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I kinda think you're missing the point of the Pi. It wasn't marketed as a low cost replacement for a computer, it was marketed as a low cost computer to learn a

I kinda think you're missing the point of the Pi. It wasn't marketed as a low cost replacement for a computer, it was marketed as a low cost computer to learn and experiment with. In particular, having a raft of IO that you can hang cheap sensors, motors and all sorts of things off of and play with. Attempting that with a ThinkPad or any regular computer isn't quite as straight forward, and is a bit of a non-starter because out of the box they don't have these IO ports unless you go and find some external "box", which adds to your $200 cost, and is likely not inexpensive.

dehrmann 6y ago
This is a weird niche, though. It's basically "I want a microcontroller, but don't want to program a microcontroller."
- thebigman433 6y ago
  Its a maker niche mostly. Its definitely not a microcontroller since it runs a full OS. It is a good tool for any project that needs a full computer OS and what comes with that, along with IO ports. Plus its tiny and relatively cheap
- saagarjha 6y ago
  That niche is basically “education and hobby”.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Are microcontrollers that unapproachable for the hobbyist?
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      I don't thinks so at all. I'm basically a dummy and that's what I use make a living. Used to be the thing that makes life difficult for a hobbyist is either you need to learn a lot of arcana to string free tools together and learn to debug blind. Or you needed to spend a bunch of money on tools. With a bundled in circuit emulator and IDE it's easy to get started. That used to cost a couple of thousand. Now it's a few hundred to $1500 or so.
    - tehbeard 6y ago
      For a seasoned hobbyist, not really if you get the correct tools and software. How exactly do you program a microcontroller? With a pc. So having a pi with NOOBS on the boot drive where u can just plug in peripherals and be off to the races is easier.
    - teh_klev 6y ago
      Not really, not if the tooling is half decent. And for stuff like the Arduino it's fairly good, even for a beginner with a wee bit of programming knowledge. I used to be pretty fluent in 6502 back in the early 80's, it's a long forgotten skill in my brain. I bought an Arduino kit back in 2010 and had a bunch of flashing LEDs working in about half an hour. And I'm not that clever. It's all about the tools.
    - HotHotLava 6y ago
      Depends heavily on the project: For more electronics and hardware-oriented projects an Arduino or microcontroller might even be easier to use. But imagine making e.g. an internet-controlled LED light strip. With an Arduino setting up the WiFi, accepting TSL connections, etc. would probably be a major pain and require additional hardware. With a Raspberry Zero W, this can be done via ssh in a few minutes, and it still has PWM ports to connect the hardware to.
- teh_klev 6y ago
  It's not a niche, in the same way that the Arduino isn't a niche. Back in the day the BBC Micro B had a thing called the "User Port". It was a TTL level bunch of pins you could attach all sorts of experiments to, controlled by a 6522 VIA. It was amazing, very few home computers had this feature (though the ZX81, Spectrum etc eventually got these add-on boards over time) I for one, when writing BBS software, hacked together a thing to allow my BBC's User Port to detect carrier select, ring indicate and something else off of my old (pre-Hayes) modem to provide these signals from the modem's RS232 interface to detect calls and dropped calls etc, because the beeb only had RS432 which made it