Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by geocrasher » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

comprev wrote: post #17

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.

A laptop would consume significantly more power than an RPi.

I hear this argument all the time. But unless you're doing something that's solar, battery, RTG or otherwise non-grid powered, then what does it really matter? At what scale is a person running so many old laptops that they need to switch to RPi's to save power?

And if that person can afford the Pi's, they can afford the power, so there's no point quoting power costs.

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

#62

Post by PaulBGD_ » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

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.

Even in the Raspberry ecosystem you can easily pick up a Pico, which offers all of that.

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

#63

Post by gaudat » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #59

gaudat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing that tripped me up the most was concurrent tasks. In languages like Go or JavaScript it’s pretty easy to figure out how to decrement a timer or wait until x time to perform a task without having the waiting period be blocking. On an arduino, you have a few options but none of them are likely to be familiar to high level software devs. It isn’t rocket science, but there are loads of little details like that…

RTOSes are developed to solve this exact problem of concurrency. Try Zephyr, ThreadX (from MS) or FreeRTOS (from Amazon) or whichever OS your microcontroller vendor supports. It will be eye opening, and you get to learn to write safe code in C with synchronization primitives just like our ancestors.

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

#64

Post by shrimp_emoji » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:19 PM UTC

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…

[flagged]

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

#65

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #59

gaudat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing that tripped me up the most was concurrent tasks. In languages like Go or JavaScript it’s pretty easy to figure out how to decrement a timer or wait until x time to perform a task without having the waiting period be blocking. On an arduino, you have a few options but none of them are likely to be familiar to high level software devs. It isn’t rocket science, but there are loads of little details like that…

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by nicky0 » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #59

gaudat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing that tripped me up the most was concurrent tasks. In languages like Go or JavaScript it’s pretty easy to figure out how to decrement a timer or wait until x time to perform a task without having the waiting period be blocking. On an arduino, you have a few options but none of them are likely to be familiar to high level software devs. It isn’t rocket science, but there are loads of little details like that…

Not having high-level languages available is a big part of the fun of programming microcontrollers.

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

#67

Post by monocasa » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

cinntaile wrote: post #56

bschwindHN wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The point the GP made was that timing issues weren't a real problem on the rpi thanks to the tools mentioned.

That's not the kind of timing the original point was talking about AFAICT. Real time response is the issue with regular Linux, not vaguely accurate wall time.

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

#68

Post by nickthegreek » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #41

retrocryptid wrote: post #4

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…

> 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 s…

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.

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

#69

Post by rrosen326 » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

gaudat wrote: post #42

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.

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.

This is so true! I just programmed an Arduino for a diy attic fan controller. Was it hard? Not really. Was it a bigger pain in the butt than programming for home assistant? Oh gosh yes. And quite limited in comparison. It really made me appreciate zWave plus python plus home assistant plus appdaemon. High level coding - use it if you can!

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

#70

Post by afavour » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #64

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…

[flagged]

Eh, “web dev” hate is overplayed. Most devs are “higher level” devs, be that web, Java, .NET, whatever. The professional incentive isn’t there to become a lower level programmer for many. Doesn’t mean they’re dumb, they’re just heading where the work is.