How long will original controller be available

[Aiph5u (Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))]

Hey Forrest,

@SurfinGump

Are you saying that an Orange Pi can directly take the place of a Raspberry in relation to the Onefinity? I’ve never felt or had the need to open mine up, but I thought the 1F Pi not only physically sits in a specific place inside the box, but also has a ribbon cable going to the stepper board from all the pin headers on the Raspberry? If so, then physically, the active pins on that ribbon cable will need to be translated/mapped to the Orange board, which I guess is not too difficult but may be annoying to say the least.

If you take into account the above, this answers your question a little better.

@SurfinGump

Also, what about the Pi firmware which is currently using Pi OS (Raspbian) of which I don’t believe will run straight away on the Orange Pi as it uses a Linux/Android hybrid OS? If so, then getting the buildbotics code (not to mention Onefinity’s specific flavor) onto the Orange Pi may be problematic?

Orange Pi (and the many others small single-board computers) support various operating systems. I would run armbian OS on it. Debian runs on it too (Debian on Allwinner)

@SurfinGump

I have used a number of boards dating back to when the Arduino IDE was version zero-point-something, but have enjoyed having the Pi and ESP boards being so pervasive in the past few years and could just grab-n-go for whatever hair-brained idea I had that particular day. And with having a few hobbies now, just don’t feel too much like branching out into the Orange Pi or other parallels.

[/begin soapbox] I also think the “shortages” for the Pi are not the complete reason for them going for as much as a used laptop, but also that the RPI Foundation screwed up not having enough manufacturers. Just last summer the one (and only one) stateside officially sanctioned manufacturer in Texas did not renew their contract. Wait, what?!? Someone decided to stop making one of the most popular electronic devices in the world, that makes no sense. It was at that time I also heard some numbers; there are 400,000 Pis produced EVERY MONTH! Granted, this is split between a few different models but at what point do you stop calling those kind of numbers a result of supply shortages? [/end soapbox]

besides the reasons mentioned above why I don’t want to use the Raspberry Pi, the unavailability of a platform is probably already a killer criterion

Why the Raspberry Pi <= 3 is slow

But seriously, to explain the reasons mentioned above a little better: The Raspberry Pi <=3 has a strange internal structure:

@Aiph5u

The problem is, on Raspberry Pis up to model 3, the USB host adapter and other peripheral devices are not attached to the CPU directly, but over a peripheral controller, and even this peripheral controller is not connected directly to the ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, but to the VideoCore IV. Therefore peripheral devices are relatively slow:

Schematic structure of the Raspberry Pi

Contrary to what one might expect, it is not the ARM CPU that leads the Raspis, but the VideoCore multimedia processor - and that is also the limiting factor.

– Source: Überreife Himbeere - Wie es mit dem Raspberry Pi weitergeht - Heise c’t 8/2016 S. 148

It’s only with Rasperry Pi 4 that USB and Ethernet host adapters are connected directly to the CPU over PCIe, allowing for USB 3.0 including USB On-The-Go and Gigabit Ethernet.

As you can see above, on Raspberry Pis <3, it is not the ARM CPU that controls the computer, but a chip that is called VideoCore IV. And the drivers and firmware to control this chip are proprietary and you’ll have to get it as closed-source binaries from the Raspberry Pi Foundation Server. These do not come from the Raspberry Pi OS server.

Now if you just want to run the bbmc application (=the Onefinity Controller application), I see no reason why you would have to forcibly use a Raspbery Pi. All you have to make sure is that the application can talk to the Onefinity AVR mainboard over a serial line and that you can program the two AVR chips on the board - which is mainly not really different to what many people know from writing a program into their Arduino from their PC.

By the way, the Obsolescence Statement of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is it will remain in production until at least January 2026. If someone is willing to produce it

Today many manufacturers question whether ARM is the future. Some rethink their focusing on ARM because you need licenses to produce an ARM-based chip. Meanwhile there exist platforms that are open hardware like RISC-V: No licenses necessary… More and more chip manufacturers are becoming interested in the new platform. While RISC-V first appeared in small single-board computers and developer boards such as those from SiFive (e.g. here), now in December 2022 Ventana microsystems introduced a RISC-V for data centers with sixteen cores, the Veyron V1… But SiFive also plans big…