impossible to do this with (all you had was CTS, RTS, RX, TX and Ground). The Beeb had an analogue port. You could hang all sorts of experiments off of that...external thermometers and the like. PC's (Apple included) "ruined" all that, and what external interface boards you could get to replicate this functionality were usually pretty expensive, because the world moved on, and this kinda thing wasn't built into the design spec. The Pi was intended to recreate that 70's/80's fun, joy and excitement, and re-introduce the ability to do stuff like this that modern PC hardware simply doesn't provide for out of the box. I don't mean this as a slight, but perhaps you missed out on that era, but have also missed out on the point of this stuff for "hacking" out ideas because where you've got an itch you need to scratch....like building a weather station out of bits. The Pi, it's marketing etc is an amazing thing and should, and does, get folks back to hardware and software hacking for fun and intellectual curiosity without spending megabucks. Sorry I missed the last part: > "I want a microcontroller, but don't want to program a microcontroller." But it encourages you to learn how to program a microcontroller, that's the whole point. Curiosity which leads to other things. I had to fix things on my car but didn't wan't to learn or wasn't interested about how to fix things on my car...turns out I am now. And saved money. And learned things. And saved money. And satisfied some mysteries about how cars work. Again, to encourage curiosity which leads to other things.
- klodolph 6y ago
  RPi is a ton of computing power that you can shove almost wherever you want for low cost. Even the Pi Zero ($5) has 512MB RAM and an ARM11 running at 1GHz. It has HDMI & USB. I’d say that your criticism could be seen as “why use a microcontroller when you could just use a PLA?” Well, there are a lot of reasons why you might choose a PLA, but microcontrollers are cheap these days and easier to program. And the Raspberry Pi is also cheap and easier to program than microcontrollers. The Pi is easier to program than a microcontroller, more powerful, and still quite cheap. Cheap enough that it’s sometimes being kept in “production” designs.
  - teh_klev 6y ago
    > Even the Pi Zero ($5) has 512MB RAM and an ARM11 running at 1GHz. It has HDMI & USB. If I had one of these as a teenager in the early 80's I'd have fainted with idea overload. But as it stands we had 8 bit processors running at 1-2MHz and 32-64k of memory.
  - lebed2045 6y ago
    > Even the Pi Zero ($5) may I ask where can I buy Pi Zero for 5 dollars? Even on Aliexpress (perhaps I wrongly assume it's the cheapest place to buy) there options start from $15 and up https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20210124074135&SearchText=pi+zero https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S... I'm not trying to invalidate your argument in any way, just genuinely curious. Also, does anyone know the actual production cost of such device?
    - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      https://www.microcenter.com/product/486498/zero-v13-development-board---camera-ready https://www.microcenter.com/product/486498/zero-v13-developm... it says 1 is 4.99, but multiple is 10$ when I saw it
      - AstroJetson 6y ago
        They are trying to get new people involved to hook them into the hobby and of course get them to buy more stuff from them. Remember you need an SD card, power, keyboard, mouse, oh look it's a RaspberryPi book, oh cool, they have a magazine and suddenly that $5 loss has turned into $80 of sales. The person buying 10 at a time is just buying the boards, so no extra items other than maybe a PSU. If you really want 10 at $5 go every day at lunch, that's what I did.

