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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

#131

Post by fer »

nickthegreek wrote: post #68
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…

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.

I've had about half a dozen Raspberry Pi in total (only 1 through 3), and many dozens of SBCs, and I found Raspis generally unreliable except for the Raspberry Pi 1 (model B), which is extremely slow for anything nowadays.

The longest I've had running was a The Things Network gateway on a Raspberry Pi 3: OK for 2 years, then it killed the sd card (not corruption, it just wouldn't work anywhere anymore). I set it up again and it killed the new card within a week. Again, and within a month. I gave up and it sucks because the LoRa shield is Raspberry-specific.

A Raspberry Pi 2 died just because while decoding ADS-B. SD was fine.

For the rest of the experiences, I always found some data corruption at some point. Often hanging and needing monthly reboots.

The only worse SBC (and it wasn't really an SBC) I've experienced was the Cubox i4-Pro. I eventually lost it, and I'm almost glad, weekly data corruptions and crashes, underwhelming performance and very fickle behavior overall.

Other Pis have turd-tier hardware support but whatever you manage to get running tends to be reliable. Pine64 (the oldest model) is so far the only SBC I haven't seen crash, trash an SD card yet, or have FS corruptions yet.

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

#132

Post by dheera »

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.

> Want to have something that opens your curtains or flashes some RGB lights in your hallway or whatever? Pick yourself up an Arduino / ESP32

The reason I'd go for an ESP32 for this use case isn't because RPis are overkill, but rather because it's much easier to write, compile, flash, and run code on bare metal on an ESP32 that has access to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi but isn't vulnerable to file system corruption. You can do this on an RPi, it's just much harder.

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

#133

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

eggy wrote: post #112

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 departmen…

> I [...] found a state that would be unsafe.

That seems separate from the hardware issue with the raspi, like something that would happen with better hardware as well.

It feels like this needs to be handled in the dev tools where going into a dangerous state is automatically followed up by exiting it once an operation is performed and you can't mistakenly stay in the dangerous state. And then have an exhaustive analysis of the FSM to show it performs as expected with the correct state transitions.

What was it (an automated curtain puller?) and did the machine have useful hardware lockouts, such as physical rope-speed limiters or whatever, to make sure it couldn't do bad stuff even if commanded to?

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

#134

Post by olabyne »

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…

Raspi's are stable if you respect 2 things :

- avoid writes to sd card too much (log2ram mitigates this, alpine in read-only solves this)

- plenty of power (the recent 3 and 4 have huge sipkes of current draw !)

Do you know the reason for your reboots ? Also before the 3+, the die have no RF shield. The B and 2 B+ are exposed if you don't use a metal case with a seperation from the PSU.

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

#136

Post by AlotOfReading »

t344344 wrote: post #110
sircastor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.... O…

Every rpi (ever?) has supported the 100mA USB 1.1 output limit. All except one have additionally supported the 2.0 500mA limit, and most of those support 1000/1200mA with a boot config parameter at most, assuming your power supply is adequate.

I'm sorry you had issues, but these are just normal embedded systems problems. I totally get if that's not what you want to deal with, but you should really consider a different platform like a NUC.

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

#137

Post by mnw21cam »

causi wrote: post #93

RPi prices are so inflated they barely make sense at all, let alone for all these little "give my plants half a cup of water every day" projects.

The power available in a RasPi is way overkill for "give my plants half a cup of water every day" projects too. I don't need four cores and dual HDMI outputs to tell a motor to spin for half a minute once a day.

I'm just building a outside watering system. I was going to use a RasPi, simply so that it can log the things like temperature, light levels, rainfall, and water butt levels that it uses to work out how much water to dole out, and so that I can log in remotely and change the settings. But there's a shortage and I ended up getting an Arduino instead. It can do everything I need except data logging and remote access, but those don't matter so much.

RasPi should be split into two camps - one being a system for people who want to build a small computer, with decent speed, RAM, real time video decoding, etc, and the other for people who just need a slow low power device with Linux that has GPIO.

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

#139

Post by yamtaddle »

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!!!!!

Sure, running off the SD card sucks, but "flash the card on another computer, boot straight to your installed OS" is the nicest OS installation experience I've ever had.

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

#140

Post by adql »

Comparing off the shelf USED hardware to new one isn't exactly fair.

Yeah, it's option to consider but I don't think price comparison is fair or even important here.

What is however is that you can just generally shove an SSD to NUC and forget about it for forever and not worry about microSD woes, finding the right case and power supply for rPi etc.

I think pi only gives real benefits when you actually are using the IO it provides over "normal PC"; or if you really need to shave that few watts off.

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