331–340 of 354 posts
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Having had a subscription to Hack-a-Day for a long time, I firmly believe that the vast majority of "weird one-off" Raspberry Pi projects don't actually need anything as capable as a Raspberry Pi SBC. It's just a matter of brand recognition and familiarity. If it gets too expensive, I suspect that more users will migrate to microcontrollers than to gutted notebooks. You don't even need to learn anything new, I'm sure…
A lot of things wouldn't even need a RP2350. The original Arduino alone was pretty slick for a lot of cool small scale projects.
It's crazy how Raspberry Pi & Apple prices have moved in converging direction. Pi 5 8GB is $200 MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available) Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad.. So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a c…
8GB of LPDDR memory is around $100 in volume. That leaves $100 for everything else on the Pi, including the hardware, building it, transporting it, and retailer margin. That leaves $500 for everything else on the MacBook Neo. That's why you can get so much more from the MacBook Neo. There's 5X as much budget for everything other than RAM.
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I'm sure Microcenter is not selling Pi Zeroes at a loss. They're an authorized retailer selling at the part's MSRP. They do sometimes make these available only in store, not online, once they sell out online and I don't think it's a mystery why a retail business would do that.
Why are you so confident? Raspberry Pi's prospectus says "unit gross profit margin of 20 per cent. for us and 10 per cent. for our ARs" and they give an example: "sell it to our ARs for $90, which in turn would sell it to the end user for $100". AR=Approved Resellers and delivery costs are paid by the reseller. Is 10%/$1.50 enough to pay for the retailer's freight, ~3% fee to accept credit cards, inventory carrying,…
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Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface? Can it be used to build a portable battery powered smartphone like PC (Compute Module 5)? Raspberry Pi’s biggest strength is its form factor and low power draw.
To drive a touchscreen and serve as a Home Assistant interface you need neither a Pi nor an N100-class mini PC. That's the job of an ESP32. 20 bucks... for a pack of 5. (plus the screen. And ethernet / PoE variants are rare, and not as cheap, so if that's a hard requirement, maybe not for your specific use case)
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Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface? Can it be used to build a portable battery powered smartphone like PC (Compute Module 5)? Raspberry Pi’s biggest strength is its form factor and low power draw.
> Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface? Yes. Generally only requiring a $10 PoE splitter like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134500605396 Some N100 class machines draw more power, but many don't, and there are more capable PoE splitters for a few dollars extra. Use a USB touchscreen.
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> Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface? Yes. Generally only requiring a $10 PoE splitter like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134500605396 Some N100 class machines draw more power, but many don't, and there are more capable PoE splitters for a few dollars extra. Use a USB touchscreen.
I might also point out that with Pi/mini PC pricing being the way it is, a used iPad mini mounted to the wall is also in the same price range. As a bonus you could remove it from the wall and walk around with it, and you’ve got way less DIY work to deal with.
Edit: Putting a device with permanently attached battery inside of a wall or even on a mount, always plugged in gives me the heebie-jeebies.
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It's not the GPIO, it's the software ecosystem for anything you would want to connect to the GPIO.
Sure, but none of the hardware peripherals routed out to those pins are exclusive to that pin header. If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that. If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi…
SBC Customer: Let's say I build a product using your latest SBC. Will it get updates after I bought it?
SBC Vendor: No
SBC Customer: Okay, but surely I can at least buy more in 2035?
SBC Vendor: No
SBC Customer: Why would anyone building a commercial product be interested in your particular SBC then?
SBC Vendor: We expect you to buy and then regret your purchase.
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Good point, everyone was expecting GPU prices to go down and all crypto bros to drop their mining rigs, but they can just repurpose them now...
I thought anyone serious about mining switched to ASICs and custom hardware a while ago. At least for BTC and maybe eth, a custom asic setup is ~2-3x more profitable