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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

#41

Post by magicalhippo »

retrocryptid wrote: post #4

I know that you didn't ask, but my $0.02 is that yes, RasPi's are unreliable. If you use one for as an unattended remote server, it will do you well to include a hardware watchdog that power cycles the device after it hangs. But modern NUCs seem to take MINUTES to boot the BIOS. I had been using various BeagleBones and found them more reliable than RasPi's and faster to boot than the NUCs in the office. But depending…

> I know that you didn't ask, but my $0.02 is that yes, RasPi's are unreliable.

I've been using RPis and "clones" for internal services for years, and there's hardly any fuzz with them at all. At most a power cycle once a year.

They've endured house losing power multiple times, I've yet to swap SD-card on any of them, they just keep chugging.

But sure, I wouldn't trust my life to one. I just find it odd that people say they're highly unreliable while all of mine just work.

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

#42

Post by gaudat »

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.

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.

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

#43

Post by computerfriend »

aayushdutt wrote: post #8

Why am I getting a cloudflare error? Visiting from India via Chrome. Msg: I got an error when visiting set-inform.com/2021/08/24/unpopular-opinion-dont-use-a-raspberry-pi-for-that/. Error code: 1020 Country: IN Data center: fra08 Timestamp: 2023-03-22 13:33:46 UTC

Same.

    Error code: 1020
    Ray ID: 7abeef5a9d8c6e55

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

#44

Post by aleph_minus_one »

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…

> and watch your ass because an EE is about to arrive to drag you for not just using a 555 timer in your projects.

I know from an electrical engineer that with microcontrollers having become that cheap, it can often be cheaper to use a massively produced microcontroller instead of a 555 despite the former often being insanely overpowered for the task at hand.

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

#45

Post by Steltek »

geocrasher wrote: post #11

If you don't need GPIO, then you don't need a RPi. They are useful, but an old laptop can do most things a Pi can do, and putting them to use keeps them out of the landfill longer.

I'm a bigger fan of Dell desktop that companies have put out to pasture after a refresh cycle. They're very expandable, have plenty of horsepower, and the idle power draw isn't that bad. The better thermal characteristics compared to a laptop usually lead to very long life as well.

Related to a sibling comment, a decent UPS could power a Dell like that for a couple of hours if it's mostly idling.

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

#46

Post by bschwindHN »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #36
dale_glass wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most importantly, it doesn't have an OS that provides next to no benefit for many of those tasks, and suffers from inconsistent timing. Something like ESP32 is much more reliable at controlling hardware. It will never miss on a triggered limit switch in time because memory ran out for some reason and it started swapping.

Ah, that kind of timing. I have made several kinds of clocks with RPis, one that ran fine for years driving a little servo to strike an hourly chime like a grandfather clock, which was all very easy thanks to having an OS with NTP and cron. But I mostly agree with the article, I have a Gigabyte Brix fanless NUC-alike as my real home server, and a couple of Pis doing little things (and switched to 'overlay file system…

> very easy thanks to having an OS with NTP and cron.

An ESP32 can still have both of those things in some capacity.

https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-ntp-client-date-time-a...

https://github.com/DavidMora/esp_cron

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

#47

Post by antx »

geocrasher wrote: post #11

If you don't need GPIO, then you don't need a RPi. They are useful, but an old laptop can do most things a Pi can do, and putting them to use keeps them out of the landfill longer.

That's a broad generalization. Sure, reduce, re-use, recycle.

But... it's nice to have a system that has a very minimal footprint, which isn't exactly the case with a laptop.

Then again, we can argue semantics over "need" vs "want".

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

#48

Post by jaredhallen »

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.

FWIW, my home DNS has been running on a pi SD card for at least 5 years with many, many power outages (I live in a rural area with very unreliable electricity). So far it hasn't had a problem. Overall I agree with the sentiment, and will probably move off the pi at some point. Just saying the SD card situation isn't as dire as it is sometimes made out to be.
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