Comment by supportengineer
17 days ago
Advantages of Raspberry Pi: No fans, no moving parts, no dust. Huge amount of software, documentation, support available.
17 days ago
Advantages of Raspberry Pi: No fans, no moving parts, no dust. Huge amount of software, documentation, support available.
The Raspberry Pi 5's official heatsink comes with a fan and its collection of software is dwarfed by what's available for a x86 PC regardless of whether it's running Linux or Windows.
That fan stays idle on low loads, and if you wanted you could also leave it unplugged to just rely on the heatsink.
Then again, N100 can also be bought with passive cooling. But not so sure how the mini PCs of the article would fare without a fan.
I've been running a fanless mini-pc as a firewall for years. They work just fine. The ones you get from aliexpress come in a case where half of the case is a massive heat sink, and it will get a little bit warm.
> you could also leave it unplugged to just rely on the heatsink.
You can also expect your hardware to have a shorter life.
1 reply →
Mhm...
mini PC:
[X] No fans available with atoms or i3s
[X] No moving parts
[X] x86... Huge amount of software
[X] documentation
The only thing is support but the raspberry foundation is also not really helpful if you go into the nitty gritty parts.
Though a fan is recommended for the 4 and 5 models
I would add GPIO pins that are also well documented.
For some Mini PCs there are fanless cases, e.g. from Akasa: https://akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.tpl&...
I've got one of those, and it houses a system with 8 CPU cores, 32 GB RAM (can be upgraded to 64 if need be), 1 TB NVMe and 4 TB SSD - and it's all inside, whereas with an RPi the SSD would have to be external. The only thing that's collecting dust now is the old RPi.
Huge amount of software compared to?
If you're doing stuff with the GPIO, I'm sure there's far more software written for the Raspberry Pi than anything else.
If you're just using it like a normal computer, then it's not special.
There is more and better GPIO support for Arduino, ESP32 and STM32 than anything Linux based.
Mostly other options with no fans, dust, or moving parts.
The fact that you can run a Linux on it means you can tap into a big ecosystem of existing software. Nice to have.
good question -- methinks the GP didn't read the article.
the rpi does have a ton of software compared to other SBCs, but the article is about fking x86 machines.
With power consumption so low on some of these, I feel like they defeat most of the benefit of ARM and you get way more native software on x86
Rugged Intel NUCs have no fans.
what software is rpi only ? honest question
A bit niche, but one software I use for my Raspberry Pi powered 3d printer is camera-streamer: https://github.com/ayufan/camera-streamer
It provides a WebRTC stream for a USB camera (or Pi Camera, what I'm using). Rather than the old, inefficient, low-quality MJPEG stream. The software itself will run on anything, but the WebRTC only works on a Pi for now.
Almost everything can be modified or configured to run on another system, but it’s pretty common for RPi to be the default or best-tested platform.
Not sure if this is still the case but I thought you could get a free version of Wolfram Mathematica for RPI for free
It’s available, but not free. The language server is free for all linuxes, sans data.
Running Mathematica on underpowered hardware lead me to hate Macs for over a decade.
I have concerns.