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Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That

235 points by Narutu 3y ago

kevinsky 3y ago
Certainly agree that the Raspberry Pi's SD card is unsuitable as a boot device if you have any issues with power failures or voltage regulation. You can boot from a USB but by the time you pay for the USB drive you are in the same price range as other Micro computers.
- chasil 3y ago
  "the storage is WAY more reliable than micro-SD cards" Common MLC media is good for 5,000 writes before end of life. SLC media can take 100,000 writes, and is available in SD card form (but it is more expensive).
- jaredhallen 3y ago
  FWIW, my home DNS has been running on a pi SD card for at least 5 years with many, many power outages (I live in a rural area with very unreliable electricity). So far it hasn't had a problem. Overall I agree with the sentiment, and will probably move off the pi at some point. Just saying the SD card situation isn't as dire as it is sometimes made out to be.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  I often had filesystem corruption after needing to pull the plug only once. Some Linux gurus said I should install ZFS! I have a habit of using heavy-duty sdcards, because they also seem very susceptible to ESD in this dry, year-round desert weather. RPis are fun toys and I got a lot of mileage out of an $80 kit I picked up while I was in community college. I got some attachments and a 7" touchscreen and I had so much fun installing Raspbian on it. I later attempted to configure it as some sort of surveillance station but that didn't go well. Then I installed the actual Pi-Hole package on it and that was great, but I eventually migrated to NextDNS. Nowadays I have practically no use for a Linux box with a tiny screen and abysmal storage abilities. It's sitting on my desk, darkened screen for months on end. I couldn't even think of a use case. I tried making it some sort of media server to hook up to my speakers, but the media centre packages are abysmal and crashy and can't handle Bluetooth or anything useful. I couldn't even get them to play YouTube videos. They're as bad as the surveillance packages.
  - kunjanshah 3y ago
    Look at hifiberry and the OS that comes with it. I use it to setup airplay to some passive speakers and it works great. Supports various sources including airplay 2.
- slowmotiony 3y ago
  I used a HDD connected via USB as a boot drive and after a few days of working fine it suddenly wasn't able to mount it any more, it was something to do with not enough power current in the USB ports. Lost all data and had to reformat the whole thing.
cr3ative 3y ago
Agree with this article - those little Prodesks are available very cheap and with some impressive configurations for power vs. strength. I have an i3-8100T version which includes on-cpu video encoding, ideal for Plex. Runs unRAID. Replaced a much larger system which took much more power.
- accrual 3y ago
  This is what I do. Small form factor PCs meant to sit behind monitors are plenty powerful for many homelab tasks. I divide mine up into multiple VMs and have CPU, memory, and disk to spare for whenever I want to spin up something new.
retrocryptid 3y ago
I know that you didn't ask, but my $0.02 is that yes, RasPi's are unreliable. If you use one for as an unattended remote server, it will do you well to include a hardware watchdog that power cycles the device after it hangs. But modern NUCs seem to take MINUTES to boot the BIOS. I had been using various BeagleBones and found them more reliable than RasPi's and faster to boot than the NUCs in the office. But depending on the availability of a TI part is the road to perdition, so maybe I'm just using the wrong NUC models.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  > I know that you didn't ask, but my $0.02 is that yes, RasPi's are unreliable. I've been using RPis and "clones" for internal services for years, and there's hardly any fuzz with them at all. At most a power cycle once a year. They've endured house losing power multiple times, I've yet to swap SD-card on any of them, they just keep chugging. But sure, I wouldn't trust my life to one. I just find it odd that people say they're highly unreliable while all of mine just work.
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    My rPi pihole hasn't had a single hiccup for years. Multi power outages and everything. I actually thought it was going to be a way bigger hassle over time but its been smooth sailing.
    - fer 3y ago
      I've had about half a dozen Raspberry Pi in total (only 1 through 3), and many dozens of SBCs, and I found Raspis generally unreliable except for the Raspberry Pi 1 (model B), which is extremely slow for anything nowadays. The longest I've had running was a The Things Network gateway on a Raspberry Pi 3: OK for 2 years, then it killed the sd card (not corruption, it just wouldn't work anywhere anymore). I set it up again and it killed the new card within a week. Again, and within a month. I gave up and it sucks because the LoRa shield is Raspberry-specific. A Raspberry Pi 2 died just because while decoding ADS-B. SD was fine. For the rest of the experiences, I always found some data corruption at some point. Often hanging and needing monthly reboots. The only worse SBC (and it wasn't really an SBC) I've experienced was the Cubox i4-Pro. I eventually lost it, and I'm almost glad, weekly data corruptions and crashes, underwhelming performance and very fickle behavior overall. Other <randomfruit> Pis have turd-tier hardware support but whatever you manage to get running tends to be reliable. Pine64 (the oldest model) is so far the only SBC I haven't seen crash, trash an SD card yet, or have FS corruptions yet.
SnooSux 3y ago
Do NUCs have GPIO or do I have to stick to a SBC for those?
- musingsole 3y ago
  Not typically
- epx 3y ago
  You can always use an AVR or ESP32 as your remote GPIO.
- fullstop 3y ago
  I have a qotom box which I use for my firewall and it has a header for GPIO. I think that it might be a singular GPIO, though. You'd have better luck attaching an esp32 over USB to add additional GPIOs.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Industrial mini PCs will often have 8-32 GPIOs for controlling equipment. Expect to pay a hefty markup for one of these from a name brand, or a moderately reasonable price for a no-name Chinese NUC. The NUCs you see from e.g. Intel had a "custom solutions header", which was a bunch of common buses on an internal header you could expose with some bios config and wires, including 1-2 GPIOs, but that was it.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  There are various sorts of USB-based add-on GPIO boards these days, but often you're fine with an ESP or Pico doing some of the low-level work and reporting back via serial or USB HID.
hrns 3y ago
And instead of buying more powerful hardware you can try to get the always free oracle VPS (4vcpu ARM, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage), do your compute stuff there, and keep the RPI as pi-hole/home assistant only. It will save you on electricity bill as well.
- dijit 3y ago
  > free oracle VPS (4vcpu ARM, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage) <insert my standard disclaimer regarding oracle based on lived experience> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 Just because you haven't been bitten yet, does not in any way mean you won't be, and crucially: it doesn't preclude others following your advice being bitten.
  - hrns 3y ago
    > it doesn't preclude others following your advice being bitten. Just Google which ones are actually always free. Didn't have any problems personally.
    - dijit 3y ago
      At least in my case I was not presented an obviously free option and the shapes given matched the always free tier, despite not being included in it. I'm a reasonably smart individual, I did not click through blindly and made a concerted effort to discover the free option and was taken aback by the fact that I couldn't find an option that was branded as being free and was assured by a friend (working for Apiary in Oracle) that it was fine to pick the shape I picked. Look, Regardless of how it came to pass: I should have been permitted to cancel. I continually paid what I considered to be the final bill (3 times in fact) until ultimately I was charged for an amount that it was not possible for me to actually pay (imagine trying to pay 0.1 US Cents or $0.001). I know we like to think that we're smarter than other posters and that "maybe they were holding it wrong", but I can't put into words how sincerely you'd be mistaken in thinking that in this case. You are very likely thinking while reading this: "Yeah, but that wouldn't happen to me, it hasn't happened, I feel safe enough in my decisions I could get out of it" -- you'd be wrong.
soared 3y ago
I disagree with the author here. The vast majority of rpi users aren’t trying to purchase the optimal hardware for their project, they’re trying to tinker around with something fun. Literally all of my rpi projects have short lifespans since I know the rpi is able to do so many things, so I use it in many different projects. Rpis are almost never the optimal/cheapest/best option for a project, but they’re almost always the optimal computer to reuse in 10 different projects over and over!
- frantathefranta 3y ago
  I don't know if it started with pi-hole but one of these projects must have been the turning point for "load up an SD card and let your pi run for years at a time with nothing else". That's how a lot of people use them and especially with recent prices it's pretty wasteful. I have 2 pis and both run multiple of the programs that people usually run solo on a pi (Octoprint, MPD server and player, UPS controller, (Zig|ZW)2MQTT and so on)
  - outworlder 3y ago
    With recent prices I agree it's a problem, but they were otherwise cheap and borderline disposable computers. I have a Pi3 that's dedicated to Octoprint - just because I want it to have all the resources when printing and I have some heavy plugins (the Arc Welder, for one). However, the Pi4 is running Home Assistant and several other things within HassIO, like Adguard, NodeRed, the UPS monitor, Tailscale, etc. It's a much more powerful Pi, with 8GB. I would replace it with a TinyMiniMicro if it died today. Although, given that it's currently sitting in a rack, I want to also give it control of the rack fans(heat dissipation is not a problem most of the time) and add some RGB lighting, which would be perfect for the Pi. I'd argue that, given the current prices, if you don't need the GPIO pins, the author is correct.
- ryanianian 3y ago
  I shorted a few RPis in my day. It would hurt to do that now given their price. Even so, OP is about running server stuff rather than electronics or robotics hobbyist stuff. The Pi works as a little hass and automation server, but only barely. I've been "mini pc" curious for a while, and TFA mentions a "TinyMiniMicro" resource that seems quite useful.
aayushdutt 3y ago
Why am I getting a cloudflare error? Visiting from India via Chrome. Msg: I got an error when visiting set-inform.com/2021/08/24/unpopular-opinion-dont-use-a-raspberry-pi-for-that/. Error code: 1020 Country: IN Data center: fra08 Timestamp: 2023-03-22 13:33:46 UTC
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
  Same but attempting to visit from Vietnam
- kube-system 3y ago
  Cloudflare thinks you are a threat. If your ISP assigns you a dynamic IP, maybe trying renewing your lease?
- chetangoti 3y ago
