Raspberry Pi 5: available now
raspberrypi.comI'm sorry but it got too expensive and hence lost its main advantage. These days I use second-hand desktop mini-pcs that cost minimally more than the full Rpi set (charger, CD card, case, SBC) but are much more powerful. For anything involving WiFi/IoT, I use ESP32 - far less expensive and very easy to use. And for cases where WiFi is not needed, we have tons of interesting solutions and few reasons to use the Pi.
The main advantage of the Pi is the ecosystem and availability/consistency, not the price.
The hardware is known and well documented has the best OS support.
If I have issues, I can just move the SD card to another one, or just reflash another SD with 0 downtime or fuss.
Sure, but the reason it generated that ecosystem was because of the price. I remember when the first Pi's were being marketed, and "the $30 computer" was absolutely the main selling point being pushed.
I think both are true.
The low price point got me into them over a decade ago. The ecosystem is why I prefer them even at their top spec lines.
Even at their current prices, the 8GB versions are inexpensive enough to grab instead of a 4GB one, even if there is no initial need.
And I don’t have to deal with the process of buying second hand, maybe will work, maybe won’t, items.
> The main advantage of the Pi is the ecosystem and availability
Availability is a big oof. We learned over the past few years that you shouldn't build anything of any importance on top of RPi because when manufacturing crunches hit "hobbyist" products are first to be sidelined.
I don't think that's a very helpful takeaway from the situation.
Early in my career as an EE, I learned that your world could suddenly be upset and swaths of components could suddenly become unavailable to the small manufacturer because an auto company or some other massive customer got preference, so the majority of parts went "on allocation." Meaning that the production runs were allocated to certain customers and if you were lucky then you got the leftovers. You could suddenly not be able to built product for a year because critical parts just couldn't be found on the market. I remember one vendor selling a part that normally cost around $16 for over $400.
It's not specific to the Pi: this happens everywhere.
These are the two high RAM models but I expect the low RAM model to retain the same $35 price. That's no microntroller cost but if you can get away with such they also have the Pico these days which is $4.
Pico has its own problems:
1. VQFN package is a pain to deal with. You can't use a soldering iron, so its reflow-only and therefore requires hotplate + reflow hot air to deal with. Due to the difficulty of rework, you likely can't use the soldering iron+solder wick technique to fix solder bridges, for example... and therefore also require a soldering stencil to work with (gotta deposit the correct amount of solder-paste and hope everything works out good). Inspection requires X-Rays as well because everything is "under" the package, so you can't even visually inspect your joints.
I definitely prefer TQFP (seems to be the package with the biggest inventory in practice), and enjoy even the larger SSOP or even SOIC packages available from some competitors. All competitors offer VQFN as an option as well, in case you are truly size-constrained. But in my experience, a 9mmx9mm TQFP-32 is perfectly fine (7x7mm raw, but the leads take up another 1mm for total of 2mm added on the two sides). Your 32-traces are going to take up like half an inch of routing space anyway, so its not like the 5mmx5mm VQFN saves much space in practice IMO (IE: You'll need 6-layers or something... and/or to cut out lines to really take advantage of the space-savings from a VQFN)
Note: Hobbyists _should_ be using hotplates to do the bulk of their surface-mount soldering jobs. But accessibility to soldering iron for rework / touching up problems is a huge advantage to TQFP.
2. 0kB of on-board flash. RP2040 requires external components to boot, complicating the flashing / loading / bootup process.
3. Poor sleep specs, for a microcontroller. Your typical AVR DD (modern ATMega), or STM32G0, or Ti MSP430 / MSPM0 are all in the dozens or low-hundreds of microamps sleep (with some competitors in the ~hundreds of nanoamps for deepest sleep states). RP2040 sleeps at ~0.5mA to 1mA, an order of magnitude more power.
4. Poor power specs, for a microcontroller. Your typical AVR DD, SAMD, STM32G0, Ti MSP430 / MSPM0 are maybe single-digit mA (under 10mA across the board). RP2040 is like 20mA. I kid you not: an 8-bitter like AVR DD can be going full-tilt at like 4MHz or 8MHz and still have less power-usage than RP2040 *at idle*.
5. Lack of peripherals. RP2040 has PIO and SRAM as superpowers... but its got fewer timers, ADCs, DACs, OpAmps, Comparators, than all of its competitors.
---------------
RP2040's main superpower is its 264kB of SRAM. If you need gobs and gobs of SRAM, RP2040 is probably the right choice.
All other situations? I'm pretty sure you'd prefer a 12-bit differential ADC with 16x gain (ex: AVR64EA48), or 12-bit differential ADC (no PGA) + 3x OpAmps (ex: AVR128DB64) and multiple comparators and 4x onboard Vref, or 2x Zero-drift OpAmps + 1x general-purpose OpAmp (ex: TI's MSPM0 line).
Honestly, I'm not impressed by the Pico for general purpose use. The Pico works as a specialized compute-device (high SRAM, high MHz and dual-core), but this is simply impractical for many applications. You'd really rather have ADCs or Comparators in more typical electrical designs. Combo'd with the high-power usage (probably from all that redundant RAM the RP2040 has), and its difficult to recommend.
--------
Going in the other way: Cortex-M4F cores with a floating-point unit, even at 64MHz, will be much-much-much faster than a 200MHz RP2040. Why?
Because hardware float32 matter.
Why do you have 264kB of SRAM when you don't even have a floating-point unit? The RP2040 can't even be a good DSP-like system with all that compute power because you gotta software-emulate floats.
So if you _actually_ need compute power, you'd probably should be picking an STM32F4 (aka: Cortex-M4F) processor instead. RP2040 sits in this awkward zone where its got gobs of SRAM + MHz but is stuck on Cortex-M0+ (lacking floats, and other key instructions), so it doesn't actually have very fast compute in a very common case that matters...
So yeah, RP2040 works if you're willing to rewrite to integer-fixed point... if you don't need peripherals like ADCs or ACs, if you're willing to spend more power and complexity (due to the lack of on-board Flash), and are willing to use leadless VQFN packages. Its... quite a niche IMO.
Just a note on soldering: I’m perfectly capable of soldering VQFN at home, but these days it’s so easy to order fully assembled boards from JLCPCB that I think lost hobbyists would start with the Pico and then go straight to turnkey assembly once they have a custom design. I stopped assembling my own boards two years ago (after a decade) once I placed my first turnkey order at JLCPCB. Ten pieces of a simple RP2040 board including shipping is like $80.
I agree the lack of floating point and the poor ADC are an issue. I designed a high power brushless motor controller using the RP2040 and the FOC loop only runs at 8kHz which is fast enough for my use, but much slower than a higher end board. I just love this processor too much to use something else.
The main advantage to this processor is that it seemingly will never go out of stock (until it’s EOL date). When I started designing the motor controller in early 2022 during the chip shortage, I went to the Digikey “microcontroller” category with no filters and sorted by most in stock. They had millions of RP2040’s - it was the most in stock microcontroller on Digikey. I guess since Raspberry Pi only have a single SKU for their microcontrollers they can just churn them out in huge quantities.
My goal is to stay invested in this product line until an updated rev comes out with a better ADC and floating point. I bet they’re working on it.
Hmm.
You have a point about RP2040 being a thing that JLCPCB's assembly service benefits from. A singular chip that you "plan to use in most projects", along with pre-loaded pick-and-place machines that have common I2C attachments, makes sense in the scheme of factory design. (While something like Microchip's AVR DA vs AVR DB vs AVR DD vs AVR EA loses out, because SKUs are the enemy of such an assembly line as you'd be forced to manually swap-out reels in between production runs).
Still, RP2040 is a compromised part with plenty of downsides that I've listed above. And as far as a "centerpiece jack-of-all-trades" microcontroller goes, I'm not convinced that the RP2040 is the best to keep preloaded in such a configuration yet anyway to be mass produced into many designs.
But your point stands. It is a production / prototyping issue that intrigues me and I wasn't thinking about earlier.
------------
> Just a note on soldering: I’m perfectly capable of soldering VQFN at home
Well yes. I did say that Hotplate + Reflow Hot Air Gun works. But *soldering iron* is an advantage IMO.
Personally speaking, I don't see any of the chips I use on a regular basis on JLCPCB's list, so I've never felt the need to experiment with it. I can see how its advantageous if those preloaded pick-and-place machines have the chips / components you use though.
Sure I agree with all that.
