5 ms·

I'm a longtime Pi fan but I'm really dubious of the single board computer market . At $5-$10 (pi-zero / W) and $35 (pi3 / pi 4) these little boards made a ton

I'm a longtime Pi fan but I'm really dubious of the single board computer market . At $5-$10 (pi-zero / W) and $35 (pi3 / pi 4) these little boards made a ton of sense. Pushing into ~ $120-$150 to me doesn't make any sense. You can get 8gb/16gb N100 at that price point complete with a case. I saw his point on the per-watt performance which is valid, but are people running a room full of these things? Why spend so much to save 10 watts ? Someone please enlighten me on how this segment still remains viable.

stefan_ 3y ago
But the per-watt performance of these chips is usually terrible, made as they are on older silicon processes. Any recent-ish laptop CPU will have no problem beating them.
- nic547 3y ago
  The Intel N100 is a Alder-Lake N chip, based on Intel 7. It's four of the small cores you find on 12-Gen Laptop processors, made with the same process. It's successor arch, Meteor Lake has only recently launched, so the N100 shouldn't be too far off in terms of efficiency.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    these small intel cores aren't known for their power efficiency
    - nic547 3y ago
      Mostly because the high end intel processors are run at power limits where they're getting extremely diminishing returns, trying to eek out every last bit of performance. In lower power scenarios the little cores can be more efficient than the large ones. And at 6W TDP the N100 is a low power scenario. https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/01/28/alder-lakes-power-efficiency-a-complicated-picture/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/01/28/alder-lakes-power-effi...
      - beebeepka 3y ago
        Oh, sure. Still not anywhere nearly as good as the latest Zen parts but the n100 mini pcs are very cheap.
edvinbesic 3y ago
This resonates with me. I have a few zeros, 3’s and 4’s for random things (nerves projects, dns, bastion host etc) but the price point now puts it squarely in the “I better have a good use case for this” rather than “I want to tinker around and if it ends up in a drawer no big deal” camp.
- tonymet 3y ago
  i'm with you. i'm leaning toward moving them all to a proxmox server
rcarmo 3y ago
It's an interesting segment, especially now that Intel N100 machines are out. But it essentially depends on what you want to do, and what use/need you have for ARM hardware. Me, I write fairly low-level stuff that runs on ARM (for kicks), so having one of these as a server/development sandbox makes a ton of sense (even though I have Macs and VMs and whatnot, some things you can only do with hardware). I grant that you won't find normal people filling their closets with these. But when you walk past, say, a phone exchange, a 5G base station, or any other of hundreds of invisible machines out there, they'll be running a variation of these boards (perhaps slower and dumber, but soon ramping up to this kind of thing), because Intel lost the embedded market years back.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
beachy 3y ago
It's a good question. Here's my specific use case, I'm sure there are plenty more. I have a golf simulator running in the cloud (AWS) on a g4dn.xlarge ec2 insurance. At home, I use a raspberry pi 5 as a thin client. It plugs into a 4k projector and streams down the display of the cloud PC. Because it's cheap and reliable, I can leave it in place sitting up on the ceiling attached to the projector. I wouldn't want to devote a more expensive laptop to the job - the raspberry pi 5 is just man enough for the job, powerful enough but only just.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  I did mostly the same for a while, but with a Pi 4: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/10/23/1700 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/10/23/1700
  - beachy 3y ago
    Sounds interesting (but a bit above my pay grade). AWS uses a streaming tech called NICE DCV which runs in a browser (chromium) on my raspberry pi. I was using a RP 4 before, but the performance is noticeably better with the RP 5.
- Geisterde 3y ago
