Raspberry Pi questions

[screwdriver8932]

I'm planning to buy a Raspberry Pi 4b and have a few questions to ask about it.

- Can you plug it into any screen which supports HDMI?
- Can you plug in any USB keyboard and mouse?
- Is it necessary to buy a cooling fan?
- Do emulators perform better if you plug in an external GPU?
- Can you spoof the wifi MAC address?
- Can you disable the wifi module when you're not using it?
- Does it perform reasonably fast if you're using encrypted files?
- Is there any other information worth knowing?

 

[Seriel]

- Can you plug it into any screen which supports HDMI?

Yes.

- Can you plug in any USB keyboard and mouse?

Yes.

- Is it necessary to buy a cooling fan?

No, you just have a bit worse performance without one because of thermal throttling. You will need one if you want to overclock or if you want to get more performance.

- Do emulators perform better if you plug in an external GPU?

Uhh I've never actually done this but I don't see why some newer emulators might, but please don't count on it.

- Can you spoof the wifi MAC address?

You sure can, in a number of ways. Here are some links that might help:
https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-mac-address-spoofing/
https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/71483
https://www.kalitut.com/2017/11/change-raspberry-pi-mac-address.html
Almost all documentation for the Pi 3 should apply to the 4 since they run the same OS and have similar (But not exactly the same) hardware.

- Can you disable the wifi module when you're not using it?

You can, manually at least. Either temporarily until next reboot with something like 'sudo ifdown wlan0' or a more permanent and at a slightly lower level by adding the following to your config.txt on /boot (Which should automount on Windows if you insert the SD card and have an OS on it, otherwise find /boot/config.txt in linux)

dtoverlay=disable-wifi

Source: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/62522

- Does it perform reasonably fast if you're using encrypted files?

Depends what you mean by "perform reasonably fast" and what exactly you're doing with those files. The Pi 4 CPU should be reasonably competent enough to handle decrypting files on-the-fly but don't expect computer or server level of performance and remember there will always be at least a slight drop in perf.

- Is there any other information worth knowing?

Best advice I can give is if you don't know how to do something, search it on Google and read all the information carefully. It can be quite fun to mess with a Pi if you know what you're doing, but you need to have patience and a small amount of research skills to learn how to do those things.

 

[Shadow#1]

yes def get a heatsync with fan the first responder has never owned a pi4 that shit gets hot as fuck

 

[sarkwalvein]

yes def get a heatsync with fan the first responder has never owned a pi4 that shit gets hot as fuck

But it will still work red hot stable without a heatsync, so I guess it is not "necessary" but "recommended".

 

[Seriel]

yes def get a heatsync with fan the first responder has never owned a pi4 that shit gets hot as fuck

An interesting assumption but no I have owned a Pi 4 since the first day of its release. It is not necessary to get a heatsink. Without one it will still perform better than a Pi 3 and I doubt you will care about your Pi being warm wherever you have it sitting. If that, or getting the most performance is something you care about then of course you should get one.
Not using a heatsink or fan will not kill your Pi, since the SoC will thermal throttle (As I said in my first response).

 

[screwdriver8932]

I have three more questions:

- Is the Raspberry Pi compatible with the game controller to USB adapters available on Raphnet? I can't link to the website because I'm new.
- Is it possible to spoof the bluetooth MAC address?
- Is it possible to disable the bluetooth module when you're not using it?

 

[Shadow#1]

I have three more questions:

- Is the Raspberry Pi compatible with the game controller to USB adapters available on Raphnet? I can't link to the website because I'm new.
- Is it possible to spoof the bluetooth MAC address?
- Is it possible to disable the bluetooth module when you're not using it?

USB controllers work

No

Yes

 

[screwdriver8932]

Thank you everyone

 

[Shadow#1]

Thank you everyone

Why would u need to spoof the BT Mac address?

 

[dragonblood9999]

You mentioned that you wanted to use emulators with it. If you are going to use recalbox or retropie, neither support the pi4. Although you can get to work, I think.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

 

[screwdriver8932]

Why would u need to spoof the BT Mac address?

Paranoia

 

[dragonblood9999]

Your outdated

I know you can install retropie on a pi4 with lakka but I was thinking of a official version of it.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

 

[Seriel]

I know you can install retropie on a pi4 with lakka but I was thinking of a official version of it.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

That's not Retropie though, that's Lakka.
Lakka is just Retroarch, Retropie has a bunch of other stuff as well. For a lot of cases Lakka will work though.

 

[dragonblood9999]

That's not Retropie though, that's Lakka.
Lakka is just Retroarch, Retropie has a bunch of other stuff as well. For a lot of cases Lakka will work though.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-game-emulators,40102.html

Tom's Hardware has written tutorial on how to install retropie Raspberry Pi 4. Not just retroarch. So you can install retropie if you really want it.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

 

[Seriel]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-game-emulators,40102.html

Tom's Hardware has written tutorial on how to install retropie Raspberry Pi 4. Not just retroarch.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

That tutorial (After mentioning Lakka) does appear to have a way to install Retropie on an existing Raspbian Buster on the Pi 4 yeah, that's fair enough. But what do you mean by "official version of it"? That is official Retropie, it's just not the full OS image it's putting the Retropie program on top of an existing Raspbian Buster.

Also that method is entirely separate and has nothing to do with Lakka.

While we're still waiting for RetroPie to have official Pi 4 support, which would also mean a premade disk image, you can at least use it now.

 

[Shadow#1]

I know you can install retropie on a pi4 with lakka but I was thinking of a official version of it.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

Yes official retropie here dude

https://files.retropie.org.uk/images/weekly/