I’ve moved to a model of only designing with parts available at JLCPCB (or LCSC, which you can have JLC order internally for you). It requires a change in mindset, but being able to spend $300 on QTY 10 fully assembled complex PCBAs delivered in two weeks is a revelation. No more boxes of components sitting around my lab. No more hours spent doing microscope and tweezer placement. No more orders split across Digikey and Mouser. I order the PCB and everything else from the same place. Hell I got my first CNC machined parts from JLCPCB recently and their quote was 20% cheaper than the other Chinese CNC house I was using.
It’s real nice. I focus on design and testing and not doing assembly.
Actually, they did a huge buy of RP2040 right out of the chute, in order to get decent prices. Heck, in not huge quantities, the chip costs $ 0.70 --- not so bad.
But if you want super cheap, 'standard'-type uC chip, look at the $ 0.10 https://github.com/openwch/ch32v003/tree/main
VQFN is quite possible using a soldering iron (the difficulty is the soldering pad underneath, but that isn't necessary and doable with suitable PCB design) . IMHO QFN is much easier to solder (and rework) than LQFN because bridges between two pads are easier to get away than bridges between the pins of QFP.
Pretty much no MCU in the same price range contains a DAC and most comparable MCUs don't have integrated OpAmps. The external flash has it's disadvantages, but it's also much cheaper to have huge amounts of flash. Typical 1$ MCUs can't include external flash in their address range, so it also can't be added in a similar way.
The RP2040 isn't suitable for a lot of floating point tasks, but floating point tasks on MCUs are not that common. FPGAs are often used as DSP-monsters and floating point isn't very nice on them.
If you need fast processing, with real multitasking, flexible (digital) pheriperals (PIOs can also simulate timers and up to ~22 total timers are nothing to scoff at), some nice fixed point DSP stuff (hardware divider, interpolators), gobs of (external) flash & RAM and great software support the rp2040 is pretty much the way to go as a default micro-controller.
For ~1$ it's a pretty compelling offer which is hard to beat with non-chinese chips.
> Pretty much no MCU in the same price range contains a DAC
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technol...
10-bit DAC and Differential ADC at $1.00 right now at Digikey.
> most comparable MCUs don't have integrated OpAmps
STM32, AVR, and MSPM0 all have OpAmp chips in their family. No, not every chip. But this means that your assembly code / c-code and drivers just transfer over to the OpAmp family (Ex: AVR128DB48) when you need OpAmps.
So my code I wrote earlier on the AVR16DD14 $1 earlier just magically upgrades to the OpAmp version inside the family.
Bonus points to MSPM0 for having higher quality chopper/zero drift OpAmps even. (Though negative points for TI chips to be out of stock right now lol)
All of these are rail-to-rail in my experience as well. So.... Yeah... The competition is tough these days.
> If you need fast processing, with real multitasking, flexible (digital) pheriperals (PIOs can also simulate timers and up to ~22 total timers are nothing to scoff at)
Spend $5 more and get a real chip if you're actually processor limited. The Linux Capable SAM9X60 is sitting there at like $8. That's a full bore Linux 6.x kernel.
Anyone at the $1 to $3 market ain't doing this for cost/performance efficiency... but instead overall cost optimization. The 600MHz to Ghz class chips are all available at $10 and are a better choice for processor limitations.
If you're scared of BGA, then I'm still willing to bet that STM32F7 or STM32F4 are better choices with hardware Floats and like 200MHz to 800MHz.
But yeah, 8-bitters and Cortex-M0+ chips aren't here to win performance or compute benchmarks. They're here because a potato-chip is all you need to run an ADC + send data over SPI or I2C and/or react to a UART. For all deeper needs, please for good gracious... please buy a $3 or $5 or $8 chip instead.
---------
I do think the $1 to $3 market is mostly about "Making sure you don't have to buy something else". Like having on-board flash (cutting off another $1 from the BOM / assembly), or whatever.
RP2040 goes a different approach, $1 is very cheap and 264kB is a very large amount of SRAM, but it really doesn't contain anything else worth noting (I guess a single-ended ADC and the PIOs like you mentioned). But all the SRAM/PIO in the world isn't enough to get you to output a 10-bit analog signal through a DAC.
The pico's float support is actually quite good, highly optimized. Sure, not as good as having hardware floating point. https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/raspberry-pi-pico-c-... page 24
How do you feel about the esp32's? I know there's a few variants of the 32 with different capabilities, but how do you feel about using that as a general purpose MCU including projects that might not need wifi/bt?
I'm somewhat surprised they didn't go with these as they seem relatively powerful+low deep sleep, with builtin wifi/bt, etc? Their analog input I think is limited though
ESP32 honestly feels like its a WiFi/Bluetooth chip that people are hacking into a kinda-sorta usable uC. Probably because... that's what it actually is...
If you need WiFi/Bluetooth, it seems like ESP32 is a good fit. If not, its kind of awful with regards to integration.
---------
I know that not everyone's doing mixed-signal projects. But ADC, Comparators, OpAmps, Timers are just so damn useful. And STM32, AVR, TI all offer a huge amount of analog-components in practice (with pros/cons to each).
Given how absurdly cheap uCs are today, the minute you say "Oh, lemme just get an I2C ADC to add to the ESP32", and suddenly you realize that the AVR64EA32 chip over there is probably the best "I2C ADC" under $2 (16x PGA, 12-bit Differential 350kSample/sec), and you're suddenly wondering what the ESP32 was supposed to be doing if you're not using WiFi/Bluetooth.
Do hobbyists typically need more ADC than what the ESP32 provides? Granted, it's limited to essentially one 12bit split on 8 channels, but with well calibrated dividers, that probably meets many needs.
I think the ESPs are really the perfect balance of functionality to (low) cost. That and the excellent beginner-level documentation and community.
I haven't tried it yet (or checked the datasheet), but I've heard that the ESP32 has a really crappy ADC. It's nonlinear to the point of only getting 10 of 12 useful bits out.
It is 12bit but the bottom 0-0.1v and 3.2v-3.3v just read as the min-max.
Honestly for many projects needing analog it might be "good enough", but it leaves a lot to be desired, and like the parent said, the moment you're looking for a a i2c adc you end up looking at another MCU anyway.
That's if you need an analog adc which my projects don't (sensors are all i2c anyway) but definitely takes away from being used as a general purpose chip.
It is a shame espressif didn't put a better adc in there.
Some ways to use ADCs...
* The recent AVRs are all differential ADCs, which is highly useful as "voltageA - voltageB" is a common measurement in practice. And its quite different than ChannelA (read a fraction-of-a-second earlier) - ChannelB (read right now), for multiple reasons. (Common-mode noise for one, you'll want to sample at the same time to negate common-mode noise)
* Anti-aliasing filters should be applied for best-practice design against your expected sampling rate... but RC 1st order filters have poor performance. The free-opamps you get from STM32G4 / AVR DB / TI's MSPM0L are easily turned into Sallen-key 2nd order filters, or chained together into 4th order filters or beyond. Or in more practical terms, an RC filter achieves -80db (aka: 10-bits of attenuation of aliased signals) after 4 decades. So a 100Khz sampling rate only has an effective bandwidth of 10 Hz.
Meanwhile, a 2nd order filter gets 80db in 2 decades, so you have a bandwidth of 1Khz.
Yes, despite having a 100Khz sample rate (or beyond) in the digital realm, it only has accuracy and efficacy in a much smaller domain. You have to perform basic analog analysis if you care about any bit of accuracy.
* In the case of STM32 or Ti (which have only single-ended OpAmps), you can build a differential OpAmp to perform VoltageA - VoltageB as a preprocessing step before the ADC.
* I'd say the most common use of differential signals is probably current-measurement across a 0.1 Ohm resistor. If 1-amp is flowing the resistor will have 0.1V across it. Furthermore, there's a common-mode voltage of unknown (ex: the resistor might be 2.3V to 2.4V on the two sides one second... but another time it will be 1.5V to 1.6V), so a single-ended measurement is not ideal. So you need to get rid of the common-voltage while simultaneously taking this difference-measurement.
-------------
So basically... OpAmps win so hard its not even a fair fight. Free OpAmps on your microcontrollers (STM32G4, AVR DB, and TI MSPM0L) chips just win in all things analog, even in the most basic case of just sampling into an ADC in practice.
Of course, for precision design, you need to build an analog circuit out of precision parts (ie: a dedicated precision OpAmp rather than the general-purpose ones you find for free on a uC). But many basic designs can be solved with the free opAmps from these uCs, as long as you taper your expectations. (In any case, its far better than what ESP32 will accomplish without opamps of its own)
You really end up with "the sum is greater than each of the parts". ADCs are so much more useful when you have an OpAmp or two at your disposal.