  I get same 403 error. Here is archive: https://archive.is/HmDQz https://archive.is/HmDQz
- computerfriend 3y ago
  Same. Error code: 1020 Ray ID: 7abeef5a9d8c6e55
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  One thing CloudFlare can do is basically replicate the old-school abuse-and-attack-reduction tactic of blocking most Asian IP blocks.
avidphantasm 3y ago
I've been pricing out small systems recently for a light weight server at home (to use in part with a weather station). Given the lack of availability/expense of RPi 4s and the expense of a decent NUC, I'm leaning in the direction of an M2 Mac Mini, which has better idle power than AMD64 options, and not much worse than an RPi 4.
- cfiggers 3y ago
  Isn't the very cheapest M2 Mac Mini still like, $600...? That seems to put you in a completely different price and performance category than even the most kitted-out RPI possible, even at inflated grey-market prices.
- 3np 3y ago
  Availability has been and is still OK at other "piish" SBC vendors like Hardkernel, Radxa/Allnet, friendlyelec, orange, banana, pine64, etc. Most of them get new stock regularly even when things sell out. If OS options is making you skittish, pick one with good Armbian support. If you need the extra power (even an rpi4 sounds like overkill for a weather station) you could also look at Intel embedded systems. I haven't verified but I'd wager you can find something comparable to the M2 in size and power for half the price or less.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  You can buy an Intel Compute Stick for cheap.
nippoo 3y ago
I often end up giving the opposite unpopular opinion: RPis are overkill for a lot of DIY IoT uses. Want to have something that opens your curtains or flashes some RGB lights in your hallway or whatever? Pick yourself up an Arduino / ESP32 with built-in WiFi, often an Ethernet port, tons of GPIO. It consumes milliwatts of power, boots in under a second, and is cheap enough to be disposable.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  And most importantly, it doesn't have an OS that provides next to no benefit for many of those tasks, and suffers from inconsistent timing. Something like ESP32 is much more reliable at controlling hardware. It will never miss on a triggered limit switch in time because memory ran out for some reason and it started swapping.
  - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
    Ah, that kind of timing. I have made several kinds of clocks with RPis, one that ran fine for years driving a little servo to strike an hourly chime like a grandfather clock, which was all very easy thanks to having an OS with NTP and cron. But I mostly agree with the article, I have a Gigabyte Brix fanless NUC-alike as my real home server, and a couple of Pis doing little things (and switched to 'overlay file system' so running only from memory and not writing to those frail SD cards).
    - bschwindHN 3y ago
      > very easy thanks to having an OS with NTP and cron. An ESP32 can still have both of those things in some capacity. https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-ntp-client-date-time-arduino-ide/ https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-ntp-client-date-time-a... https://github.com/DavidMora/esp_cron https://github.com/DavidMora/esp_cron
      - cinntaile 3y ago
        The point the GP made was that timing issues weren't a real problem on the rpi thanks to the tools mentioned.
geocrasher 3y ago
If you don't need GPIO, then you don't need a RPi. They are useful, but an old laptop can do most things a Pi can do, and putting them to use keeps them out of the landfill longer.
- theblazehen 3y ago
  And includes built in battery backup
  - dijit 3y ago
    Normally a good idea to remove the battery actually, they bulge over time and could present a fire hazard.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    That assumes the battery still works. I have some old laptops, but few have usable batteries.
- comprev 3y ago
  A laptop would consume significantly more power than an RPi.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    However, you can buy a lot of electricity for the price of a scalped RPi these days.
    - timeon 3y ago
      This is true. But some people are not concerned just about the price.
      - tasuki 3y ago
        What are you concerned about?
JOnAgain 3y ago
Without disputing anything in the article, I often see little to no value placed in consistency, simplicity, and repeatability with these kinds of analysis. In this case, I would prefer to manage 1 set/type of hardware for all my uses unless I really needed to deviate. If the difference is $100 in overkill for a Pi-hole, but right-sized for other use cases, I find value in the consistency. 1 form factor, 1 OS, 1 set of hardware compatibility, if a script works 1 place, it works everywhere, etc.
bullen 3y ago
Silence, volume and stability are 3 features they also have, atleast with heatsinks like these: http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png SD cards are saturated by 2W TDP Raspberry 2, but the 4 has workload speeds for CPU intense operations. This cloud hosting service has been running from my home fiber with better uptime than AWS/GCP for the last 10 years: http://host.rupy.se http://host.rupy.se Longevity is the key value.
musingsole 3y ago
For prototyping, RaspberryPis will get you where you're going faster than anything else. The Linux environment gives you speed of development. The form factor let's you toss it in a parts bin. The GPIO gives you direct, easy access to the physical world. After prototyping, redeveloping for a different platform is often not worth the cost. If you didn't use the GPIO, switch to a NUC or similar. Or don't. Raspberry Pis are in data centers now, occupying server racks. Don't fight the signal; retransmit.
zamubafoo 3y ago
While his arguments of performance to power might have some truth, I strongly dislike that he's using the current pricing as a comparison point. Sure, buying one now is (relatively) expensive for what it is, but I bought my Pi's back when they were MSRP ($45-54 USD for RPI4 4GiB and $35 USD for RPi3B+). Nothing can compete at that price point. While there are cheaper options or more powerful options for a bit more, none of them have the same support the Raspberry PI has. As for reliability, dropping ~$25 USD for a drive enclosure and having it boot from that is doable with the Raspberry Pi 4 (and the 3 but I've never tested it).
epx 3y ago
This is a letdown of the current state of technology - guess most of us expected to be able to run a (regular distro) Linux on $2 chips that could even embed a "real time processor" to do the bitbanging. The opposite happen: a Raspy Zero price rivals the NUC.
some_random 3y ago
I typically see two kinds of raspi hate, and only one of them is reasonable imo. The first is stuff like this article, where you can probably get something better than a raspi these days for about the same price (especially when you consider scalper pricing) or just run a docker image in a server you can make with an old computer. This is very good advice, especially now that getting a raspi at MSRP is borderline impossible. The second is most of the comments here, declaring that novices should just learn embedded programming and use an arduino for everything! If you're in this camp, you should consider _why_ people chose to use raspis for project. and watch your ass because an EE is about to arrive to drag you for not just using a 555 timer in your projects.
- petsfed 3y ago
  I mean, there is the trollduino https://hackaday.io/project/176844-trollduino-v10 https://hackaday.io/project/176844-trollduino-v10
- Denvercoder9 3y ago
  > novices should just learn embedded programming For people that think this is a significant barrier, I'd suggest to take a look at MicroPython (on something like a ESP32 or RP2040 -- there's no reason to bother with the classic 8-bit Arduinos anymore). It gives you an environment that's surprisingly similar to what you'd use on a Pi.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > and watch your ass because an EE is about to arrive to drag you for not just using a 555 timer in your projects. I know from an electrical engineer that with microcontrollers having become that cheap, it can often be cheaper to use a massively produced microcontroller instead of a 555 despite the former often being insanely overpowered for the task at hand.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - 3y ago
don-code 3y ago
My homelab, up until the beginning of last year, consisted completely of Raspberry Pi's - gen 1 through 4. Because they're so resource constrained, adding new services in my homelab meant adding more Pi's. Pi's themselves then became near-impossible to buy, which meant I couldn't expand anymore. I bought a set of four 10-year-old HP rackmount servers instead - 56 cores, 88GB of RAM, and 12TB of storage total (note: I pay for the electricity solely with home solar, so the ~400w idle isn't a financial concern). They run Kubernetes for workload scheduling. All told, it cost about $500 to acquire all of the equipment. Honestly, I haven't looked back to the Pi days. Provisioning a new service in my homelab used to have a lead time of two weeks (acquire a Pi, image it, install services, etc.), and now I can deploy something new in 15-30 minutes. I learned a ton through running systems on resource-constrained ARM32 devices like those, but it's ultimately not a great use for them.
- nicolaslem 3y ago
  > I pay for the electricity solely with home solar, so the ~400w idle isn't a financial concern. Maybe not a financial concern but probably an environmental one. Yearly that is 3.5 MWh that could be used to de-carbonate the grid instead.
  - eep_social 3y ago
    Probably not actually, but nice concern troll.
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    Arguably in the winter that 400W is also helping heat their house, and depending on what type of furnace they use, may be reducing some of their dependency on natural gas.
    - gh02t 3y ago
      Unfortunately that is similarly offset by the extra need to cool in warmer weather. Though it's interesting to think about given you have to factor in different system efficiencies for different power and heat/cool types as well as climate. Figuring out where the balance actually lies is gonna be different for everybody.
zer00eyz 3y ago
From the article: "I migrated my Pi-hole from an actual RPi" Can a RPI be a final solution? It sure can! Can an RPI be a bridge to something else? Yes and that is where it shines! Having a RPI or two around gives you tools to experiment with. It can be a server, or it can act as an IOT device, or a USB HID device or... Some of my RPI projects have been replaced with old laptops, or Beelink boxes, or ESP hardware. I think of RPI as a first step, that lets me play before committing to something (and spending).
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  Yeah I don't think it's an awful tool for experimenting or education. But I regularly see people expecting a Raspberry Pi fleet to be an actual server cluster, and you're just creating a bad time for yourself there. I use a combination of Intel NUCs, Gigabyte Brix, and flashed Datto Altos (branded Zotac Z-Boxes) for various roles and they absolutely shine whether running Linux or Windows-based workloads.
dusted 3y ago