dehrmann 6y ago

This is a weird niche, though. It's basically "I want a microcontroller, but don't want to program a microcontroller."

thebigman433 6y ago
Its a maker niche mostly. Its definitely not a microcontroller since it runs a full OS. It is a good tool for any project that needs a full computer OS and what comes with that, along with IO ports. Plus its tiny and relatively cheap
saagarjha 6y ago
That niche is basically “education and hobby”.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Are microcontrollers that unapproachable for the hobbyist?
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    I don't thinks so at all. I'm basically a dummy and that's what I use make a living. Used to be the thing that makes life difficult for a hobbyist is either you need to learn a lot of arcana to string free tools together and learn to debug blind. Or you needed to spend a bunch of money on tools. With a bundled in circuit emulator and IDE it's easy to get started. That used to cost a couple of thousand. Now it's a few hundred to $1500 or so.
  - tehbeard 6y ago
    For a seasoned hobbyist, not really if you get the correct tools and software. How exactly do you program a microcontroller? With a pc. So having a pi with NOOBS on the boot drive where u can just plug in peripherals and be off to the races is easier.
  - teh_klev 6y ago
    Not really, not if the tooling is half decent. And for stuff like the Arduino it's fairly good, even for a beginner with a wee bit of programming knowledge. I used to be pretty fluent in 6502 back in the early 80's, it's a long forgotten skill in my brain. I bought an Arduino kit back in 2010 and had a bunch of flashing LEDs working in about half an hour. And I'm not that clever. It's all about the tools.
  - HotHotLava 6y ago
    Depends heavily on the project: For more electronics and hardware-oriented projects an Arduino or microcontroller might even be easier to use. But imagine making e.g. an internet-controlled LED light strip. With an Arduino setting up the WiFi, accepting TSL connections, etc. would probably be a major pain and require additional hardware. With a Raspberry Zero W, this can be done via ssh in a few minutes, and it still has PWM ports to connect the hardware to.
teh_klev 6y ago
It's not a niche, in the same way that the Arduino isn't a niche. Back in the day the BBC Micro B had a thing called the "User Port". It was a TTL level bunch of pins you could attach all sorts of experiments to, controlled by a 6522 VIA. It was amazing, very few home computers had this feature (though the ZX81, Spectrum etc eventually got these add-on boards over time) I for one, when writing BBS software, hacked together a thing to allow my BBC's User Port to detect carrier select, ring indicate and something else off of my old (pre-Hayes) modem to provide these signals from the modem's RS232 interface to detect calls and dropped calls etc, because the beeb only had RS432 which made it impossible to do this with (all you had was CTS, RTS, RX, TX and Ground). The Beeb had an analogue port. You could hang all sorts of experiments off of that...external thermometers and the like. PC's (Apple included) "ruined" all that, and what external interface boards you could get to replicate this functionality were usually pretty expensive, because the world moved on, and this kinda thing wasn't built into the design spec. The Pi was intended to recreate that 70's/80's fun, joy and excitement, and re-introduce the ability to do stuff like this that modern PC hardware simply doesn't provide for out of the box. I don't mean this as a slight, but perhaps you missed out on that era, but have also missed out on the point of this stuff for "hacking" out ideas because where you've got an itch you need to scratch....like building a weather station out of bits. The Pi, it's marketing etc is an amazing thing and should, and does, get folks back to hardware and software hacking for fun and intellectual curiosity without spending megabucks. Sorry I missed the last part: > "I want a microcontroller, but don't want to program a microcontroller." But it encourages you to learn how to program a microcontroller, that's the whole point. Curiosity which leads to other things. I had to fix things on my car but didn't wan't to learn or wasn't interested about how to fix things on my car...turns out I am now. And saved money. And learned things. And saved money. And satisfied some mysteries about how cars work. Again, to encourage curiosity which leads to other things.
klodolph 6y ago
RPi is a ton of computing power that you can shove almost wherever you want for low cost. Even the Pi Zero ($5) has 512MB RAM and an ARM11 running at 1GHz. It has HDMI & USB. I’d say that your criticism could be seen as “why use a microcontroller when you could just use a PLA?” Well, there are a lot of reasons why you might choose a PLA, but microcontrollers are cheap these days and easier to program. And the Raspberry Pi is also cheap and easier to program than microcontrollers. The Pi is easier to program than a microcontroller, more powerful, and still quite cheap. Cheap enough that it’s sometimes being kept in “production” designs.
- teh_klev 6y ago
  > Even the Pi Zero ($5) has 512MB RAM and an ARM11 running at 1GHz. It has HDMI & USB. If I had one of these as a teenager in the early 80's I'd have fainted with idea overload. But as it stands we had 8 bit processors running at 1-2MHz and 32-64k of memory.
- lebed2045 6y ago
  > Even the Pi Zero ($5) may I ask where can I buy Pi Zero for 5 dollars? Even on Aliexpress (perhaps I wrongly assume it's the cheapest place to buy) there options start from $15 and up https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20210124074135&SearchText=pi+zero https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S... I'm not trying to invalidate your argument in any way, just genuinely curious. Also, does anyone know the actual production cost of such device?
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    https://www.microcenter.com/product/486498/zero-v13-development-board---camera-ready https://www.microcenter.com/product/486498/zero-v13-developm... it says 1 is 4.99, but multiple is 10$ when I saw it
    - AstroJetson 6y ago
      They are trying to get new people involved to hook them into the hobby and of course get them to buy more stuff from them. Remember you need an SD card, power, keyboard, mouse, oh look it's a RaspberryPi book, oh cool, they have a magazine and suddenly that $5 loss has turned into $80 of sales. The person buying 10 at a time is just buying the boards, so no extra items other than maybe a PSU. If you really want 10 at $5 go every day at lunch, that's what I did.