Hello. At the end of the last year, in October or November, I had this obsession or impulse to buy a Raspberry Pi. Don’t ask me why, because it was an ADHD thing of mine. Because I couldn’t find any Raspberry Pi 4 out there, I went to a Raspberry Pi 400, because it was the most similar device to a Pi 4. I was happy, I had a computer which ran better than my slightly old Mac Mini 2016, despite having 4 GB of RAM too.
And, since December, almost January, it’s collecting dust. I don’t know why I don’t use it, and I don’t know why I can’t take the decision to use it despite thinking about it sometimes. I can play games on my Mac Mini which I can’t play on my RP 400, but those games are still old, abandonware in some cases. But it’s struggling with few programs opened, including my browser, and I don’t like that, so I’m eager to use my RP 400 again.
So, tell me, what other things can I do with my RP 400, besides browsing the web, listening to music or playing emulators? Or, in other words, is a RP 400 better than a Mac Mini 2016 to do the same stuff?
You can teach the Pi400 to pretend to be a Commodore 64.
Very appropriate as both are keyboard comptuers, and both have held the title of top selling personal computer of all time.
I have a ZX Spectrum emulator. I’m not used to Commodore 64. It’s superior in some aspects, but inferior in others, and the aspect ratio of the pixels seems odd to me (they’re rectangular, not squared). Besides, I grew up with a Spectrum model, whose name I can’t remember right now. But good advice.
You may have this the wrong way round - you’ve got a solution in search of a problem. ‘I want to use this computer what is it good at?’ If you had a use-case for it, wouldn’t you be using it already? What keeps you using your Mac mini instead for general purpose computing stuff?
What do you like doing on computers? That way folks responding can tailor their suggestions. If I told you the 400 exposes the GPIO pins and you can pick up a breadboard adapter for it and interact with physical components via python, would that sound interesting to you or mean anything to you? Have you searched the internet for “raspberry pi projects” and seen anything that seems interesting to you? Do you just need help whittling options down?
I have a handful of pis, none in the 400 case though. One runs pi-hole as an ad/tracker blocker for my network, one is in a little case with a 7" screen and I use it for emulation, one is a general purpose computer, one is hooked up to my a/v receiver as an mpd player (though it’s been a while since I’ve used that).
What keeps you using your Mac mini instead for general purpose computing stuff?
Mostly video games, like Steam, or other open source video games which can run on a x86/x86_64 device but not on an ARM, like OpenRCT, FTL, Daggerfall Unity, and so on. That is the only thing.
What do you like doing on computers?
Sometimes I would like to learn some programming language, but besides that, nothing substantial. Maybe in the future I can use volumio or pi-hole. Or maybe run some fediverse instance. But as for now, the regular stuff, like music, web…
I watched videos of people doing wonderful things with their Raspberries, even building small towers with info screens, and I felt amazed. I would like to do that in the future, or just do experiments with hardware.
Sounds like you already found a use for both systems. Do continue using them like you do. Maybe install some more advanced Linux distribution to learn, e.g. Arch Linux.
I think I tried Arch Linux ARM with no success in the past. Or maybe it was Manjaro ARM. I can’t remember right now, but I know the experience was far away from expected.
You could set it up as a media centre if you don’t have a sufficient option already.
I’ve used mine for emulators, media server, and file server over time. I’ve only got a 3b though so a bit limited compared to the 4s.
I’m in the same boat. I used mine for over a year as my main computer. Now, it is set aside. I suppose it could replace my multimedia centre, or I could make it a distraction-free writing machine. A small home server? A little Syncthing backup machine? I don’t want to get rid of it. So I would like to see a few answers here as well.
you could turn it into a old school gaming station, or build something cool with it or even try linux on it.
in the last case you could sell it online for a descent amount.
I usually keep two working devices to myself, in case one of them stops working.
I was considering to record some screen captions while I’m playing retro games. I mean, my Mac Mini cannot handle powerful video games, and RAM struggles sometimes. I’ll see.
You could try some completely different operating systems like Amiga (PiMiga) or RiscOS to see a different way the world could have gone.
I didn’t know about those systems. I only knew about Raspberry Pi OS, or some linux distributions with ARM support, or even RetroPi.
The former is basically just a pre-configured high-end Amiga that runs extremely well through software emulation. It comes with a large selection of software, games and demos to play around with, and Chris Edwards has customized it to an unbelievable degree. Version 3 is the latest.
RiscOS is at least as interesting from a user interface perspective, but perhaps a little less fun in the software department. You know that ARM chip that’s in your Pi? That came from the company that also made RiscOS, so this is the original native ARM OS. You might want to watch a little video about it first (there are some great ones on youtube) to understand just how differently it works.
I mean, whatever you want really. Think of things that having a low power computer that could potentially run 24/7 could do, that an desktop/laptop would be too expensive or noisy to do. I’ll give you a few examples of my use cases, though mine is a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB.
I have a couple of smart lights and switches, however the app is incredible bad and they have no support for Apple HomeKit, so I use Homebridge to control them and integrate into shortcuts.
Like you, I also enjoy playing games in steam, but I have a little too many games, so while I’m working ArchiSteamFarm is running to get me some card drops.
I also am quite fond of having multiple backups of things, so I pay an cloud drive to backup both photos and files as well as having an HDD connected to my RPi, running both Immich and Nextcloud for backing up promos and files respectively.