I generally agree, there are a few places I'll throw a pi, because it's small and easy to set up and just hack something.. Like a print/scan server or an easy way to get a microphone or webcam hooked up to the LAN.. But a lot of times, an ESP8266 or even just ATmega part is just fine.. other times, some old laptop or PC is way better.. Currently, my only Pis in operation is the Pi400 on the living-room TV for retropie, and the one attached to the printer and scanner to network those without having to install weird stuff on the windows/linux clients
happycube 3y ago
IMO it's "You don't have to use a Pi for that" Also the later generation thin clients (i.e. Dell/Wyse 5060, 5070) are cheaper still and also pretty good. They're reasonably responsive for desktop tasks and can even drive 4k60 over DisplayPort.
matthewaveryusa 3y ago
I agree that you shouldn't use the pi as a server. The biggest drawback is that arm is still not as well supported as x86 and isn't as heavily optimized.
jpalomaki 3y ago
For me the main issue has been the storage reliability. But what if there was a "Pi" that would boot from the network. Not local, but from Internet. With some tinkering, you could add a small network mounted drive for persisting things like configuration information. Bootup times would be long, but quite often these type of devices are not constantly turned on and off.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Pi already can boot from the network, mate.
tambourine_man 3y ago
If your alternative to RPis are used NUCs or laptops, than you lost me. I want reliable and quiet. I have RPis running for more than a decade everyday with not a single crash. In what conditions are those used PSU? Who knows. I'm also not a fan of bringing other people's dust and keyboard grease along.
- afavour 3y ago
  Many NUCs are whisper quiet and just as reliable as an RPi. Often more so given the number of folks that run everything in their RPi off an SD card without considering the lifespan of them. I didn’t replace my RPi with a NUC but I did get a Celeron powered mini PC. It’s basically silent and has been happily running Ubuntu under my desk for over a year now.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    If new, sure, but then you're in for a lot more money than the Pi. If it's used, I'm not interested.
    - afavour 3y ago
      My mini PC was $150. Definitely more than a RPi but not insane.
    - unethical_ban 3y ago
      Used = value. But if you want new and still cheap, there are mini PCs with SoC style pentiums, barebines around $200, $20/8gb ram and 20/256gb nvme. And they can often have 2.5gb Ethernet these days.
- Delphiza 3y ago
  "NUC"s can be fanless PCs. The fanless part makes them quiet. There are no moving parts to make a noise.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
sircastor 3y ago
The thing that makes the RPi such a great choice when there are so many choices is the community and the plethora of information about the platform. Here’s the hardware and the software that we know works, and piles of people have it running right now. Mix in an unknown element and who know how it’s going to behave. Let alone where you can get help.
DeathArrow 3y ago
> A complete Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB kit is admittedly cheaper — typically $150 these days Raspberry Pi was great for $35. For $150 not so much.
wodenokoto 3y ago
> You do not have access to set-inform.com. The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site. Anyone else get this?
- notpushkin 3y ago
  I do. I'm in Turkey right now. Guess they want the opinion stay unpopular after all shrug
- letaem77 3y ago
  Same from my country… I checked if it’s my iPhone’s iCloud Private Relay.
snitch182 3y ago
yeah, you can use an old refurbuished pc for most of it. But running on 5W .. no. Putting it literally into the wall, no. Arduino is to much overhead upfront. It is the ideal middle ground. I went with rockpi because of the shortages .. works just as well and has a little more punch.
causi 3y ago
RPi prices are so inflated they barely make sense at all, let alone for all these little "give my plants half a cup of water every day" projects.
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  The power available in a RasPi is way overkill for "give my plants half a cup of water every day" projects too. I don't need four cores and dual HDMI outputs to tell a motor to spin for half a minute once a day. I'm just building a outside watering system. I was going to use a RasPi, simply so that it can log the things like temperature, light levels, rainfall, and water butt levels that it uses to work out how much water to dole out, and so that I can log in remotely and change the settings. But there's a shortage and I ended up getting an Arduino instead. It can do everything I need except data logging and remote access, but those don't matter so much. RasPi should be split into two camps - one being a system for people who want to build a small computer, with decent speed, RAM, real time video decoding, etc, and the other for people who just need a slow low power device with Linux that has GPIO.
  - outworlder 3y ago
    > I'm just building a outside watering system. I was going to use a RasPi, You could also use a $1 ESP8266 or a slightly more expensive ESP32.
    - mnw21cam 3y ago
      While that looks like a very nice chip, it still doesn't have ethernet or non-volatile storage, so it doesn't help with remote access or logging.
throwaway2056 3y ago
Please start here. Tons of thinclients https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
eggy 3y ago
Having worked on safety-critical, custom circuitry and programming, particularly in the entertainment engineering field, I find the prolific use of Arduinos, RPis, and ESPs, to be concerning. You pay more for an equivalent industrial board, but there's been a lot more QA/QC done on it. Don't get me wrong, I started with Basic Stamps from Parallax back in the 90s to control window display animatronics in NYC department stores. Great stuff. Fun. But with all the emphasis on high-integrity hardware and software, Rust (I prefer Ada/SPARK2014 for such things until Rust matures in this field), and hobbyist programmers creating show control or machinery controls, I worry that people don't realize that you don't have the same assurances you do with industrial-grade equipment. I opened a very large box a vendor created to control their overhead rigging for a show I was running and found an Arduino and when I had the code audited found a state that would be unsafe. Most tech workers in entertainment would not catch this sort of thing. Yet, this is machinery being deployed above an audience. Greatfully, there are new standards being developed to catch this sort of thing, but these standards/guidelines lag behind, and with the pace of production, I am sure there is a lot being done out there that is unsafe.
- LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
  > I [...] found a state that would be unsafe. That seems separate from the hardware issue with the raspi, like something that would happen with better hardware as well. It feels like this needs to be handled in the dev tools where going into a dangerous state is automatically followed up by exiting it once an operation is performed and you can't mistakenly stay in the dangerous state. And then have an exhaustive analysis of the FSM to show it performs as expected with the correct state transitions. What was it (an automated curtain puller?) and did the machine have useful hardware lockouts, such as physical rope-speed limiters or whatever, to make sure it couldn't do bad stuff even if commanded to?
  - eggy 3y ago
    True, I was just offering up an example on the software end, but it has to do with hobbyist embedded people think they can make an Arduino sketch for safety-critical applications. I am more concerned with hardware issues, since the plethora of ESPs and Arduinos being made do not go through a Six Sigma type process to control the process. Also, the piece I pointed out did not have other separate hardware or other safety watchdogs in the box, like a Pilz unit supervising Beckhoff i/o. It was an Arduino with some relays off of its GPIO pins. High-integrity systems need to include both the hardware and software. There are actually standards for high-integrity systems aside from the usual aerospace stuff that applies to show control or machinery control. Safety-Related Control Systems (SRCS) are being addressed more and more in ASTM F24 for Amusement Rides and Devices. I loved my Basic Stamp, Pic-chip, and Propeller chip days. Fun, but I am glad I progressed beyond the hobby level before anyone let me put a piece of kit up! Window displays were fairly innocuous! I've always tried to add actual physical, mechanical interlocks on some of the stage machinery I've designed where a flipped bit or faulty i/o would cause harm or death! See my Arduino reference below. I wish SPARK2014 would get more love. It has been around for a while with real-world applications, but Rust is the darling of the tech crowd now. AdaCore and Ferrous Systems are teaming up to bring some Ada goodness to Rust along with the legacy experience and apps. Cool article on drones and SPARK2014: https://blog.adacore.com/how-to-prevent-drone-crashes-using-spark https://blog.adacore.com/how-to-prevent-drone-crashes-using-... Cubesats: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/building-high-integrity-applications-with-spark/F213D9867D2E271F5FF3EDA765D48E95 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/building-high-integrity... Arduino and Safety-Critical Circuit: https://forum.arduino.cc/t/safety-critical-circuit/319986/2 https://forum.arduino.cc/t/safety-critical-circuit/319986/2
DeathArrow 3y ago
I've found an Intel Compute Stick for $30. I'm tempted to buy it and find an use later. PiHole, mail server.
aimor 3y ago
I've been thinking about this for a year or so. I currently have 7 Pis (5 Pi0ws and 2 Pi3s) running various projects at home. I started collecting them on Pi day each year, and any time I want to try something new I just grab a new one and go. A few weeks ago I took one on a plane and installed Pi OS on a 0w using the plane's wifi, then SSHed to the pi over USB and played with it that way. At home they're hanging off various UPS and power outlets, I once forgot about one powered by my basement router and I didn't notice for two years. It was still happily serving an old version of my cookbook. Yeah, there's things I want to move to more powerful hardware. But it's a step up: it's more expensive, more setup, a more persistent system (even if everything's in containers). I wouldn't steer people away from using Pis based on that tradeoff, they still have a high ceiling for what they can do and when you do bump into that ceiling it's much easier to justify spending 10-100x for the right hardware. It took me 7 years of tinkering to hit that ceiling with my projects, I don't regret staying on Pis for so long.
johnklos 3y ago
