Fixing the biggest flaws of the Raspberry Pi 4

hello everybody I hope you're having a fantastic day I absolutely love the raspberry pie this is an eight gigabyte model and it is a beast of a single board computer but it is not without its faults so in this video we're going to take a look at the Raspberry Pi 4 we're gonna check out some of its faults and we're gonna show you some solutions let's get started as we take a look at the board there's absolutely nothing wrong on this side we've got a couple of USB 2 ports a couple of USB 3 ports we've got ethernet all that's great um no problems there but as we move around to this side the problems begin uh the first thing is it is nice that they provide two of these little micro HDMI ports and um I Honestly though would rather have a single full-size HDMI port than two of these mini ones and the main thing is it's just finding adapters for them I have entire boxes of HDMI cables but I always need to find a special cable or special adapt after to get these things to work and I find that pretty annoying and while we're looking at the top of the board this thing is a beast of a CPU the problem is most people say it requires active Cooling and that in of itself is not a problem but the problem is most of the cooling fans are absolutely terrible they make a ton of noise they don't even do such a great job of cooling you have to add your own little heatsinks pretty annoying as we flip the board over you can see that I have a high quality Samsung Evo 256 Gig micro SD card in this thing and that has actually served me pretty well but the fact that you need a Micro SD card is pretty frustrating these things are not hard drives they're not made to be run the same way that hard drives are run and there's always reliability problems things like that plus they're expensive the next thing that annoys me is although this thing has a wonderful 40 pin gpio thing there is Nary a label to be found on here so you don't know what all these pins do and so I always find myself going back and forth to the documentation to figure out what each of these pins does and that just kind of sucks now we are actually going to tackle the pin label problems in a couple of different ways but the first way we're going to do it is with the sponsor of this video pcbway.com and you see on PCB way I got 10 of these pcbs and they run five bucks plus about seven dollar shipping and I got 10 of these little breakout boards for the Raspberry Pi and as you can see every single pin is labeled uh they took me about two minutes to solder up and I was able to uh you know it's a little fluxy but uh these things fit right on top of the Raspberry Pi and allow you to see what you're plugging in which is pretty awesome they also offer an extra benefit that when you're doing your prototyping you can actually remove this and keep all of your wires hooked up and then set it aside while you're doing other things on the Raspberry Pi so these things again I ordered them from pcbway.com and they're just super simple they're an awesome sponsor of the channel you can hit one button and get it in your cart and have them to you in just a couple of days now the next thing I want to show you is not sponsored but I bought it and I loved it so much that I had to show it to you for this video it is the Argon one m.2 Raspberry Pi case and I went ahead and bought the 18 watt power supply to go with it now I have this thing hooked up and I love it so much but I'm willing to rip it apart because it solves so many problems so I think it's important for me to give you just a little bit of backstory I was looking to upgrade a server and one of these retropie things and uh this thing had it's a cool looking case but the fan is gar garbage and obviously is limited to 256 gigabytes now um you know obviously I own a whole bunch of ROMs there are places online where you could download pre-configured images with up to like let's say a terabyte of ROMs you know and then put it on your Raspberry Pi but obviously I can't tell you where you could get such romps so I went online to start checking out to see how much it would cost to buy a one terabyte micro SD card now again I don't love micro SD cards for this type of thing but it seemed like the best thing at the time and I'm astounded first of all I'm astounded that you could fit a terabyte on something that small but beyond that uh just astounded how expensive they are I mean they're 100 to 150 dollars you know depending on the brand and the quality and all that kind of stuff and you know that's a lot of data to lose if something goes bad and so um they are pretty dang expensive and that um is what led me to Bringing In this bad boy and this is the Argon one m.2 let's take a look so this is an absolutely beautiful in my opinion Raspberry Pi case it is Sleek it has that stealth fighter look and um it's got a built-in fan it's got m.2 we're going to get to that in just a minute um but it is just such a cool case to put your Raspberry Pi in I mean it is just the perfect case in my opinion and I'm going to show you why so let's start looking at the problems that I addressed earlier the first one is the one that we've solved with this board but there's also another way to solve it and check this out this magnetically attached cover actually lists the port labels on the case itself which I think is just an awesome idea beyond that it even has some color coding in there which I think is pretty sweet and what's really cool is that this thing actually will the clearance is closed but this little thing will actually fit on here and fit on this case so you can actually use the two of these together so these things together solve the gpio problem and what's really sweet these things just attach with magnets it just Clips on there and that is just a very nice little way to handle that now the next problem that I brought up and this really does drive me crazy is these little micro HDMI connectors they feel weak they're hard to find the adapters for I've got a million HDMI cables but only a couple of these and they solve that by actually breaking out not one but two full-size HDMI ports right on the case and I'm going to show you how they do that in just a minute so we're going to take this thing apart and uh I'll show you how it works now the bottom of this thing is actually a semi-transparent feels like acrylic or something like that uh so it's kind of cool you can still see the lights going on in there but uh it does go together with four screws so we're just going to take it apart and I'm going to make sure I pull that USB adapter out of the side and uh we'll see what this thing's got going on the inside so we've got the screws out we're going to go ahead and pull this out and then that gives us access to the back now the first thing you'll see is this tray here and this includes an m.2 slot now here's what makes this really magical I was saying earlier that the one terabyte cards Run 100 to 150 you can buy the case and a one terabyte SATA m.2 drive for ninety seven dollars combined so you get all the features the better reliability of the m.2 SSD the awesome case and everything