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i've done the rant many times before [1] but frankly rpi has almost never made sense. there were always things like the ECS Liva/Liva X for $100-125 that were
by paulmd 2y ago
i've done the rant many times before [1] but frankly rpi has almost never made sense. there were always things like the ECS Liva/Liva X for $100-125 that were fully-featured, for roughly the same price as a rpi once you consider all the shit you'll need to get that $45 computer booted up. The Liva (and similar booksizes/net-tops, and similar things like AM1 platform from AMD) benefited hugely from using standard drivers and standard BIOS versus a massive amount of early ARM jank (the early RPi days a lot of things were actually soft-float, let alone niceties like UEFI!).
the best argument for rpi has always been the combination of GPIO and linux. But that's a double-edged sword too, because linux isn't really very good at hard-realtime. And you can always just get a Bus Pirate or similar tool for doing just plain GPIO. And nowadays the ESP32 has basically completely displaced it for a lot of those sorts of "GPIO glue" roles.
If you didn't need that, like if you just wanted a low-power fileserver or HTPC... the x86 stuff was better, because it actually worked reliably, at roughly the same price. Like literally just go buy an off-lease mini-tower or USFF mini-pc for $10 from a surplus store, even.
This goes doubly when you consider all the problems with the early rpi. Like basically it uses USB 2.0 (unidirectional 500mbps) as a system bus... but it also dropped USB packets under load due to bugs in the firmware[0], that nobody outside the Pi foundation could address because Broadcom didn't release the documentation for like 5 years.
[0] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19 https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701297
- nirav72 2y agoyeah, even for GPIO interfacing, there are far cheaper options (ESP32) than the raspberry Pi out there. The Pi was an appealing piece of hardware about 10 years. But now, not sure it makes sense to use as a low cost server.
- adriancr 2y agoThere's raspberry pi pico and pi zero that compete against esp32. The product in title uses a rp2040 for gpio. I for one prefer the raspberry products (nice sdk for pico and much more features for not that much more power use/cost on pi zero) I do have ESP32s as well but they're mostly stuck to micropython.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoone big advantage pi had over minipc is a lot of the minipcs are in the 30 watt range while the early pis were single digit watts. that advantage has decayed over time though...
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoA good number of the mini PC's idle under 12W. My i5-6500t does. Yeah they ramp up under load to 30W, but a before rpi5 to start to ramp up like that would've been way more compute than an RPi could offer. Also notably there are some low power options too. My first kube cluster was on these nice 2014 Acer Chromebox cxi's; they idled at 6w! Crazy slow 2957u Celeron processor, but I used it a node as my desktop for ~2 years (with 16GB ram). But it had gobs of USB bandwidth, mpcie wifi, sata, gigabit, and if i'd sprung for i3 models it probably would have been downright pleasant to use versus the 1.6GHz no turbo dual core I was getting. Personally I've avoided the atom cores generally, but there's been a variety of decent low power offerings of big cores for a while. Heck, my Ultrabook tablet is ~6W when running, with screen on, with a i5-7200u. 15W TDP core with some additional TDP up available. Point is, there's been a range of pretty low power x86 offerings. Just, not always super obvious.
- Asmod4n 2y agothe n100 mini pc i got here runs at around 3.5 watts while running homeassistant with a unifi network server while having around two dozen devices connected. under debian 12 minimal.
- craftkiller 2y agoHow are you measuring that? I've been scouring the web for low-idle-power builds and 3.5 watts is far below the best builds I've found (assuming that 3.5 watts is measured at-the-wall).
- Semaphor 2y agoThe futro S740, popular with selfhosters in Germany, gets similar wattage for people [0]. On a slightly older CPU (J4105). I can't measure values below 10W myself, but with 2 SSDs and 8GB RAM it never goes above that value, even under full load. [0] https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consumption.md https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...
- fragmede 2y agoNever understood RPis, because as a Intel user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a NUC, making a case locally with a 3d printer, and then using ZFS or Btrfs for the computer's filesystem.
- megous 2y agoA also "Never understood why people go grocery shopping to make their own food for $25 when they can go to a restaurant for a $200 meal, or go through the gabage behind the restaurant to pick up some throwaway scraps for nearly free."
- irusensei 2y agoRPis used to be cheap.
- fragmede 2y agohm guess the zeitgeist didn't like my take on Dropbox except I have linux https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23797092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23797092 for this.
