Testing Out The Raspberry Pi 400

 

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the ports on my newly acquired Raspberry Pi 400 with the following specifications:

• Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.8GHz
• 4GB LPDDR4-3200
• Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN
• Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 2 × USB 3.0 and 1 × USB 2.0 ports
• Horizontal 40-pin GPIO header
• 2 × micro HDMI ports (supports up to 4Kp60)
• H.265 (4Kp60 decode); H.264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode); OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.0
• MicroSD card slot for operating system and data storage
• 78- or 79-key compact keyboard (depending on regional variant)
• 5V DC via USB connector
• Operating temperature: 0°C to +50°C ambient
• Maximum dimensions 286 mm × 122 mm × 23 mm

Figure 2 shows its actual appearance.

Figure 2

I bought it on a whim for my 73rd birthday and it only arrived today. The operating system was already installed on the 16GB memory card and, after connecting the power and the monitor, I was up and running in no time. The first hardware issue that I encountered was with Bluetooth. My ancient monitor has no inbuilt speakers and so I assumed that I would be able to listen to sound using my Bluetooth earbuds. Not so. The Raspberry Pi's Bluetooth 5.0 did not detect them.

I've only ever used the earbuds with my iPhone and they work flawlessly on that device. I succeeded in connecting to them from my Ubuntu laptop and the connection was terrible but it was still, technically, a connection. With a second set of Bluetooth earbuds, I encountered the same problem. I'll come up with a solution to this Bluetooth "invisibility" sooner or later probably, after all it's only Day 1. I know what I'm letting myself in for. If I didn't want any problems, I'd simply go out and buy a Mac of some description. I still may do so but for the moment I'll enjoy tinkering and troubleshooting with my new toy.

Software-wise, it becomes clear that the Chromium browser and the Chrome browser as two different beasts as the following extract from this site explains:

Google Chrome is one of the most popular browsers all over the world. And Raspberry Pi is the most popular mini-PC device. But unfortunately, they can’t meet together –  there is no Chrome build for Raspberry Pi (and for any other ARM-based PC except Chromebook). You can use a number of other browsers (such as Epiphany, IceWeasel or even Lynx), but will face a lack of functionality.  Many Pi-world enthusiasts use the open source version of Chrome – Chromium browser. But this isn’t a full replacement.

Chrome includes a number of proprietary libraries and in some cases, you need to use authentic Google software. For example, you can watch videos on Netflix or Amazon Prime with Chrome and can’t with Chromium. Good news that there is a simple solution to override this issue. Using Exagear Desktop allows you to get full x86 Linux environment. And this means that you can launch any application available in x86 Linux world, including Google Chrome!

Maybe I'll try Exagear out at some point but at the moment I have 4GB of RAM and a 16GB memory card as permanent storage. I need to be careful not to overtax these limitations. If possible, I'd like to upgrade to 8GB RAM and swap the memory  card for a fast SSD. I need to watch some tutorials on the subject to determine if this is possible.

ADDENDUM:

I'll quote from the article on this website:

Updating the firmware is as important as keeping your operating system and software up to date, though there might be less frequent stable updates. The main importance of this is security patches. If vulnerability in the code has been found, your Raspberry Pi firmware needs to be updated to reduce the risk of it being exploited.

The other reason is performance enhancement. Though updates usually only bring minor changes, some offer major benefits. For example, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s November 2021 update increased the turbo-mode clock from 1.5 GHz to the 1.8 GHz for recent Raspberry Pi 4s.

If you’re running Raspberry Pi OS, your firmware options are limited to what’s offered by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We’ll mention some alternative Raspberry Pi-compatible operating systems later.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has put a lot of work into making the initial setup and update process for Raspberry Pi OS extremely easy. It’s detailed on their website, but the basic steps are to check for updates with sudo apt update followed by running a full upgrade (if there’s anything new) with sudo apt full-upgrade. Using this process, you’ll be updating the operating system as well as the firmware to the latest stable releases.

My hope of course was that this update would solve my Bluetooth problems. As if it would be that easy! The update made no difference whatever in that department.