There are complete passively cooled n3350 based systems on Ali express with 64gb storage and 6gb ram in a case with power supply ready to go for $65 with free shipping. That works out cheaper than the cheapest pi after buying case, storage and power for the pi. You can buy usb gpio breakouts for <$10 too. Lower power than the pi 4 too due to the huge process node advantage (despite the x86 disadvantages). 28nm vs 14nm for the pi 4 vs the n3350.
The pi is fun but honestly for pi hole or similar you might as well buy the all in one x86. For media streaming definitely buy the all in one x86. For gpio stuff ok the pi is reasonable but even then if you want to make a product rather than a home automation once off you’d go a different route completely.
I suspect a lot of the current disdain is a product of function creep. While the original Raspberry Pi was used as a desktop and server, people understood its limitations. Now that many of the limitations have diminished, to the point where you can expect reasonable performance as a desktop and use it as something more than a simple web server, people are justifiably comparing it to alternatives (which have come down in price over the same period of time).
Of course, the Pi is also facing competition from higher end microcontroller based solutions. People seem to forget that there was a time when hobbyists bought the Pi for "Internet of Things" like projects, both due to its cost and size. Then came the ESP8266 and ESP32 and development boards that packaged both a microcontroller and network interface.
This, but also that they gave a huge middle finger to the hobbyist community during the component crisis by giving preference to integrators.
Most makers I know have pivoted to ESP32 during this time as it was good enough and actually available. Probably would have happened sooner or later though.
The ESP32 has nothing to do with a Raspberry Pi. It's only good that people learnt to use the better tool (in terms of price and power consumption) once better tools like MicroPython or NodeMCU came around.
When the first raspberry was introduced, it was really really hard to interface an electronics project with the internet. Arduinos were really dumb at the time. That's why the raspberry was so ideal. But most electronics projects didn't really need a whole linux distro running on it. It was just that there was no other option.
The ESPs introduced a totally new class that can cover most of the usecases of electronics projects that the raspberry originally aimed at. They support wifi, bluetooth, pretty serious processing, enough for most connected projects. They totally ate the raspberry's lunch in the embedded market. Of course the RP2040 aims for this too but IMO it's kinda too little too late, the ESP32 is already so well established and has the biggest community.
At the other end of course the PC pricing came down and the intel N100's and the like eat its lunchon the other side.
Absolutely right... I used to use Pi Zero W's for IOT projects. I had several of them around my house running sensors, rgb lights and the like. Now I can do the same thing with a much smaller device like an ESP32. Setting up a device that changes light colour based on time can be done with a €3 esp8266 flashed with WLED. For other projects I will use the beefier ESP32-S2/S3 or the Pi Pico Microcontroller.
If you have a led to light up over the internet the Pi was the simplest, cheapest and fastest to develop for. Now the ESP is simple enough and so cheap the RPi doesn’t make sense for the use case, but it took a long while to get here.
Too true.. I have a nas project in pieces on the table next to me, since I was out of work for several months and couldn't put any more into it... I "saved" a hundred dollars or so going from AliExpress components, the mainboard doesn't work right, and trying to get it replaced would cost about as much as a different board from AliExpress. In the end, I wish I'd spent the extra hundred or so on a different case and board. The cost of the drives significantly outweigh other costs.
It bugs me to no end how much a small (4-drive) nas can cost, compared to much more capable mini-pc prices.
That’s all true but the OP said that Pis are “no longer cheap”. The reply was simply a demonstration that they are still available at the same price point, no matter what the competition is or isn’t doing.
Sure, if you want to deal with strange problems no one has ever faced. RPi's strength isn't in meaningless performance benchmarks, is in actually getting stuff done.
They vary widely. I bought an off brand mini PC where the USB ports randomly lost power. There was no online community or support to speak of to help me figure out the problem. In that regard the Pi is far better.
Are there loads of driver support for those USB/GPIO things? I've only done that on PI and the Python libs made it super easy. Now it's one more thing to solve research rather built-in.
I don't think so - if you needed GPIO on a small x86 the easiest way would be to hook an Arduino / RP2040 to it. That seems like it's still the sweet spot for RPi, esp. the Zero W, if you need small, low-power, full OS and GPIO.