- k_bx 2y agoI have a solution which was developed and tested by another person under rPi. I know it's working on exact model. All I need to do is to buy exactly the same model of rPi, install the same OS, and deploy that solution there, as many as I need. You need to be very naive to think that replacing rPi with a completely different thing will not bring any problems. Hell, even changing the rPi model does!
- Brian_K_White 2y agoThe only reason the exact model matters at all in the first place, is because of arm and broadcom.
- k_bx 2y agoSure. And another thing that matters: the producer of a faulty USB cable that led us to waste several days of work. And another: shitty battery producer that led us waste several more days. This "little computer land" is flaky and hard, and rPi matters because it gives at least some common ground. I wish it'd be more universal, but it's not.
- trs-80 2y agoIt's not just them, the majority of SBC manufacturers are on these bizarre old Linux forks that have been patched all to hell and will never see mainline. Kind of same situation with most smartphones, too (as they are all the same SoCs). There are some very noble projects (like PostmarketOS for phones, and Armbian for SBC) who try to be "mainline first" to keep these fascinating little devices going longer (and more reliably). They do an amazing job considering what they have to work with, but these are not big companies with a lot of resources behind them, so if you care about this sort of thing (not you specifically, that's for anyone reading) then consider perhaps lending a hand (or a few bucks)! Cheers! :)
- Brian_K_White 2y agoBut x86 boards have vastly fewer kernel & driver support problems. It's not even close, not even in the same order of magnitude. The problem is not "sbc", the problem is "arm sbc" Running on a random "unsupported" x86 board is no more of a problem than an unsupported laptop. There are sometimes no drivers for some peripheral but it's nothing like arm where you can't even boot without a dtd and most of the hardware has some freak custom interface instead of just pcie and usb and well known chips. Every single arm board is like it's own whole different platform. A Bananna Pi Foo A and a Bannana Pi Foo A+ both with nominally the same cpu and specs might as well be a trs-80 and an appollo guidance computer when it comes to bringing them up.
- jeroenhd 2y agoWhat I've ways felt was a major advantage for Raspberry Pi compared to all of the other SBCs is that the Pi actually got regular updates. Maybe other SBC manufacturers started doing that too since I first got my hands on a Pi, but it definitely didn't use to be the case. The ECS Liva would cost me €200 (€278 when avoiding webshops that look like scams) without memory. An RPi5B is €88. I don't think I'll get more than twice the use out of an ECS Liva if all I want to run is Pihole. And remember, the point of the Raspberry Pi was not to bring a cheap, high performance computer to prototypers. It was created to aid schools in teaching kids about computers. They've changed their tune ever since just about everyone with a computer project started buying out their reserves, but making things easy for professionals was not part of the plan from the start. If you have cheap access to better computers, make good use of that! I still find the RPi to be competitive for cheap, low-power compute, though.
- paulmd 2y agoThe ECS Liva X is 10+ years old, it’s a product I bought in 2014. You’re seeing elevated prices from scalpers who are selling stock of a product that was discontinued 8 years ago, buying a new-in-box GTX 760 is going to run you a premium as well. At the time, I bought one Liva for $100 and then two Liva Xs for $125 each a year or so later. All of them were 2gb memory/32gb emmc models.
- nicoco 2y agoI like to use a single remote for both my TV and Kodi, and the raspberry pi has the CEC HDMI thing which makes it possibke. It's not that common in SBCs AFAIK.
- squarefoot 2y agoHad the same problem when moving from a RPi to a mini PC, and solved the problem using this external dongle: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter Unfortunately it's not cheap, although the same functionality could be offered by a USB equipped small microcontroller "sniffing" 2 wires from a pass-through HDMI port.
- 2y ago
- dark-star 2y agoWell, it's a very standardized platform that is readily available and guaranteed to be available for some time. This is why some hardware projects reply on it and the intricacies of its GPIO timing. I agree that if you want a small computer to run your home NAS on, then sure, there might be better alternatives. But if you want to (say) plug one into your old Amiga (with a PiStorm) so that it emulates the CPU's bus timings and runs as an incredibly fast M68000 CPU, there's no way around the RPi (unless you want to do a lot of hardware development yourself... if that's even possible since on most of these Chinesium clones, the GPIO is hidden behind a ton of bridges, busses and/or MCUs which would kill the latency in those tightly constrained use-cases) I assume nobody would bother porting the hardware-related code to the "Chinesium Clone of the Week" every few months