  [dead]
jhot 3y ago
I recently bought a mini pc with an AMD 5500u (6 cores, 12 threads, 15W), 16 GB DDR4, and a 512 GB nvme SSD for $225 (on sale a bit). I suspect it would run laps around the orange pi despite the similar price and wattage.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Which mini PC was that? That sounds great.
  - eropple 3y ago
    Beelink sells a bunch of them, as do a few other vendors (who are all probably rebadging from the same manufacturers somewhere). If you're willing to spend more, the ones with Ryzen 7840HS processors are particularly impressive.
    - SSLy 3y ago
      Don't beelink mini PC's have terrible power supply that makes them randomly go silent?
      - eropple 3y ago
        Some of them have something weird on them, most of them are a normal barrel jack. I can't speak to the weird one, I don't have one of those.
  - jhot 3y ago
    The brand is GenMachine. Bought from Newegg and shipped from china so you can probably just order from their website
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    The other avenue you can go down is to get a used mini pc from Lenovo/HP/Dell. These are great because the providers are delivering huge volumes meant for corporate America. This means there is competition, and the build quality is good, not expecting the hacker market to throw together a printed case. I recently picked up a used HP with 16GB RAM, 512SSD, AMD5 series chip, and an OEM Win10 license for ~$150. Untested, but the idle power draw on it is supposed to be 10-15watts. My only complaint about the unit is that I wish these were powered by USBC PD. More common is to be powered by a 19V barrel jack, which would make replacements more of a pain if the external power supply dies. Serve the Home has an ongoing series about evaluating these: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
varispeed 3y ago
> Why spend so much to save 10 watts ? That's a wrong mindset to have. How are we going to improve environment if we will be careless about energy? As in the saying > If you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves
- jadamson 3y ago
  How much energy was spent on raw materials, components, assembly, and shipping?
  - varispeed 3y ago
    Production and shipping is a one time event and most likely in the same ballpark regardless how much energy the device uses. Whereas power consumption is recurring and it adds up. Multiply the difference by hundreds of thousands or more devices and it is no longer is trivial.
    - dns_snek 3y ago
      They might not consume a lot of power, but they're also not doing much work. How does their performance per watt compare to a modern low power laptop, an intel NUC, the N100, etc.?
georgyo 3y ago
I used to think this way as well, but then I started doing the actual math. My last power bill was ~$103 for exactly 256kw, or put another way about $0.40/kwh. For context this is in NYC. I'm sure other people have cheaper power elsewhere. 0.01kw * 24 hours * 30 days * 0.4 $/kwh = $2.88 a month or about $35 a year. If something is going to be on constantly, the ROI on a 10watts savings can quickly out pace the initial investment. And that is every 10 watts. Something using 100watts continuously is 10 times that. This affected a bunch of my other thinking as well. Having a raspberry pi in my home as always on server costs as much a small linode instance and much less reliable.
- Macha 3y ago
  Similarly, I upgraded the GPU in my server from a decade old formerly high end gaming GPU to a modern lower-mid range because I wanted new video encoders, and a smoother Linux driver experience. But it's idle 99% of the time. The difference in idle consumption (80% lower on the new GPU) works out to €50/year, which means even if I didn't use any of the other features of the GPU, it would pay for itself in 3 years. Video encoding power draw is also 86% lower and even if I found something to max the new card out, it's still 40% lower than maxing out the old card (for a lot more compute power than the ten year old card).
  - paulmd 3y ago