----------
Note: many uCs have analog comparators which perform "VoltageA > VoltageB" vs "VoltageA < VoltageB" comparisons... which might be sufficient and simpler than using the ADC. I don't think the ESP32 has any Voltage-comparators though.
So its really the mix: an ADC here, a Voltage Comparator there, a few OpAmps for free, a Zero-crossing detector here... suddenly you can build many designs from these $1 or $2 chips with incredible amounts of accuracy. (Well, incredible for $1 or $2 of course. These parts can't replace more expensive analog chips...)
That makes sense thank you!
Yeah, that sleep current is inexcusable for an MCU. So is the lack of onboard flash. Weird design all around.
The "killer-app" for the RP2040 is some kind of larger display controller IMO.
Displays use tons of power anyway, so 20mA power consumption of RP2040 is fine. And you need 264kB of SRAM for a good frame-buffer, and dual-core means one core can be dedicated for the display and the 2nd core can do all the other functions of your application.
Graphics are likely too large to fit on a typical on-board Flash, so you'll need QSPI (or larger) amounts of Flash anyway, so the weird bootup / requirement of Flash is made redundant.
---------
But general purpose use of RP2040? Uhh... no? Honestly, the RP2040 feels very much like a cut-down microprocessor in its design.
I guess RP2040 has the advantages of Micropython and more than enough SRAM to run larger sets of Micropython code for beginners... which is an advantage for some folk.
---------
I kind of wish that the bottom-tier of microprocessors became more commonplace for hobbyists. Full Linux 6.x kernels and 128MB with a variety of ADCs / Comparators on the SAM9x60 (ARMv5 Microprocessor with on-board DDR2 with ~50mA power usage at downclocked 200MHz)
Why run microPython? Just run Python 3 and G++.
Bonus points: idles at 2.1mA and sleeps at 200uA, so this Linux-capable microprocessor is comparable to the RP2040's idle/sleep specs. (I'm cheating though: DDR2 uses a substantial amount of power and I'm only counting CPU-power. But it still goes to show how absurdly high-power the RP2040 is in practice).
It makes sense, if the Pi Foundation is known for anything it's for giving zero thought to power management and their over-reliance on SD cards for flash memory.
I've been feeling this way for a while: that Raspberry Pi lost its way, in pursuit of specs over cheap.
I've been very surprised to not see other people discussing it.
The first Pi (2012 release) was $35, this release is, when inflation adjusted to 2012 dollars, $44. So in the same ballpark-ish
One thing here:
The rpi3b is still around. You can also get the rpi zero, rpi zero 2 W, rpi pico, etc.
Get the right one for the job. If you need an M.2 SSD or actual 4k video playback, go for the rpi 5, if not, for sth. else.
> The rpi3b is still around
Yeah, and it costs over $50 for just the SBC:
https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-MS-004-00000024-Model-Bo...
The first place I checked was 38 €. This, coincidentally is 30 € plus the inflation since 2018. I hardly can blame them for inflation.
> I'm sorry but it got too expensive and hence lost its main advantage.
I don't think that estimate takes into account the power savings you'd get from an ARM sbc versus a NUC or NUC-like minipic.
> I don't think that estimate takes into account the power savings (...)
I don't think this is relevant. RPis cost is a critical factor in it's usefulness as a disposable toy computing platform, not web servers that need to run 24/7.
Moreover, that cost is further worsened by the need to buy a custom power supply.
I have two RPi 4s that run 24/7 that I will likely replace with a 5.
> Moreover, that cost is further worsened by the need to buy a custom power supply.
But you don’t need to?
>
From RPi5's FAQ:
> Raspberry Pi 5 is a higher-performance computer than Raspberry Pi 4, and you may have problems using an under-powered supply. We recommend a high-quality 5V 5A USB-C power supply, such as the new Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C Power Supply.
As mentioned in a previous HN discussion, not only was RPi5 designed to require a nonstandard power supply, the official "high-quality" power supply for the RPi4 is also considerably underpowered at 15W at 5.1V-3A[1] while RPi5 stands at 27W at 5V-5A.
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/type-c-power-supply/
Their FAQ is definitely unclear, but, as mentioned in a previous HN discussion, a 5V/3A is going to work fine for most workloads. They limit downstream USB current to 600mA. If you need the full 1.2A limit, you can buy their power supply, another (not common) one, or a powered USB hub.
5V/5A will also give you 5W extra power on the device for their high performance mode.
But again, it’s not necessary and most uses of a Pi will do fine with 5V/3A.
> Their FAQ is definitely unclear, but, as mentioned in a previous HN discussion, a 5V/3A is going to work fine for most workloads.
I don't think so. Historically, Raspberry pi board always had non-standard power requirements and always required rpi's official power supply to work reliably. My RPi4 board forced me to buy the official power supply to work without weird problems and I did nothing but vanilla stuff with it.
RPi5 worsens this problem by requiring a power supply that draws 5A.
Depends on what you’re doing with it. For many things it will run fine off of a 3A 5V supply, which almost any usb-c adapter will do. But as soon as you start hanging any USB devices off of it, IIRC you need a 5A/5V supply which is unusual outside of the RPi-specific one.
Yes, and it depends on the devices. 5V/3A will limit USB power to 600mA. Could also use a powered USB hub.
They are not as high as you might think, a J4105 still idles at 4W without optimization. And at least for my use cases, idling is what the CPU does most of the time.
What about power / TDP though? I personally lean heavily towards ARM/MIPS and hopefully soon RISC-V for that above all? Depends on the use case of course…
For tinkerers and experimentation TDP or power consumption is rarely a factor (for me anyway). I just need cheap access to compute that's available, right now. The device never runs long enough for power consumption to factor into total cost of ownership for me. Waiting forever for low consumption, and often more expensive devices, is for me personally, more expensive than whatever additional power a device I can use right now, when I need it, will draw. The cost of me losing inspiration/motivation due to waiting for a device, or not being able to afford a device, is an order of magnitude more costly than the few cents I'll spend from inefficient power draw. Focusing on TDP is a premature optimization imo, the same as when we hyper focus on loop efficiency in an app with zero users or scaling issues, you don't need to worry about it while in the validation phase, and probably not for a long time after that as well. And let's be honest here, unless you're optimizing every piece of software on the device (whether you wrote it or not), there is all kinds of needless power draw happening even on the lower TDP devices due to inefficiencies in the code.
For long term deployments, I think recycling what would become e-waste by reusing older enterprise units is better overall for the environment than letting it go to a dump and buying a lower power consumption unit.
TL;DR: TDP is not a factor for me, quick and lowish cost access to devices right away is way more important at the start
Which ones, specifically?
For instance Lenovo Thinkcentre. Checked now on ebay and there were several under 50 Euro.
I gather all the manufacturers have similar offerings that are available dirt cheap on the used market.
yeah. Some of those ThinkCentre models have an actual 8x PCIe slot. Like the m720q.
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...
Similar to the other comment since I bet they're the same platform design are the Dell Optiplex-es that I use. Great low power ESXi hypervisors!
And they are promptly out of stock, I assume.
I've owned every Raspberry Pi since the first one but I think the 4 was my last one. They are fun to tinker with with but not great for long-term use in my experience. I felt like I had to babysit it way too often, it absolutely wasn't a "setup an forgot" device, again in my experience. It'd be rock solid for 2-3 months then randomly stop working, rinse and repeat.
A little bit back I bought a cheap (~$250) mini pc to run Home Assistant on and I haven't looked back. The Raspberry Pi 4 did decent at that job but was a little flakey for my liking and I even had a special case with an m.2 adapter so I didn't have to use the SD card. And before "$XX < $200" (whatever these are going for now), I spent over $100 for my RPi 4 (top ram, I think 4? or was it 8?) especially since you need a case, power supply, etc. Also I had to buy a m.2 ssd and that special adapter.
EDIT: I don't doubt that some of you don't have stability issues and/or have a Raspberry 1 that's been running since release without issue. That just wasn't my experience. Maybe that's my fault, I don't know. I know that I bought "raw" boards, kits from multiple suppliers, and expensive cases that came with approved power supplies but without fail in a couple months it wouldn't be pingable/ssh-able and I'd have to power cycle it and sometimes the software on it would just lock up (same software wouldn't have issue on my home server). In the end maybe I'm an idiot or not smart enough to manage a RPi but especially after the stock issues not too long ago and who the RPi Foundation prioritized, coupled with my experience of the hardware, I'm not really interested in the platform.
I've used Pi's dating back to the first one (even had one from the first batch manually packaged up by Eben and co). They're good, but arent without their issues. Power management has been a consistent problem with every single Pi. That combined with the Raspberry Pi Trading Co's behaviour over the last couple of years made me move to alternatives.
