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

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

#31

Post by don-code »

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.

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

#32

Post by frantathefranta »

soared wrote: post #7

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 alwa…

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)

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

#33

Post by zer00eyz »

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).

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

#34

Post by magicalhippo »

theblazehen wrote: post #14
geocrasher wrote: post #11

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.

And includes built in battery backup

That assumes the battery still works. I have some old laptops, but few have usable batteries.

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

#36

Post by blacksmith_tb »

dale_glass wrote: post #22
nippoo wrote: post #10

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.

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.

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).

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

#37

Post by dusted »

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

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

#38

Post by Denvercoder9 »

some_random wrote: post #27

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 imp…

> 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.

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

#39

Post by cfiggers »

avidphantasm wrote: post #13

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.

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.

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

#40

Post by ryanianian »

soared wrote: post #7

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 alwa…

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.

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