Tech – Element 14’s new Pi Desktop- This One Might Be Important – Update: utter disappointment

Element 14 has just announced their new “Pi Desktop” (bad name, all generic terms, hard to get meaningful search results). It may be worth attention, even from those who know what they’re doing.

I know, I know, there have been a lot of efforts to create some sort of “kit” to turn a Raspberry Pi into a really usable desktop, and most miss the point almost entirely, negating or ignoring the big advantages of the RPi, the very reason it has been a huge success (over 12 million sold at this writing). There’s a chance that this might be different.

The RPi has succeeded very largely because it’s a scrounger’s dream. That’s part of what manufacturers and vendors don’t seem to “get” at all- it was never targeted toward “consumers”, it has always been targeted to the DIY crowd, whether hardware hackers or beginning programmers in grade school. It inspired the imaginations of the sort of people who already have an interest in gadgets and technology.

It’s intended to run off of 5 volt power from a micro-USB jack, so any sufficiently powerful USB phone or tablet charger will do. It’s got HDMI out, so it will plug into any spare TV or device with a screen and HDMI in. It’s got USB ports, so you can plug in any typical mouse and keyboard you have laying around, or the wireless dongle for them. It uses a micro-SD card for storage by default, same as a million other devices, and can be configured to use (and now even boot off of) a USB thumb drive, or USB external hard drive, or a notebook drive in a USB “enclosure”, or a USB SSD… whatever you need, if you even need storage beyond a micro-SD card. You may well not need any one of these things, Raspberry Pi’s are used a great deal for specialized tasks.

The point is, the type of person that wants to buy a Raspberry Pi is exactly the sort of person that already has a lot of this stuff lying around, and knows where and how to get more of it dirt cheap or for free… including on-line sources (sometimes direct from Asia), friends, thrift stores, even dumpsters. Not only can your typical nerd create some sort of a system with a Raspberry Pi and typical consumer electronics junk, but doing so means that they can upgrade any of the components when better ones become available cheap or free.

Creating a commercial package that includes the Raspberry Pi, a screen, keyboard, mouse, plus whatever hardware the vendor is really trying to sell may make the kit more “complete”, but it drastically reduces the appeal to those who already have a lot of it, or can easily procure it for far less than a typical “consumer” would pay.

So, what have we got here?

This new “kit” from Element 14 includes some sort of “hat” (or daughterboard)  that plugs into the GPIO array of a Raspberry Pi 3, and a case. It includes a power controller,  a real-time clock (RTC) with battery, and an mSATA “SSD interface”. That last is the critical point on which our interest should hing, but let’s address the others two:

The real-time clock (RTC) is a surprisingly important part of a desktop computer, and it was actually pretty much the first thing I did with my first Raspberry Pi (a first-generation Model B). It’s not so critical if you’re always connected to the Internet, because any modern operating system will take the “system time” from there, but once you’re not, the lack of a RTC means that your system is going to fall back to some distant-past default date, and that’s bad. It means that dates on newly created or changed files can be wildly off, which can create some subtle and annoying problems. The first RTC I added to an RPi was just a generic Chinese module that cost a few dollars, and I had to add code to the startup, shutdown and web connection scripts to get it to work properly. I’m going to really date myself here… I didn’t solder it in place, I used my old wire-wrap tool and wire to connect the pins on the module to the GPIO pins on the RPi. Those of you who know what that means probably go back to at least the ’80s in the field.

Unfortunately I soon discovered that the old RPi B simply didn’t have much potential as a desktop machine.

These days there are lots of options to get a RTC on a Raspberry Pi, from stand-alone boards to many with other “main” functions that include a RTC as almost an afterthought. No wire-wrap required.

The power controller is a welcome addition, but hardly unique. One of the gripes against the Pi has always been that it goes on “standby” when you shut it down from the menus, rather than powering all the way down… so the great temptation is just to pull the plug, which is how a lot of SD cards get scrambled.

I assume they’re talking about something like the Pi Supply switch, which calls itself an “ATX style”, and really seems to be. It works like we’re used to notebooks and desktops working now, you push a button to turn it on (the Pi is powered all the way down) and you shut it down from the menus, in which case it pauses for a little while and then shuts the power to the Pi completely off. Works like a charm. Yes, it does come as a kit that needs to be soldered, but it’s pretty trivial (what can I say, I’m a geek, no problem) there really aren’t many components, and that gives you the easy option to run wires and/or connectors to external switches if you want it mounted in a box. There is also some downloadable utility to use a switch to start an orderly shutdown process on the Pi if you want that- so far I haven’t bothered, nothing I’ve used it on yet was intended to be a long-term setup.