Once an 8GB pi cost more than an i3 or i5 mini pc that is capable of being upgraded it became completely pointless even considering them.
The only things I now have running on Pi's is my PiHole on an old Pi 2 - it's been flawless for years, and a Pi 3 that handles humidity detection in the utility room and turns on an extractor fan.
I'm with you on this. I have the Pi Zero W and Pi Zero 2 W. These are IMO the ideal devices in their lineup. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for when computers had limitations but I love them. I have the old one running PiHole, (so DNS stays up if I reboot my server) and the other doing monitoring. I've had zero problems doing everything over wifi, and actually being wifi is a benefit for my internet monitoring since wifi going down on my mandatory AT&T router wouldn't be captured by an ethernet connected device.
I also like the Pi 3A+ as an in-between. Especially before the release of the Zero2 as the Zero1's CPU was a bit too weak.
Pi Zero 2 W are still hard to find. Even though the Rpi 4 supplies have gotten better in the past few months.
It's been in stock for months every time I cared to look.
Looks like only 1 U.S seller has it in stock. The others have the Zero W. Not the 2. But thanks, I hadn't looked at the rpilocator in a while and was waiting for my local Microcenter to get them.
> Once an 8GB pi cost more than an i3 or i5 mini pc
But the Pi probably costs less once you factor in energy costs, no?
Depends on workload and the machine; some x86 machines are sufficiently low power that pis lose their advantage.
X86 machines have had perfectly fine idle wattages for ages now. I’m not sure why people think an x86 machine is sucking 50W at all times or something.
Anecdata: I have a netbook from around 2009 with an Atom processor. Default clock is 1.6 GHz but I ran it at 800 MHz. With an SSD inside, it sips power and ran 24/7 basic web services for years.
no actual data here: no power (Watts) provided for the netbook to enable a fair comparison.
It's great that it did not become ewaste, and a computer you have is better than one you don't have, but people likely shouldn't pick up old netbooks over something like a pi.
I agree. The machine is remote so I don't have it on hand, but I believe the stock AC adapter is rated for 40 watts according to a search online. However, I haven't recently plugged it into my Kill-A-Watt to see the actual draw, especially since I run it at half frequency. I'll bring it with me next time I'm out there for an upgrade to see what it actually pulls. :)
It's because ATX PSU desktops have high idle whereas a laptop, embedded device, or ATX12VO doesn't. People mean different power delivery methods and bundle it all up under x86 vs ARM
I tried measuring the wattage of my Pi Zero W when I got it but my Kill-A-Watt just registered 0 even when running stress -c 1. ;)
You can measure it with an inline USB power meter. They generally run between half a watt idle and 2 watts depending on what you're doing (using a camera, Wi-Fi, and keeping the CPU busy) and if you've shut down things like the video output and LEDs to try to save power.
A lot of it depends on what you use it for, in my usecase I've kept the two Pi's I mentioned as they sip a tiny amount of power. The Lenovo Thinkcentre I've got sits idle at around 7w but it's running a fair few service I use for dev work throughout the day, and the Pi would struggle to cope.
If you used one for something equivilent to a pihole then I think yes it would cost more over time, although we're likely talking many years of 24/7 runtime for it to then become more expensive, the low power x86 chips are a lot more efficient than they used to be.
> wasn't a "setup an forgot" device
It absolutely is. I have 4 RPi devices in the house actively doing work and I only touch them when I need to change a feature or something like that.
1. Front end to my 3D printer - RPi 2.
2. Magic Mirror - RPi 4.
3. Front end to my ancient HP LaserJet to make it wireless - RPi Zero W
4. Detector for Dryer finishing and sending me a text message - RPi Zero 2 W
These require no babysitting whatsoever.
All of my Pis have shat the bed after 3-5 years and had to be reimaged. I assume it's a combination of power outages + SD card lifetimes
My RPi 2 with the 3D printer has been operating with no problem since 2017 or something like that. The RPi Zero W with the HP LaserJet since around 2019.
Fingers crossed, it's been fantastic reliability.
How do you tell when the dryer is finished?
I bought a Kasa Smart Plug (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LN3C7WK). It has an API for reporting energy usage. Luckily there was already a library (https://github.com/python-kasa/python-kasa) for calling this API. I wrote a small console app that checks energy usage and when I detect a drop, I know that the dryer is done. Then the app uses Twilio to send me a text message.
This is my second attempt at solving this problem. In the first incarnation, I attempted to do audio recognition for the sound that the dryer makes when its done, but I just couldn't get it to work well. The sound was too short to generate a good signature.
Ah, that's a nice way, thank you!
I have 3 pi’s, running piVPN, piHole and homebridge as well as 2 displays that show my website activity and statistics. They only broke one SD card in 6 years and I never tinker with them.
I haven't used homebridge in 2 years at least but that was one the least reliable pieces of software in my experience. I've seen people online talk about how it's rock solid for them and others talk about how it's flakey. I'm in the latter camp. After the 3rd or 4th time I had to re-add everything to the Home app after my "hub" went sideways I gave up and transferred the 1 plugin I maintained to someone else since I stopped using it. I even ran homebridge on docker as well as my a RaspberryPi but never had good luck.
Like I wrote multiple times before here, I stopped having stability issues with the Raspberry Pi 2 and have had very few issues with SD cards.
I have Pis that have been running for 3+ years now (and that haven't been running longer because I upgraded them to Pi 3 or 4 boards, although they are performing the same jobs), and it's not just the OS either - I have Raspbian on the Pi 3 that runs my desktop touchscreen monitor (which controls all my lighting, and has an uptime of 167 days), and Ubuntu on my Homebridge/Zigbee gateway (which has an uptime of 61 days because I upgraded it before Summer, but has been running for nearly 2 years now).
If you need more CPU power, the RK3588 boards (as long as they have proper Armbian support) are decent bets, but at that point an Intel N100 might be more interesting since those CPUs can average below 10W on light load and will boost to better overall performance. Yes, they will be more expensive, but the going rate is 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for less than $200, so...
But if you want something that just works _forever_ at under 5W mean load, the Pi 4 is still it. And you can boot it off an USB SSD to great effect (I have a Proxmox instance running that way).
Like I said in another thread, I use a rpi zero2 as the backup of a VPS so I can program on it with my iPad even no internet is available. The reasons I use it is that:
1. You can configure the zero2 so that when it is connected to the iPad with a usb cable, 2 machine will construct an ethernet over usb and you can mosh from iPad to zero2 without any external network. zero2 also get both the data and power from a single usb cable
2. zero2 is cheap to replace. Micro sd card is cheap and easy to be cloned. You don't worry about software or hardware loss.
3. zero2 is actually quite usable in headless/ssh mode. I used to do the same thing on zero1 and it's a little bit sluggish.
I actually have my entire setup stored in a mint tin box.
I have two Pi 3Bs that have been running as VPN hosts for two years now. I ssh in about once a month to verify that updates are applied, and they've just worked without a problem.
Where I've had problems with other Pis has mostly come down to power supplies that don't deliver enough power. Getting a properly sized power supply will likely solve a lot of your issues.
I've had a pi 4 running pi hole untouched for multiple years.
YMMV, that's why I stressed "in my experience". I'm aware some people find them rock solid, I'm just not one of those people.
I have docker containers running on my local app server that I literally never think about and have been humming away without issue for years (aside from server restarts or updates which I rarely need to do and it's often as easy as a `docker pull`). That's what I'm looking for, if it requires any more interaction then I'd rather pay more. I'm not saying "my time is worth so much" exactly, it's not like every hour of my day is packed full and I couldn't do some more server admin but I don't want to do that. I have the money (which isn't really all that much more) to avoid it so I do.
It's the same way that in my early 20's I cobbled together local storage servers full of shucked hard drives to save money and now I pay for a Synology and raw drives. I just don't want to spend my free time doing that anymore.
The care-and-feeding argument is absolutely legit, I have made several things over the years with RPi-s that were great until they weren't. Like an air quality monitor / logger which ran fine for a couple of years, until the sensor conked out, I replaced it with a turnkey one that's worked fine - though I am sure its sensor will also give up eventually, that's just the nature of them). Or a chiming clock that drove a servo to strike a doorbell chime, the little cheap hobby servos burned out after a couple years, bigger ones introduced more complicated power setups, and bashed the chime harder than was needed. But I also have a couple of Zero W-s which have been running fine for quite a while, the key for them, aside from simpler hardware, was the 'overlay file system' which loads into RAM only, so the sd cards don't get trashed writing logfiles etc.
