[LAU] Raspberry PI, internal audio IF + testing new USB IF

[Jeremy Jongepier]

On 03/03/2015 11:35 PM, Ken Restivo wrote:
> After doing several Raspberry Pi projects, I'm very negative on them, and will never use them or recommend them again.
> 
> The built-in audio is crap, it's not even 16-bit.

True, it's 11-bit PWM so also not your standard DAC ;)

> 
> The power management and regulation is non-existent and sucks. Raspberry Pi's have destroyed a half-dozen SD cards of mine. The people in the Pi community just shrug about this. It's unacceptable to me.

Bought my first RPi in the Fall of 2012 and that one, including all the
ones that came after it, have not eaten any SD card in my case. Had my
share of corrupted filesystems though but no faulty SD's.

> 
> USB is a joke on Raspberry's. I wouldn't even try to use a USB device. The Raspberry developers solved this problem by doubling the number of USB ports on the new B+ units... without fixing any of the problems... so now you can have twice the fail.

The implementation is not that good but I can live with it.

> 
> Ethernet is a joke; it's a USB device. To get the Pi to work reliably, I've had to turn off USB2 mode anyway, so the Ethernet is beat-the-dog slow too.

If you disable Turbo mode for the ethernet interface network is a wee
bit slower but USB performance is better.

> 
> There's no databook for the chip, last I checked. Oh sure, there's a PDF documenting a few of the features of the I/O ports. There's no actual databook, like any good CPU core or SOC would have.

That's surely a major drawback.

> 
> There's no real bootloader. Some call it a feature, I don't. There's no built-in flash either (another thing touted as a feature that I consider a design limitation).

I call it a feature, takes away the complexity of picky bootloaders like
uBoot. Flash memory is nice but apart from not having to buy a SD card
for a couple of bucks I don't really see the advantage of it. On my
Cubieboard2 I don't get any noticable performance gain when running the
OS from flash.

> 
> I don't consider it economical since once you add up all the things you'll need to get it to do work, you could buy a better-engineered platform for the same price. And the Pi is slower than many of the other platforms in its price range.

The community is huge, I'd call that a valuable economical asset. But
then I have no notion of how big the other communities are at the moment.

> 
> I'd instead recommend the BeagleBone Black for projects if you want a mature, well-documented platform, or any number of the new exciting ARM-based platforms coming out if you wanted to venture into something new.
> 
> I've done a few projects using the Pi over the past few years, both pro-bono and professionally, and I would not recommend the platform to anyone.

The RPi is just not made for professional use. If you need an ARM
development board for professional use I'd recommend a Beagleboard,
Cubieboard, Odroid or any other board that doesn't have the
aformentioned issues with the onboard audio, USB, ethernet,
documentation etc. But then in my experience most of these alternatives
are more expensive than a RPi.

> 
> Sorry, I like to stay positive but my experience with Raspberry's has not been good.

I like 'm but I can imagine people really having issues with them. I
jumped the bandwagon not expecting much of it. So far the RPi exceeds my
expectations for a $35 computing device.

Jeremy

> 
> Keep looking and you'll probably quickly find something that works.
> 
> -ken
> --
> ---------
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 07:59:57PM +0100, Carlos sanchiavedraz wrote:
>> Hello dear all.
>>
>> I'm testing a small interface for some musical and technological projects
>> which has an instrument input jack on one side and no audio output, just
>> USB on the other side. This IF works great but you have no physical audio
>> output to monitor/hear sound, so I thought I could enable internal audio IF
>> (as I've done on other devices) and that will be the audio output instead
>> of needing another second IF to get audio from.
>>
>> So I decided to rescue some past investigations I made when first
>> researching about RPi, along with the great content generated by some dear
>> great folks in here, and some new research one after each problem.
>>
>> First started from a Raspbian 2012 version which I had already tweaked for
>> a headless autojamming/instrument effects/looper, but got many issues
>> making step by step progresses that I briefly point here FWIW:
>>
>> - Enabled internal IF on Raspbian 2012 [1]
>>
>> - Found mmap problem regarding using Jackd with internal IF [2], even tried
>> a module somebody compiled
>>
>> - Tried switching to the new platform version, Raspbian 2015 (raspberrypi
>> 3.2.27+) but there wasn't even /proc/asound
>>
>> - Couldn't get to load snd-bcm2835 kernel module for internal soundcard [4]
>>
>> - Finally I got an error from the very raspi-config regarding internal
>> audio IF [5]
>>
>> Although I continue researching, I guess somebody here has already gone
>> through some of this, but I'm wondering if it's already an abandoned thing
>> by the makers themselves this thing of the internal IF thing.
>>
>> Thanks as always.
>> Greetings all.
>>
>> +info:
>>
>> [1] enable internal souncard on Raspbian 2012
>> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22raspberry+pi%22+enable+internal+soundcard&t=debian
>> http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=18573
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12144972/jack-audio-connection-kit-jackd-daemon-fails-to-start-on-raspberrypi
>>
>> [2] enable mmap to run jack with internal soundcard on Raspbian 2012
>> https://martinezjavier.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/mmap-support-for-raspberry-pi-bcm2835-alsa-driver/
>> https://www.hifiberry.com/forums/topic/jackd/
>>
>> [3] cat: /proc/asound: No such file or directory
>> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22cat%3A+%2Fproc%2Fasound%3A+No+such+file+or+directory%22&t=debian
>> http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=74914
>> http://forum.ubuntu.ru/index.php?topic=99987.105
>> http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=415341
>>
>> [4] error when loading snd-bcm2835 kernel raspberrypi 3.2.27+ module for
>> internal soundcard on Raspbian 2015
>> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22libkmod%3A+ERROR+..%2Flibkmod%2Flibkmod.c%3A554+kmod_search_moddep%3A+could+not+open+moddep+file+%27%2Flib%2Fmodules%2F3.2.27%2B%2Fmodules.dep.bin%27%22&t=debian
>> http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=36445&p=305808
>>
>> [5] error raspi-config when enabling audio via minijack on Raspbian 2015
>> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=raspberry+pi+%22there+was+an+error+running+option+A9+audio%22&t=debian
>> http://www.hifiwigwam.com/showthread.php?115856-Raspberry-Pi-2/page3
>>
>> -- 
>>
>> C. sanchiavedraZ:
>> * NEW / NUEVO:     www.sanchiavedraZ.com
>> * Musix GNU+Linux: www.musix.es
> 
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