    Note that this trend isn’t always downwards - upgrading from rdna2 to 3 or from intel CPUs to AMD CPUs could result in increased idle power, sometimes significantly so. Things like higher PCIe lane configurations, higher generation/transfer rate, or higher memory channel count/frequency are likely going to represent higher power expenditures at all levels. PCIe 5.0 is a very fast link (a PCIe 5.0 channel is about equivalent to a DDR5 memory channel) and the trend is already upwards in terms of PCIe 4.0 requiring much more than PCIe 3.0. And turning the link speed down doesn't mean you get all the power back either. (From what I remember, ASPM is sometimes still a mess especially with consumer chips with their own frequency transitions and OC'd fabric/System Agents, and devices don't all wake up reliably all the time and return to high-power state, so iirc the enthusiast advice is "it's only a couple watts, it's a hassle, leave it off". I fear this may become "it's a hassle and it's also a significant power expenditure". I hope it's improved like other frequency transition things. :\) Also, just in general, the product focus on efficiency varies between vendors. NUCs are quite efficient, because they put a lot of focus into it to win those corporate contracts back in the day. A random minisforum mini pc probably is less efficient than an old nuc. Connectx-5 is much less efficient than connectx-4 even when running at lower pcie speeds. Ssds generally pull much more power than the HDDs they replaced, and pcie5 pulls much more than pcie4 which pulls much more than PCIe 3. Most laptop or other power bricks don't hit 80+ cert and if you are switching off a fancy brick that does, you'll use more. Etc. Not saying you didn’t look at it, but you have to look at it specifically and newer is not automatically better, sometimes product tiers increase over time too. And it’s certainly always a product-by-product thing. The exact way products are built or cut down doesn't just matter for performance, it affects power too.
kornhole 3y ago
If it is running 24/7 for years, watts add up. Running cool and quietly is another benefit. My Orange PI 5 has been running Nextcloud, Mastodon, Jellyfin, XMPP, Cryptpad, Vaultwarden, and about a dozen other services/sites for about a year. I love it. Some apps only run on X86, and I install those on a VPS.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  > If it is running 24/7 for years, watts add up. Running cool and quietly is another benefit. Ideed, but I think one would be best served to actually do the math. I like having my own router on which I can segment stuff, for example, having my smart TV on the network but not allowing it to phone home and deliver me ads. I have an old 6th-gen i5 I salvaged from work, which, I thought, must draw a lot of power, so I started looking at newer low-power models, like n5xxx or n100s. Well, if you want one with multiple network ports, it quickly costs around 2-300 Euros. You can also forget about having 10 Gb ports, although such Internet speeds are becoming common where I live, and you can get a 30 Euro dual 10Gb adaptor off Ebay which fits in the PC I already have. Anyway, I don't actually need 10 Gb right now, so it's not really an issue in practical terms. But 300 Euros isn't exactly pocket change for me, so I sat down and did the math. I'd need around 3 years to break even on electricity costs. Then I went and bought a watt-meter off Amazon. Turns out, the horror-stories of older computers drawing around 40-50 W at idle didn't apply to my specific box, and it only drew around a third of what I had estimated, which means an 8-9 year break-even. Of course, rates will most likely increase over that period, which would bring it closer.
kristopolous 3y ago
There's some arm-only stuff that's fun to work with like risc-os and AOSP. Also if you're trying to fill out a support matrix, having an ARM machine is a useful thing to have around. It's also cheaper and probably easier to work with than Apples ARM systems for these purposes (although the used market for the m1 will probably cross below a new pi within 2-3 years)
