Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

set-inform.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 270 posts

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

#211

Post by hahamrfunnyguy »

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…

I think it depends on the type of project. I found the out of box experience to be super easy with Arduino. You install the IDE, plugin the board via USB and can start writing code right away.

As a full stack web developer, I am always finding myself getting bogged down in activities to support the work of development (managing dependencies, deployments, builds, etc). I don't enjoy that part of being a developer.

The experience of being able to write a few lines of C code and have stuff happen right away is very pleasant and a breath of fresh air. Unless it's necessary, I would rather not complicate things by having to deal with an OS and everything that entails.

You can get an ESP32 (Seeed Studio Xaio) Arduino-compatible board for $5 from Digikey. Incredibly cheap for hobby-scale projects!

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

#212

Post by JeremyNT »

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 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 impossible.

This bit was always the head scratcher to me. I've never owned or worked with a pi, simply because I have an old SFF PC that is many times more powerful. I remember reading stuff here on HN about people building k8s clusters and similar things on raspis... why would you do this to yourself? Just virtualize on the junky old PC if you really want to have multiple "nodes" of some sort.

I get there are use cases where "put a small slow computer in a physical location" is what you actually want, but it feels like raspi gets jammed into a lot of uses which don't make much sense. Just because you can doesn't mean you should...

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

#213

Post by genmud »

freeopinion wrote: post #196
paxys wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess that's true for a certain wealth target. If you consider the Pi as the sweet spot for price, have at it. But https://pine64.com/product/pinecone-bl602-evaluation-board/ costs $4. It fits a different sweet spot for price, power consumption, etc. A drawer-full of 20 Pis could run me $2000. A drawer-full of Pinenuts would run me... well perhaps $2000 because I could fit 1000 of them in a drawer. If I want to bro…

That’s apples to oranges, more comparable would be a pi pico w, which is like $6, has better documentation, and is more likely to be available when you need one.

I have a bunch of pine devices, but if you think raspberry pi’s are difficult to come by, finding a pine device in stock over the last few years has been a challenge at least for me personally. Things have started to get much better though, it seems.

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

#216

Post by lll-o-lll »

rleigh wrote: post #204
lll-o-lll wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bare metal C++ for PI. https://github.com/rsta2/circle Access to most of the hardware and real-time deterministic behavior. It’s a really great project and lets you twiddle those gpio pins at ridiculous speeds with perfect timing (less than a millisecond). A PI comes with a whole bunch of great hardware baked in, so if you have one laying around, and want to do some microcontroller stuff, I think it’s a great choice.

It's still an A-profile MPU and not an R- or M-profile MCU, and while it will be fast it will have less deterministic behaviour than we might like. If you disable the caches and MMU you'll get better consistency. But wouldn't we expect ~microsecond accuracy from a properly-configured MCU?; ~millisecond accuracy is not a particularly high bar.

You can read pins (well one) with sub-microsecond latency using the Fast Interrupt Request, but I have not tried this myself. I think a PI would be more than capable of matching most microcontrollers just due to its very fast clock speed. Add multiple cores with the PI4 and you get a crazy amount of compute between each pulse as well.

There are a bunch of clocks that run plenty fast to enable high resolution timing as well.

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

#217

Post by dsr_ »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #209
ar_lan wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 costs... $169 USD actively on Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Model-2019-Quad-Bluetooth/d... ). I can find more powerful laptops for cheaper. I can get a Dell R720 which has drastically more computing power (32x RAM, much more powerful CPU) for twice the price. RPI used to be economical. If it still cost $50 USD, I'd grab them in a heartbeat to do these types of projects, but as it is,…

The RPi starts at $35. The prices you’re seeing on Amazon are scalpers takings advantage of the chip shortage. When Adafruit, for example, has them in stock, they’re at MSRP.

If you can't order a dozen any day of the week for the list price, they aren't really available at the list price.

As far as I can tell, the only Pi that you can reliably buy in quantity 1 at list price is the Pico.

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

#218

Post by yuuta »

I have been running my homelab for 2 ~ 3 years, and I never considered rpi to be one of the servers ... It is just for toys or some "high school robots" stuff, with 0% availability and are very fragile. How many times your SD card fail / filesystem break / undervolt occurs / accidentally short-circuit? If you want to have a host running Linux 24 * 7, go with a used Thin Client on eBay (they are at least x86). If you are like me who want to build a rack at home, go with some used PowerEdge / ProLiant gears from eBay. They do way better things than your Pi (with BMC, Xeon cores, and ECC memory, possibly), and they are cheaper as well (my PowerEdge R520 servers only cost less than C$200 each). These machines have proper CPU, hard drive, and power supply. Do not use a Pi unless you are building some IoT experiments that require GPIOs.

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

#219

Post by justeleblanc »

geocrasher wrote: post #183
justeleblanc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bat…

You know there's this little event going on called climate disruption, and that a leading cause is energy overconsumption, right?

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

#220

Post by justeleblanc »

comprev wrote: post #161
justeleblanc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good, you understood my point. Using an overpowered device is a complete waste of resources.
Post reply on HN