I think the problem was a compatibility issue between the Pi’s video output and the old TV I was using as a monitor. I used a fresh micro HDMI to full HDMI cable as a direct connection, but still took a lot of fiddling to get it on.
Now I’m building a full sized PC for him. We built a KBDcraft Adam keyboard for it together, which he really enjoyed https://kbdcraft.store/products/adam
Yeah I was thinking of the 500 in the context of a good kid’s machine. The portability is definitely a plus, although if you’re having to pack a display and a power cable anyway, I think I would (and will, since I happen to be looking for something right now) just go with a Beelink S12 or similar. The kid can do some light gaming on it then, too. The 400 keyboard doesn’t look particularly nice to type on either, tbh.
david@liqueur:~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p2 13G 4.8G 7.3G 40% /
david@liqueur:~ $ swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/var/swap file 204784 0 -2
Sure the adapter introduce a cost, but even a used Optane drive is going to have better reliability, in addition to the mentioned performance, than a new SDcard; so pay $5.
For video decoding on the GPU, processing on the same GPU memory in place and then displaying takes significantly less work than decoding on the CPU copying to the GPU and doing the rest their and most of the time is in the copy.
The Pi 400 is small because it's meant to be aimed at the young. But young children are good with clicking buttons and poor with fine dexterity; they will likely do better with mice.
A clip-on trackpad to go alongside it would be nice, though.
I'm not really the target market but I am hoping a Pi 500 will tick all the right boxes to use as a cheap computer in a space-constrained workshop.
I would gladly overpay if there will be an 8G version, as it would make it a nice set - decent spec plus decent passive cooling out of the box.
We should hope so, pi 5 dumps a lot of heat, it might need a passively cooled aluminium case plate so it doesn't throttle
I never got why they left the waste of a GPIO connector on the 400 and forced you to have to adapt the video outs.
that's the whole point for a lot of us, otherwise we'd just use one of the billion other SBCs.
If the requisite is "I need an sbc to jam into a keyboard that has a modern vid-out" there are plenty of small SBCs and massive keyboards.
A big part of the aim was simply to provide a nearly-all-in-one device for educational computing.
Physical computing is part of the school curriculum in the UK, mainly starting in Key Stage 2 (7-11 year olds, though there's some in Key Stage 1, as well).
This device exists in a very particular market space where for example the CrowPi laptops sell quite well. But it has been made by team of people who are influenced by the BBC Model B and the profound impact it had.
I'm not saying the latter isn't a significant fraction, I'm just saying I think almost nobody buys the keyboard form factor device not to use the video with it.
You can consider the Pi 400 to be a very particular love letter to the BBC model B, with the GPIO port providing the kind of physical computing access provided by the "Tube" port.