Comment by bri3d
17 days ago
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