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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

#111

Post by seanw444 »

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.

To get on-motherboard, one might even say.

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

#112

Post by eggy »

Having worked on safety-critical, custom circuitry and programming, particularly in the entertainment engineering field, I find the prolific use of Arduinos, RPis, and ESPs, to be concerning. You pay more for an equivalent industrial board, but there's been a lot more QA/QC done on it. Don't get me wrong, I started with Basic Stamps from Parallax back in the 90s to control window display animatronics in NYC department stores. Great stuff. Fun. But with all the emphasis on high-integrity hardware and software, Rust (I prefer Ada/SPARK2014 for such things until Rust matures in this field), and hobbyist programmers creating show control or machinery controls, I worry that people don't realize that you don't have the same assurances you do with industrial-grade equipment. I opened a very large box a vendor created to control their overhead rigging for a show I was running and found an Arduino and when I had the code audited found a state that would be unsafe. Most tech workers in entertainment would not catch this sort of thing. Yet, this is machinery being deployed above an audience. Greatfully, there are new standards being developed to catch this sort of thing, but these standards/guidelines lag behind, and with the pace of production, I am sure there is a lot being done out there that is unsafe.

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

#114

Post by aimor »

I've been thinking about this for a year or so. I currently have 7 Pis (5 Pi0ws and 2 Pi3s) running various projects at home. I started collecting them on Pi day each year, and any time I want to try something new I just grab a new one and go. A few weeks ago I took one on a plane and installed Pi OS on a 0w using the plane's wifi, then SSHed to the pi over USB and played with it that way. At home they're hanging off various UPS and power outlets, I once forgot about one powered by my basement router and I didn't notice for two years. It was still happily serving an old version of my cookbook.

Yeah, there's things I want to move to more powerful hardware. But it's a step up: it's more expensive, more setup, a more persistent system (even if everything's in containers). I wouldn't steer people away from using Pis based on that tradeoff, they still have a high ceiling for what they can do and when you do bump into that ceiling it's much easier to justify spending 10-100x for the right hardware. It took me 7 years of tinkering to hit that ceiling with my projects, I don't regret staying on Pis for so long.

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

#115

Post by appleiigs »

retrocryptid wrote: post #103
magicalhippo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 everyth…

> We deployed over 1k RasPi's for a particular customer

Is that the proper tool for the job?? I just read an article saying "Unpopular Opinion: Don't Use a Raspberry Pi for That" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35260322)

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

#116

Post by DeathArrow »

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.

You can buy an Intel Compute Stick for cheap.

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

#117

Post by ahepp »

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.

I think we are talking about things like interrupt latency, not NTP synchronization.

MCU interrupt latency can be extremely deterministic. I ran some measurements for work and found Linux to be adequate for many uses, but it is a valid concern. There are some Linux kernel patches like PREEMPT_RT that attempt to bound Linux latencies, but generally MCUs are a lot better suited if latency is critical. In part because they just have less software running on them to interfere with timing.

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

#118

Post by ahepp »

dale_glass wrote: post #75
cinntaile wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A few ms? In my experience that seems well within the capabilities of Linux. I guess last time I measured wasn't on a Raspberry Pi. I'm kinda tempted to take a shot at profiling this and writing up a blog post since it seems like a useful topic, although it will probably be a few months until I can get around to it.

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

#119

Post by tasuki »

timeon wrote: post #108
kube-system wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you concerned about?

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

#120

Post by creeble »

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…

More anecdata: my Open Sprinkler Pi has been running for many years, with only power-fail reboots (maybe once a year). It doesn’t write much to flash, but it’s never needed a reboot because it failed.
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