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"Outside of commercial use, the $100 dollar price tag is a little high for the 'impulse buy then stick it in a drawer' use case most of us using Pis are familia
by randomstring 6y ago
"Outside of commercial use, the $100 dollar price tag is a little high for the 'impulse buy then stick it in a drawer' use case most of us using Pis are familiar with."
I swear, some day, maybe even soon, I will find a use for all the Raspberry Pis, various Pi POE adapters, Pi cameras, and sensors I own.
- abraae 6y agoI suggest you don't develop an interest in esp32, or like me you may add an equivalent pile of those devices to your gaggle of interesting but unused hardware. At least it's much cheaper that pi!
- lostlogin 6y agoDon’t forget the need compare different esp32s or esp8266s.
- michrassena 6y agoI've really gone down that rabbit hole recently, and I get it, but I don't regret it. There's a whole world of electronics that I've been missing. As wonderful as Linux is, at the end of the day, once you have Linux running on a device, it becomes a bit generic. The Raspberry Pi is useful and fun, but they are sort of interchangeable with any other Linux computer. These gumstick-sized microcontrollers bring back some of the joy I had with computing in years past.
- afandian 6y agoNot sure if you were referencing gumstix there, but I remember fantasizing about getting one of the tiny SBCs over a decade ago but they were too expensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumstix#/media/File:Gumstix_oconnor.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumstix#/media/File:Gumstix_oc... A decade later we have ESP32 and RPi Zero. And it looks like gumstix have read the writing on the wall and now make RPi accessories. https://www.gumstix.com/ https://www.gumstix.com/
- michrassena 6y agoI don't think I was consciously referencing Gumstix, but that must be where I first heard the term. I remember being interested in those at the time, but like you I thought they were too much.
- abraae 6y agoLinux is indeed wonderful, but there's a lot to be said for dealing with things at a simple level when your goal is to e.g. measure voltages, turn LEDs and relays on and off etc. I still find it incredible that a fairly fast, dual core computer with a color display, wifi, bluetooth, USB, battery charging and all the memory you need costs $8! [0] [0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001235066814.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001235066814.html
- michrassena 6y agoThat's really an incredible price for a computer with a color display. I enjoy and use Linux, but I think it's so versatile and general purpose my inclination is to put it online, run Firefox, play videos or whatever, and then it's magically just another PC. It's kind of like the old saw about every program expanding until it can do email. I'm starting to see the small devices, like esp32 inherit some of the aura of the old home computers which ran BASIC from ROM.
- mhh__ 6y agoThe thing that I want in the future is things at the ESP32 price point that can actually do interesting work - i.e. 1GSPS ADC and an FPGA on a board for 20 bucks let's say. I suspect moore's law may have died too early for it, but I can dream...
- adolph 6y agoFrom ESP there’s downsizing to 555timer chips https://howtomechatronics.com/how-it-works/electronics/555-timer-ic-working-principle-block-diagram-circuit-schematics/ https://howtomechatronics.com/how-it-works/electronics/555-t...
- throwaway2048 6y agomicrocontrollers are cheaper than 555s these days
- StreamBright 6y agoI usually use them as local dev env. I deploy everything to my local cluster before I try to run it on a real infra. It is pretty good. I can also virtualize some of the workload using Firecracker. https://dev.l1x.be/posts/2020/11/22/getting-started-with-firecracker-on-raspberry-pi/ https://dev.l1x.be/posts/2020/11/22/getting-started-with-fir...
- swalsh 6y agoThis seems like a great use case. I have a refurbished 1U server I use, but the fans on that thing are sooo loud.
- maxerickson 6y agoDevelop a remote temperature monitor (freeze alarm).
- willis936 6y agoI have redundant pi holes and NTP servers running. One of them is GPS/PPS trained with chrony for some truly accurate network time. I have another pi with a SCART hat and 180 GB of ROMs driving my BVM. I have a 0w modulating its clock with Daftendirekt at 7am every morning for a pirate FM radio alarm clock. If I had more impulse purchasing power I’m sure I would like to experiment with octoprint on my CR10S-Pro. There are lots of things you can do with Pis. My use cases are far from the most fun or clever. You just have match them to your interests :)
- randomstring 6y agoTo be fair, I have 7 Pis running on my network. Home Assistant, 2x Pi-Holes (for redundancy), 1 magic mirror, my Weasleyclock, 1x w/ a hi-fi berry acting as a Spotify streaming device, and a garage door sensor. So roughly half the pis are in service. Maybe only 5% of all the sensors and projects are.
- leipert 6y agoHow do you set up the pi holes for redundancy? Just manually configured as primary and secondary DNS, or some nifty configuration syncing?
