I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.
Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?
Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?
I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?
All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.
So SBCs are shit now?
Nothing changed, the hardware is the same as before. Your little pi servers are still doing the exact same work they did before. The only variables are prices on SBCs vs used small factor x86s, and the short, short attention span of terminally online hobbyists.
Use whatever you like, no need to race after others’ subjective (and often hyperbolic) judgment.
Very much this. The allure of raspberry pis was that they were $30 toys that could actually be used to do things that were equivalent to much more expensive computers and computer control systems.
Somewhere along the way they lost the plot, probably when supply chain issues drove their prices sky high along with the compute modules being used for home lab servers, and now cheap knockoffs based off of Rockville chips or ESP32 are just as capable as raspberry pis for a fraction of the cost, and at the same time actual desktop computers in miniature form factor have become so cheap on the second hand market that they are incredibly competitive with the raspberry pi.
Don’t get me wrong, pi is a great platform. But the use cases in which it leads the pack have become incredibly narrow.
Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.
Even the pi5 with the nvme hat is not currently price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor as far as I know.
Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.
That has been true even before the price increase - what still makes me use pis now and then is that just so many people are familiar with them, the standardized form factor with lots of extension modules, and the software support - pretty much any software targeting that kind of use has been tested on pi variants.
I’d nowadays go for using compute modules, though - they’re smaller, and you can get them with flash, eliminating the SD card problem many pis had. You can get carrier boards for the compute modules in the classic pi form factor, so you can have the best of both worlds.
price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor
What’s the model number for that?
Elitedesk 800 g4s can be picked up for ~$130 or so depending on where you look
Yeah, make a Pi with 1GB RAM, video & ethernet for like 20-30€ and you’d ruin me.
I know about the banana, orange, whetever-pis but in my experience they always needed lots of extra stuff to work (like fucing and recompiling libraries). The Pi “just worked” IMO.
I don’t understand this post. Whatever you bought then for they’re still good for. People’s opinions don’t make them less useful.
Sir, this is Lemmy. People treat the applications and hardware you use with ethical alignment and switching to FOSS literally has approval on the level of religious conversion.
It’s no wonder people around here care so much about random people’s opinions, the place practically filters for it.
People are shitting on them because the price point for arm sbcs has risen, while the price point for small x86 computers has come down. Also, x86 availability is high and arm sbc availability has become unreliable. They also aren’t generally supported nearly as well. If you don’t need more power and you already have them on hand there’s no reason not to use them.
I’m curious, what’s an example of a mini x86 machine comparable to a raspberry pi? I just did research and ended up buying a RPI 5. I may have not known what to look for, but what I found in the x86 space was $200+ and seemed pretty underwhelming compared to a $80 SBC on arm.
https://www.acepcs.com/products/mini-pc-intel-n100-ultra is only $140, and it looks to me like Pi5+ is $160 with PS/case/microSD.
This looks cool, is it getting good reviews?
I don’t know what a pi5+ is, unless you mean orange pi 5+?
I just bought a RPI 5 8GB (base price $80), all accessories in, for like $115. It never occurred to me that this would’ve been considered “expensive”, but a lot of people in this thread are saying so because rpis used to be $30. I mean the price has increased, but hasn’t the price of literally everything increased noticeably at the same time?
Pi5+ just because I’d originally written Pi5+PS/case/SD.
And you’re right that everything has gotten more expensive, but $35 in 2016 (Pi-3) is only $45 today (and you can still get a 3B for $35). The older Pis hit, for me, a sweet spot of functionality, ease, and price. Price-wise, they were more comparable to an Arduino board than a PC. They had GPIOs like a microcontroller. They could run a full operating system, so easy to access, configure, and program, without having to deal with the added overhead of cross-compiling or directly programing a microcontroller. That generation of Pi was vastly overpowered for replacing an Arduino, so naturally people started running other services on them.
Pi 3 was barely functional as a desktop, and the Pi Foundation pushed them as a cheap platform to provide desktop computing and programming experience for poor populations. Pi4, and especially Pi5, dramatically improved desktop functionality at the cost of marginal price increases, at the same time as Intel was expanding its inexpensive, low-power options. So now, a high-end Pi5 is almost as good as a low-end x86, but also almost as expensive. It’s no longer attractive to people who mostly want an easy path to embedded computing, and (I think) in developed countries, that was what drove Pi hype.
Pi Zero, at $15, is more attractive to those people who want a familiar interface to sensors and controllers, but they aren’t powerful enough to run NAS, libreelec, pihole, and the like. Where “Rasperry Pi” used to be a melting pot for people making cool gadgets and cheap computing, they’ve now segmented their customer base into Pi-Zero for gadgets and Pi-400/Pi-5 for cheap computing.
Ok.
This looks cool, is it getting good reviews?
I really was asking. I did a little research and concluded any x86 machine I could buy would be too slow for reliable video playback unless I spent over $200. I am open to actually being wrong there though.
If you’re not into the whole Google Home/Alexa/Apple Home echo system, and have Home Assistant already running, you could use them to build a bunch of smart assistants with Open Thread Border Routers.
I was just looking at doing this in my house but the cost of Pis vs used Google Gen2s with Thread Border Routers built in was cost prohibitive for me.
I have an x86 proxmox setup. I stuck a kill-o-watt on it. Keep your pi setup if it does what you want, and realize that there’s someone out there who is jealous of your power bill.
My x86 Proxmox consumes about 0.3 kwh a day at around 15% average load. I’ve only had the Kill A Watt on it for a day, so I don’t know how accurate that is, but it shouldn’t be too far off.
How bad is it?
My current file server, an old gaming rig, consumes 100w at idle.
I’m considering a TrueNAS box running either 2.5" ssd’s or NVME sticks (My storage target is under 8TB, and that’s including 3 years projected growth).
Go tweak your power and fan settings. 100w at idle is way too much unless it’s 15 years old.
Fans, especially small ones are very sneaky energy hogs. Turn them waaay down.
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The price is what happened. A pi 5 costs almost as much as an old used computer.
This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it’s really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.
If you’re just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.
And then there’s still all the crap it needs to work, if you don’t already have it. Power supply, adapters, storage, case, hats, etc.
less so with TCO considering the power budget…laptops however…
True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you’re not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.
I thought this was about FIFA
Attach a small camera to one of them and attach it to a bird feeder. Set another one up with frigate.
It’s a fun use and actually good for the environment.
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I have a small cluster of Pis running k3s kubernetes and running several services for my household. Yea they could all run on a single beefy server but I had fun learning it all.
Still got’em all. Pis are 3d printing, running small automation projects, running on solar in my back yard. I have far too many others that I took a hit on, honestly. Acme Arietta G25 is one that I’ve really only done some hardware dev on. I’ll prob be buried with it. I had a Pocket C.H.I.P that was sick, but after the company fell, I ditched it. Omega Onion 2 hasn’t seen any electrons since about. Two weeks after I received it. But yeah, five liters of fun…
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity k8s Kubernetes container management package
16 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
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They are still good, arm is awesome. i have Pi4 as OpenMediaVault and docker/homeassistant, etc. Friend gave me a Pi2 surprisingly OMV6 installs on it (even though it ia technically not supported), that one became a PiHole. My 13 year old iomega arm NAS just got converted to a debian minidlna server. Uses 20% of the 256MB RAM.
A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn’t shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you’re literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.
Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC’s from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.
Pine64 makes some cool devices that run on 100% free software.