You have perfectly described my approach to tech tasks that lack intrinsic joy or interest
Mine runs the Unifi controller and PiHole on a Pi 3 and it has survived, untouched, across four separate moves. Helps to properly tune logging to not over-wear the SD card.
My three Orange Pi 5's are in my home k8s cluster (mostly as local GitHub Actions arm64 builders, but also have m.2 storage for Longhorn and run the occasional one-off) will probably tick along without being looked at again for years.
Absolutely. I dumped most of my PIs for older mini-PCs and NUCs. Throw in a bit more RAM and run Proxmox on it. Way better stability, functionality, and manageability.
If you have 3 of those, you can run a Proxmox cluster, which is a godsend for applications like Home Assistant, which require stability and uptime.
The only time I use a Pi these days is when I need to interface with something via the GPIO pins. Netbooting increases the reliability vastly.
Interesting, my experience with pihole has been basically set it and forget it for several years now.
With BirdNET-pi, I have had a few hiccups due to the SD cards getting worn out from constant writing.
What SD cards do you use?
I’m not sure what’s in the pihole and I’m afraid to pull it out but probably Sandisk class 10 in that one.
In the BirdNET-pi I used whatever came in the CanaKit which I’m not even sure if it was branded. I gave that to my parents and my dad replaced it and hasn’t had problems since then.
They've been releasing videos which talk about various aspects of the Pi 5 design in some detail, and I've found them really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/@raspberrypi/videos
I was surprised by just how much of the hardware and software of the Pi 5 was custom designed by (or for) the Raspberry Pi org. Custom MIPI implementation, custom IO chip, custom image signal processor, custom camera drivers (w/libcamera), custom video drivers (w/Mesa+DRM). They were able to cut out pretty much all of the Broadcom firmware and the VideoCore is no longer handling the bootup process.
> the VideoCore is no longer handling the bootup process.
Nope that part remains. The VideoCore VPU does almost nothing other than that and power management on the RPi5 though
If you're looking for one to buy, or any other version for that matter, rpilocator is pretty good.
I doubt there will be any listed on that for months, the first two preorder batches from the day it was announced are scheduled to deliver November to January. I would imagine that since then there have probably been enough preorders to fill their production quota until 2025.
Can I please have a Raspberry Pi 500? I like the idea of the Pi 400 - a computer inside a keyboard. And I'm looking forward to having a Pi 5 inside one. Anyone know when I can buy one of these for my daughter?
If a Pi 500 were to be made it should be a carrier case for the Pi5 compute module. The Pi as a keyboard form factor is too limiting.
Agreed, mostly because I'm looking forward to the CM5. But I do have a Pi 5 on pre-ordered along with the official wall wort and the active cooler. I skipped the case because I'm thinking about a Flirc and wondering if Coolermaster will bring out a Pi 5 version of their 4B case.
I wonder if the RPi5 is finally enough for browsing the web and watching media without hiccups. My experience with RPi4 was too sluggish.
Not saying this applies, but: The speed of the raspberry pi goes up dramatically when using a fast USB disk instead of micro SD. Most people start with a micro SD, and I had no idea how much faster a Pi could go.
my 2¢: if external storage is not an option for some reason, dropping ext4 in favor for F2FS will do a lot of good for sparing your sdcard from early death (due to superblock updates happening every so often), if not for performance due to ext4 not being flash-aware by design.
If that's not an option AND your setup has no power issues (e.g. it has good power supply, externally powered usb hub etc), disabling journalling might also improve performance: tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdaXXX (can't do it on mounted fs, so either do it from initram consolee, do pivot_root to minimal fs in ram, or do it from another machine)
SD cards have a FTL internally; I'm not sure F2FS helps you much there.
F2FS was specifically designed for flash storage and takes FTL into account, unlike ext4. So it should help.
I'll anecdotally confirm this - fast IO matters and sped my pi desktop up considerably.
Yeah I confirm too. Fast IO plus a little cooling fan makes the Pi 4 almost enough for daily desktop. I think the Pi 5 will get me all the way there.
It does apply to me - I never tried it with a USB disk. I'm getting an RPi5 eventually, and I'll try this out. Thanks for sharing!
With the Pi 5 you can do better than that, there's PCIe support and an official NVMe hat. Or will be eventually, anyway.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/app/uploads/2023/09/40e82000-af3...
Awesome! Would love to hear if/how your experience changes
Now that the RPi 5 exposes a PCIe interface, I have a feeling we're going to see a lot more folks adopting it as a NAS.
If the drives aren’t powered by the pi, then aren’t there going to be grounding issues with a NAS?
If only FreeNAS (TrueNAS now?) would run on it
Does it not? what's the Pi missing? I assume truenas scale (the linux based one) would work better.
As far as I know there isn’t an ARM build of TrueNAS but I could be wrong
TrueNAS (the BSD one) also works fine when Virtualized under Linux
yes, m.2 slot when?
same for network
No cpu is ever enough for modern web.
Disable, and then selectively re-enable JavaScript.
The web works again.
I have a 2013 macbook and browsing web is unusable, especially on these landing pages that have animations
This is true, or was true until Apple released the M1 / M2 chips.
Even then new Reddit makes safari stutter if scroll too long/several tabs
Crazy. I think this is why people stick to the old reddit design. Or use mobile, but is that properly using reddit?
Those chips magically solve the webs problems? Nope. I was given an M1 pro for work. Guess what? The web is still slow.
Which is kind of silly because a cheap chinese phone of $100 can play media without problems, and it includes a screen.
The Pi's a bit limited due to its pretty terrible I/O performance, finicky power system and the insistance on sticking with old broadcom chips.
The broadcom thing made sense to begin with, they got a great deal on the pricing. But with the likes of the Rock Pro being pretty much on a price parallel now (and higher performing) it no longer makes sense.
That has more to do with the web ecosystem than the Raspberry Pi hardware.
It really doesn't. Cheap phones have browsed the web just fine for a long time, now. Raspberry Pi makes some weird hardware choices and have been suffering from it for a while. The insistence on SD cards (other manufacturers support eMMC or m.2 or both, and while RPi5 does now this has been the case elsewhere for A While) is the biggest problem with overall perf, including browsers.
I would expect the boards with the RK3588 to still be more pleasant to use than an RPi5, but the RPi5, used with an m.2 drive, should be significantly better.
Cheap phones don't browse 'the' web 'just' fine—they browse 'a phone-optimised responsive' web 'reasonably' fine.
A fair comparison of cheap phones and a Raspberry Pi would be browsing the web with the "Desktop site" feature enabled in the phone browser.
I have a Moto G...something, at least five years old, sitting on my desk. It normally acts as a teleprompter. I opened up Chrome, turned on desktop site mode, and started browsing, and gotta be honest: it was fine. If nothing else, if absolutely nothing else, it could scroll a web page without stuttering, and a Raspberry Pi 4 has never been able to do that in any configuration I ever tested.
How is MicroSD weird? A microSD card 1) is available at Officeworks etc, and 2) doesn't require soldering so imaging the OS can be done before your RasPi even arrives on your Windows/Mac computer.
In contrast eMMC is soldered onto the board, while the m.2 didn't even exist back in 2012 when the first RasPi launched.
It's not that SD cards don't have advantages, it's that they also have noted disadvantages in terms of speed and reliability, particularly when you factor in that people don't always buy the high end models.
In a time when computer programs habitually assume fast storage, running your operating system and primary runtime on a microSD card is weird. Even "fast" microSD storage usually isn't unless you buy cards that cost as much as the SBC in the first place. If you want some perf in the SD form factor you go to the full-size card--that's one reason cameras still use them--but even there you encounter pretty hard limits, which is why higher-end cameras have also gone to SSD-over-USB-C and CFExpress Type B.
eMMC does not have to be soldered-on, either; the Orange Pi 5+ has a swappable eMMC module.
This is the pi5, not the pi1. Technology marches on. Maybe the SD made sense in 2012, but that doesn't mean it still makes sense in 2023.
It's being reviewed on youtube positively in this regard. If you're reluctant, it wouldn't hurt to wait a few weeks and see what the reviewers who were not favored with prerelease hardware have to say about it.
You'd expect the experience to get better since people have been testing with prerelease software as well, but... we'll see.
I checked all Eastern Europe retailers on their website and none of them seem to be having the board in stock.
All of them are either taking preorders or say they will start deliveries in late december or early january.
The only retailers that seem to have any stock at all are in the UK and buying from there is a nightmare due to brexit (assuming the boards ever arrive at all - they have a nasty habbit of taking people's money but never deliver).
I guess the delays are due to regulatory paperwork, as the blog post suggested.