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoMy guess would be for guest/home use or maybe for different devices/profiles.
- willis936 6y agoThe typical reason for running redundant pi holes is high availability. If you really want all DNS traffic to go through your filter then your internet ceases working as long as your DNS server stops running.
- willis936 6y agoBoth. Have your router (optionally all clients) point to each DNS server. You can go further by keeping the pi holes synchronized: https://github.com/vmstan/gravity-sync https://github.com/vmstan/gravity-sync Since some hostile clients (such as TVs) have hard coded DNS, it is necessary to forward all port 53 and 853 traffic to a pi hole. This is easy enough with NAT redirection rules in the router, even with two pis. https://www.myhelpfulguides.com/2018/07/30/redirect-hard-coded-dns-to-pi-hole-using-edgerouter-x/ https://www.myhelpfulguides.com/2018/07/30/redirect-hard-cod...
- whalesalad 6y agoHah! As I look down near my feet there is a clear plastic bin full of pi's, usb cables, micro hdmi, a picam, a go pro, all kinds of crap I swear I will use and never do. I do have a pihole running on a pi3 that has been serving dns for my home network for about two years now without so much as a hiccup.
- m463 6y agoI think the answer for those projects is probably a netboot diskless pi and have a server that handles the PXE boot + disk. Folks here have done it, then all your pis are online easily, especially with poe. I think it would be great for camera stuff - it's like VMs turned inside out where your server runs lots of remote physical machines.
- swalsh 6y agoI recently had a need for one (installation of Octoprint), but then realized the one I had in a drawer was too old to work. So I ended up having to purchase a new one anyways.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoThe tipping point for me was setting up the infrastructure to network boot my Pis. Now it's trivial for me to plug in a Pi anywhere on the LAN, and even switch what OS it is booting into just by changing a symlink on my fileserver. It's now very easy to experiment with different things, and not worry about the cards dying.
- randomstring 6y agoThis has been on my TODO list for a while. But first I need to set up another Pi to be the PXE server... :)
- LeoPanthera 6y agoIt doesn't need to be another Pi, of course.
- bopbeepboop 6y agoRecommended howto?
- LeoPanthera 6y agoGoogling Raspberry Pi Network Boot will return the official documentation - it's a built in feature of the Pi boot rom.
- michrassena 6y agoThere's a price point here that makes sense, and it isn't $100 + the Pi + the M2 SSD. Anything more than this and you get into the low-end laptop price range with full x64 compatibility and a Windows license.
- techrat 6y agoExcept by that point you're dealing with a full laptop with proprietary drivers and, well, Windows itself. There's a reason a Pi took off as the SBC of choice: How open it is and what it still can do without adding things to it. If you're only looking at price tag when it comes to adding an SSD and a hat to compute module, the compute module concept was never for you in the first place.
- michrassena 6y agoI have three Raspberry Pi computers. The third, a Pi Zero came in the mail today. So I'm sold on the strong points of the system. My point wasn't about the laptop having Windows, just that there was a "Windows tax" on the inexpensive laptop and it still offered a better price / performance value. I bought a laptop a couple of years ago for $250. It has a display, two kinds of USB ports, HDMI, Ethernet, a keyboard, trackpad and a battery. I'm sure I could run Linux on it if I needed to. It's not fast, but it's faster than any tricked out Raspberry Pi. If we envision the Raspberry Pi as a learning tool, it's almost too good. It's really too powerful and too complex. As a general purpose computer it still falls short of what I consider a good use of my free time. Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic that there is such a wide market for add-ons for the Pi, for an aftermarket of small players with neat ideas. I have to pry myself away from the sites where they sell this stuff. But this project is just a little too expensive to make it worthwhile for me. I'd like to see a Pi+M2 kit for $100, which likely there will be in time.
- imtringued 6y agoFor lots of low income people Linux on ARM is a down grade and the stuff that only "desperately poor" people would even consider. Having a "proper" laptop with a "proper" OS will decrease the perceived difference between yourself and other non poor people.
- _0ffh 6y agoThis comment, and the general response to it, made me feel slightly less ashamed. Thanks for that! =)
- hosh 6y agoI’m experimenting with self-hosting platforms, like sandstorm.io. (It is not currently available on an rpi, though there is a lot of interest within the community) Right now though, going to setup pi-hole so my daughter can stay on task during remote learning, and if we ever get a smart TV, pi-hole the adtech dns.
- swebs 6y agoJust put LibreElec on the Raspberry Pi 4 and you instantly have a cheap media player capable of running HEVC video.
- Railsify 6y agoI use my pis to run an air quality sensor. It runs continuously.