so we accepted the length that that came in. When they went out of production, we switched to custom made cables, so we have them made to the length that we consider optimum. I can't think why ribbon cable length would be a factor. It's possible that the shorter ones might support a slightly higher SPI frequency.

How many Duet 3 boards do you have? Are they all the same board version?

A Former User

@dc42 said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

@CaLviNx said in Any Suitable alternative to the Raspberry Pi?:

So I went for a look at the rest of the printers with Duet-3’s now I don’t know if it makes any difference but both printers that the Rpi’s died in both have the longer ribbon cables and the others that have been running with no issues all have shorter ribbon cables. All the Ribbon cables were supplied to me with the Duet-3's
The shorter cables are all about 50mm shorter
@DC42 would there be any reason for this to be a factor?

We were originally using off-the-shelf ribbon cables so we accepted the length that that came in. When they went out of production, we switched to custom made cables, so we have them made to the length that we consider optimum. I can't think why ribbon cable length would be a factor. It's possible that the shorter ones might support a slightly higher SPI frequency.

How many Duet 3 boards do you have? Are they all the same board version?

I have 6 Duet 3's , 1 is a 0.6 pre-production board and the other 5 are 1.0.1 revisions, it was 1.0.1 boards that had the Rpi's that died in them.

I have shortened all (long) my ribbon cables of any unnecessary material.

I just purchased a banana pi bpi-m3 as allegedly it has the same pin-out as the Rpi and again will allegedly run Raspbian OS out of the box, so we will see what it does when it arrives.

oliof

Raise, topic!

Following an idea by @Dougal1957 I will test a RaspberryPi Compute Module with eMMC and the RPiCM IO board. The latter means I can run the whole setup from my 24V PSU (as long as I don't intend to fry the PCIe port, and maybe not use the fan port except with a 24V fan). I will report how that fares.

My Raspberry Pi4 is rock solid since I run it off the RPi Power Supply, but I want to get rid of that.

o_lampe

I was looking for alternatives to Raspi too and just want to ask if anyone has tried the Odroid N2?
I'm not sure if it has a 100% compatible GPIO connector, but I have one laying around and only serve as host for my MCU-node experiments.
I also used it to make my TV smart and it served me well with it's noiseless huge heatsink.
It runs from 12V and can use eMMC modules, which I highly recommend.
(don't ask me,how many genuine Sandisk SD-cards for my MCU node I had to replace)
It runs on Linux and Android, which might be an alternative?

jay_s_uk

have a look at this https://teamgloomy.github.io/dsf_on_armbian.html

oliof

I have an RPi Compute Module and the IO Board ready to replace the RPi4.

Advantages: eMMC memory instead of SD card should be more resilient; you can use the PSU to power the board without a buck converter.

Disadvantages: Higher price, larger footprint, requires the smaller thin film connectors for camera/screen.

o_lampe

@jay_s_uk
If it's listed on the armbian page, does it mean,the GPIO-connector is compatible, too?

The AMlogic S902 is listed, but the N2 has S922X.

cad405

My 5 cents: 6 months now with a Duet3 & RPi3. It is powered by a Meanwell 5V 2.5A with a good cable (3A capable). Have good SD card and proper cooling - no worries whatsoever. Oh, it is a Debian box (minimal) only with duet packages. It takes 30sec to boot. Do not even bother to clean shutdown.