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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

#161

Post by comprev »

justeleblanc wrote: post #97
geocrasher wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can also afford to let my faucet run 24/7. Should I do it to avoid needing to turn the knob when I need to wash my hands?

Here in Ireland water (to domestic properties) is free - as I embarrassingly discovered when phoning them up to setup an account :)

In theory, I could leave all the taps on 24/7, however that’s A) abuse of a free service, and B) a complete waste of resources.

Even cleaning the car I’m very strict about turning the hose off when I’m using the sponges.

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

#162

Post by kjs3 »

dylan604 wrote: post #154
gaudat wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>just like our ancestors. why am I laughing at how much this stings? we're not that old, damnit!

I saw a tee shirt the other day that said "It sucks to be the same age as old people". We are that old. :-)

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

#163

Post by charcircuit »

rolenthedeep wrote: post #156
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.

Honestly, working with all the restrictions of an embedded system like this is something that all programmers should experience at some point. Being forced to actually consider how you're using resources teaches you a lot about how to write efficient code. Or at least if gives you a better understanding of what the machine is actually doing with your code.

Not all embedded systems are that limited. Check the specs of some of the latest flagship phones.

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

#164

Post by ocdtrekkie »

zer00eyz wrote: post #33

From the article: "I migrated my Pi-hole from an actual RPi" Can a RPI be a final solution? It sure can! Can an RPI be a bridge to something else? Yes and that is where it shines! Having a RPI or two around gives you tools to experiment with. It can be a server, or it can act as an IOT device, or a USB HID device or... Some of my RPI projects have been replaced with old laptops, or Beelink boxes, or ESP hardware. I t…

Yeah I don't think it's an awful tool for experimenting or education. But I regularly see people expecting a Raspberry Pi fleet to be an actual server cluster, and you're just creating a bad time for yourself there.

I use a combination of Intel NUCs, Gigabyte Brix, and flashed Datto Altos (branded Zotac Z-Boxes) for various roles and they absolutely shine whether running Linux or Windows-based workloads.

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

#165

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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.

Arguably in the winter that 400W is also helping heat their house, and depending on what type of furnace they use, may be reducing some of their dependency on natural gas.

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

#166

Post by petsfed »

ahepp wrote: post #118
dale_glass wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think milliseconds overestimates by a few orders of magnitude, but non-real-time OSs really suffer for the intermediate IO stuff you expect in an embedded project (e.g. SPI, I2C, etc)

A long time ago, I was playing with Project Nerves on an Orange Pi running some flavor of debian. I was doing some I2C transaction (at 400 kHz, each bit is single-digit microseconds), and I ultimately had to have a re-attempt loop because the transaction would fail so often. I found a failure cutoff of 5 attempts was sufficient to keep going. I don't recall the failure rate, but basically, whenever a transaction failed, I'd have to reattempt 2-3 times before it eventually succeeded.

Meanwhile, on a bog-standard Arduino with an ATMega328P, I send the I2C traffic once, and unless the circuit is physically damaged, the transaction will succeed.

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

#167

Post by arbuge »

ahepp wrote: post #125
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.

I can't really disagree with what you're saying about Pis often being overkill, but I've been using Raspberry Pi Zero Ws for more projects where I might have used ESP32s, and I've been very happy with the choice. Basically any project I have that isn't battery powered or timing critical, I'd prefer to use a Pi. Zero Ws have a $10 MSRP (of course, huge shortage at the moment). I think they're pretty cost competitive f…

"huge shortage at the moment"

AFAIK this "at the moment" period has now extended all the way from the time they were introduced to the present day. One long moment for sure.

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

#168

Post by MrFoof »

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.

Strongly agree here. Local SD storage IO aside, a Pi 4B 8GB is basically on par with a high end desktop I had in the mid-2000s.

That’s an insane amount of compute on something that can be sub-2W over POE, or 1.3W on WiFi.

Though for all the homelabbers out there, you probably have a NAS. Use Log2RAM, and present some ISCSI volumes to the Pi, and you’d be staggered with the very real work a Pi can do when not saddled by the SD card - without having to directly attach storage.

- -

I’d argue that for “IoT” stuff even Arduinos are overkill in terms of computing power. Granted, I realize this is the case functionally because of BOM optimization and making it forgiving (more power than needed) for beginners.

- -

Granted, going back to the original article: Yes, 1L form factors are nuts. Mac Minis are insane (but not cheap), and if you look at 35W Zen 3 Ryzen 7 PROs you can get similarly insane power cheaper if you need x86. But all the much older former office 1Ls are everywhere and offer ludicrous performance to hobbyists for pennies on the dollar, with (as mentioned by the article) sub-10W idle.

- -

Honestly, it’s just a great time to be a tinkerer. We’re drowning in ubiquitous, cheap compute.

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

#169

Post by k__ »

I wanted to give my girlfriend the option to watch streams on her TV.

An important point was that the solution had a regular browser that worked with every streaming website out there.

So, I got an Asus TinkerBoard, because it had good video rendering. I constantly had issues with that thing. Updates, connection problems, etc.

Then the FireTV stick was released with the Silk browser. I bought one, and never went back.

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

#170

Post by paxys »

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.

This combined with the main article shows the exact reason why Raspberry Pi is as popular as it is. When I'm starting a new project I can either worry about Arduino or ESP32 or other microcontrollers or various NUCs or getting a board fabricated from scratch...or I can grab a RPi from the drawer and know that it will just work, regardless of whether I need to toggle some RGB lights, browse the web, or run a Kubernetes cluster.

There is nothing else out there that hits the sweet spot in between price, power consumption, processing speed, extensibility, software compatibility, out-of-box experience and lots more.

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