Comment by Neywiny
17 days ago
I think these are great options for where pis aren't needed. Over the years I've seen a deluge of "I needed a microcontroller but didn't know what that was so I used a pi" and "I needed little more than a docker image but I didn't know what that was so I used a pi". The pi really comes in handy when you need the combo of the 2. Otherwise, people are just jacking up the price for those who really do need it. And that's not me, but rather people I've known who had great use cases and couldn't buy them.
After having bought Pis and then sold them all, I've never understood them. The Pico and Pi Zero seem to have a place, but the performance of the big Pi is so bad, it's rather pointless as an "embedded" computer or general purpose computer with a display.
For an embedded computer you basically need to go bare metal with Circle or something similar.
But then I'd wonder what you're building because there are powerful microcontrollers you can buy for $15/1 that will handle anything with basic networking and sensors. I know some musical synthesizers are made with rPi4 and I'm befuddled that they're not the most powerful synths ever made.
I think they oddest one out is the Arduino line, which is generally underpowered and expensive compared to just having a drawer of esp32s sitting around.
Arduino pre-dates the existence of ESP, at least in the western market.
Also, Arduino as I think you're using it here is really just slang for AVR microcontroller dev boards.
Arduino isn't actually that, it's a boot loader and a highly simplified set of libraries to interact with a wide variety of microcontrollers including ESP-32 and what people traditionally think of as "Arduino" meaning the branded dev boards labelled that way.
Of course the whole Arduino ecosystem is basically garbage, but it does help beginners get into the idea of doing embedded things.
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The Arduino "line" is a bunch of dev boards. The attiny40 chips cost less than $0.50 at high volumes.
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A embedded computer using microSD for main storage should be a non starter for any serious application. They fail far too easily given the bad thermal layout on the board. You can get the larger ones to boot USB, but the smaller ones obviously can't.
I've got a guy who loves running these things, but calls me every other month because one of his images fails, and he needs help rebuilding it. So far I doubt he's saved himself any effort, time or money.
This is so true. Back when I used to use reddit, I had to leave the raspberry pi subreddit for this reason. 95% of the projects only needed a small C program and microcontroller but instead used a full blown OS and Python. It drove me nuts.
The Pi method sounds 1000x more approachable to a beginner. Which is it exactly where the Pi shines. I see nothing wrong with it.
I just wholeheartedly disagree relative to Arduino. You're telling me I gotta find a microsd card, get their software, either
A) muck around with the boot settings file (though I think recently they can do that in the flasher) or B) find a mouse, keyboard, monitor
Then, as a beginner who likely doesn't already, learn Linux and beyond that embedded Linux, then learn the languages and environment (the amount of times people have told me their task was to get the project's code started on boot is astounding), networking, drivers, etc etc etc.
You're telling me that's 1000x more approachable than the 1 line of
digitalWrite(BUILTIN_LED, 1); // because Arduino will set the output mode for you I believe
It takes on an Arduino? Which boots immediately every time, no sd card corruption issues, no anything, just runs the code?