51–60 of 270 posts
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.
A laptop would consume significantly more power than an RPi.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do NUCs have GPIO or do I have to stick to a SBC for those?
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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…
> 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-a... https://github.com/DavidMora/esp_cron
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> 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.
> it doesn't preclude others following your advice being bitten. Just Google which ones are actually always free. Didn't have any problems personally.
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.
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.
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.
Shhhh stop spilling our secret to the software people... The semiconductor shortage is bad enough already... That said though, programming embedded devices like Arduino and ESP32 needs a completely different style of thinking than with high level languages or web stuff. Things like MicroPython reduces the friction just a bit to make it easy enough to get on board.
It isn’t rocket science, but there are loads of little details like that which will make you pause and then write loads of bugs and awful software before you finally figure it out. Meanwhile, accomplishing the same thing with a high level language might be trivial.
It can be discouraging but I’ve come to love it. You learn a lot, and having a physical board doing a tangible thing with actuators and sensors can be really gratifying.
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.
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.