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> You can get 8gb/16gb N100 at that price point complete with a case. The last time I read a post like this I immediately rushed to buy an N100 that I now have sitting in my living room doing literally nothing, lol It's funny how huge the market is for people (like myself) addicted to having the latest and great tech gadgets. I have multiple of every Raspberry Pi... doing nothing.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  I end up eventually using them up in various DIY projects. I like to have a pile around because it lowers the inhibitions to get started with one! Nothing to break your new-whim momentum like a missing part and shipping times.
  - doublepg23 3y ago
    Isn't that the truth. I'm not a huge brick and mortar store guy but I miss Radio Shack when I don't want to wait days for the resistor I need now - even if it is cheaper per unit in 2024.
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      You're so right. Berlin has one store like that left, and I make sure to hit it as often as I can to help it survive. Because that's an ETA of an hour to the missing part, and not 2-3 days (local supplier) to weeks (AliExpress).
- intrasight 3y ago
  I also had multiple Pi's doing nothing, and took advantage of the Covid shortage to sell them to folks who may be doing something. Now waiting for my Pi 5.
  - hnuser123456 3y ago
    I also had multiple pis doing nothing. I finally got pihole going on the 3b with DHCP server, hosted my blog on the 4, and have a 5 hooked up to a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and speaker, and when set to 1080p, it's actually a responsive, usable personal computer. I'm developing a three.js game on it that uses a per-frame-updated 512x512 soft shadow map and runs on it at about 50fps at 1080p. I'm planning on running a node.js server on the pi 4 (or maybe 5) and make it multiplayer, though maybe there's a better way to implement the server backend. Of course, if the pi 5 can run it at 1080p50, then so can any random junk laptop from the last 10 years, which is a good feeling.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
The Point of PI is not the computer - it’s the GPIO, camera kit, infrared camera, various HATs, such as gps or motor control. It’s for making a camera that opens a door when it detects a cat, or puts more food when birds eat all the food in a feeder. It’s not best for being a server in a closet
- paulmd 3y ago
  The point of the pi was for teaching computer science in educational settings. Of course it largely failed at that (imagine running a lab full of raspberry pi 1 model b with the original full-size sd card and phone usb chargers) but everything else is a retcon/product pivot. It wasn’t invented for hacker anything.
theodric 3y ago
I spent a couple grand[1] building myself an all-flash Pi CM4 NAS that I reckon will deliver RoI in ~25 years at €0.39/kWh. I did it for the sport, mainly, and because I wanted silence and minimal power draw. It works pretty well, though! The Pi has a nice ecosystem, is better for hardware hackery than N100 mini PCs, and like all cheapish consumer products, people will kinda buy them just to buy them. I have a Pi5 sitting unused on my desk. Doing my part to pay for Eben's private island, I guess. I'll find a use for it eventually. [1] https://github.com/theodric/NASty/blob/main/NASty-bill-of-materials.csv https://github.com/theodric/NASty/blob/main/NASty-bill-of-ma...
- tomcam 3y ago
  I’ve set a reminder for this date in 2049 to make sure ROI was achieved
  - theodric 3y ago
    thank you.
jareklupinski 3y ago
if i knew the drawbacks of the apple tv and the extra money i'd have to spend on apps just to get it somewhat functioning as a network media player, i'd have been better off with the orange pi 5+ if it works as advertised.... my previous experiences with their zero line have been.... trying...
prakis 3y ago
There is a huge demand for Pi clones in the Industrial segment. Check RevolutionPi.com. $200 for a single Pi is cheap, the equivalent Intel Box costs close to $2000, yes 10x. It's even difficult to get decent number of Industrial Pis on time.
znpy 3y ago
> Pushing into ~ $120-$150 to me doesn't make any sense. You can get 8gb/16gb N100 at that price point complete with a case. And the power supply. Current-day SBCs aren't like the first-gen raspberry pi, where you could just recycle your old phone charger and off you went.