I got mine from MCM Electronics. To be honest, I don’t really remember why. Maybe Pi-Supply wasn’t selling direct yet back then.

So, the case, the RTC and the power supply switch are all very nice. Now we get to the real heart of the matter, the mSATA interface. This is the key to the whole thing.

The Raspberry Pi is very I/O bound, always has been. The latest processor is a four-core and amazingly capable for the price, the 1 mb of memory is pretty scanty but enough to run Linux well, the memory access is plenty fast enough, but of all the “storage” access, the micro-SD card socket, the USB ports, the Ethernet jack, the on-board Bluetooth and Wifi, the fastest is… the USB ports. USB 2.0. That’s just sad, and really, really hampers the user experience. Anyone who has upgraded their main machine from a hard drive to a solid-state drive will tell you that it’s the single most effective thing you can do to improve the entire user experience, short of upgrading a whole machine… and the Raspberry Pi is sort of in the opposite direction, with storage being slower rather than faster.

We have hoped for years that they’d come up with a Raspberry Pi with some sort of improved storage access, anything significantly better than USB 2.0, but so far it hasn’t happened. Now this $50 kit is promising some miscellaneous nice-to-have bells and whistles, but mSATA as well.

There are a number of possibilities as to how this has been implemented. It may, sadly, be restricted to the speed of the USB 2.0/Ethernet bus, in which case the mSATA interface is entirely wasted and the use of it more than a little deceptive. If that’s the case, this kit can probably be safely ignored. If, on the other hand, they’ve come up with some significantly faster way to get data in and out of the GPIO array, this could be huge.

Maybe.

Frustratingly, as of right now, I can’t find any real technical details at all, just marketing puff. That’s really too bad, a tech product should not be announced without technical details being accessible, at least if you’re willing to download specs. It’s, again, symptomatic of being unable to perceive who it is that they’re marketing to.

The first hope may be Adafruit- I’m writing this on Wednesday, and Wednesday evening is when they live-stream several segments, including “New Products”. It will be uncharacteristic and disappointing if they didn’t cover anything that’s released by Element 14, and it’s hard to imagine “Lady Ada” (Limor Fried) not covering this very important point- and she’s one of the people who can probably know at a glance what they’ve done without spreadsheets.

I’ll be listening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9dRjMllYqc (Adafruit’s “Ask an Engineer” on Youtube, 8:00 pm GMT-4 EST)

– Robert the Wombat

UPDATE: Well, this turned out to be a big disappointment.

I finally found the information I was looking for in this Youtube video:

Element 14 Pi Desktop Overview And Assembly (Youtube.com)

As I said, one of the reasons that I was hopeful that the included mSATA interface meant that they had finally done something significant about the Raspberry Pi storage input/output bottleneck is that I was not aware that there was any way to access the USB 2.0 controller through the GPIO pins, which are the usual interface to a Pi “hat”. It turns out that they handled this in just about the most disappointing way possible: they include a little u-shaped two-ended plug that jumpers one of the Pi USB jacks to some jack, probably a micro-USB, on the hat.

Wow. Just wow. That means that they’re running their mSATA connection at USB 2.0 speeds, which is just sad. It means that it’s going to pretty much completely waste the speed of any mSATA device that’s attached to it, while restricting you to pretty expensive storage options. This is… not good. It means that the only real advantages you’re getting with their $50 kit are a real-time clock (less than $5) and cosmetics, with the huge disadvantage that you have to pay for an mSATA SSD when you could get the same performance for a fraction of the price from pretty much any modern, cheap external thumb drive or USB hard drive. It means that, while the Raspberry Pi is still great for embedded, dedicated projects, the potential that everyone has seen for years for it to eventually become an inexpensive, modular, workable desktop PC replacement has still not been realized, that in that respect it’s still pretty much a toy. Until they provide some sort of storage I/O that’s much faster than USB 2.0 (the micro-SD card slot is even slower) it won’t really be usable as a primary PC for anyone much beyond the level of a not-very-demanding 6-year-old, and that’s a real shame.

Somebody needs to clue in the management at Element 14 that you can’t pull this stuff on technical people. We’re the folks that look beyond the fancy $50 led-lit case and see that what’s inside is actually worse choice than $20 worth of assorted consumer electronics junk bought on-line. I’m guessing that their target market is indulgent non-technical parents buying what their little kids ask for because it’s “cool”.

Sigh. Maybe when/if we get a Raspberry Pi 4.0, however long that might take, they’ll actually provide some way to realize its potential. It would be nice if that happens before we’re all spending time working in VR and even a dirt-cheap non-VR PC is just a curiosity.

– Robert the Wombat