At this price and power consumption, considering the extra cost of a solid housing etc, those small factor x86 boxes make more sense to me, I have no plan to acquire a RPi5 for now.
I had to buy a case fan to set atop my Intel 4port mini PC, otherwise it would hard lock due to heat. Now, I needed it for the network ports, but there are tradeoffs.
For weeks Microcenter (in the US) listed them as available 23 October. When I checked yesterday I see "Available on Nov 03,2023".[0] I wonder why that is.
[0] The test on the page looks like "AVAILABLE" and copies as " Available on Nov 03,2023 "
Can anyone recommend a forward looking “JBOD case” holding the rpi5 that maybe has room for ample cooling for 24/7 usage? Basically for something like a “DIY Asustor” ++ build? Any 2c much appreciated.
It's unfortunate but unless you're willing to spend quite a bit of money (or are willing to forgo compactness) these are hard to find especially for 3.5" drives.
Radxa did have the Taco and Mediasonic does make compact 4/8 bay JBODs bur these are USB only.
There are also various NVME to SATA/SAS adapters but these mostly make use of port multipliers and speed won't be amazing. You'll probably also want some SATA backplanes to make wiring less nightmarish but these are annoying to source at a reasonable price.
My latest idea I had for something semi compact and performant was to try and use a USB4 SSD enclosure with adapters to connect a full size PCIE card. You'd then get a Thunderbolt DAS theoretically.
Be aware that TB 3/4 is only PCIe3, 4 lanes (each 8Gbit) = 32 gbit
But is it still the most attractive SBC at its price point?
Sadly, yes.
You can buy whatever else you want, even cheaper and better today, and after three years, getting a modern supported OS will be a total pain, due to binary blobs, custom drivers, custom "design solutions" etc.
RaspberryPi is currently the only SBC where you can take any revision of it and still get fully working(! yes, even wifi, bluetooth, etc.) software for it, even if it's not the newest and the greatest model.
It's my understanding that https://www.armbian.com/ has quite broad hardware support, and there are boards from Orange Pi and Pine64 that boast actual mainline kernel support, so this is more a case of a fragmented ecosystem than there being zero competitors that can meet or exceed pis.
x86 based SBCs being the notable exception, since you're very likely going to get an Intel CPU that's in the lineage to Atom (and now E-Cores)
The first gen Pi Zero W isn't really supported anymore due to the outdated ISA. But other than that, you're right.
This is just nonsense. There are plenty of old (6-7 year old boards) very well supported in Linux. I've been using several such boards for that long.
If anything, support gets better with time, usually.
Which SBCs are you referring to?
Many of these https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/arch/arm64/bo... or these https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/arch/arm64/bo... or these https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.6-rc7/source/arch/arm/bo...
SoC support for Rockchip/Allwinner is usually good, except for the newest SoC, where the support may be lacking in some aspects that may or may not matter to whatever usecase at hand.
Checking the board DT before buying is a good idea, to see what's supported.
I have about 8 differnt Orange/Xunlong and Pine64 SBCs, running for between 7-3 years with continuous mainline Linux updates.
Orange PI 5 Plus is faster (10% faster single threaded, 200% faster multicore per Geekbench) and also supports up to 32GB of memory. It has decent support, but not anything like the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. So if you want a SBC that is fast for special well defined projects, go with Orange PI 5 Plus, but if you want one for arbitrary hobby projects with tons of support everywhere, go with the Raspberry Pi series.
I have both two OPi5's and an OPi5 Plus, and honestly? It's not a problem. Armbian support's there and is emphatically Good Enough for the 90%+ case. They're excellent boards.
If you want to talk about bad support, let's talk about something like the NanoPi R5 series. Oof.
The big current issue that prevents me from using my boards is lack of GPU drivers. Armbian has instructions on how to use the panfork fork, but even those are not good. The panfrost team definitely do good work, so I have high hopes for future drivers. Especially with desktop OpenGL support that the rPis never got.
So I do have a rPi 5 ordered because they've advertised full upstreamed mesa Vulkan support on release. Maybe desktop OpenGL via Zink on top of Vulkan will be good enough.
What is wrong with NanoPi? I was thinking of getting an R6C to use for RK3588 development.
The vendor OS is clunky and weird, Armbian doesn't have support (for the R5C at least), it doesn't have NVMe support (only a wireless m.2), flashing the eMMC is really weird...I wouldn't buy another NanoPi. I quite like the Orange Pi 5's for RK3588 boards though.
Orange PI 5 Plus is about 2x the cost of Raspberry Pi 5.
The Orange Pi 5 has a very similar CPU and is comparable in cost. The Plus is the "premium" model with things like 2x 2.5G ethernet ports.
Wait wait wait. 2 LANs on PCIe? One M.2 slot on PCIe? And this works with armbian?
That's my new router board, if it works okay!
And... if i can buy it anywhere...
Amazon has it, so it seems widely available: https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Rockchip-Frequency-Developm...
I have an ordinary Orange Pi 5 for my HomeAssistant setup and it's quite alright. Having a real NVME SSD in there instead of an SD card gives me peace of mind. I did some tests with zstd and found it about 50% the speed of my Threadripper (restricted to 8 cores for the test). The non-efficiency cores are therefore probably more than twice as fast as a 2 generation old AMD chip, which is pretty impressive.
For the cost of the Orange Pi 5 Plus, you're starting to get into similarly-equipped Intel N100-based machines. I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing the two, but I'd assume it's faster. So you might want to look at those. (Amazon is expensive; everyone gets these from AliExpress. I also don't know how well modern Intel machines do booting without a keyboard and a mouse; the ARM SBCs do great.)
Well amazon.com doesn't help me much, although they can handle customs to europe for me (it's more trouble dealing with customs than the actual VAT value).
As for Intel machines, most i've found lately seem to be oriented towards home theater, a lot of useless (to me) video outputs and never enough network cards.
Not sure how low power they are either. This is the Intel that seems to have stopped caring about power consumption completely to win the speed race, and people are buying so why would thy care?
Right now I'm still using a dual core Atom Dsomething from I don't remember when, its main quality is it eats 15 W including 2 spinny discs (2.5" 5400 rpm). An Orange Pi with a ssd and the GPU turned off might eat even less.
I’ve never seen a 32gb for sale?
They are available for pre-order via the official Orange Pi store on AliExpress right now, slated to ship in November. I know since I was about to pull the trigger on this one:
Technically yes but in most cases you dont need an sbc. An old Lenovo Thinkcentre or Dell OptiPlex Micro can end up being cheaper by the time you add all the additional expenses onto the pi (storage, power, case, etc). The micropc's are also infinately better performing and are upgradable.
What about energy usage for the next few years?
How much does a Raspberry Pi 4/5 use with some sort of external storage running? How much does one cost once you factor in a case, cooling, storage, and a power supply?
I paid $195 NEW for a Beelink S12 Mini with 16GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, and an Intel N95 CPU
I believe it is said to idle at about 8W. It's a powerful enough machine you could run a bunch of small VMs on it, assuming your workload didn't involve GPIO or other hardware things.
I rolled a handful of RPis into VMs on one Orange Pi 5 because it has memory to do so and I wasn't using anything Pi specific.
on their website the cheapest lenovo is 500€ and the cheapest dell is 600€ while a kit R5 is 150€, not at all the same price
Yeah I'm not referring to new ones. Ebay. Dirt cheap and even the ones several generations old are very power efficient and vastly outperform the pi on both performance and cost.
I haven't checked, but Odroid are/were more competitive AFAIR (RPi's have a better software support, though).
LibreComputer boards are some of the best supported ones that just run standards Debian/Ubuntu ARM builds
Yes, I'd say that - RPi is, through its moat, the only player in town where you as an user (hobbyist, corporate, ODM) can be assured that there's reasonable build quality, availability of parts, and especially the tooling around it.
You have 3 choices:
1. Raspberry Pi
2. X86 System
3. Barely functioning SOCs with no mainline support and major software issues until eternity.
> 2. X86 System
A lot of the small/mini/micro form-factor systems (even ~five year old used corporate machines) are almost always the (significantly) better option at the price point. I bought a used Dell SFF system a couple of weeks ago for $119 that runs circles around the Pi in every way (16GB RAM, NVMe, real I/O, real USB, PCIe, six core i5, etc) while idling at 9 watts, which makes little difference in operating cost even in locales with the most expensive electricity in the world - especially as the Pi continues to be more power hungry and often requires a fan. The SFF system is even upgradable to 64GB of DDR4 and has a full length x16 PCIe slot and an additional x4 slot.
