• Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.

          At the same time, for more serious projects, it’s lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.

          I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.

          • Norgur ( Norgur@kbin.social ) 
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            You know that RPi 5 actually does have PCIe, right?
            And you know that RPI Zero 2W is as fast as an Raspberry pi 3, so plenty fast for the purpose you described, right?

            And you know that the RPi 4 and 5 in particular are so fast that they can easily power your homelanb, 3d printer, smart home and NAS without breaking a sweat, right?

            • Yet they’re still inferior to even older x86 hardware. You can pick up a used NUC (or similar) for less than a pi 4 and it blows it out of the water on performance, while using only marginally more power.

              • Norgur ( Norgur@kbin.social ) 
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                Look, I don’t know why there is so much Opposition to the pi,.since it’s just one of many tools we have at our disposal to get stuff done the way we want it and I don’t get why there has to be an objective best all around solution. If the Pi is what you are looking for: buy that, it’s nice that it has the things it has, it’s relatively low power and it’s tiny. If you are looking for more, buy more.

                Of course there is faster stuff that’s older. For my setup, I want tiny and I want fast enough to host low-performance stuff like Home assistant, Baby buddy, an art stack, you get the jist. For this purpose a Pi that.goes into a literal drawer was exactly the thing I was looking for. It’s basically used to replace the VPS I have for security sensitive stuff (Vaultwarden). So “marginally more power” is still wasted power for me. It sits in a tiny cabinet next to my router now, happily serving me the wheel of time audiobooks and telling me when my.kid has.last eaten.

                • I don’t know why there is so much Opposition to the pi

                  It’s because they’ve become way too expensive for what they are. They made perfect sense and filled a gap when they were priced half of what they are now. They’ve completely lost the direction or purpose they once had, or intentionally changed it to be something else entirely. And it seems that just doesn’t align well with many people.

            • Yeah, I have to use some weird adapter cable to get some cards to somehow maybe work a bit, but still probably need some external power supply, because there’s no way an RPi can deliver 75W.

              Yes, it’s doable, but in the sense that I could build a house with just a saw and a forest.

        • Pringles ( Pringles@lemm.ee ) 
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          I was in the market for something low budget with two nics for a local firewall. Since this gave me a nice discount on top, I ordered a zimaboard now as it’s pretty much exactly what I need. Thanks for the tip

        • A refurbished thin client from eBay. Or a refubed sff/usff.
          They are pretty much the same price these days, and come with a case/PSU.
          If you don’t need the GPIO and special connectors that a raspberry pi has, sff/usff is going to be cheaper, has upgradeable ram&sata and some have pcie3.0 slot.
          Running pihole (let’s be honest, a huge reason people buy a pi)? Get a usff/sff, slap an SSD (probably the cost of a raspberry pi case/PSU/SD-card) in there and an intel i340-t4 4port NIC (this is extra. Can just use the onboard NIC), and install proxmox. Then run pihole in a VM. And now you have spare capacity to run a whole bunch of other fun things, with the safety net of snapshots and backups so if you mess up a config you can just roll another VM.

          • Norgur ( Norgur@kbin.social ) 
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            That’s about 4x the price for pihole. Pihole runsnon a zero 2w with headroom to spare. So it’s 16€+SD card+power supply you got lying around. What you described is a pretty convoluted setup for that. I had pihole+ Octoprint running on a 2W before. Worked flawlessly in my setup.

      • That’s fine, but that means that it’s no longer anything special for a lot of the home server stuff a lot of people do with them.

        There are loads of cheap, small (not as small, but small enough for most people not to care) used x86 systems (eg thinkcentre) that I can grab instead.

  • ShortN0te ( ShortN0te@lemmy.ml ) 
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    The 3B+ was probably the high of the raspberry pi. It is still pretty much unrivaled in terms of idle power consumption and energy efficiency (or at least i have not seen any other SBC that got below 0.5 Watts on idle) on the consumer market.

    But i have trouble investing further into them.