for about the price of a micro SD card and definitely cheaper than the price of a quality micro SD card and I think that is pretty awesome so this board just sits here by itself there's not really much to do to it you just put the single screw in there and as you can see the little m.2 Drive comes right out I'm going to show you uh something else in just a second so I'm going to leave that out and we're going to put that over here I'm going to put the screw over here for safety keeping and then this thing just actually comes in here with just a couple of screws right down here we're going to take these out and I'm going to show you this carrier board which I love also so this little carrier board I'm going to gently take it off so this little carrier board here has the two full-size HDMI ports and the speaker Jack which is just brilliant so as you can see here you just carefully line it up and you pop it together and your Raspberry Pi becomes a one with the carrier board and then over here we have something that's really cool this is actually a very quality fan um I've mentioned this case before and you know they look the same I mean that looks this like the same kind of fan or you can actually see there's more blades on this one but uh this fan is just quiet and it just feels like good quality in addition to that it actually has these heat contact pads and these um these heat spreaders basically on the case itself and that's because this thing is aluminum it actually uses the entire case as a heatsink and then one of the things that we haven't mentioned is the whole idea that I said the Raspberry Pi does not have a power button but this case actually gives you a power button not only does it give you a power button but it gives you the ability to choose whether you want to have to hit the power button after you lose power or if you want to automatically come on so let's say when I use this thing as a server in the event that the power would go out and the UPS would go out this thing will automatically boot your Raspberry Pi when the power comes back on and then in addition to that it actually has infrared so you can use an IR remote control to control the thing which is very very sweet so as you can see here the gpio pins are actually coming up here so this board moves the gpio pins over here so that you can get them with the little labels and with the color codes right there so what you do is now you make sure your heat pad things are on there and you carefully line this thing up with the gpio port and you push it on and you put in a couple screws and you are good to go now I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about the one downside that people say about this case and for me it's not really a downside but it is that the the micro SD card is not accessible when you have it in the case so you actually do have to take the back off to get to the micro SD card but as you can see here I'm not booting from the micro SD card because there wasn't one in there I'm booting from the m.2 and that's what makes this thing magical so what you do is you go on the Raspberry Pi website and you download a little SD image and you put it in here and your screen will be green and then immediately after that if you put an SD card in here it'll boot to this but if there's an m.2 card hooked up it'll boot to that so basically what I'm telling you is that you can use an SD card but you don't need one now since we're all talking I'm going to show you about one other thing that I really like there's a lot of different versions of these kind of things but what's really cool I've really come to like this R2 top m.2 reader now for those of you who aren't familiar there are two kinds essentially of m.2 ssds there's the nvme and there's the SATA and not every reader can read both but this one can so um the Raspberry Pi case requires a SATA SSD and the reason for that is that you will not saturate an m.2 mvme Drive um there it's actually running over USB and so although this is 30 to 40 percent faster than running on the fastest micro SD cards um adding a true nvme drive would not make it faster so this thing uses B plus M keying and all you have to do it looks kind of backwards but you put in here and what I like about this is you don't need any kind of tiny screws or anything like that I use this for transferring images and all that kind of stuff now you don't have to do this you can actually transfer the image using the raspberry pi itself but this thing is pretty sweet and of course I'll have a link to this in the description so as I put this thing back together about the only thing this doesn't solve is the availability of Raspberry Pi's I was fortunate enough to get some of them before the uh before the shortage hit everybody but they're still hard to come by and they say that this year the supplies will return back to normal um no telling if that's true I kind of think it probably is I'm surprised they're not back to normal by now the understanding is that what they've been doing is using their supplies and um providing them to companies that are basically based their company on the Raspberry Pi instead of makers like us and I don't know how you feel about that um you know companies like uh Canary the people who make those honey pot devices they're based on a Raspberry Pi and without the Raspberry Pi they wouldn't be able to function as a business so um the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been prioritizing people like that and allowing them to get their raspberry pies while we all sit around and wait so um I don't know how you feel about that but anyway so let me ask you this are there any other things that drive you crazy about the Raspberry Pi anything else you'd like to fix um you know to me this thing is a godsend for fixing a lot of these bugs and these I guess not bugs these design choices of the Raspberry Pi and um you know I've been really really happy with it I've been running it um everything is Snappy everything runs really well I like the power switch um I did buy and I'll grab it in a second I did buy the um argon brand 18 watt USB adapter and so um I like that I like it actually does have a power switch on it also um for the most part I've always recommended the Canon kits ones but you know there's nothing special about this but it does seem to be a decent um power supply so I have that now the last thing you have to do is you plug in this little jumper thing that jumpers the USB from uh the carrier board up to this board and then there's your little power switch over there I don't think I pointed that out but that is the Argon case maybe what I'll do is I'll hook it up and plug it in so that you guys can hear how quiet it is so as you can tell it's both not a loud sound and not a horrible sound and it turns off if it actually doesn't need it so uh pretty impressive in my book anyway let me know what you think and I appreciate you guys and I hope you have a great day thanks for watching

Channel: AnotherMaker

Views: 16,868

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Id: UZR8hOWWbFQ

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2023