Raspberry Pi 4 8GB and Raspberry Pi OS overview and demo, plus booting a Pi 4 from USB via a beta firmware update. These really are exciting times for the wonderful world of Pi! :)

If you enjoy this video, you may also like my other Pi 4 episodes, including:

Raspberry Pi 4 Passive Cooling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJC6OpGpq0Y

Raspberry Pi 4 Week: Desktop PC Replacement?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3ddj9_LMgU

If you are wondering, you can find the Pimoroni Fan SHIM here: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/fan-shim

NOTE ON INSTALLING BETA USB BOOT FIRMWARE
In this video I show how I configured three Raspberry Pi 4s to boot from USB. Please note that these instructions are provided in good faith, but that you install any beta firmware at your own risk. There is also no guarantee that what is shown in the video will work on your Pi 4 with your particular USB drives or USB SATA adapters. It is called beta firmware for a reason! Fairly soon the official Pi 4 USB boot firmware will be available, and waiting for this release is a safer option.

If you are familiar with the Raspberry Pi YouTube and wider community, you may notice that the process I use to install the beta firmware involves fewer steps than included in many other guides. In part this is because I flashed the June 6th 2020 firmware (pieeprom-2020-06-03.bin), and not the initial May 15th file (pieeprom-2020-05-15.bin) used in many other videos and tutorials. The latter required fixes to be made to a Raspberry Pi OS installation. But at the time of writing (June 9th 2020), the June 6th firmware did not.

Some other tutorials also execute unnecessary commands, as well as editing the rpi-eeprom-update file located in the Pi’s /etc/default/ directory. Specifically they change the environment variable “FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS” in this file from “critical” to “beta”. As far as I am aware, this variable tells the Pi which category of firmware update to automatically install. However, it is also my understanding, as well as my practical experience, that this environment variable is ignored by the rpi-eeprom-update utility if you do a manual install with a -f flag included, followed by the location and name of a specific firmware file. Indeed, the -h help information for the rpi-eeprom-update utility states that the -f option installs “the given file instead of the latest applicable update”.

If you have changed “FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS” from “critical” to “beta”, then your Pi will in the future automatically pick up beta firmware updates, which may not be what you want it to do! So if you have followed another guide and edited this file, my strong suggestion is to change “beta” back to “critical”. Of course, I may be wrong about all of this. But this is the best information I can provide.

More videos on computing and related topics can be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/explainingcomputers

You may also like my ExplainingTheFuture channel at: http://www.youtube.com/explainingthefuture

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:40 Pi 4 Models
03:48 Raspberry Pi OS
10:30 USB Boot demo
12:57 Firmware Update
18:06 Happy Birthday

#RaspberryPi #RaspberryPiOS #Pi4USB #ExplainingComputers