    1. They do not post any update guides for newer Debian releases and basically only support new deployments.
    2. It looks like they are abandoning their older products. vcgencmd for example is still broken on the 3B+. Since they “fixed” it for the 4B. See https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1224
      • ShortN0te ( ShortN0te@lemmy.ml ) 
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        • Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.

        Was not even thinking about that. Implementing USB-PD is so easy these days. Basically just putting a chip there who handles the PD and then a step down(or whatever) converter which they already have anyway. (See ebay USB PD trigger for implementations)

        That is so dump.

        Talking about hardware flaws, i think they even fucked up the USB-C implementation on the PI 4. They put the resistor on the wrong pins or somthing. Dont remeber exactly.

  • I think pi is on the road to mainstream. Probably time to shift to an open source hardware competitor to boost it. Not saying pi is bad, I have one and its great. Those like me who love tinkering should consider going the extra mile and „radicalize“ themselves to open hardware. The project I hear the most of is Banana-PI. https://www.banana-pi.org

    • Does it have dual band wifi, wide software support, dual 4k output at 60hz, 4gb of ddr4, NVME support via addon?

      Your cheap thin client likely isn’t a modern computer. The PI 5 is, and costing another $30 isnt exactly a roaring failure.

      • 4GB of DDR4 is a lot worse than 8GB of DDR3. Those (slightly) older business SFF computers are plenty capable compared to the pi and their software support is at least as strong.

        You’re also going to have to add several peripherals to the pi that aren’t included in the price.

        • mosiacmango ( mosiacmango@lemm.ee ) 
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          It’s pretty good ddr4, but okay. You can have 8Gb of ddr4 for another $20. Not exactly a bank burner for a server or client.

          How about the other features? Does that 8GB ddr3 computer have dual band wifi? Dual monitor 4k support at 60hz? Native hardware hevc/vp9 decoding?

          Id love to see a link to these $30 PC people are talking about. Even older SFF aren’t going for $30 generally, unless youre buying in lots.

          Can you beat a raspi 5 with a recent-ish SFF going for $200? You bet, but that flips the “pi is bad value for the money” on its head.

          • B0rax ( B0rax@feddit.de ) 
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            I‘m not sure about the $30. but look at the Fujitsu Futro S740. They can be had for about $50 with 8gb of ram and an included ssd, have support for dual 4K monitors and so on. No WiFi out of the box, but they do have a second m.2 that can be used with a cheap WiFi card if that is what you need (or you could install a second ssd).

      • Jode ( Jode@midwest.social ) 
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        Is it possible to get these pi’s for that price now though? Because I member 2 years ago looking at paying rediculous scalper pricing for a pi to run octoprint on, and by the grace of my brother having a spare one was able to avoid spending 150 bucks on scalper bullshit.

        • mosiacmango ( mosiacmango@lemm.ee ) 
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          That’s a 2013 CPU. Pretty ancient, likely no modern codec hardware support. Also look like it hits a 208 on geekbench 5 single treaded, where a raspi 5 is getting 574. Multi treaded, you have the above at 708, versus the Raspi 5’s 1608.

          So just off the cuff on the cpu, the +$30 raspi5 has 3x single thread speed, and 2x multithread speed. The PI does even better on newer tests. That doesnt take into account the large improvements to RAM either that you get going from decade old ddr3 to ddr4, or wifi 5, or being able to add an nvme, etc. Looks to me that youre getting a lot more computer in a $60 raspi5 than this $30 sff.

          Im betting this $30 sff stacks up better against a $30 raspi 4, in which case, yeah, that tracks.

            • mosiacmango ( mosiacmango@lemm.ee ) 
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              So your argument is that a raspi 5 is too good of a machine for most use cases? That’s a wholley different argument than the “raspi 5 is too expensive for its specs.”

              I would argue that you can’t really speak to people’s individual computing needs without knowing what they are.

              Im personally using a 5 as a media box with libreelec, and after paying for everything, I’m out $90. That’s still $10 cheaper than a roku 4k ultra, and it does everything and much, much more without locking me into a ad-riddled ecosystem on static hardware. That’s a great value for money that the $30 SFF options can’t compete with.