It's unfortunate that people don't include nuance in their discussions. These "do" or "don't" type articles make broad generalizations, sometimes as arguments in favor of their position. For instance, using SD cards for storage is problematic for certain uses, but that doesn't include the popular practices of using a small USB-attached SSD, nor of logging to RAM, nor of logging / writing to NFS. That by itself is just a factor, not a reason. Likewise, price and availability make the assumption that we're talking about Raspberry Pis, which we know have gone commercial and are way too expensive and hard to get. There are many, many other kinds of Pis like Orange, Nano, Rock, et cetera. There are plenty of other factors which are good or bad, depending on your situation, like power supplies - a single NUC power supply brick can be HUGE, but a single IKEA USB power adapter can power several USB devices - so it depends on your use case. These are nitpicks, but what really irks me is when people make comments like this: ..."don’t have to put up with the quirks of Raspian or running an alternative distro that has zero community" That's dismissive, reductive, and a rather shitty take. Perhaps this author shouldn't be running Linux at all because of all the quirks in each distro. Perhaps they should run Windows. Oh, wait! Windows has even more quirks, and arguably a community so large and disparate that I'd consider it worse than any community of any OS project with "zero community". Oh, well. My take is that Pis of all sorts are wonderful little devices that have an assortment of advantages and shortfalls for many, many use cases, and you can learn lots using those advantages and overcoming those shortfalls, if you want. That last part - "if you want" - means more than anything. It's personal, and others shouldn't tell you what you should or shouldn't want.
kstrauser 3y ago
I run a Mastodon server. In one of the giant floods of new users, I installed Docker on an RPi that I already had laying around and used it to increase my asynchronous worker capacity. I doubt I would have gone out and bought an RPi for that, but I had one up and running anyway, and it turned out to be perfect for the job. Note that I could solder my own boards together from bare PCBs and components. I just don't want to have to when someone else has already done the hardware work for me.
MrStonedOne 3y ago
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mig39 3y ago
I tend to try out a lot of Raspberry PI projects (PI-hole, WeeWX, etc) then eventually migrate them to a VM in an ESXi server. Much easier to manage and more reliable.
adql 3y ago
Comparing off the shelf USED hardware to new one isn't exactly fair. Yeah, it's option to consider but I don't think price comparison is fair or even important here. What is however is that you can just generally shove an SSD to NUC and forget about it for forever and not worry about microSD woes, finding the right case and power supply for rPi etc. I think pi only gives real benefits when you actually are using the IO it provides over "normal PC"; or if you really need to shave that few watts off.
philliphaydon 3y ago
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tinglymintyfrsh 3y ago
1. Too expensive. Maybe in 5-10 years, pricing will return to normalcy. When inventories are tight, they should backlog fulfilling corporate orders because they drive scarcity with deep pockets that harm innovation and accessibility for average retail customers. Have a preorder waiting list rather than unactionable "out-of-stock" indications that lose sales. 2. Probably can do the same (electronics) with an Arduino or run (a lightweight job) in a container on an existing computer.
ulnarkressty 3y ago
The article is right, if you need a (very) low power server the rpi is unbeatable. I have tried a lot during the years to make it as robust as possible, however I find that there is only a matter of time until a power failure, regular update or even a simple reboot will render a pi unusable. And you'll be powerless to fix whatever flavor of boot error is occurring half a world away. Never had these kinds of issues with regular servers. Perhaps if there was a way to "boot to ssh" to fix these... Some recommend the miniPCs from Dell, Fujitsu etc. But they also have custom firmware with their own set of problems and strange design decisions which you won't be able to change if you needed to.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  I never had a breaking update on Raspbian. However, I have run into write errors caused by power failures that required an fsck on the SD from a different computer: I now have a `@reboot touch /forcefsck` cronjob, but it may just be a talisman (IIRC, dirty filesystems get a fsck automatic at boot) Have you considered read-only boot & system partitions? That way, your pi will always boot, at the cost of have to remount in read/write mode to perform updates.
redtriumph 3y ago
I have noticed that this website is blocked for some reason in India. For affected users, here is the archived copy: https://archive.ph/HmDQz https://archive.ph/HmDQz
mixermachine 3y ago
I fully agree. We built our app testing parcour with about 10 phones, 10 nfc simulators and a Raspberry to orchestrate the whole thing. The Raspberrys USB ports sometimes did not work properly and we feared that we could quickly kill the SD card. Additionally the processing power was not that great. In the end we switched to an Intel N5000 notebook with a broken screen (working HDMI) that we had lying around (used price under 100€,in this condition maybe under 50€). The system now has aN uptime of over 100 days and works much better.
k__ 3y ago
I wanted to give my girlfriend the option to watch streams on her TV. An important point was that the solution had a regular browser that worked with every streaming website out there. So, I got an Asus TinkerBoard, because it had good video rendering. I constantly had issues with that thing. Updates, connection problems, etc. Then the FireTV stick was released with the Silk browser. I bought one, and never went back.
sanmon3186 3y ago
I am getting access denied from India. “You do not have access to set-inform.com. The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site.” I got an error when visiting set-inform.com/2021/08/24/unpopular-opinion-dont-use-a-raspberry-pi-for-that/. Error code: 1020 Ray ID: 7ac01a0f4d06415e Country: IN Data center: bom06 IP: 49.37.133.177 Timestamp: 2023-03-22 17:19:49 UTC
- robjan 3y ago
  They are also blocking my Hong Kong IP
Havoc 3y ago
Yeah the value proposition ist quite out of whack at the moment on most SBCs in the rasp 4 class. Not a particularly unpopular opinion anymore though. Most subreddit for example are already steering people towards minipcs
nirav72 3y ago
I've seen people waiting months to get their hands on a Raspberry pi 4 to self-hosting bunch of apps. Not sure why. Something like an HP Elitebook G2 with a i5 and 8gb ram can be had for $110 on secondary markets like Amazon renewed or ebay. About 10x the performance compared to a Pi 4. Only thing missing is GPIO port. But even that is a easy fix for another $10-15. Only down side is the power draw. Compared to a Pi4, you're going to see an average power draw of 20-40 watts.
cosmotic 3y ago
PiHole shouldn't be writing much to the SD card if at all; Something seems wrong there. Once it boots (a read only affair), it should be running exclusively from memory, no? Maybe periodically updating the rules and saving to disk?
theodric 3y ago
When you're chasing minimum power consumption, tho, a Pi4 (in my case, a CM4) with a 200MHz base clock, a USB3 card, a SATA card with 6 SSDs attached, running 3 Alpine VMs and a couple Docker containers will idle at 12W and perform surprisingly well when asked to while drawing no more than 27W with every system running at full tilt. I didn't expect it to be as good as it is, and I can't find anything else that can touch it. But my use case is narrow and specific.
jeffrallen 3y ago
The reason not to use a Raspberry Pi is that you can never buy them.
stefantalpalaru 3y ago
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yuuta 3y ago
I have been running my homelab for 2 ~ 3 years, and I never considered rpi to be one of the servers ... It is just for toys or some "high school robots" stuff, with 0% availability and are very fragile. How many times your SD card fail / filesystem break / undervolt occurs / accidentally short-circuit? If you want to have a host running Linux 24 * 7, go with a used Thin Client on eBay (they are at least x86). If you are like me who want to build a rack at home, go with some used PowerEdge / ProLiant gears from eBay. They do way better things than your Pi (with BMC, Xeon cores, and ECC memory, possibly), and they are cheaper as well (my PowerEdge R520 servers only cost less than C$200 each). These machines have proper CPU, hard drive, and power supply. Do not use a Pi unless you are building some IoT experiments that require GPIOs.
teunispeters 3y ago
Given in Canada it's cheaper to just buy a small Intel PC than a raspberry pi 4 of late, I've been exploring alternatives lower down ... ST-Micro's stuff as an alternative to Arduino (which is also $$$ here). I guess it depends on what you're doing. I like working with hardware and low-level software.
- bmurphy1976 3y ago
  I have to say these look really tempting: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805075742151.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805075742151.html I need to split some services off of my overloaded Raspberry Pi 4 but I just can't find any in stock anywhere. That NUC is so low priced it's hard to resist pulling the trigger, and in all likelihood it probably crushes the RPI4 in terms of performance.
  - teunispeters 3y ago
    yeah, watch for heat though. (I didn't have that specific model, but I had one overheat in a hot summer day ...) Of all places, London Drugs sometimes carries them. Places that sell POS (point-of-sale) systems are more likely to have the small form factor computers.
nfriedly 3y ago
My house has one Raspberry Pi 2b for DNS (Pi Hole), and then everything else (including a second Pi Hole) is in docker containers on my file server. Between the two, I've been very happy. The file server is an old i7 2600k that used to be my desktop PC before I added some hard drives and installed Unraid on it. Unraid makes managing docker containers incredibly easy, especially with the Community Applications and Auto Update Applications plugins.
footlose_3815 3y ago
Ha! I was building OpenCV on a Pi and I remembered I had a 6500T thin DELL I could use instead.
jjk166 3y ago
The value of the RPi is its versatility. It's not the optimal tool for any task, but I can be confident it will work well enough for an extremely wide range of projects. Some projects you might know exactly what you need at the start, but most times you don't, and when you prematurely optimize you often find yourself bending over backwards to make the wrong thing work.
nipperkinfeet 3y ago
ESP8266 is more than enough for many of my projects.
rldjbpin 3y ago
the rpi foundation is another example of openai-like evolution of an org - started out with a noble cause but switched course when faced with the realities. the whole supply-chain fiasco was a great example of their current priorities when their arm was twisted. they started out with promoting cs education but ended up being more loyal to their corporate partners. but to be fair to them, half the problem was us, who want it for cheap computing. the "hackers" in this site could easily achieve similar results by repurposing an old phone than to buy another one of these sbc for their home lab. to be honest, we are spoilt by the rpi ecosystem, and we choose it even when overkill because we can (or at least could until they became over $100). at the end of the day, you do what you want with your wallet.
flimsypremise 3y ago
The big benefit of something like a pi is that it offers the flexibility of a linux-bootable computer with the IO pin interface of an MCU. That being said, maybe there's a cheap, easy way to get a GPIO interface on a NUC? I know there are USB to GPIO boards you can buy, but I have no idea how easy they are to use, and what the drawbacks might be. There are also extremely expensive GPIO interfaces that negate the cost-savings of using a cheap NUC.

