The Steam Link was a little box ahead of its time. It streamed games from a PC to a TV, ran 1,500 0f them natively, offered a strange (if somewhat lovable) little controller, and essentially required a great network, Ethernet cables, and a good deal of fiddling.
Valve quietly discontinued the Steam Link gear in November 2018, but it didn’t give up. These days, a Steam Link app can be found on most platforms, and Valve’s sustained effort to move Linux-based (i.e., non-Windows-controlled) gaming forward has paid real dividends. If you still want a dedicated device to stream Steam games, however? A Raspberry Pi 5 (with some help from Valve) can be a Substitute Steam Link.
As detailed in the Raspberry Pi blog, there were previously means of getting Steam Link working on Raspberry Pi devices, but the platform’s move away from proprietary Broadcom libraries—and from X to Wayland display systems—required “a different approach.” Sam Lantinga from Valve worked with the Raspberry Pi team on optimizing for the Raspberry Pi 5 hardware. As of Steam Link 1.3.13 for the little board, Raspberry Pi 5 units could support up to 1080p at 144 frames per second (FPS) on the H.264 protocol and 4k at 60 FPS or 1080p at 240 FPS, presuming your primary gaming computer and network can support that.
Jeff Geerling’s test of Steam Link on Raspberry Pi 5, showing some rather smooth Red Dead movement.
I have a documented preference for a Moonlight/Sunshine game streaming setup over Steam Link because I have better luck getting games streaming at their best on it. But it’s hard to beat Steam Link for ease of setup, given that it only requires Steam to be running on the host PC, plus a relatively simple configuration on the client screen. A Raspberry Pi 5 is an easy device to hide near your TV. And, of course, if you don’t end up using it, you only have 450 other things you can do with it.
Actually getting the GPU working required patching the Linux kernel to include the open-source AMDGPU driver, which includes Arm support and provides decent support for the RX 460 (Geerling says the card and its Polaris architecture were chosen because they were new enough to be practically useful and to be supported by the AMDGPU driver, old enough that driver support is pretty mature, and because the card is cheap and uses PCIe 3.0). Nvidia’s GPUs generally aren’t really an option for projects like this because the open source drivers lag far behind the ones available for Radeon GPUs.
Once various kernel patches were applied and the kernel was recompiled, installing AMD’s graphics firmware got both graphics output and 3D acceleration working more or less normally.
Despite their age and relative graphical simplicity, running Doom 3 or Tux Racer on the Pi 5’s GPU is a tall order, even at 1080p. The RX 460 was able to run both at 4K, albeit with some settings reduced; Geerling also said that the card rendered the Pi operating system’s UI smoothly at 4k (the Pi’s integrated GPU does support 4K output, but things get framey quickly in our experience, especially when using multiple monitors).
Though a qualified success, anything this hacky is likely to have at least some software problems; Geerling noted that graphics acceleration in the Chromium browser and GPU-accelerated video encoding and decoding support weren’t working properly.
Most Pi owners aren’t going to want to run out and recreate this setup themselves, but it is interesting to see progress when it comes to using dedicated GPUs with Arm CPUs. So far, Arm chips across all major software ecosystems—including Windows, macOS, and Android—have mostly been restricted to using their own integrated GPUs. But if Arm processors are really going to compete with Intel’s and AMD’s in every PC market segment, we’ll eventually need to see better support for external graphics chips.
Enlarge/ The 8GB Raspberry Pi 5 with the official fan and heatsink installed.
Andrew Cunningham
We’re many months past the worst of the Raspberry Pi shortages, and the board is finally widely available at its suggested retail price at most sites without wait times or quantity limitations. One sign that the Pi Foundation is feeling more confident about the stock situation: the launch of a new 2GB configuration of the Raspberry Pi 5, available starting today for $50. That’s $10 less than the 4GB configuration and $30 less than the 8GB version of the board.
Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton writes that the 2GB version of the board includes a revised version of the Broadcom BCM2712C1 SoC that is slightly cheaper to manufacture. Upton says that the D0 stepping of the BCM2712C1 strips out some “dark silicon” built-in functionality that the Pi wasn’t using but was still taking up space on the silicon die and increasing the cost of the chip.
“From the perspective of a Raspberry Pi user, [the chip] is functionally identical to its predecessor: the same fast quad-core processor; the same multimedia capabilities; and the same PCI Express bus that has proven to be one of the most exciting features of the Raspberry Pi 5 platform,” Upton writes. “However, it is cheaper to make, and so is available to us at somewhat lower cost. And this, combined with the savings from halving the memory capacity, has allowed us to take $10 out of the cost of the finished product.”
