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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

#181

Post by ahepp »

arbuge wrote: post #167
ahepp wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My recollection is shit really hit the fan after the pandemic? It looks like the Zero W was released in 2017. I remember up until the last couple years, you could at least get one per order from Adafruit/Sparkfun at MSRP. I think there may have even been a time when you could get like, 10 per order or something?

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

#182

Post by slowmotiony »

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 used a HDD connected via USB as a boot drive and after a few days of working fine it suddenly wasn't able to mount it any more, it was something to do with not enough power current in the USB ports. Lost all data and had to reformat the whole thing.

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

#183

Post by geocrasher »

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?

I didn't say that having resources meant they should be abused. I said that if somebody can afford $150 for a RPi can afford $2.50/mo for power instead of $0.50/mo for power, and that as a result, factoring in lower power use is a poor reason for buying something you don't otherwise need, especially when that power is easily available.

If that power were coming from locally finite source such as solar or wind, or battery, it's a different story.

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

#184

Post by sangnoir »

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.

> I want reliable and quiet. I have RPis running for more than a decade everyday with not a single crash.

I had the original Model B running continuously for 8+ years until the USB contacts rusted-out due to high humidity.

The prices in the article are absurd: why would I choose a $260 SFF PC vs a $5 RPi Zero W I got 5 years ago? The comparison may make sense for new purchases with the ongoing shortage.

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

#185

Post by repomies69 »

paxys wrote: post #170
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 Kubernete…

It is the software compability. Things working out of the box, without hassle. Almost nothing beats that. Almost everything is secondary.

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

#186

Post by SkyPuncher »

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've done embedded programming, but I just don't enjoy it. It's far too in the weeds for the type of simple tasks I want to do around my house. Every time I start with Arduino, I realize that I'm simply not having fun.

Raspberry pie lets me work at a higher level that I actually find enjoyable.

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

#187

Post by SkyPuncher »

tasuki wrote: post #119
timeon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are you concerned about?

The feeling of waste when I'm running a 20 watt laptop in the corner 365/24/7.

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

#188

Post by nirav72 »

I've seen people waiting months to get their hands on a Raspberry pi 4 to self-hosting bunch of apps. Not sure why. Something like an HP Elitebook G2 with a i5 and 8gb ram can be had for $110 on secondary markets like Amazon renewed or ebay. About 10x the performance compared to a Pi 4. Only thing missing is GPIO port. But even that is a easy fix for another $10-15. Only down side is the power draw. Compared to a Pi4, you're going to see an average power draw of 20-40 watts.

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

#190

Post by sangnoir »

ulnarkressty wrote: post #152

The article is right, if you need a (very) low power server the rpi is unbeatable. I have tried a lot during the years to make it as robust as possible, however I find that there is only a matter of time until a power failure, regular update or even a simple reboot will render a pi unusable. And you'll be powerless to fix whatever flavor of boot error is occurring half a world away. Never had these kinds of issues wi…

I never had a breaking update on Raspbian. However, I have run into write errors caused by power failures that required an fsck on the SD from a different computer: I now have a `@reboot touch /forcefsck` cronjob, but it may just be a talisman (IIRC, dirty filesystems get a fsck automatic at boot)

Have you considered read-only boot & system partitions? That way, your pi will always boot, at the cost of have to remount in read/write mode to perform updates.

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