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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

#101

Post by steve_adams_86 »

nicky0 wrote: post #66
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…

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

I completely agree. It brings you back to more fundamental aspects of problem solving that sometimes you miss with higher level programming. There are a lot of things I can do on a modern web server with a language like Go that are pretty cool, but not particularly interesting because it's kind of trivial. There are so many resources available to the program, things to fall back on for resilience, plenty of common problems are ironed out into popular libraries, etc.

Trying to automate something truly reliable and consistently with a microcontroller on the other hand can be simultaneously soul crushing and exciting — there are so many edge cases and challenging problems.

Sometimes I'll spend hours trying to figure out how to interface with a single sensor, and while it isn't important or impressive in the scheme of things, I really enjoy it.

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

#102

Post by cushychicken »

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…

Oh, cool! A summons!

Hey, nerds! Do some real hacking and program with solder and a 555 timer!

Regards, The EE who showed up to drag you all

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

#103

Post by retrocryptid »

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…

Happy that yours works well. Many problems don't show up until you hit larger numbers.

We deployed over 1k RasPi's for a particular customer. We averaged about five reboots per day. On top of that I had to deal with the RasPi Organization's insistence that they were not an ODM. Though these were the RasPi B's and RasPi2 B+'s. I'm sure the reliability has gotten better over the years.

I'm not a big TI fan, but everything I needed I got in a BeagleBone: they're more reliable than RasPi's, you can actually get the firmware source code and they have a "normal" returns process.

I don't have the data for the BBB based cube-sats running Kubos (which was the project after the RasPi project) and there were less than 50 deployed, but I've never heard of any of them rebooting themselves unless the ground told them to do so or there was a battery failure.

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

#104

Post by LegitShady »

t344344 wrote: post #95
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 hate PI because its hardware is just junk. Cheap low end stuff designed for consumer electronics like TVs! Devops like to use Intel NIC, ECC memory only. But somehow Pi junk gets pass because it is "open-source" or what. Great, we will run this mission critical deployment from cheap SD CARD!!!!!

if anything you're doing can be described as mission critical there was never a real argument for using raspberry pi unless there's no consequences to losing the mission, in which case what does mission critical really mean?

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

#105

Post by eep_social »

nicolaslem wrote: post #72
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.

Probably not actually, but nice concern troll.

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

#106

Post by aidenn0 »

cushychicken wrote: post #102
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…

Oh, cool! A summons! Hey, nerds! Do some real hacking and program with solder and a 555 timer! Regards, The EE who showed up to drag you all

I am not an EE, but I've done a missing-pluse detector both with a 555 and with an 8-bit micro. Both solutions were great. I sure as heck wouldn't use an Rpi for it though.

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

#108

Post by timeon »

kube-system wrote: post #25
comprev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A laptop would consume significantly more power than an RPi.

However, you can buy a lot of electricity for the price of a scalped RPi these days.

This is true. But some people are not concerned just about the price.

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

#109

Post by meepmorp »

Delphiza wrote: post #96
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.

"NUC"s can be fanless PCs. The fanless part makes them quiet. There are no moving parts to make a noise.

I still miss the sound spinning disks, sometimes; it let me know the computer was thinking hard.

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

#110

Post by t344344 »

sircastor wrote: post #99
t344344 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate PI because its hardware is just junk. Cheap low end stuff designed for consumer electronics like TVs! Devops like to use Intel NIC, ECC memory only. But somehow Pi junk gets pass because it is "open-source" or what. Great, we will run this mission critical deployment from cheap SD CARD!!!!!

The funny thing about hardware and non-nerds/non-EEs/etc. is that most people don't care if the components are "junk". They care if they can make their project work on it. They care how much time it takes from beginning to end. They care how easy it is to get help when something doesn't make sense. It's small, it's inexpensive, it gets the job done.

It does not get the job done.

Last problem I had with Pi: my keyboard did not work for some reason. Guess what, Pi has shitty USB 1.1 implementation (USB 2.0 is different stack), on top of that it does not give enough power to connected devices. With normal computers I had similar problems in 2003!!!

For serious use it is like Gentoo. You have to learn about its boot process, how it bootstraps from video memory.... Or how USBC power delivery is not really important (remember Pi4 initial batches?)...

It only makes sense if you are deploying embedded devices on midscale (~100 devices). For hobby projects it is a nonse. You have to learn completely new HW platform just to read sensor data...? Haha

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