At $50, the price tag is still north of the baseline $35 price that the Pi started at for many years. The Pi 4 had a 1GB model for $35 when it launched, and there was a $35 2GB model available for a while in 2020, but widespread shortages and supply chain issues led to a “temporary” price increase in late 2021 that is, as of this writing, still in place. At least the 2GB Pi 5 is only $5 more expensive than the 2GB version of the Pi 4, which is still in stock for $45 at many retailers.
Though you’ll want a fully fledged 8GB Raspberry Pi if you want to try using one as an everyday desktop PC, there are plenty of Pi use cases that will benefit from its additional speed and connectivity options without needing more RAM. Retro emulation boxes aren’t necessarily RAM-hungry but can benefit from the Pi 5’s extra CPU and GPU speed, and many types of lightweight server apps (Wireguard, Homebridge, Pi-hole, to name a few) can benefit from the faster Wi-Fi and Ethernet and improved support for more reliable NVMe storage.
All that said, for just $10 more, we’d still probably point most people to the more flexible and future-proof 4GB version. The Pi boards sitting around my house have all lived multiple lives at this point, picking up new tasks as my needs have changed, and new Pi boards have come out—if your Pi project today won’t benefit from more RAM, it’s possible that tomorrow’s Pi project will.
The 2GB Pi 5 is available for order from outlets like PiShop and CanaKit and should filter out to other Pi retailers soon.
Enlarge/ Raspberry Pi Connect looks like a good reason to make a Pi account, at least if you’re not running your own DynDNS, VPN, and other remote-access schemes.
Raspberry Pi
One Raspberry Pi often leads to another. Soon enough, you’re running out of spots in your free RealVNC account for your tiny boards and “real” computers. Even if you go the hardened route of SSH or an X connection, you have to keep track of where they all are. All of this is not the easiest thing to tackle if you’re new to single-board computers or just eager to get started.
Enter Raspberry Pi Connect, a new built-in way to access a Raspberry Pi from nearly anywhere you can open a browser, whether to control yourself or provide remote assistance. On a Raspberry Pi 4, 5, or Pi 400 kit, you install Pi connect with a single terminal line, reboot the Pi, and then click a new tray icon to connect the Pi to a Raspberry Pi ID (and then enable two-factor authentication, of course).
From then on, visiting connect.raspberrypi.com gives you an encrypted connection to your desktop. It’s a direct connection if possible, and if not, it runs through relay servers in London, encrypting it with DTLS and keeping only the metadata needed for the service to work. The Pi will show a notification in its tray that somebody has connected, and you can manage screen sharing from there. The Pi’s docs site has a lot more on the particulars.
Connect works only on 64-bit systems running the Bookworm version of Pi OS with a Wayland window server. Connect was created partly due to Pi’s transition to Wayland from X, which offered its own remote desktop option. According to the Pi firm, the service runs on a peer-to-peer WebRTC connection, similar to that of Zoom, Slack, Teams, and other video-sharing services. The whole service is in beta at the moment, and the company says it’s not quite sure how much traffic to expect through its relay servers.
Whether or not autonomous vehicles ever work out, the effort put into using small cameras and machine-learning algorithms to detect cars could pay off big for an unexpected group: cyclists.
Velo AI is a firm cofounded by Clark Haynes and Micol Marchetti-Bowick, both PhDs with backgrounds in robotics, movement prediction, and Uber’s (since sold-off) autonomous vehicle work. Copilot, which started as a “pandemic passion project” for Haynes, is essentially car-focused artificial intelligence and machine learning stuffed into a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and boxed up in a bike-friendly size and shape.
A look into the computer vision of the Copilot.
While car-detecting devices exist for bikes, including the Garmin Varia, they’re largely radar-based. That means they can’t distinguish between vehicles of different sizes and only know that something is approaching you, not, for example, how much space it will allow when passing.
Copilot purports to do a lot more:
Identify cars, bikes, and pedestrians
Alert riders audibly about cars “Following,” “Approaching,” and “Overtaking”
Issue visual warning to drivers who are approaching too close or too fast
Send visual notifications and a simplified rear road view to an optional paired smartphone
Record 1080p video and tag “close calls” and “incidents” from your phone
At 330 grams, with five hours of optimal battery life (and USB-C recharging), it’s not for the aero-obsessed rider or super-long-distance rider. And at $400, it might not speak to the most casual and infrequent cyclist. But it’s an intriguing piece of kit, especially for those who already have, or considered, a Garmin or similar action camera for watching their back. What if a camera could do more than just show you the car after you’re already endangered by it?