stefan_ 3y ago

But the per-watt performance of these chips is usually terrible, made as they are on older silicon processes. Any recent-ish laptop CPU will have no problem beating them.

nic547 3y ago
The Intel N100 is a Alder-Lake N chip, based on Intel 7. It's four of the small cores you find on 12-Gen Laptop processors, made with the same process. It's successor arch, Meteor Lake has only recently launched, so the N100 shouldn't be too far off in terms of efficiency.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  these small intel cores aren't known for their power efficiency
  - nic547 3y ago
    Mostly because the high end intel processors are run at power limits where they're getting extremely diminishing returns, trying to eek out every last bit of performance. In lower power scenarios the little cores can be more efficient than the large ones. And at 6W TDP the N100 is a low power scenario. https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/01/28/alder-lakes-power-efficiency-a-complicated-picture/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/01/28/alder-lakes-power-effi...
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      Oh, sure. Still not anywhere nearly as good as the latest Zen parts but the n100 mini pcs are very cheap.

edvinbesic 3y ago

This resonates with me. I have a few zeros, 3’s and 4’s for random things (nerves projects, dns, bastion host etc) but the price point now puts it squarely in the “I better have a good use case for this” rather than “I want to tinker around and if it ends up in a drawer no big deal” camp.

tonymet 3y ago
i'm with you. i'm leaning toward moving them all to a proxmox server

rcarmo 3y ago

It's an interesting segment, especially now that Intel N100 machines are out. But it essentially depends on what you want to do, and what use/need you have for ARM hardware. Me, I write fairly low-level stuff that runs on ARM (for kicks), so having one of these as a server/development sandbox makes a ton of sense (even though I have Macs and VMs and whatnot, some things you can only do with hardware). I grant that you won't find normal people filling their closets with these. But when you walk past, say, a phone exchange, a 5G base station, or any other of hundreds of invisible machines out there, they'll be running a variation of these boards (perhaps slower and dumber, but soon ramping up to this kind of thing), because Intel lost the embedded market years back.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

beachy 3y ago

It's a good question. Here's my specific use case, I'm sure there are plenty more. I have a golf simulator running in the cloud (AWS) on a g4dn.xlarge ec2 insurance. At home, I use a raspberry pi 5 as a thin client. It plugs into a 4k projector and streams down the display of the cloud PC. Because it's cheap and reliable, I can leave it in place sitting up on the ceiling attached to the projector. I wouldn't want to devote a more expensive laptop to the job - the raspberry pi 5 is just man enough for the job, powerful enough but only just.

rcarmo 3y ago
I did mostly the same for a while, but with a Pi 4: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/10/23/1700 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/10/23/1700
- beachy 3y ago
  Sounds interesting (but a bit above my pay grade). AWS uses a streaming tech called NICE DCV which runs in a browser (chromium) on my raspberry pi. I was using a RP 4 before, but the performance is noticeably better with the RP 5.
Geisterde 3y ago
[dead]

jhot 3y ago

I recently bought a mini pc with an AMD 5500u (6 cores, 12 threads, 15W), 16 GB DDR4, and a 512 GB nvme SSD for $225 (on sale a bit). I suspect it would run laps around the orange pi despite the similar price and wattage.

plagiarist 3y ago
Which mini PC was that? That sounds great.
- eropple 3y ago
  Beelink sells a bunch of them, as do a few other vendors (who are all probably rebadging from the same manufacturers somewhere). If you're willing to spend more, the ones with Ryzen 7840HS processors are particularly impressive.
  - SSLy 3y ago
    Don't beelink mini PC's have terrible power supply that makes them randomly go silent?
    - eropple 3y ago
      Some of them have something weird on them, most of them are a normal barrel jack. I can't speak to the weird one, I don't have one of those.
- jhot 3y ago
  The brand is GenMachine. Bought from Newegg and shipped from china so you can probably just order from their website
- fbdab103 3y ago
  The other avenue you can go down is to get a used mini pc from Lenovo/HP/Dell. These are great because the providers are delivering huge volumes meant for corporate America. This means there is competition, and the build quality is good, not expecting the hacker market to throw together a printed case. I recently picked up a used HP with 16GB RAM, 512SSD, AMD5 series chip, and an OEM Win10 license for ~$150. Untested, but the idle power draw on it is supposed to be 10-15watts. My only complaint about the unit is that I wish these were powered by USBC PD. More common is to be powered by a 19V barrel jack, which would make replacements more of a pain if the external power supply dies. Serve the Home has an ongoing series about evaluating these: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

varispeed 3y ago

> Why spend so much to save 10 watts ? That's a wrong mindset to have. How are we going to improve environment if we will be careless about energy? As in the saying > If you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves

jadamson 3y ago
How much energy was spent on raw materials, components, assembly, and shipping?
- varispeed 3y ago
  Production and shipping is a one time event and most likely in the same ballpark regardless how much energy the device uses. Whereas power consumption is recurring and it adds up. Multiply the difference by hundreds of thousands or more devices and it is no longer is trivial.
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    They might not consume a lot of power, but they're also not doing much work. How does their performance per watt compare to a modern low power laptop, an intel NUC, the N100, etc.?

georgyo 3y ago

I used to think this way as well, but then I started doing the actual math. My last power bill was ~$103 for exactly 256kw, or put another way about $0.40/kwh. For context this is in NYC. I'm sure other people have cheaper power elsewhere. 0.01kw * 24 hours * 30 days * 0.4 $/kwh = $2.88 a month or about $35 a year. If something is going to be on constantly, the ROI on a 10watts savings can quickly out pace the initial investment. And that is every 10 watts. Something using 100watts continuously is 10 times that. This affected a bunch of my other thinking as well. Having a raspberry pi in my home as always on server costs as much a small linode instance and much less reliable.

