(no title)
picture | 4 months ago
However besides the personal dislike, I think its worthwhile to stop giving so much merit based on advertising "open source" or "effort" or "presentation" etc, because frankly many of these YouTube "makers" and the "maker community" are misguiding a lot of people to make bad designs and waste time and resources. People ought to value correctness and quality a bit more, lest our things become even more enshittified than they are now. One would think that hobbies would be a refuge from disposable low quality shit... yet we get RPi Pico et al (which are arguably getting less shitty but still laughable compared to actually good MCU products) and the people who claim to "out do the big corp" by using a Raspberry Pi with an SDR dongle and saying they achieved $50000 of capability with $60 in parts..
Case in point, the Opulo PNP systems are significantly overpriced and have amateurish mechanical as well as circuit design that are worse than cheaper systems like Pandaplacer in terms of reliability and performance.
Johanx64|4 months ago
I agree that Opulo PNPs are overpriced though, but I'm sure people getting these are aware that it's just a bunch of 20x20 aluminium profiles, 3d printer mgn rails, basic DC pump, etc and parts-wise there's nothing to justify the price, but they get them anyway because of entusiastic community engagement and support aspects - most importantly - in English. And it probably works just fine for the small scale projects they are used in.
picture|4 months ago
- Broken ADC design on RP2040 with nonlinearity at certain codes (and they're not fixing it)
- Shipping chips with exact part number of inductor and specific DCDC layout requirement (like come on, the Chinese are advertising zero decoupling capacitor required and you can route the USB right under the chip in funky shapes and everything "just works".. meanwhile RPi is doing this)
- GPIO current leakage (fixed with a stepping but I would hate to be those who bought a reel of the earlier stepping)
"Actually good MCU products" in my opinion are those with at least a reason to exist. For example the ubiquity of STM32, the radios of ESP32, the high compute of i.MX RT1172, the cheapness of PY32 et al, the low power of Ambiq chips, the reliability of Atmel/Microchip, the USB3 on CH569, the potential true MCU-level-SoC-capability on AG32, etc. When compared with these, RP chips are frankly not innovative at all (PIO does not unlock much actual capabilities besides party tricks). Combined with the general culture of people hyping RPi Pico chips, it results in a culture of ignorance and hype.
Erratas alone aren't a big deal, but the fact that they're happening with such basic things and for no innovation is not a good sign. We shouldn't give RPi a pass just because "it's the good old RPi that we know"