235 points by Narutu 3y ago

Certainly agree that the Raspberry Pi's SD card is unsuitable as a boot device if you have any issues with power failures or voltage regulation. You can boot from a USB but by the time you pay for the USB drive you are in the same price range as other Micro computers.

chasil 3y ago
"the storage is WAY more reliable than micro-SD cards" Common MLC media is good for 5,000 writes before end of life. SLC media can take 100,000 writes, and is available in SD card form (but it is more expensive).
jaredhallen 3y ago
FWIW, my home DNS has been running on a pi SD card for at least 5 years with many, many power outages (I live in a rural area with very unreliable electricity). So far it hasn't had a problem. Overall I agree with the sentiment, and will probably move off the pi at some point. Just saying the SD card situation isn't as dire as it is sometimes made out to be.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I often had filesystem corruption after needing to pull the plug only once. Some Linux gurus said I should install ZFS! I have a habit of using heavy-duty sdcards, because they also seem very susceptible to ESD in this dry, year-round desert weather. RPis are fun toys and I got a lot of mileage out of an $80 kit I picked up while I was in community college. I got some attachments and a 7" touchscreen and I had so much fun installing Raspbian on it. I later attempted to configure it as some sort of surveillance station but that didn't go well. Then I installed the actual Pi-Hole package on it and that was great, but I eventually migrated to NextDNS. Nowadays I have practically no use for a Linux box with a tiny screen and abysmal storage abilities. It's sitting on my desk, darkened screen for months on end. I couldn't even think of a use case. I tried making it some sort of media server to hook up to my speakers, but the media centre packages are abysmal and crashy and can't handle Bluetooth or anything useful. I couldn't even get them to play YouTube videos. They're as bad as the surveillance packages.
- kunjanshah 3y ago
  Look at hifiberry and the OS that comes with it. I use it to setup airplay to some passive speakers and it works great. Supports various sources including airplay 2.
slowmotiony 3y ago
I used a HDD connected via USB as a boot drive and after a few days of working fine it suddenly wasn't able to mount it any more, it was something to do with not enough power current in the USB ports. Lost all data and had to reformat the whole thing.

cr3ative 3y ago

Agree with this article - those little Prodesks are available very cheap and with some impressive configurations for power vs. strength. I have an i3-8100T version which includes on-cpu video encoding, ideal for Plex. Runs unRAID. Replaced a much larger system which took much more power.

accrual 3y ago
This is what I do. Small form factor PCs meant to sit behind monitors are plenty powerful for many homelab tasks. I divide mine up into multiple VMs and have CPU, memory, and disk to spare for whenever I want to spin up something new.

retrocryptid 3y ago

I know that you didn't ask, but my $0.02 is that yes, RasPi's are unreliable. If you use one for as an unattended remote server, it will do you well to include a hardware watchdog that power cycles the device after it hangs. But modern NUCs seem to take MINUTES to boot the BIOS. I had been using various BeagleBones and found them more reliable than RasPi's and faster to boot than the NUCs in the office. But depending on the availability of a TI part is the road to perdition, so maybe I'm just using the wrong NUC models.

magicalhippo 3y ago
> I know that you didn't ask, but my $0.02 is that yes, RasPi's are unreliable. I've been using RPis and "clones" for internal services for years, and there's hardly any fuzz with them at all. At most a power cycle once a year. They've endured house losing power multiple times, I've yet to swap SD-card on any of them, they just keep chugging. But sure, I wouldn't trust my life to one. I just find it odd that people say they're highly unreliable while all of mine just work.
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  My rPi pihole hasn't had a single hiccup for years. Multi power outages and everything. I actually thought it was going to be a way bigger hassle over time but its been smooth sailing.
  - fer 3y ago
    I've had about half a dozen Raspberry Pi in total (only 1 through 3), and many dozens of SBCs, and I found Raspis generally unreliable except for the Raspberry Pi 1 (model B), which is extremely slow for anything nowadays. The longest I've had running was a The Things Network gateway on a Raspberry Pi 3: OK for 2 years, then it killed the sd card (not corruption, it just wouldn't work anywhere anymore). I set it up again and it killed the new card within a week. Again, and within a month. I gave up and it sucks because the LoRa shield is Raspberry-specific. A Raspberry Pi 2 died just because while decoding ADS-B. SD was fine. For the rest of the experiences, I always found some data corruption at some point. Often hanging and needing monthly reboots. The only worse SBC (and it wasn't really an SBC) I've experienced was the Cubox i4-Pro. I eventually lost it, and I'm almost glad, weekly data corruptions and crashes, underwhelming performance and very fickle behavior overall. Other <randomfruit> Pis have turd-tier hardware support but whatever you manage to get running tends to be reliable. Pine64 (the oldest model) is so far the only SBC I haven't seen crash, trash an SD card yet, or have FS corruptions yet.

SnooSux 3y ago

Do NUCs have GPIO or do I have to stick to a SBC for those?

musingsole 3y ago
Not typically
epx 3y ago
You can always use an AVR or ESP32 as your remote GPIO.
fullstop 3y ago
I have a qotom box which I use for my firewall and it has a header for GPIO. I think that it might be a singular GPIO, though. You'd have better luck attaching an esp32 over USB to add additional GPIOs.
AlotOfReading 3y ago
Industrial mini PCs will often have 8-32 GPIOs for controlling equipment. Expect to pay a hefty markup for one of these from a name brand, or a moderately reasonable price for a no-name Chinese NUC. The NUCs you see from e.g. Intel had a "custom solutions header", which was a bunch of common buses on an internal header you could expose with some bios config and wires, including 1-2 GPIOs, but that was it.
rcarmo 3y ago
There are various sorts of USB-based add-on GPIO boards these days, but often you're fine with an ESP or Pico doing some of the low-level work and reporting back via serial or USB HID.

hrns 3y ago

And instead of buying more powerful hardware you can try to get the always free oracle VPS (4vcpu ARM, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage), do your compute stuff there, and keep the RPI as pi-hole/home assistant only. It will save you on electricity bill as well.

dijit 3y ago
> free oracle VPS (4vcpu ARM, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage) <insert my standard disclaimer regarding oracle based on lived experience> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 Just because you haven't been bitten yet, does not in any way mean you won't be, and crucially: it doesn't preclude others following your advice being bitten.
- hrns 3y ago
  > it doesn't preclude others following your advice being bitten. Just Google which ones are actually always free. Didn't have any problems personally.
  - dijit 3y ago
    At least in my case I was not presented an obviously free option and the shapes given matched the always free tier, despite not being included in it. I'm a reasonably smart individual, I did not click through blindly and made a concerted effort to discover the free option and was taken aback by the fact that I couldn't find an option that was branded as being free and was assured by a friend (working for Apiary in Oracle) that it was fine to pick the shape I picked. Look, Regardless of how it came to pass: I should have been permitted to cancel. I continually paid what I considered to be the final bill (3 times in fact) until ultimately I was charged for an amount that it was not possible for me to actually pay (imagine trying to pay 0.1 US Cents or $0.001). I know we like to think that we're smarter than other posters and that "maybe they were holding it wrong", but I can't put into words how sincerely you'd be mistaken in thinking that in this case. You are very likely thinking while reading this: "Yeah, but that wouldn't happen to me, it hasn't happened, I feel safe enough in my decisions I could get out of it" -- you'd be wrong.

soared 3y ago

I disagree with the author here. The vast majority of rpi users aren’t trying to purchase the optimal hardware for their project, they’re trying to tinker around with something fun. Literally all of my rpi projects have short lifespans since I know the rpi is able to do so many things, so I use it in many different projects. Rpis are almost never the optimal/cheapest/best option for a project, but they’re almost always the optimal computer to reuse in 10 different projects over and over!

frantathefranta 3y ago
I don't know if it started with pi-hole but one of these projects must have been the turning point for "load up an SD card and let your pi run for years at a time with nothing else". That's how a lot of people use them and especially with recent prices it's pretty wasteful. I have 2 pis and both run multiple of the programs that people usually run solo on a pi (Octoprint, MPD server and player, UPS controller, (Zig|ZW)2MQTT and so on)
- outworlder 3y ago
  With recent prices I agree it's a problem, but they were otherwise cheap and borderline disposable computers. I have a Pi3 that's dedicated to Octoprint - just because I want it to have all the resources when printing and I have some heavy plugins (the Arc Welder, for one). However, the Pi4 is running Home Assistant and several other things within HassIO, like Adguard, NodeRed, the UPS monitor, Tailscale, etc. It's a much more powerful Pi, with 8GB. I would replace it with a TinyMiniMicro if it died today. Although, given that it's currently sitting in a rack, I want to also give it control of the rack fans(heat dissipation is not a problem most of the time) and add some RGB lighting, which would be perfect for the Pi. I'd argue that, given the current prices, if you don't need the GPIO pins, the author is correct.
ryanianian 3y ago
I shorted a few RPis in my day. It would hurt to do that now given their price. Even so, OP is about running server stuff rather than electronics or robotics hobbyist stuff. The Pi works as a little hass and automation server, but only barely. I've been "mini pc" curious for a while, and TFA mentions a "TinyMiniMicro" resource that seems quite useful.

aayushdutt 3y ago

Why am I getting a cloudflare error? Visiting from India via Chrome. Msg: I got an error when visiting set-inform.com/2021/08/24/unpopular-opinion-dont-use-a-raspberry-pi-for-that/. Error code: 1020 Country: IN Data center: fra08 Timestamp: 2023-03-22 13:33:46 UTC

