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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

#251

Post by steve_adams_86 »

adql wrote: post #151
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. It brings you back to more fundamental aspects of problem solving that sometimes you miss with higher level programming. There are a lot of things I can do on a modern web server with a language like Go that are pretty cool, but not particularly interesting because it's kind of trivial. There are so many resources available to the program, things to fall back on for resilience, plenty of common pr…

> Sometimes I'll spend hours trying to figure out how to interface with a single sensor, and while it isn't important or impressive in the scheme of things, I really enjoy it. I found a fake sensor like that once.... was wondering why my code done by datasheet didn't worked on cheapo breakout board I bought off aliexpress. Then I read ID register and they used older chip that had some of the stuff set up differently.…

Same, I bought a couple waterproof temperature probes under the name of a reputable manufacturer and wound up getting what turns out to be notorious knock offs. It was way harder to set up and the actual sensors measured within several degrees C of each other, haha. I'm a lot more careful of where I order components from, now.

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

#252

Post by ahepp »

dsr_ wrote: post #217
colejohnson66 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean isn't the truth somewhere in between? You can probably get one a lot cheaper than $150 or whatever it's selling for on Amazon if you don't need it today. At the same time you're right that it means something that you can't just go out to the store and buy one at anything remotely close to MSRP

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

#253

Post by abudabi123 »

klardotsh wrote: post #224
genmud wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only are Pine hard to find stock of, but I've basically never heard of a well-built Pine64 product, and that's coming from someone with three of them. They're all buggy, flimsy, doorstops at this point. Whereas my biggest complaints about Pis are that (1) I broke a plastic case for one of mine while it was in a moving box, oops, (2) SD cards are a pain in the butt and fragile.

The smaller than a finger nail size ”user unfriendly SD card“ is replaceable with USB memory as boot device.

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

#254

Post by ahepp »

sokoloff wrote: post #199
repomies69 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I find the lifetime effort of an AVR/ESP8266/ESP32 to be lower than a Pi. I’ve had AVRs (of mine) running in the house for 9+ years without being touched (and ESPs for over 5). Things do just work out of the box on them (often easier than installing Raspian, getting it onto wifi, setting up ssh, looking up the commands to set a GPIO, figuring out cron, rc.d, etc.) It’s way faster IME to just use the Arduino digital_w…

There's a lot of stuff you can do to Linux on the Pi to make it have some of the nice qualities you're describing.

I've set up my Buildroot project to copy "authorized_keys" and "wpa_supplicant.conf" from the fat32 formatted boot partition to their normal locations. So I flash an SD card, drag and drop the files onto the SD card, plug it in the Pi and SSH right in.

With regards to filesystem corruption on power failure, you can mount the root filesystem as read-only. If you need to write to files you could mount a tmpfs volatile filesystem.

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

#255

Post by tasuki »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #187
tasuki wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you concerned about?

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

20 watt is very little. Are you sure it's more of a waste than buying a brand new energy-efficient device?

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

#256

Post by mnw21cam »

outworlder wrote: post #205
mnw21cam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm just building a outside watering system. I was going to use a RasPi, You could also use a $1 ESP8266 or a slightly more expensive ESP32.

While that looks like a very nice chip, it still doesn't have ethernet or non-volatile storage, so it doesn't help with remote access or logging.

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

#257

Post by rldjbpin »

the rpi foundation is another example of openai-like evolution of an org - started out with a noble cause but switched course when faced with the realities.

the whole supply-chain fiasco was a great example of their current priorities when their arm was twisted. they started out with promoting cs education but ended up being more loyal to their corporate partners.

but to be fair to them, half the problem was us, who want it for cheap computing. the "hackers" in this site could easily achieve similar results by repurposing an old phone than to buy another one of these sbc for their home lab. to be honest, we are spoilt by the rpi ecosystem, and we choose it even when overkill because we can (or at least could until they became over $100).

at the end of the day, you do what you want with your wallet.

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

#258

Post by ta988 »

milesvp wrote: post #130
gaudat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And these peripherals can run at hundreds of MHz doing real work in every cycle. I can probably do very low latency audio processing with an interrupt firing at the sample rate. Delay is a few samples instead of at least couple of ms like on a PC with an audio interface.

You probably could, but I’d recommend getting a chip with a dedicated I2S peripheral and use freertos with a high priority dedicated audio task that’s sole task is processing audio. You really don’t want to miss an audio sample. It’s very audible, and depending on what you’re doing makes audio processing essentially a hard real-time constraint.

FreeRTOS has a massive effect on throughput. If your audioprocessing is predictible and your interrupts too there is no reason to need that overhead.

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

#259

Post by ta988 »

gaudat wrote: post #98
ta988 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many microcontrolers have timers and counters or even state machines (PIOs on RP2040 is a nice example of that) for this reason. They allow you to handle those cases out of the main computing unit. The MSP430s are also full of these magic things. They are harder to get introduced to than just writing Python. But you don't realize how powerful those things are until you step out of how you were handling things on a mu…

And these peripherals can run at hundreds of MHz doing real work in every cycle. I can probably do very low latency audio processing with an interrupt firing at the sample rate. Delay is a few samples instead of at least couple of ms like on a PC with an audio interface.

Yes working on a Arm M7 at 480MHz I get 1 to 3 samples latency on most things I'm doing (mostly synthesis). And that's on a single core even.

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

#260

Post by hammyhavoc »

MrFoof wrote: post #168
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…

Distro/stack recommendations for a Pi? Intrigued by your usage with Log2RAM and ISCSI volumes!
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