This machine does everything in my house, even functioning as a 2.5gb router which is already something the Raspberry Pi could never do. Add on a dozen docker containers, a VM or two, and the gap only widens. I did upgrade the RAM for $40 but the systems it replaced more than make it come out ahead on power and cost. You can still resell a Pi 4 for ~$70.
Perhaps most important - availability. There is no shortage of these systems on eBay and elsewhere (or new), there never has been and there likely never will be.
For many years the Raspberry Pi was a good default "go-to" for many applications but x86_64 has come a long way and at this point I struggle to come up with all but a few bespoke use cases for the Raspberry Pi.
When I was living in Israel, I was never able to find reasonably priced older 2nd hand x86s; there is no eBay culture, and somehow when companies have an upgrade cycle and retire a lot of old hardware, it is always to middle men who then ask for ridiculous prices (like 70% of price of new, faster, more efficient, cooler machine).
I wonder if that’s unique to Israel, or if the ease of getting reasonable 2nd hand hardware is unique to the US.
Big advantage of Raspberry Pi is that they are available everywhere for similar price. At least now that the shortage has ended. They have resellers all over the world which means can shop in local language.
My guess is that most of used PCs come from the US. A lot of companies have refresh cycles where buy new hardware every five years or so. There are a lot of support employees that get cheap mini PCs.
Re: cheap pcs for support employees - that’s true everywhere; but it feels like only in the US is this 2nd hand market open to everyone.
things micro pcs cannot do:
- rpi has GPIO pins
- many rpi boards' max power consumption is around the idling power consumption of a pc, rpi zero 2 can run off a standard usb A port of a laptop
- rpi zero 1/2, rpi 3A and rpi 4 has usb gadget mode which means it can be plugged to a notebook and two machines will connect over usb ethernet. That is especially helpful for debugging headless machines when in a hotel room (no wifi under your control, no ethernet cable).
- yes microsd is slow, but it's also cheap and easy to swap. That means you can: 1. if a board is broken then take out the card and insert it into another board. It will take you 2 minutes max and then everything will be exactly the same. 2. clone your entire microsd card as backup 3. you can swap different OS by swapping microsd. No need to partition your harddisk.
I do my development works on my iPad connecting to a remote VPS. And I always has a rpi zero 2 as my backup when I have no internet connection. You just connect ipad to zero2 using a usb-c to usb-c cable with a usb-c to micro usb adapter, then you can mosh from ipad to zero2 and keep programming. How wonderful!
[edited for formatting]
> - rpi has GPIO pins
This is certainly one of the "bespoke applications" I was referencing. That said, I tend to feel that USB GPIO boards[0] are more capable and flexible when/if you need GPIO. There's also the ESP32 series which almost always make more sense for me at least. You can add as many of these as you want to meet any GPIO need you will ever have. In almost every case I've needed GPIO having it available over wifi vs being limited to a few inches from a Raspberry Pi has been tremendously more useful.
> - many rpi boards' max power consumption is around the idling power consumption of a pc, rpi zero 2 can run off a standard usb A port of a laptop
Fair enough, but how often does this really matter? I'm not advocating for unnecessary burning of the planet but as an example at $0.20 per kWh a seven watt delta comes down to $1/mo which (to me, at least) is nothing over the lifetime of the hardware when factoring in the dramatically improved capability.
> - rpi zero 1/2, rpi 3A and rpi 4 has usb gadget mode which means it can be plugged to a notebook and two machines will connect over usb ethernet. That is especially helpful for debugging headless machines when in a hotel room (no wifi under your control, no ethernet cable).
Another bespoke application that is perfectly fair. This can also be achieved with a tiny travel router (I LOVE mine) which will also run circles around gadget mode in terms of performance and functionality - significantly better Wifi, multiple real ethernet ports, it's own USB host for whatever. Running OpenWRT of course so it's still a Linux machine you can do whatever with - including connecting the USB GPIO boards I referenced above.
> - yes microsd is slow, but it's also cheap and easy to swap. That means you can: 1. if a board is broken then take out the card and insert it into another board. It will take you 2 minutes max and then everything will be exactly the same. 2. clone your entire microsd card as backup 3. you can swap different OS by swapping microsd. No need to partition your harddisk.
MicroSD is EXTREMELY slow and unreliable when compared to NVMe, microsd is cheap but you "get what you pay for". You can also achieve similar cost, swap-ability, and ease of overall use with USB flash drives which are often higher performance and more reliable anyway. A full EFI BIOS, bootloader, etc comes in very handy.
These are generally excellent points but the vast majority of Raspberry Pi use cases seem to be people looking for a linux machine/home server/etc that doesn't touch any of this functionality.
But hey, in the end use what works for you!
Dell SFF Systems I’ve looked at are huge. They are like 3-4x the size of a Pi 5. Is there a specific model that is more comparable in size to the Pi?
It's a fair point but I guess I can't wrap my head around it. Within a square foot you get at least 10x the capability and expansion of a Pi.I'm probably limited by my own perspective and bias but I can't understand someone not being able to find a square foot for a device that can replace any number of things, in my case even my router. Inch for inch they can't be matched but I suppose if you really only have a few inches a Pi is your best bet. I'm just glad I'm not in that situation.
I did reference the "mini/micro" variants which are significantly smaller - with the sacrifice being loss of PCIe which when it comes to x16 + x4 slots there really isn't any way to get around. Mine can also take two 2.5" SATA drives depending on how you feel about that.
Dell calls them micro. Like 5090 micro. HP and Lenovo also have them, calling them mini and tiny respectively.
They are about a litre in volume. However they give up the pcie slots for the size.
Yeah. Just go with x86. If you like adventures go with the Raspberry Pi. If all you need is the cheapest CPU, then enjoy messing around with obsolete kernels I guess.
I believe the Pi is also pretty much the only sensible choice for GPIO support on Linux.
There are so many subtly different smallish x86 systems though that finding one that's cheap, power-efficient, fast, extensible, reasonably quiet and well supported on Linux is pretty difficult. At least to me.
I have a bunch of these systems from the past few years related to my work building self-hosted decentralized systems. Most recent is this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BVLS7ZHP and so far it's working well. I'm running Ubuntu 22 and I have the stock internal SSD plus an externally attached 2T M.2 NVMe drive (via USB3.2 and this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RVC6F9Y).
x86 has the best cost/benefit nowadays, especially for server/desktop applications. Just a random example from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/KAMRUI-Computer-Computers-Business-Re...
For three: look into second hand Chromeboxes.
4. Educating yourself and not spreading horseshit.
If you aren't buying a thousand of them, how much does "price point" really matter to you?
> If you aren't buying a thousand of them, how much does "price point" really matter to you?
A lot of recreational tinkerers are already giving up their free time, and accepting a slightly inferior product to the commercial options. To also spend more would be a step too far :)
Getting my 20-year-old mono laser printer network-enabled with $20 of hardware: Smart, e-waste-reducing move, even if it only supports 300dpi.
Doing the same thing with $100 of hardware: Why waste the time, when a brand new mono laser would cost less, offer better print quality, and have built in wifi?
Setting up a DIY networked camera with $50 of hardware: Fun little hobby project, maybe more secure than the sketchy cloud options and cheap imports that never get firmware updates.
Doing the same thing with $130 of hardware: Just buy from Axis or Pelco or whoever. They'll have figured out the waterproofing, and the night vision, and the PoE, and nobody will call you a dumbass for buying the "wRoNg tYpE oF mIcRoSdcArD"
Lots of people buy these on a finite hobby budget.
Is there some missing context here, like "...and they only have ten dollars to spend on hobbies during the entirety of 2023 due to the famine wracking their homeland?"
I mean, when you're talking about things (items in your "finite hobby budget") that cost less than a hundred dollars, why are you going to fuss about the "price point?" I am intrigued by how much this appears to matter to people who comment on Raspberry Pi threads.
Hobbyists spent, at times, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on microcomputers in the eighties, and that was real money back then. Even the quaint ZX whatevers that were sold in Europe were, in inflation-adjusted terms, much more expensive than a Pi. Perhaps that's why I find these recurring concerns about how much an inexpensive SBC costs to be a bit baffling, particularly in the case of a hobbiest who is only buying one of them.
Some people really don't have a lot of disposable income. Are you saying we should just stop thinking about making products accessible to those people? You seem to think that these rich "hobbyists" make up the entire population, but I'd bet there were at least ten families in the US who couldn't afford a computer for every "hobbyist" that bought one. What a bunch of elitist gate-keeping nonsense.
These low-cost SBCs are often viewed as a gateway product for introducing people to technology they wouldn't otherwise have access to - a system that could be a serviceable PC or launchpad for hobby electronics. The hobbyists you mention, apparently flush with cash and not a care in the world, aren't the people who need the price break. It's low income families with kids that need access to resources that might lead to a better future.