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
Same but attempting to visit from Vietnam
kube-system 3y ago
Cloudflare thinks you are a threat. If your ISP assigns you a dynamic IP, maybe trying renewing your lease?
chetangoti 3y ago
I get same 403 error. Here is archive: https://archive.is/HmDQz https://archive.is/HmDQz
computerfriend 3y ago
Same. Error code: 1020 Ray ID: 7abeef5a9d8c6e55
yamtaddle 3y ago
One thing CloudFlare can do is basically replicate the old-school abuse-and-attack-reduction tactic of blocking most Asian IP blocks.

avidphantasm 3y ago

I've been pricing out small systems recently for a light weight server at home (to use in part with a weather station). Given the lack of availability/expense of RPi 4s and the expense of a decent NUC, I'm leaning in the direction of an M2 Mac Mini, which has better idle power than AMD64 options, and not much worse than an RPi 4.

cfiggers 3y ago
Isn't the very cheapest M2 Mac Mini still like, $600...? That seems to put you in a completely different price and performance category than even the most kitted-out RPI possible, even at inflated grey-market prices.
3np 3y ago
Availability has been and is still OK at other "piish" SBC vendors like Hardkernel, Radxa/Allnet, friendlyelec, orange, banana, pine64, etc. Most of them get new stock regularly even when things sell out. If OS options is making you skittish, pick one with good Armbian support. If you need the extra power (even an rpi4 sounds like overkill for a weather station) you could also look at Intel embedded systems. I haven't verified but I'd wager you can find something comparable to the M2 in size and power for half the price or less.
DeathArrow 3y ago
You can buy an Intel Compute Stick for cheap.

nippoo 3y ago

I often end up giving the opposite unpopular opinion: RPis are overkill for a lot of DIY IoT uses. Want to have something that opens your curtains or flashes some RGB lights in your hallway or whatever? Pick yourself up an Arduino / ESP32 with built-in WiFi, often an Ethernet port, tons of GPIO. It consumes milliwatts of power, boots in under a second, and is cheap enough to be disposable.

dale_glass 3y ago
And most importantly, it doesn't have an OS that provides next to no benefit for many of those tasks, and suffers from inconsistent timing. Something like ESP32 is much more reliable at controlling hardware. It will never miss on a triggered limit switch in time because memory ran out for some reason and it started swapping.
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Ah, that kind of timing. I have made several kinds of clocks with RPis, one that ran fine for years driving a little servo to strike an hourly chime like a grandfather clock, which was all very easy thanks to having an OS with NTP and cron. But I mostly agree with the article, I have a Gigabyte Brix fanless NUC-alike as my real home server, and a couple of Pis doing little things (and switched to 'overlay file system' so running only from memory and not writing to those frail SD cards).
  - bschwindHN 3y ago
    > very easy thanks to having an OS with NTP and cron. An ESP32 can still have both of those things in some capacity. https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-ntp-client-date-time-arduino-ide/ https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-ntp-client-date-time-a... https://github.com/DavidMora/esp_cron https://github.com/DavidMora/esp_cron
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      The point the GP made was that timing issues weren't a real problem on the rpi thanks to the tools mentioned.

geocrasher 3y ago

If you don't need GPIO, then you don't need a RPi. They are useful, but an old laptop can do most things a Pi can do, and putting them to use keeps them out of the landfill longer.

theblazehen 3y ago
And includes built in battery backup
- dijit 3y ago
  Normally a good idea to remove the battery actually, they bulge over time and could present a fire hazard.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  That assumes the battery still works. I have some old laptops, but few have usable batteries.
comprev 3y ago
A laptop would consume significantly more power than an RPi.
- kube-system 3y ago
  However, you can buy a lot of electricity for the price of a scalped RPi these days.
  - timeon 3y ago
    This is true. But some people are not concerned just about the price.
    - tasuki 3y ago
      What are you concerned about?

JOnAgain 3y ago

Without disputing anything in the article, I often see little to no value placed in consistency, simplicity, and repeatability with these kinds of analysis. In this case, I would prefer to manage 1 set/type of hardware for all my uses unless I really needed to deviate. If the difference is $100 in overkill for a Pi-hole, but right-sized for other use cases, I find value in the consistency. 1 form factor, 1 OS, 1 set of hardware compatibility, if a script works 1 place, it works everywhere, etc.

bullen 3y ago

Silence, volume and stability are 3 features they also have, atleast with heatsinks like these: http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png SD cards are saturated by 2W TDP Raspberry 2, but the 4 has workload speeds for CPU intense operations. This cloud hosting service has been running from my home fiber with better uptime than AWS/GCP for the last 10 years: http://host.rupy.se http://host.rupy.se Longevity is the key value.

musingsole 3y ago

For prototyping, RaspberryPis will get you where you're going faster than anything else. The Linux environment gives you speed of development. The form factor let's you toss it in a parts bin. The GPIO gives you direct, easy access to the physical world. After prototyping, redeveloping for a different platform is often not worth the cost. If you didn't use the GPIO, switch to a NUC or similar. Or don't. Raspberry Pis are in data centers now, occupying server racks. Don't fight the signal; retransmit.

zamubafoo 3y ago

While his arguments of performance to power might have some truth, I strongly dislike that he's using the current pricing as a comparison point. Sure, buying one now is (relatively) expensive for what it is, but I bought my Pi's back when they were MSRP ($45-54 USD for RPI4 4GiB and $35 USD for RPi3B+). Nothing can compete at that price point. While there are cheaper options or more powerful options for a bit more, none of them have the same support the Raspberry PI has. As for reliability, dropping ~$25 USD for a drive enclosure and having it boot from that is doable with the Raspberry Pi 4 (and the 3 but I've never tested it).

epx 3y ago

This is a letdown of the current state of technology - guess most of us expected to be able to run a (regular distro) Linux on $2 chips that could even embed a "real time processor" to do the bitbanging. The opposite happen: a Raspy Zero price rivals the NUC.

some_random 3y ago

I typically see two kinds of raspi hate, and only one of them is reasonable imo. The first is stuff like this article, where you can probably get something better than a raspi these days for about the same price (especially when you consider scalper pricing) or just run a docker image in a server you can make with an old computer. This is very good advice, especially now that getting a raspi at MSRP is borderline impossible. The second is most of the comments here, declaring that novices should just learn embedded programming and use an arduino for everything! If you're in this camp, you should consider _why_ people chose to use raspis for project. and watch your ass because an EE is about to arrive to drag you for not just using a 555 timer in your projects.

petsfed 3y ago
I mean, there is the trollduino https://hackaday.io/project/176844-trollduino-v10 https://hackaday.io/project/176844-trollduino-v10
Denvercoder9 3y ago
> novices should just learn embedded programming For people that think this is a significant barrier, I'd suggest to take a look at MicroPython (on something like a ESP32 or RP2040 -- there's no reason to bother with the classic 8-bit Arduinos anymore). It gives you an environment that's surprisingly similar to what you'd use on a Pi.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> and watch your ass because an EE is about to arrive to drag you for not just using a 555 timer in your projects. I know from an electrical engineer that with microcontrollers having become that cheap, it can often be cheaper to use a massively produced microcontroller instead of a 555 despite the former often being insanely overpowered for the task at hand.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
[flagged]
- 3y ago

don-code 3y ago

My homelab, up until the beginning of last year, consisted completely of Raspberry Pi's - gen 1 through 4. Because they're so resource constrained, adding new services in my homelab meant adding more Pi's. Pi's themselves then became near-impossible to buy, which meant I couldn't expand anymore. I bought a set of four 10-year-old HP rackmount servers instead - 56 cores, 88GB of RAM, and 12TB of storage total (note: I pay for the electricity solely with home solar, so the ~400w idle isn't a financial concern). They run Kubernetes for workload scheduling. All told, it cost about $500 to acquire all of the equipment. Honestly, I haven't looked back to the Pi days. Provisioning a new service in my homelab used to have a lead time of two weeks (acquire a Pi, image it, install services, etc.), and now I can deploy something new in 15-30 minutes. I learned a ton through running systems on resource-constrained ARM32 devices like those, but it's ultimately not a great use for them.

nicolaslem 3y ago
> I pay for the electricity solely with home solar, so the ~400w idle isn't a financial concern. Maybe not a financial concern but probably an environmental one. Yearly that is 3.5 MWh that could be used to de-carbonate the grid instead.
- eep_social 3y ago
  Probably not actually, but nice concern troll.
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  Arguably in the winter that 400W is also helping heat their house, and depending on what type of furnace they use, may be reducing some of their dependency on natural gas.
  - gh02t 3y ago
    Unfortunately that is similarly offset by the extra need to cool in warmer weather. Though it's interesting to think about given you have to factor in different system efficiencies for different power and heat/cool types as well as climate. Figuring out where the balance actually lies is gonna be different for everybody.

zer00eyz 3y ago

From the article: "I migrated my Pi-hole from an actual RPi" Can a RPI be a final solution? It sure can! Can an RPI be a bridge to something else? Yes and that is where it shines! Having a RPI or two around gives you tools to experiment with. It can be a server, or it can act as an IOT device, or a USB HID device or... Some of my RPI projects have been replaced with old laptops, or Beelink boxes, or ESP hardware. I think of RPI as a first step, that lets me play before committing to something (and spending).

ocdtrekkie 3y ago
Yeah I don't think it's an awful tool for experimenting or education. But I regularly see people expecting a Raspberry Pi fleet to be an actual server cluster, and you're just creating a bad time for yourself there. I use a combination of Intel NUCs, Gigabyte Brix, and flashed Datto Altos (branded Zotac Z-Boxes) for various roles and they absolutely shine whether running Linux or Windows-based workloads.