Macha 3y ago
Similarly, I upgraded the GPU in my server from a decade old formerly high end gaming GPU to a modern lower-mid range because I wanted new video encoders, and a smoother Linux driver experience. But it's idle 99% of the time. The difference in idle consumption (80% lower on the new GPU) works out to €50/year, which means even if I didn't use any of the other features of the GPU, it would pay for itself in 3 years. Video encoding power draw is also 86% lower and even if I found something to max the new card out, it's still 40% lower than maxing out the old card (for a lot more compute power than the ten year old card).
- paulmd 3y ago
  Note that this trend isn’t always downwards - upgrading from rdna2 to 3 or from intel CPUs to AMD CPUs could result in increased idle power, sometimes significantly so. Things like higher PCIe lane configurations, higher generation/transfer rate, or higher memory channel count/frequency are likely going to represent higher power expenditures at all levels. PCIe 5.0 is a very fast link (a PCIe 5.0 channel is about equivalent to a DDR5 memory channel) and the trend is already upwards in terms of PCIe 4.0 requiring much more than PCIe 3.0. And turning the link speed down doesn't mean you get all the power back either. (From what I remember, ASPM is sometimes still a mess especially with consumer chips with their own frequency transitions and OC'd fabric/System Agents, and devices don't all wake up reliably all the time and return to high-power state, so iirc the enthusiast advice is "it's only a couple watts, it's a hassle, leave it off". I fear this may become "it's a hassle and it's also a significant power expenditure". I hope it's improved like other frequency transition things. :\) Also, just in general, the product focus on efficiency varies between vendors. NUCs are quite efficient, because they put a lot of focus into it to win those corporate contracts back in the day. A random minisforum mini pc probably is less efficient than an old nuc. Connectx-5 is much less efficient than connectx-4 even when running at lower pcie speeds. Ssds generally pull much more power than the HDDs they replaced, and pcie5 pulls much more than pcie4 which pulls much more than PCIe 3. Most laptop or other power bricks don't hit 80+ cert and if you are switching off a fancy brick that does, you'll use more. Etc. Not saying you didn’t look at it, but you have to look at it specifically and newer is not automatically better, sometimes product tiers increase over time too. And it’s certainly always a product-by-product thing. The exact way products are built or cut down doesn't just matter for performance, it affects power too.

kornhole 3y ago

If it is running 24/7 for years, watts add up. Running cool and quietly is another benefit. My Orange PI 5 has been running Nextcloud, Mastodon, Jellyfin, XMPP, Cryptpad, Vaultwarden, and about a dozen other services/sites for about a year. I love it. Some apps only run on X86, and I install those on a VPS.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
> If it is running 24/7 for years, watts add up. Running cool and quietly is another benefit. Ideed, but I think one would be best served to actually do the math. I like having my own router on which I can segment stuff, for example, having my smart TV on the network but not allowing it to phone home and deliver me ads. I have an old 6th-gen i5 I salvaged from work, which, I thought, must draw a lot of power, so I started looking at newer low-power models, like n5xxx or n100s. Well, if you want one with multiple network ports, it quickly costs around 2-300 Euros. You can also forget about having 10 Gb ports, although such Internet speeds are becoming common where I live, and you can get a 30 Euro dual 10Gb adaptor off Ebay which fits in the PC I already have. Anyway, I don't actually need 10 Gb right now, so it's not really an issue in practical terms. But 300 Euros isn't exactly pocket change for me, so I sat down and did the math. I'd need around 3 years to break even on electricity costs. Then I went and bought a watt-meter off Amazon. Turns out, the horror-stories of older computers drawing around 40-50 W at idle didn't apply to my specific box, and it only drew around a third of what I had estimated, which means an 8-9 year break-even. Of course, rates will most likely increase over that period, which would bring it closer.

kristopolous 3y ago

There's some arm-only stuff that's fun to work with like risc-os and AOSP. Also if you're trying to fill out a support matrix, having an ARM machine is a useful thing to have around. It's also cheaper and probably easier to work with than Apples ARM systems for these purposes (although the used market for the m1 will probably cross below a new pi within 2-3 years)

