I dunno what everyone else is using pis for but for me it’s not media centers or servers. The pi has a full gpio header with i2c and spi. I can hook up LCD screens, sensors, servos, etc without much additional components. It’s like an Arduino except I get a real file system, network stack, multicore performance.
It’s more than just a single board computer it feels like an ultra microcontroller.
I feel like this whole “micro PCs are better than raspis” is coming from the group of people who never really used pis for what they were intended? I don’t know. Maybe I’m out to lunch here, I’m not trying to defend the pi because it is definitely a really bad choice for a lot of things but honestly despite all the bad blood they’ve accrued there still isn’t an sbc that can really match it’s utility and community support at least that I’ve seen.
Thade780@lemmy.world 5 months ago
No shit. I have five Lenovo Tiny M720q with the i5-9500t and 32 gigs of RAM each in a XCP-NG cluster, another one as standalone Plex server (QuickSync kept on failing under XCP) plus an old Shuttle SFF with an old (2015, I think) Atom acting as standalone.
Power consumption is pretty much minimal, with NVMEs I don’t have to worry about slow data rates, nor sudden disk failures.
Most of all, all of these were cheap and easy to find. My two 8 bays Synology cost me way more, without even taking the disks in consideration.
Why would I even go for a RasPi or equivalent?
PassingThrough@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You would go for a Raspberry Pi when you need something it was invented for.
Putting a computer on your motorcycle or robot or solar powered RV. Super small space or low-low power availability things, or direct GPIO control.
A MiniMicro will run laps around a Pi for general compute, but you can’t run it off a cell phone battery pack. People only related Pis to general compute because of the push to sell them as affordable school computers, not because they were awesome at it, because they were cheap and just barely enough.
Thade780@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Fair enough, but I wouldn’t host something I consider as an essential service on something that isn’t constantly powered.
Guess our use cases are way too different to properly compare. 😊
HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
I’m surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.
To me, the RasPi served two purposes:
perestroika@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
I would add: