Raspberry why? 3 unfortunate things about the Raspberry Pi hardware design

Again this is very confusing for users and will make the RPi very unstable for a lot of folks. The RPi will (seem to) crash randomly depending on: what USB devices you plug in, how many of them you plug in, for how long you plug them in, what the USB devices are doing, length of cables, quality of cables, what the Ethernet connection is doing and on whether the Pi is processing a lot. In other words: !!@#$!#$ wat?

A workaround to this would be to use an externally powered USB 2.0 hub... But... Come on, wasn't the RPi supposed to be cool for it's small size, low cost and easy of use? Oh and remember, only use hubs that are on the "Raspberry Pi tested & working USB hubs"... hmmm...

3. The Micro SD card reader that maybe reads SD cards... or destroys them...

One would assume that if an SD memory card is put into an SD card reader this would actually work. Not with the Raspberry Pi... Before using or buying an SD-card for the Pi, be sure to first check the tested & supported SD-card list.

But even if you do use a correct card you will eventually get into trouble when running the Pi for extended amounts of time (minutes to months). Here's why:

• If you remove power from the RPi or remove the SD card while it is being written to, there's a big chance the OS-image will become corrupted and will fail to boot. See point 1 and 2: this will happen (a lot) if experimenting with power-draw, (USB-)devices, GPIO and/or *cables everywhere*.
• The SD card is flash memory. Flash memory has a limited amount of write cycles per memory cell before it will fail. The RPi has no correction mechanisms for this. If you leave the RPi on long enough and actually use the SD card to write to during it's operation, it will fail eventually. All by itself. Withing months, according to the internet. There are workarounds though to limit the amount of "unnesesary" writes to the SD card and extend the life of your SD card a bit. Does that make RPi a really stable platform? Not really in my opinion...

Other smaller problems

The above are some of the main problems with the RPi B2 (and other RPi's too). These are different problems however in that they don't depend on the hardware "design fails" as much, but are more general misfortunes:

• The bug which makes some RPi B2's crash when they're exposed to bright light.
• Buggy bad quality poly fuses which will make the voltage drop even more than they're supposed to.
• Bad quality audio output: the 3.5mm stereo jack output on the RPi is known to have a huge amount of noise on it. Not really usable for anything serious, makes me doubt why it's there at all?
• Other minor issues you know of?

Fixing the Raspberry Pi B2 hardware design

All of the problems described above could be fixed in future hardware designs. Better yet: they can be fixed without increasing the price of the RPi. Examples of fixes:

1. Add pads (or a power-happy connector) for an external power supply + use a poly fuse with a much higher hold current at the input power circuit (or use multiple smaller ones in parallel) for the entire board. Specify a slightly higher input voltage than 5V to compensate for the poly fuse voltage drop(s). Place the voltage regulator circuit behind the poly fuse. Of course traces would need to be adjusted to support the higher currents.
2. Replace the USB port poly fuses by poly fuses with much higher hold currents and/or place some of them in parallel.
3. Use a type of non-error prone system memory, such as eMMC. And/or... add an SATA interface if price allows. Just... any memory that is not prone to fail after a bit of use.