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> You can get 8gb/16gb N100 at that price point complete with a case. The last time I read a post like this I immediately rushed to buy an N100 that I now have sitting in my living room doing literally nothing, lol It's funny how huge the market is for people (like myself) addicted to having the latest and great tech gadgets. I have multiple of every Raspberry Pi... doing nothing.

sho_hn 3y ago
I end up eventually using them up in various DIY projects. I like to have a pile around because it lowers the inhibitions to get started with one! Nothing to break your new-whim momentum like a missing part and shipping times.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  Isn't that the truth. I'm not a huge brick and mortar store guy but I miss Radio Shack when I don't want to wait days for the resistor I need now - even if it is cheaper per unit in 2024.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    You're so right. Berlin has one store like that left, and I make sure to hit it as often as I can to help it survive. Because that's an ETA of an hour to the missing part, and not 2-3 days (local supplier) to weeks (AliExpress).
intrasight 3y ago
I also had multiple Pi's doing nothing, and took advantage of the Covid shortage to sell them to folks who may be doing something. Now waiting for my Pi 5.
- hnuser123456 3y ago
  I also had multiple pis doing nothing. I finally got pihole going on the 3b with DHCP server, hosted my blog on the 4, and have a 5 hooked up to a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and speaker, and when set to 1080p, it's actually a responsive, usable personal computer. I'm developing a three.js game on it that uses a per-frame-updated 512x512 soft shadow map and runs on it at about 50fps at 1080p. I'm planning on running a node.js server on the pi 4 (or maybe 5) and make it multiplayer, though maybe there's a better way to implement the server backend. Of course, if the pi 5 can run it at 1080p50, then so can any random junk laptop from the last 10 years, which is a good feeling.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

The Point of PI is not the computer - it’s the GPIO, camera kit, infrared camera, various HATs, such as gps or motor control. It’s for making a camera that opens a door when it detects a cat, or puts more food when birds eat all the food in a feeder. It’s not best for being a server in a closet

paulmd 3y ago
The point of the pi was for teaching computer science in educational settings. Of course it largely failed at that (imagine running a lab full of raspberry pi 1 model b with the original full-size sd card and phone usb chargers) but everything else is a retcon/product pivot. It wasn’t invented for hacker anything.

theodric 3y ago

I spent a couple grand[1] building myself an all-flash Pi CM4 NAS that I reckon will deliver RoI in ~25 years at €0.39/kWh. I did it for the sport, mainly, and because I wanted silence and minimal power draw. It works pretty well, though! The Pi has a nice ecosystem, is better for hardware hackery than N100 mini PCs, and like all cheapish consumer products, people will kinda buy them just to buy them. I have a Pi5 sitting unused on my desk. Doing my part to pay for Eben's private island, I guess. I'll find a use for it eventually. [1] https://github.com/theodric/NASty/blob/main/NASty-bill-of-materials.csv https://github.com/theodric/NASty/blob/main/NASty-bill-of-ma...

tomcam 3y ago
I’ve set a reminder for this date in 2049 to make sure ROI was achieved
- theodric 3y ago
  thank you.

jareklupinski 3y ago

if i knew the drawbacks of the apple tv and the extra money i'd have to spend on apps just to get it somewhat functioning as a network media player, i'd have been better off with the orange pi 5+ if it works as advertised.... my previous experiences with their zero line have been.... trying...

prakis 3y ago

There is a huge demand for Pi clones in the Industrial segment. Check RevolutionPi.com. $200 for a single Pi is cheap, the equivalent Intel Box costs close to $2000, yes 10x. It's even difficult to get decent number of Industrial Pis on time.

znpy 3y ago

> Pushing into ~ $120-$150 to me doesn't make any sense. You can get 8gb/16gb N100 at that price point complete with a case. And the power supply. Current-day SBCs aren't like the first-gen raspberry pi, where you could just recycle your old phone charger and off you went.