Pi was almost 6.28...

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/14/pi-was-almost-6-28.html

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in that case pi would be 2. guessing you meant pi should be the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius [or is that radius, wait I’m confused].

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I think you mean 0.5.

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honestly I’m not sure anymore - the mystery of Pi!

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I was gonna say that!!

I think you mean 0.5.

That too!!

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Small speed bump, better to heatsink, mainly networking improvements, 2.4 and 5 GHz wifi.

I was hoping for USB 3.

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KARP’s song “Pie”, wherein “pie” ostensibly means “pi”. Chew on that for awhile:

“Have a slice on me!
Calculate for free
Punch in the digits
Add whipped topping
Ready or not
Better get it while it’s hot
Kids can learn from pie
It’s scientifantastic”

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then writing a letter to the Bernoullis to boast about doing so afterwards.

Who wouldn’t?

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Yeah, nothing major. If I’m building a new project I’ll go for the B+ but I don’t see much of a need to replace existing hardware.

Yeah, not anywhere near what one should call a signfigant improvement. It’s a minor upgrade to an uncompetetive board. I guess if you’re locked to the Rpi world, it’s a nice thing, but sheesh, there’s a big world out there and there are much better boards available.

Vi Heart makes a good plea for replacing Pi with Tau which is 2*Pi.

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Does anyone make a Pi ZeroW equivalent with a standby power mode?

Vi has a new rant this year, and a patreon too:


We should celebrate Tau day on 6/28
And Fibonacci day on 11/23

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Ah, sweet mystery of pie!

there are much better boards available.

Suggestions? Always looking for hardware to play with. Last one that caught my eye a while ago was the Beaglebone Black, but I suspect it’s dated now.

Me too!
(Post must have at least 9 characters.)
(Well, that seems rather arbitrary.)

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The Orange Pi Zero and the Zero Plus both feature chips with a small system processor which can shutdown/power up the rest of the SoC for power savings. It’s currently getting support for mainline. Since it’s a completely different archetecture, you have to code specifically for it if you want to do anything while the machine is in the low power state. Any Allwinner based SoC has that ability to varying extents, IIRC.

Now, if you need good WiFi, you might want to go USB as the WiFi included on those two boards is not impressive.

For active mode power savings, you can easily disable cores (the H2+ and H5 chips those boards are based on are all quad core) and limit the clock frequency of both the processor and the memory. The linux-sunxi.org web site will have more info as will the IRC channel on freenode.

Sure, we may be wandering a bit off topic, so we may want to start a thread for this purpose if this discussion wanters too far off. Basically it depends on your needs. There are boards optimized for power consumption (low), CPU performance, GPU performance, networking, storage, I/O, cost, etc. I can’t say that any one board fits all needs.

++The ODROID boards are generally steps up from the Rpi boards in every way–faster, better storage, better expandability, more memory, etc.
++The Orange Pi boards are cheaper and come in a very wide (confusingly wide) variety of configurations.
++Then there’s the Pine64 board (and the family of boards that it’s becoming).
++There’s a variety of Rockchip based boards coming out based on Google using them in Chromebooks–which forces them to have better open source support and mainline Linux support.

I could go on longer, but I’m already far enough off topic. If you want to go into detail, start a new topic and message me and I’ll join you there.

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2π is OK for flatlanders, but for physics we use 4π at least as much, as in the expression for Coulomb’s constant: 1/(4πε0) In spherical polar, we integrate across 0 to 2π on one axis and 0 to π on another; across a surface it’s 0 to 4π and across a volume it’s 0 to 4π/3

So meh. Just learn to touch-type LaTeX.

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I don’t have much use for an embedded that draws that much power.

I installed one in a French hat.

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