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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Raspberry Pi 3A+? Wow, that became a thing? I thought that was a product line that Raspberry Pi Foundation would not continue due to lack of popularity… but now it’s back! This time, though, the board did not sacrifice computer network-grade communications capabilities…

KEY POINTS:

  • RPi 3A+ does not have Ethernet, but it does have onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

  • The Raspberry Pi Model A form factor has been one of the most requested “missing” features of the newer versions of Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. Thus, Raspberry Pi 3A+ has been created to fill that gap., also this is somewhat of a “capstone” for the Raspberry Pi Foundation since their next board will be radically different from the classic architecture.

  • The promo video is in “Far East” electronics industry style.

  • Purportedly RPi 3A+ was going to be USB 3, but they blew the design budget on the flashy promo video. “Guilty” replied one of the RPi Foundation members.

  • You can do USB OTG with Raspberry Pi A+, but because you only have a 4-pin connector at full size rather than the 5-pin micro connector, you can only do one of either master or slave and stick to that, you cannot switch back and forth dynamically.

  • Raspberry Pi does not properly implement I2C clock stretching. That is, when an I2C slave needs more time and signals that on the bus, the idea being that the master should halt the clock until the slave signals that it’s ready.

20200714/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi 3a
20200714/https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-product-raspberry-pi-3-model-a/
20200714/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
20200714/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi i2c clock stretching
20200714/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=146272

Raspberry Pi point-of-sale terminals? Go look at ViewTouch, this is developed entirely around Raspberry Pi and free, libre, open-source software. Developed by who? Not a corporate conglomerate with a big marketing budget but not very good technical skills, but by a small independent software developer who has been developing their own point-of-sale terminal software since the 1980s, starting with an Apple II computer. So, yes… you can understand why this software has not made inroads into most restaurants, despite being capable.

20200714/DuckDuckGo ViewTouch
20200714/http://viewtouch.com/