Comment by beardyw
17 days ago
The pi has a lot of exposed pins and associated hardware capabilty. That was an intrinsic part of it's design. It's what got me interested in electronics again. Any comparison should include that. It was never meant to be just a computer.
This. The Pi is a great little real world <-> computer interface. The hat ecosystem is really cool. Using one as a general computer is foolish. Unfortunately each Pi generation seems to move more towards the computer case and away from the real-world one.
The RP2040 and pi zero are still very much not regular computers for desktop use:
- https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2040/
- https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
It really is! I built a system to monitor/control my wood stove with a pi. The GPIO pins made it easy-ish to hook up an infrared temp sensor over i2c. I found a relay hat that allowed me to switch 120 VAC to control the stove's fan. My pi 4B had plenty of power to run a Ruby on Rails server to build little charts/graphs, a config UI, and some cron jobs. Lots of very powerful Lego blocks, basically.
https://github.com/locofocos/wood-stove-rails
Depends on what youre comparing. Some people buy a pi just to run home assistant or some other compute task
I bought a few used NUCs for $150 each, they're amazing home servers. Much, much faster, more capable, more flexible than a Pi, at only twice the price.
Pi's were never a good for compute-intensive tasks; running a DNS resolver (PiHole), print-server, or uploading backups to the cloud is the sort of thing it excels at. The Pi Zero W costs $15 and idles at less than 1 Watt; it's the always-on-appliance that turns on my GPU-workstation or NUC for the heavier stuff.
What do you use them for? I'm one of those that have Raspberry Pi 5 mostly just for Home Assistant. It's clearly overpowered for that use case, but I wanted the NVMe support. I'm not convinced by these articles -- used x86 box that maybe achieves almost the same low power draw still doesn't have any actual upsides if you don't realistically need that computing power.
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So you're saying that the Pi is a proverbial Toyota Hilux and people are buying it to highway commute to work and back instead of using it for what it was meant for, and then saying it compares poorly to sedan? Yea, no shit.
If you're not using the GPIO or any of the ribbon cable peripherals there are much better options out there. But a Pi will be able to do things those machines never will.
I think they are comparing a $700 micro PC to an $80 Raspberry pi, but pretending they are in the same price range since the micro PC is available cheap in the refurb market.
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You can add something like an Adafruit FT232H to the PC and still come out cheaper according to TFA’s price calculation.
The blog article is hosted on a Pi4, which also runs some python to manage the solar setup it is powered by.
In particular I’m using the GPIO pins to drive the LCD display showing solar stats and a relay to disable/enable the inverter.
They do talk a bit about it at the end with the solar powered setup they have.
Yeah, the first thing you see on raspberrypi.org is:
> Empowering young people to use computing technologies to shape the world
With a link to learning resources. So the article is true but beside the point: the Pi 5 is no match for something the Pi isn’t even aiming to be.