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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

#71

Post by tstack »

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.

Yes. I followed a tutorial for building a doorbell that uses an ESP32 to send a notification to our phones when the button is pushed. I haven’t touched it since installation and I’m always a bit amazed it still works. An RPi would’ve been overkill.

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

#72

Post by nicolaslem »

don-code wrote: post #31

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…

> 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.

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

#73

Post by kunjanshah »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #60
kevinsky wrote: post #2

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 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 muc…

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.

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

#74

Post by MegaDeKay »

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…

I think "hate" is a strong term but I know what you are trying to say. Articles like this suggest that too many people think the Pi is the only tool we have in our toolbox. Truth be told, we have a lot of tools and should use them appropriately.

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

#75

Post by dale_glass »

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.

There are different kinds of timing issues.

There's knowing the time, which you can do with something like NTP. That the RPI can manage just fine.

And there's acting with precise timing, eg, if you need to control a mechanism and reliably react on a deadline of a few ms. A RPI doesn't perform well there, which is why 3D printers use microcontrollers instead.

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

#76

Post by afavour »

tambourine_man wrote: post #58

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.

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.

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

#77

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

gaudat wrote: post #63
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ESP32 running with Arduino framework comes with FreeRTOS out of the box.

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

#78

Post by sircastor »

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.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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 easier, in a way... a Parallax Propeller and program in SPIN (their proprietary structured BASIC-like language), or C++ etc.

Exotic, but simpler mental model for most people. 8 independent cores and a simple non-interrupt driven programming model for doing basic timing and I/O with any of the 32 pins configurable for either input or output.

And super easy to interface both 3v and 5v, available in DIP, and in various easy format boards.

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