Copilot’s computer vision can alert riders to cars that are “Following,” “Approaching,” and “Overtaking.”
Velo AI
The Velo team detailed some of their building process for the official Raspberry Pi blog. The Compute Module 4 powers the core system and lights, while a custom Hailo AI co-processor helps with the neural networks and computer vision. An Arducam camera provides the vision and recording.
Beyond individual safety, the Velo AI team hopes that data from Copilots can feed into larger-scale road safety improvements. The team told the Pi blog that they’re starting a partnership with Pittsburgh, seeding Copilots to regular bike commuters and analyzing the aggregate data for potential infrastructure upgrades.
The Copilot is available for sale now and shipping, according to Velo AI. A December 2023 pre-order sold out.
Enlarge/ Is it not a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing? So small a thing!
Andrew Cunningham
The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi’s not-for-profit side expand by “at least a factor of 2X.” And while it’s “an understandable thing” that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, “while I’m involved in running the thing, I don’t expect people to see any change in how we do things.”
CEO Eben Upton confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg News that Raspberry Pi had appointed bankers at London firms Peel Hunt and Jefferies to prepare for “when the IPO market reopens.”
Raspberry previously raised money from Sony and semiconductor and software design firm ARM, and it sought public investment. Upton denied or didn’t quite deny IPO rumors in 2021, and Bloomberg reported Raspberry Pi was considering an IPO in early 2022. After ARM took a minority stake in the company in November 2023, Raspberry Pi was valued at roughly 400 million pounds, or just over $500 million.
Given the company’s gradual recovery from pandemic supply chain shortages, and the success of the Raspberry Pi 5 launch, the company’s IPO will likely jump above that level, even with a listing in the UK rather than the more typical US IPO. Upton told The Register that “the business is in a much better place than it was last time we looked at it [an IPO]. We partly stopped because the markets got bad. And we partly stopped because our business became unpredictable.”
News of the potential transformation of Raspberry Pi Ltd from the private arm of the education-minded Raspberry Pi Foundation into a publicly traded company, obligated to generate profits for shareholders, reverberated about the way you’d expect on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere. Many pointed with concern to the company’s decision to prioritize small business customers requiring Pi boards for their businesses as a portent of what investors might prioritize. Many expressed confusion over the commercial entity’s relationship to the foundation and what an IPO meant for that arrangement.
Seeing comments after the Bloomberg story, Upton said he understood concerns about a potential shift in mission or a change in the pricing structure. “It’s a good thing, in that people care about us,” Upton said in a phone interview. But he noted that Raspberry Pi’s business arm has had both strategic and private investors in its history, along with a majority shareholder in its Foundation (which in 2016 owned 75 percent of shares), and that he doesn’t see changes to what Pi has built.
“What Raspberry Pi [builds] are the products we want to buy, and then we sell them to people like us,” Upton said. “Certainly, while I’m involved in it, I can’t imagine an environment in which the hobbyists are not going to be incredibly important.”
The IPO is “about the foundation,” Upton said, with that charitable arm selling some of its majority stake in the business entity to raise funds and expand. (“We’ve not cooked up some new way for a not-for-profit to do an IPO, no,” he noted.) The foundation was previously funded by dividends from the business side, Upton said. “We do this transaction, and the proceeds of that transaction allow the foundation to train teachers, run clubs, expand programs, and… do those things at, at least, a factor of 2X. That’s what I’m most excited about.”
Asked about concerns that Raspberry Pi could focus its attention on higher-volume customers after public investors are involved, Upton said there would be “no change” to the kinds of products Pi makes, and that makers are “culturally important to us.” Upton noted that Raspberry Pi, apart from a single retail store, doesn’t sell Pis directly but through resellers. Margin structures at Raspberry Pi have “stayed the same all the way through,” Upton said and should remain so after the IPO.
Raspberry Pi’s lower-cost products, like the Zero 2 W and Pico, are fulfilling the educational and tinkering missions of the project, now at far better capability and lower price points than the original Pi products, Upton said. “If people think that an IPO means we’re going to … push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets, the only answer we can give is, watch us. Keep watching,” he said. “Let’s look at it in 15, 20 years’ time.”
This post was updated at 2: 30 pm ET on January 30 to include an Ars interview with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton.