Not really. I've been researching this extensively lately to try to add GPIO to my stack of Dell Wyse 3040s.
Options with mainline linux kernel drivers:
- MCP2221A (i2c + 4x GPIO)
- CP2112 (i2c + GPIO)
Options without kernel support:
- FT232H
- Arduino nano and clones
- Raspberry Pi Pico running some interesting firmware
- ESP32 running something like ESPHome (completely separate from host)
I've chosen the Pico for now and forked the u2if project for firmware and host support[1]. I also put together a generic ESPHome-compatible protocol server in python to tie my widgets to Home Assistant[2].
Why do everyone latch onto bit-banging pins from Linux??? Isn't that going to exhibit wildly unpredictable delays? Wouldn't you normally compartmentalize hardware handling into an OS-free or hard-realtime microcontroller and let the uC communicate with host CPU in less-realtime manners?
You can roll your own "RGB temperature sensing modem" and get/set values with `bash` and `expect` over ttyUSB, no one PWM controls RGB LEDs on a gaming keyboard straight from a task tray app. Trying to wrestle GPIO problems that way is going to be unnecessarily hard.
Not sure which part you're referring to, but I agree. The u2if firmware I'm using has an interface type that generates the addressable LED bitstream with the RP2040's PIOs. The host software dumps the pixel color values over USB CDC into a buffer on the RP2040, then when it's done the firmware tells the PIO to read the buffer with DMA and stream out the precisely timed LED bitstream.
Currently it's running in "one light string per PIO" mode but there's an inaccessible mode where one PIO can do up to 8 strings simultaneously. The pins have to be physically adjacent, though, so it's a bit more difficult to set up in a generalized way.
Ah, yeah, that’s the right way to do it, but if you can get away with using a Pi you don’t have to write a second program for your Arduino, haha. People who are happy to do it the right way were already well served, right?
Yep, that one is pretty cool too. It only does one i2c bus so it seems like it underuses the hardware a bit, but the mainline driver is pretty valuable.
What kind of bolted-down expansion does a cheap n3350 box have? How fast can I swap the main storage for something completely different? Can I power it with my USB battery bank? Does it support two digital monitors or does it instead have one HDMI and one VGA (like this is 1987)? Can I use it like an appliance and just plug in easy-to-download images like LibreELEC or EmulationStation, or do I need to understand how to make computers work before I can have a good experience with Kodi or console emulation?
I can see plenty of n3350 systems with dual hdmi on google and plenty with drive bays and relevant connectivity. Those seem to cost ~$100 vs the minimalist $65 ones.
In terms of driver support these intel systems are the easiest to work with in Linux. Very mainstream and well established drivers.
There are some nice cases for RPi 4 that have a semi-integrated USB-SATA adapter in the box. The DeskPi[1] case, Argon and the NESPi-style case in particular. DeskPi is pretty neat, if costly, and the NES-like cases have easy 2.5" sata swap. YMMV.
I upgraded my home LAN to 10gb/2.5gb early last year, and the RPi can't really keep up with it anymore. I'm using an N305 based mini-pc with 4 ethernet ports for my router now... exceeds my needs and runs great. My home server is an AMD 5900HX based mini-pc with also works very well (ProxMox, Docker, etc).
The only USB thing it has is a NIC. But given the speed of my ISP I could get around that by using VLANs, I guess.
I mean: There's not much to it. LAN port, WAN port, MicroSD storage, and a (completely optional and of dubious merit) hardware RTC that sits on the GPIO header. I'm using the bog-standard Pi Foundation plastic case.
It runs OpenWRT, which itself is very light-weight -- it's more-or-less just enough Linux to set up routing functions using a GUI, and it's meant to be able to fit in the tiny little bit of flash that consumer router hardware comes with.
IIRC, the status at the time when I put it together was that it could route packets and perform traffic shaping at ~1Gbps even with a USB NIC. It certainly did just fine when I had a 400Mbps pipe.
The pi is fun but honestly for pi hole or similar you might as well buy the all in one x86. For media streaming definitely buy the all in one x86. For gpio stuff ok the pi is reasonable but even then if you want to make a product rather than a home automation once off you’d go a different route completely.