dusted 3y ago

I generally agree, there are a few places I'll throw a pi, because it's small and easy to set up and just hack something.. Like a print/scan server or an easy way to get a microphone or webcam hooked up to the LAN.. But a lot of times, an ESP8266 or even just ATmega part is just fine.. other times, some old laptop or PC is way better.. Currently, my only Pis in operation is the Pi400 on the living-room TV for retropie, and the one attached to the printer and scanner to network those without having to install weird stuff on the windows/linux clients

happycube 3y ago

IMO it's "You don't have to use a Pi for that" Also the later generation thin clients (i.e. Dell/Wyse 5060, 5070) are cheaper still and also pretty good. They're reasonably responsive for desktop tasks and can even drive 4k60 over DisplayPort.

matthewaveryusa 3y ago

I agree that you shouldn't use the pi as a server. The biggest drawback is that arm is still not as well supported as x86 and isn't as heavily optimized.

jpalomaki 3y ago

For me the main issue has been the storage reliability. But what if there was a "Pi" that would boot from the network. Not local, but from Internet. With some tinkering, you could add a small network mounted drive for persisting things like configuration information. Bootup times would be long, but quite often these type of devices are not constantly turned on and off.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Pi already can boot from the network, mate.

tambourine_man 3y ago

If your alternative to RPis are used NUCs or laptops, than you lost me. I want reliable and quiet. I have RPis running for more than a decade everyday with not a single crash. In what conditions are those used PSU? Who knows. I'm also not a fan of bringing other people's dust and keyboard grease along.

afavour 3y ago
Many NUCs are whisper quiet and just as reliable as an RPi. Often more so given the number of folks that run everything in their RPi off an SD card without considering the lifespan of them. I didn’t replace my RPi with a NUC but I did get a Celeron powered mini PC. It’s basically silent and has been happily running Ubuntu under my desk for over a year now.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  If new, sure, but then you're in for a lot more money than the Pi. If it's used, I'm not interested.
  - afavour 3y ago
    My mini PC was $150. Definitely more than a RPi but not insane.
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    Used = value. But if you want new and still cheap, there are mini PCs with SoC style pentiums, barebines around $200, $20/8gb ram and 20/256gb nvme. And they can often have 2.5gb Ethernet these days.
Delphiza 3y ago
"NUC"s can be fanless PCs. The fanless part makes them quiet. There are no moving parts to make a noise.
- meepmorp 3y ago

sircastor 3y ago

The thing that makes the RPi such a great choice when there are so many choices is the community and the plethora of information about the platform. Here’s the hardware and the software that we know works, and piles of people have it running right now. Mix in an unknown element and who know how it’s going to behave. Let alone where you can get help.

DeathArrow 3y ago

> A complete Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB kit is admittedly cheaper — typically $150 these days Raspberry Pi was great for $35. For $150 not so much.

wodenokoto 3y ago

> You do not have access to set-inform.com. The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site. Anyone else get this?

notpushkin 3y ago
I do. I'm in Turkey right now. Guess they want the opinion stay unpopular after all shrug
letaem77 3y ago
Same from my country… I checked if it’s my iPhone’s iCloud Private Relay.

snitch182 3y ago

yeah, you can use an old refurbuished pc for most of it. But running on 5W .. no. Putting it literally into the wall, no. Arduino is to much overhead upfront. It is the ideal middle ground. I went with rockpi because of the shortages .. works just as well and has a little more punch.

causi 3y ago

RPi prices are so inflated they barely make sense at all, let alone for all these little "give my plants half a cup of water every day" projects.

mnw21cam 3y ago
The power available in a RasPi is way overkill for "give my plants half a cup of water every day" projects too. I don't need four cores and dual HDMI outputs to tell a motor to spin for half a minute once a day. I'm just building a outside watering system. I was going to use a RasPi, simply so that it can log the things like temperature, light levels, rainfall, and water butt levels that it uses to work out how much water to dole out, and so that I can log in remotely and change the settings. But there's a shortage and I ended up getting an Arduino instead. It can do everything I need except data logging and remote access, but those don't matter so much. RasPi should be split into two camps - one being a system for people who want to build a small computer, with decent speed, RAM, real time video decoding, etc, and the other for people who just need a slow low power device with Linux that has GPIO.
- outworlder 3y ago
  > I'm just building a outside watering system. I was going to use a RasPi, You could also use a $1 ESP8266 or a slightly more expensive ESP32.
  - mnw21cam 3y ago
    While that looks like a very nice chip, it still doesn't have ethernet or non-volatile storage, so it doesn't help with remote access or logging.

throwaway2056 3y ago

Please start here. Tons of thinclients https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml

eggy 3y ago

Having worked on safety-critical, custom circuitry and programming, particularly in the entertainment engineering field, I find the prolific use of Arduinos, RPis, and ESPs, to be concerning. You pay more for an equivalent industrial board, but there's been a lot more QA/QC done on it. Don't get me wrong, I started with Basic Stamps from Parallax back in the 90s to control window display animatronics in NYC department stores. Great stuff. Fun. But with all the emphasis on high-integrity hardware and software, Rust (I prefer Ada/SPARK2014 for such things until Rust matures in this field), and hobbyist programmers creating show control or machinery controls, I worry that people don't realize that you don't have the same assurances you do with industrial-grade equipment. I opened a very large box a vendor created to control their overhead rigging for a show I was running and found an Arduino and when I had the code audited found a state that would be unsafe. Most tech workers in entertainment would not catch this sort of thing. Yet, this is machinery being deployed above an audience. Greatfully, there are new standards being developed to catch this sort of thing, but these standards/guidelines lag behind, and with the pace of production, I am sure there is a lot being done out there that is unsafe.

LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
> I [...] found a state that would be unsafe. That seems separate from the hardware issue with the raspi, like something that would happen with better hardware as well. It feels like this needs to be handled in the dev tools where going into a dangerous state is automatically followed up by exiting it once an operation is performed and you can't mistakenly stay in the dangerous state. And then have an exhaustive analysis of the FSM to show it performs as expected with the correct state transitions. What was it (an automated curtain puller?) and did the machine have useful hardware lockouts, such as physical rope-speed limiters or whatever, to make sure it couldn't do bad stuff even if commanded to?
- eggy 3y ago
  True, I was just offering up an example on the software end, but it has to do with hobbyist embedded people think they can make an Arduino sketch for safety-critical applications. I am more concerned with hardware issues, since the plethora of ESPs and Arduinos being made do not go through a Six Sigma type process to control the process. Also, the piece I pointed out did not have other separate hardware or other safety watchdogs in the box, like a Pilz unit supervising Beckhoff i/o. It was an Arduino with some relays off of its GPIO pins. High-integrity systems need to include both the hardware and software. There are actually standards for high-integrity systems aside from the usual aerospace stuff that applies to show control or machinery control. Safety-Related Control Systems (SRCS) are being addressed more and more in ASTM F24 for Amusement Rides and Devices. I loved my Basic Stamp, Pic-chip, and Propeller chip days. Fun, but I am glad I progressed beyond the hobby level before anyone let me put a piece of kit up! Window displays were fairly innocuous! I've always tried to add actual physical, mechanical interlocks on some of the stage machinery I've designed where a flipped bit or faulty i/o would cause harm or death! See my Arduino reference below. I wish SPARK2014 would get more love. It has been around for a while with real-world applications, but Rust is the darling of the tech crowd now. AdaCore and Ferrous Systems are teaming up to bring some Ada goodness to Rust along with the legacy experience and apps. Cool article on drones and SPARK2014: https://blog.adacore.com/how-to-prevent-drone-crashes-using-spark https://blog.adacore.com/how-to-prevent-drone-crashes-using-... Cubesats: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/building-high-integrity-applications-with-spark/F213D9867D2E271F5FF3EDA765D48E95 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/building-high-integrity... Arduino and Safety-Critical Circuit: https://forum.arduino.cc/t/safety-critical-circuit/319986/2 https://forum.arduino.cc/t/safety-critical-circuit/319986/2

DeathArrow 3y ago

I've found an Intel Compute Stick for $30. I'm tempted to buy it and find an use later. PiHole, mail server.

aimor 3y ago

I've been thinking about this for a year or so. I currently have 7 Pis (5 Pi0ws and 2 Pi3s) running various projects at home. I started collecting them on Pi day each year, and any time I want to try something new I just grab a new one and go. A few weeks ago I took one on a plane and installed Pi OS on a 0w using the plane's wifi, then SSHed to the pi over USB and played with it that way. At home they're hanging off various UPS and power outlets, I once forgot about one powered by my basement router and I didn't notice for two years. It was still happily serving an old version of my cookbook. Yeah, there's things I want to move to more powerful hardware. But it's a step up: it's more expensive, more setup, a more persistent system (even if everything's in containers). I wouldn't steer people away from using Pis based on that tradeoff, they still have a high ceiling for what they can do and when you do bump into that ceiling it's much easier to justify spending 10-100x for the right hardware. It took me 7 years of tinkering to hit that ceiling with my projects, I don't regret staying on Pis for so long.

johnklos 3y ago

It's unfortunate that people don't include nuance in their discussions. These "do" or "don't" type articles make broad generalizations, sometimes as arguments in favor of their position. For instance, using SD cards for storage is problematic for certain uses, but that doesn't include the popular practices of using a small USB-attached SSD, nor of logging to RAM, nor of logging / writing to NFS. That by itself is just a factor, not a reason. Likewise, price and availability make the assumption that we're talking about Raspberry Pis, which we know have gone commercial and are way too expensive and hard to get. There are many, many other kinds of Pis like Orange, Nano, Rock, et cetera. There are plenty of other factors which are good or bad, depending on your situation, like power supplies - a single NUC power supply brick can be HUGE, but a single IKEA USB power adapter can power several USB devices - so it depends on your use case. These are nitpicks, but what really irks me is when people make comments like this: ..."don’t have to put up with the quirks of Raspian or running an alternative distro that has zero community" That's dismissive, reductive, and a rather shitty take. Perhaps this author shouldn't be running Linux at all because of all the quirks in each distro. Perhaps they should run Windows. Oh, wait! Windows has even more quirks, and arguably a community so large and disparate that I'd consider it worse than any community of any OS project with "zero community". Oh, well. My take is that Pis of all sorts are wonderful little devices that have an assortment of advantages and shortfalls for many, many use cases, and you can learn lots using those advantages and overcoming those shortfalls, if you want. That last part - "if you want" - means more than anything. It's personal, and others shouldn't tell you what you should or shouldn't want.

kstrauser 3y ago

I run a Mastodon server. In one of the giant floods of new users, I installed Docker on an RPi that I already had laying around and used it to increase my asynchronous worker capacity. I doubt I would have gone out and bought an RPi for that, but I had one up and running anyway, and it turned out to be perfect for the job. Note that I could solder my own boards together from bare PCBs and components. I just don't want to have to when someone else has already done the hardware work for me.

