MASTER THE RASPBERRY Pi 4
The Raspberry Pi 4, the latest iteration of the world’s most popular single-board computer, has dropped with a big impact, sporting a huge uptick in specifications that doesn’t affect its credit-card-sized footprint. But once you’ve invested your $35, what are you going to do with that cut-price, cut-sized hardware? How do you exploit its abilities? We have a few ideas that use those new features—the gigabit Ethernet, upgraded CPU and GPU, 4K-capable dual HDMI ports—and make the Pi 4 shine.
It actually arrived a few months ago, but we’ve held off on taking a dive into the Pi 4’s potential abilities because it hasn’t been ready—the hardware leap from the previous generation hasn’t been easy for software creators to catch up with, and its firmware has lagged behind a little. While things have improved, you need to go into this adventure knowing you might not yet be creating anything that’s production-ready.
That said, there’s still plenty to play with and a lot of benefit to be eked out of the miniature marvel. The Pi 4 is a feasible compact desktop computer at last. Its architecture—which includes USB 3 ports that no longer share a bus—lends itself to running as a custom NAS controller, a network appliance, or a TV media box. And as software support improves and that firmware firms up, as the key distros bring their full functionality to the Pi, there’s a world of potential to explore.
New hardware is highly exciting, and the natural response to a spiced up Pi would be to abuse it to the max. So, why not use it as a full PC? Yes, it has always been technically possible to use a Pi as a functioning desktop PC. Even the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B, with its 512MB RAM and 700MHz ARMv6 CPU, could manage a rudimentary desktop, in much the same way as you can force a Commodore 64 to run a GUI or even a Linux analog if you’re crazy. Of course, those with long memories will remember PCs of yesteryear running with far lighter specs, but they weren’t the size of a credit card with a severely limited architecture.
While there’s been incremental improvement in the Pi’s desktop performance over the years, the new hardware in the Pi 4 does away with the “technically possible” part of the equation: It is not just feasible to run a Pi 4 as a desktop machine, it is positively pleasurable,
