My thoughts on Raspberry Pi 5 after testing it for a while

The Raspberry Pi 5 is here and as any new technology, it has its supporters and detractors. In this post, you will get both points of view, plus ours.

To begin with, here in DeepSea Developments we are design partners of Raspberry Pi, so you could think we are biased, and? that could be a little bit true, but it is also true that I personally disliked Raspberry in the past. In a moment I chose other alternatives, and that decision was one of many that led my first startup to failure (I will tell you more about it in a while).

Why do some people hate the new Raspberry Pi 5?

The main comment I've heard is:?

It is basically the same as the previous one (Raspberry Pi 4). More powerful, but they removed the audio jack!! (something very “Apple” from their side). They optimized things, but there is not really a big innovation on it; and it was about time for them to include the power button.

I guess that if you have played with some Raspberry Pi before, and you have them working for some regular projects but not necessarily on the professional level, you would be right.

Between Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, they share almost all the same ports, the main differences are:

• The Ethernet port has moved from place, so you can't use previous enclosures.
• No more audio jack in the Pi 5.
• In Pi 4 there was 1 port for a camera, and one for a display. In the Pi 5 you have 2, but you can use them both as a camera, or both for display, or just mix them.
• Power button on Pi 5 (you could have an external button connected to the pinout and configured as a power button in the Pi 4).
• Real Time Clock (RTC) with battery connector. This allows you to store the time without having to reconfigure every time you turn it on again.
• USB-C seems to be the same, but in the Pi5, as more power is needed, there is a special power supply designed by them to boost the performance. It is not required, but if you want more performance, it is needed.
• PCIe port (biggest one for me). You could connect external ssd or even a Graphical card You can use external GPUs on the Raspberry Pi 5

Another reason not to feel too excited about the Pi 5 is the competitors. In the field of SBC (Single Board Computers), Raspberry Pi is the most famous player, but it isn’t the cheapest (or the most expensive), nor the fastest, the one with more features, or the cutest. And that's good for us as consumers, as we have a variety of choices.?

Depending on your niche, or budget, you could go with boards like BeagleBone (The one that always been here), Nvidia's jetson boards (good for ML/AI things), nanopi/orangepi/bananapi/[insert fruit]pi (inspired from raspberry pi that brings different flavors), LattePanda or UDOO X86 (with high performance).

So yeah, if you are used to Raspberry Pi, and see a puppy like the lattePanda, that seems powerful (and cute), that's a wow factor, for sure.

Reasons to love the new Raspberry Pi 5

If you were using the Raspberry Pi 4 at it's top performance, and still you needed more, Pi 5 is great news because it is the platform you know, and you are used to it, and more powerful! With the versatility of integrating directly peripherals through the PCIe port, or even having 2 cameras per Raspberry Pi (which is huge for some people).?

Long story short, around 2015 I was building a startup around home automation that made things different from before (home automation was around for more than 50 years but there was not really a revolution around it). This was before Alexa, or Google Home. We wanted to build a hub that learned the behavior of the users and be a real smart home instead of an automated home. Raspberry Pi was around, and we did some first tests with it. It was starting to get famous and some of my co-founders wanted to use it as our main board. I refused strongly, as it was not possible to build the future of smart home with something so bulky; It took away the flexibility of doing a powerful yet elegant product.?

The chosen board was Intel's Edison board, oriented to create IoT products with a very small form factor and the possibility to build something beautiful.

So we started a development of a year around this module, only to discover a few months before releasing our product that Intel's strategy around doing IoT boards was no longer their priority, and they announced they weren’t going to continue working with it, and set a time for stopping the support they were given. This event, plus additional situations with the partners (first startup I had, so I learned a lot on what NOT to do on a startup) led us to failure, and we looked for other horizons

Compute Module, the missing link to mass production horizon

When the first compute module was released, that was my "eureka" moment that changed my mind from disliking Raspberry Pi, to loving it. It is the way to go from prototypes and MVPs (using the regular boards) to a product ready for mass production, and optimized (using the compute modules).?

So, if the compute modules are the key, what about Raspberry Pi 5?

Two words: Fast prototyping. Many of the additional features of the Raspberry Pi 5, like dual camera or pci, are found on the compute module 4, but if you take the Compute module IO board, it is huge compared with the regular Raspberry Pi 4, or 5. The Pi 5 has the advantage of that board, in a smaller and more powerful form factor.

Appreciating Stability

Raspberry Pi has shown their position of creating a reliable and supported platform. And that is golden. At the design partner event in Cambridge UK, we found out that they still sell many Compute modules 1 to give support for many products that are still being sold with those. And also, they created different versions of the compute module not to be used in new designs but to be fully compatible and support existing designs. That is golden.

Raspberry pi CM4 IO board

Compute module vs raspberry pi 4

More yet to come

Raspberry has gone through an interesting path, from first appeal to makers/students, to later being the key component in many products for different industries. Both projects from makers and professional products are very thrilling to see and get inspired by.?

Whether you hate it or love it. It’s undeniable the positive footprint that Raspberry and all their new products do to the ecosystem, specially the new Raspberry Pi 5, which proved to be more powerful than its predecessor.

The new frontier they face is silicon (with the introduction of the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040)), which brings a new horizon of interesting applications.