MrStonedOne 3y ago

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mig39 3y ago

I tend to try out a lot of Raspberry PI projects (PI-hole, WeeWX, etc) then eventually migrate them to a VM in an ESXi server. Much easier to manage and more reliable.

adql 3y ago

Comparing off the shelf USED hardware to new one isn't exactly fair. Yeah, it's option to consider but I don't think price comparison is fair or even important here. What is however is that you can just generally shove an SSD to NUC and forget about it for forever and not worry about microSD woes, finding the right case and power supply for rPi etc. I think pi only gives real benefits when you actually are using the IO it provides over "normal PC"; or if you really need to shave that few watts off.

philliphaydon 3y ago

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tinglymintyfrsh 3y ago

1. Too expensive. Maybe in 5-10 years, pricing will return to normalcy. When inventories are tight, they should backlog fulfilling corporate orders because they drive scarcity with deep pockets that harm innovation and accessibility for average retail customers. Have a preorder waiting list rather than unactionable "out-of-stock" indications that lose sales. 2. Probably can do the same (electronics) with an Arduino or run (a lightweight job) in a container on an existing computer.

ulnarkressty 3y ago

The article is right, if you need a (very) low power server the rpi is unbeatable. I have tried a lot during the years to make it as robust as possible, however I find that there is only a matter of time until a power failure, regular update or even a simple reboot will render a pi unusable. And you'll be powerless to fix whatever flavor of boot error is occurring half a world away. Never had these kinds of issues with regular servers. Perhaps if there was a way to "boot to ssh" to fix these... Some recommend the miniPCs from Dell, Fujitsu etc. But they also have custom firmware with their own set of problems and strange design decisions which you won't be able to change if you needed to.

sangnoir 3y ago
I never had a breaking update on Raspbian. However, I have run into write errors caused by power failures that required an fsck on the SD from a different computer: I now have a `@reboot touch /forcefsck` cronjob, but it may just be a talisman (IIRC, dirty filesystems get a fsck automatic at boot) Have you considered read-only boot & system partitions? That way, your pi will always boot, at the cost of have to remount in read/write mode to perform updates.

redtriumph 3y ago

I have noticed that this website is blocked for some reason in India. For affected users, here is the archived copy: https://archive.ph/HmDQz https://archive.ph/HmDQz

mixermachine 3y ago

I fully agree. We built our app testing parcour with about 10 phones, 10 nfc simulators and a Raspberry to orchestrate the whole thing. The Raspberrys USB ports sometimes did not work properly and we feared that we could quickly kill the SD card. Additionally the processing power was not that great. In the end we switched to an Intel N5000 notebook with a broken screen (working HDMI) that we had lying around (used price under 100€,in this condition maybe under 50€). The system now has aN uptime of over 100 days and works much better.

k__ 3y ago

I wanted to give my girlfriend the option to watch streams on her TV. An important point was that the solution had a regular browser that worked with every streaming website out there. So, I got an Asus TinkerBoard, because it had good video rendering. I constantly had issues with that thing. Updates, connection problems, etc. Then the FireTV stick was released with the Silk browser. I bought one, and never went back.

sanmon3186 3y ago

I am getting access denied from India. “You do not have access to set-inform.com. The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site.” I got an error when visiting set-inform.com/2021/08/24/unpopular-opinion-dont-use-a-raspberry-pi-for-that/. Error code: 1020 Ray ID: 7ac01a0f4d06415e Country: IN Data center: bom06 IP: 49.37.133.177 Timestamp: 2023-03-22 17:19:49 UTC

robjan 3y ago
They are also blocking my Hong Kong IP

Havoc 3y ago

Yeah the value proposition ist quite out of whack at the moment on most SBCs in the rasp 4 class. Not a particularly unpopular opinion anymore though. Most subreddit for example are already steering people towards minipcs

nirav72 3y ago

I've seen people waiting months to get their hands on a Raspberry pi 4 to self-hosting bunch of apps. Not sure why. Something like an HP Elitebook G2 with a i5 and 8gb ram can be had for $110 on secondary markets like Amazon renewed or ebay. About 10x the performance compared to a Pi 4. Only thing missing is GPIO port. But even that is a easy fix for another $10-15. Only down side is the power draw. Compared to a Pi4, you're going to see an average power draw of 20-40 watts.

cosmotic 3y ago

PiHole shouldn't be writing much to the SD card if at all; Something seems wrong there. Once it boots (a read only affair), it should be running exclusively from memory, no? Maybe periodically updating the rules and saving to disk?

theodric 3y ago

When you're chasing minimum power consumption, tho, a Pi4 (in my case, a CM4) with a 200MHz base clock, a USB3 card, a SATA card with 6 SSDs attached, running 3 Alpine VMs and a couple Docker containers will idle at 12W and perform surprisingly well when asked to while drawing no more than 27W with every system running at full tilt. I didn't expect it to be as good as it is, and I can't find anything else that can touch it. But my use case is narrow and specific.

jeffrallen 3y ago

The reason not to use a Raspberry Pi is that you can never buy them.

stefantalpalaru 3y ago

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yuuta 3y ago

I have been running my homelab for 2 ~ 3 years, and I never considered rpi to be one of the servers ... It is just for toys or some "high school robots" stuff, with 0% availability and are very fragile. How many times your SD card fail / filesystem break / undervolt occurs / accidentally short-circuit? If you want to have a host running Linux 24 * 7, go with a used Thin Client on eBay (they are at least x86). If you are like me who want to build a rack at home, go with some used PowerEdge / ProLiant gears from eBay. They do way better things than your Pi (with BMC, Xeon cores, and ECC memory, possibly), and they are cheaper as well (my PowerEdge R520 servers only cost less than C$200 each). These machines have proper CPU, hard drive, and power supply. Do not use a Pi unless you are building some IoT experiments that require GPIOs.

teunispeters 3y ago

Given in Canada it's cheaper to just buy a small Intel PC than a raspberry pi 4 of late, I've been exploring alternatives lower down ... ST-Micro's stuff as an alternative to Arduino (which is also $$$ here). I guess it depends on what you're doing. I like working with hardware and low-level software.

bmurphy1976 3y ago
I have to say these look really tempting: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805075742151.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805075742151.html I need to split some services off of my overloaded Raspberry Pi 4 but I just can't find any in stock anywhere. That NUC is so low priced it's hard to resist pulling the trigger, and in all likelihood it probably crushes the RPI4 in terms of performance.
- teunispeters 3y ago
  yeah, watch for heat though. (I didn't have that specific model, but I had one overheat in a hot summer day ...) Of all places, London Drugs sometimes carries them. Places that sell POS (point-of-sale) systems are more likely to have the small form factor computers.

nfriedly 3y ago

My house has one Raspberry Pi 2b for DNS (Pi Hole), and then everything else (including a second Pi Hole) is in docker containers on my file server. Between the two, I've been very happy. The file server is an old i7 2600k that used to be my desktop PC before I added some hard drives and installed Unraid on it. Unraid makes managing docker containers incredibly easy, especially with the Community Applications and Auto Update Applications plugins.

footlose_3815 3y ago

Ha! I was building OpenCV on a Pi and I remembered I had a 6500T thin DELL I could use instead.

jjk166 3y ago

The value of the RPi is its versatility. It's not the optimal tool for any task, but I can be confident it will work well enough for an extremely wide range of projects. Some projects you might know exactly what you need at the start, but most times you don't, and when you prematurely optimize you often find yourself bending over backwards to make the wrong thing work.

nipperkinfeet 3y ago

ESP8266 is more than enough for many of my projects.

rldjbpin 3y ago

the rpi foundation is another example of openai-like evolution of an org - started out with a noble cause but switched course when faced with the realities. the whole supply-chain fiasco was a great example of their current priorities when their arm was twisted. they started out with promoting cs education but ended up being more loyal to their corporate partners. but to be fair to them, half the problem was us, who want it for cheap computing. the "hackers" in this site could easily achieve similar results by repurposing an old phone than to buy another one of these sbc for their home lab. to be honest, we are spoilt by the rpi ecosystem, and we choose it even when overkill because we can (or at least could until they became over $100). at the end of the day, you do what you want with your wallet.

flimsypremise 3y ago

The big benefit of something like a pi is that it offers the flexibility of a linux-bootable computer with the IO pin interface of an MCU. That being said, maybe there's a cheap, easy way to get a GPIO interface on a NUC? I know there are USB to GPIO boards you can buy, but I have no idea how easy they are to use, and what the drawbacks might be. There are also extremely expensive GPIO interfaces that negate the cost-savings of using a cheap NUC.