Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
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Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
1–10 of 270 posts
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#2Certainly 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.
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#3Agree 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.
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#4I 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.
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#5Do NUCs have GPIO or do I have to stick to a SBC for those?
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#6And 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.
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#7I 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!
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#8Why 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
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#9And 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.
> free oracle VPS (4vcpu ARM, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage)
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.
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
#10I 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.