Not to mention that a Raspberry Pi is an embeddable system. It might be a small part of a much larger project, so even a low price might be hard to justify.
But no, let's keep making everything expensive so that computers and technology careers are only accessible to families that already have wealth. We, the Hobbyists of lore, can strut about the city square in our wearable devices and augmented reality headsets while the dirty street urchins scramble behind us, hoping for a fallen scrap, a loose semiconductor or relay they can take home to their families so they might afford little Timmy's leg surgery...
> while the dirty street urchins scramble behind us, hoping for a fallen scrap, a loose semiconductor or relay they can take home to their families so they might afford little Timmy's leg surgery...
While you've misunderstood my comment so badly I am worried you might have suffered a recent head injury, and I'm not getting any closer to understanding the quirkiness of people who comment on Raspberry Pi related threads which is what I was really shooting for, believe me: I respect the effort here.
This is such an out of touch comment. Not every, definitely not a majority, hobbyist spend thousands of dollars on their hobby. You sound like a rich kid who doesn’t understand $8 milk is expensive.
No one is suggesting people ought to spend thousands of dollars on their hobby. The point is that the difference between an $80 computer and a $120 computer (for example) is not going to break any hobbiest in 2023. I'm trying to figure out why anyone wants to pretend that that kind of difference is a big deal, and why it always manifests in Raspberry Pi conversations. It's weird.
> edgyquant
Haha.
Having been a teenager and broke college student, I can assure you that $40 does in fact matter to some hobbyists.
When I was a broke college student I would have just not bought the top of the line system, which is what we're talking about here.
I think there is actually a point in there; I mostly subsisted on used equipment that I could get dirt cheap back then. OTOH I'm not sure I want that to be the only option.
If you're a child not earning your own money, price point matters enormously. I remember rarely ordering electronic components from Maplin because of the P&P charge which was massive compared to my pocket money.
Though I did get a buzz from my first CASHTEL order: https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Mapelin/Maplin%20Electronic...
So my missing context as to why people obsess over price differences on the order of $20 when talking about single-board computers in Raspberry Pi-related comment threads is... they're thinking of the children?
That's the market RPi was initially established for
And there is a much more powerful Raspberry Pi (model 3) available at the original price point of the Raspberry Pi. Or others like the zero that are even cheaper, and still more capable in some ways.
I'm not sure having a new one available that is quite a bit more powerful and costs $25 more is hurting those kids.
Inexpensive isn't a fixed value. A hobbyist can be someone able to splurge thousands on tech because they find it fun, but they may as well just be someone who only has 50€ at the end of the month and wants to tinker with a microcomputer they read about online.
There exists life outside of the first world where that 10 dollars is worth more
As a software guy I make far more than average. Yet in this past year I have looked at and rejected buying for my hobbies many $$$ worth of toys because I cannot afford it. Well I could, but my family vacation took priority (this could be considered part of the hobby budget). Most years the total cost of things I want for my hobbies exceeds my annual pre-tax income, but this year made an effort to not look and I still came close.
At least as someone who makes a lot of money I have plenty of good food and a dry roof over my head. However that doesn't mean I have infinite money in the hobby budget.
I dunno, as a kid if there was a $40 or a $80 thing, I would get the $40 one (both would involve negotiating with parents anyways, and there's an obvious big gap here).
$40 is a lot of money for teens without income (which is the case for most teenagers across the world outside of the US). Most kids get money maybe once or twice a year and have to spread it out, and then negotiate for other hobby-based purchases when they can. There's a reason forums are filled with people discussing how to maintain sub-$100 Thinkpads!
> I mean, when you're talking about things (items in your "finite hobby budget") that cost less than a hundred dollars, why are you going to fuss about the "price point?" I am intrigued by how much this appears to matter to people who comment on Raspberry Pi threads.
Usually an SBC is just one item on a project's part list. If I can get one that's equally suitable and 20 Euro less, that's another bunch of sensors, or another smart light, or a few additional PCBs, or a spool of filament, or another display, or other peripheral, or another filter for my photography kit.
> Is there some missing context here, like "...and they only have ten dollars to spend on hobbies during the entirety of 2023 due to the famine wracking their homeland?"
People in that kind of situation will probably not be looking at a Pi 5 for a hobby project. A lot of people are better off than that and still not in a place where a hundred dollars here and there isn't even worth thinking about. I try to limit hobby expenses because that allows me to have more projects and play with more things without cutting into anything more important.
> Hobbyists spent, at times, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on microcomputers in the eighties, and that was real money back then. Even the quaint ZX whatevers that were sold in Europe were, in inflation-adjusted terms, much more expensive than a Pi.
At least for the things I do, that's a wildly inaccurate comparison. A Pi is more like a drop-in part like an electrical component would have been back in the 80s, and most hobbyists would not have paid thousands for a specialized diode or the like, and most wouldn't have bought another personal computer for a new project. The closest analog to a proper computer back then would be my laptop, and I did pay "real money" for that. I don't buy Pis as standalone personal computing devices, they're for automation that I can't or don't want to fit on a microcontroller. Two Pi 4s are running Home Assistant deployments, another (zero W) is driving an e-ink info screen, one Pi 3-something sits inside a half-assembled robotics kit, I had another 3-something running OctoPrint until recently. If I had to pay "real money" for any of those, I'd just do without.
All fair points, in isolation. It's the overall gestalt of the cost-related conversation surrounding the Pi that I still don't understand. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
(thanks for not mentioning that you could just buy a used PC on ebay for less, har har har)
Only very rich people can say the price point doesn't matter for them. For normal people, buying something is always a matter of balancing alternatives, not even talking about poor people for which it is even more dire
If the community is part of the price you pay, then yes...
I’m going to be a contrarian and say that I really appreciate that they went for a high performing/more expensive SoC this time.
When I had to buy a SBC last time I couldn’t bring myself to get the Pi 4 because it was missing core features (4K HDR decode) vs the alternatives. But I love the community around Raspberry Pi and it’ll definitely increase my options with this SBC.
Too little, too late, too expensive. With the RP2040 they showed the world that they can still make very interesting products that fill the low footprint and low cost niche, but the battle for cheap and powerful Linux boards in my opinion is lost; the competition already won in that field and today is years ahead.
Mosern microcontrollers are extremely capable, I agree. But they aren't running a recognizable OS yet. It seems like the only thing holding them back is the ram size generally. The processors on these things obliterate my first linux machine. Is there a reason we have the offerings we do? A kiosk could absolutely be run on a rp2040 if it had more memory.
Probably from the RPI perspective it's just due to product segmentation. The Pi Zero 2 W is ~$15, has 512mb ram, and runs full linux with wireless compatibility, video output, etc. Easier to up-sell you on that rather than try to bridge the gap with a $10 product between the two.
I think the Pico/RP2040 works great for most basic electronics projects, and honestly you can get surprisingly far with its processor, up to even basic 3d graphics.[1]
[1] https://sites.google.com/site/tedrossin/home/electronics/ras...
The RP2040 doesn't have an MMU so it can't run full OS. The RP2040 is also really slow, 133MHz. The RP2040 doesn't have a display connector.
If you want to run kiosk, Pi Zero is a much better choice. It already has all that stuff. It is $10 vs $4. It runs normal OS.
is it though? checked all official resellers for two countries and the model is not readily available anywhere.
i figured that after a decade of selling millions of Pis, they could establish direct sales channels by now. but instead we are still stuck with re-resellers who charge a hefty markup on marketplaces people outside of electronics would ever visit.
this is like the major critcism that remains for me with their original mission. the price might have started being accessible, but to buy one has almost never been so.
RK3588 looks like a far more interesting SoC & product to me now.
Have you seen a RK3588 SBC that supports OP-TEE, i.e. allows the owner to run custom TrustZone code?
Not something I have looked into.
I've had my eye on https://turingpi.com/product/turing-rk1/
Reminder that rpi refuses to specially sell to educators, the supposed target and whole purpose of their mission. Those that need them can't get it because the purchasing processes in orgs means they're out of stock before it can be bought.
That is weird! Can you share a source?
Tomorrow I will collect my Raspberry Pi 5 :) (From the official Raspberry pi store)
they still use sd cards? jesus christ.
What would you prefer?
literally anything that does not bring the entire system, which is comprised of hardware that would be otherwise very fast, to a grinding halt, on so many common operations. why not just solder on some damn flash memory and make that the default? why force everyone to buy an SD card for every single device and deal with ungodly slow IO?