So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers?

I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

tburkhol,

Pi 4’s were hard to get there for a while. Pi 5’s are expensive. Lot of other SBCs are also expensive, as in not all that much cheaper than a 2-3 generations old low-end x86. That makes them less attractive for special purpose computing, especially among people who have a lot of old hardware lying around.

Any desktop from the last decade can easily host multiple single-household computer services, and it’s easier to maintain just one box than a half dozen SBCs, with a half dozen power supplies, a half dozen network connections, etc. Selfhosters often have a ‘real’ computer running 24/7 for video transcoding or something, so hosting a bunch of minimal-use services on it doesn’t even increase the electric bill.

For me, the most interesting aspect of those SBCs was GPIO and access to raw sensor data. In the last few years, ‘smart home’ technology seems to have really exploded, to where many of the sensors I was interested in 10 years ago are now available with zigbee, bluetooth or even wifi connectivity, so you don’t need that GPIO anymore. There are still some specific control applications where, for me, Pi’s make sense, but I’m more likely to migrate towards Pi-0 than Pi-5.

SBCs were also an attractive solution for media/home theater displays, as clients for plex/jellyfin/mythtv servers, but modern smart-TVs seem mostly to have built-in clients for most of those. Personally, I’m still happy with kodi running on a pi-4 and a 15 year old dumb TV.

brygphilomena,

This is how I feel.

I would much rather have a single machine running vms which I can easily snapshot and back up rather than a dozen small machines I have to deal with power supplies and networking.

SBCs have specific use cases, usually where they need to interact with hardware. That’s what made the rpi so great with it’s GPIO and hats. But that’s a rather small use case.

BCsven,

I have pi4 with OpenMediaServer for SMB shares and videos to TV, it has docker and portainer add ins; so that single Pi has CUPS, Trillium Notes, PaperlessNG, homeassistant, kanboard, pdftk converter, syncthing. It could have more, I just ran out of applications I might need. no issues with performance.

socphoenix, (edited )

Man my home server IDLES at 76 watts per hour running x86. Now mind you I need the x86 to perform some of the functions I want. This thing works as an NAS, nextcloud, media server, kiwix, security camera (zoneminder), remote desktop (xrdp), runs home assistant, gpu AI upscaling for photos, and finally screeches along running a virtual pipe organ I built that takes 69 GB of RAM to run.

If I could do that with raspberry pi’s I would in a heartbeat! the power savings alone would eventually pay for them. If it’s doing what you want then don’t worry about them. My pi400 works as a remote desktop client and one day I hope more of this stuff will work well on it/a future generation so I can ditch the tower, energy usage, and noise.

notfromhere, (edited )

What is that virtual pipe organ and why is it using 69 GB RAM when running?

socphoenix, (edited )

It is software (grandorgue) that pretends to be a pipe organ (the instrument). In order to run fast enough it needs to load every sound sample into memory to play, as well as usually multiple kinds of sound endings. I play professionally on a “small to mid sized” pipe organ with 1,438 pipes. The one I load for use at home has more than that!

The instrument was from the 1960s and I rebuilt it with a pi pico that you can see here, and you can hear the before (analog sound cards) versus one of the organs I’ve loaded into it here.

nilloc,

That’s amazing sounding! Worth the watts, even if I did get church ptsd listening to it.

socphoenix,

Hahaha yeah…it’s in many ways unfortunate that if you want to play/enjoy this instrument churches are the only option most of the time :/

Definitely worth the watts though!

nilloc,

I’ve been recently bingeing Look Mum No Computer’s rescue/re-build/midi-fication of an organ that had been shoehorned into an organist’s home, after the church had been converted. I’m more of an engineer than musician, but it’s amazing how much goes into the layering of sounds from so many different pipes.

My 6 yo loves learning with such a cool soundtrack too.

baatliwala,

I thought this was about FIFA

JohnFoe, (edited )

If you’re not into the whole Google Home/Alexa/Apple Home echo system, and have Home Assistant already running, you could use them to build a bunch of smart assistants with Open Thread Border Routers.

I was just looking at doing this in my house but the cost of Pis vs used Google Gen2s with Thread Border Routers built in was cost prohibitive for me.

ikidd, (edited )
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

I’m just going to say, I shit on them all along. ARM is relatively expensive, bespoke and difficult to compile for because of that. Anyone can puke out a binary for amd64 that works everywhere. And way, way faster than some sad little SOC. Especially weird is spending $1000 on a clusterboard with CMs that had half of the power of a 5 year old X86 SFF desktop you could pick up for $75 and attach some actual storage to.

Maybe RISC-V will change all that, but I doubt it. Sure hope so though. The price factor has already leaned the right way to make it worthwhile.

possiblylinux127,

Pine64 makes some cool devices that run on 100% free software.

shalva97,

Don’t bin them, sell them

TrickDacy,
@TrickDacy@lemmy.world avatar

I missed this sentiment. Just bought my first RPI (5) and it’s a neat little toy. I have some pretty specific requirements I’ll have to work toward but I like tinkering with it. The size, price and low power consumption beat any of the mini PCs I found. Then again I’m probably out of the loop

halm,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

So SBCs are shit now?

Nothing changed, the hardware is the same as before. Your little pi servers are still doing the exact same work they did before. The only variables are prices on SBCs vs used small factor x86s, and the short, short attention span of terminally online hobbyists.

Use whatever you like, no need to race after others’ subjective (and often hyperbolic) judgment.

iluminae,

I am nearly complete migrating my ceph cluster and nomad compute cluster to arm :shrug:

qjkxbmwvz, (edited )

I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.

Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding — so it presumably won’t draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I’m guessing it’s ballpark accurate.

Works flawlessly for Immich of course.

The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.

For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!

BCsven,

They are still good, arm is awesome. i have Pi4 as OpenMediaVault and docker/homeassistant, etc. Friend gave me a Pi2 surprisingly OMV6 installs on it (even though it ia technically not supported), that one became a PiHole. My 13 year old iomega arm NAS just got converted to a debian minidlna server. Uses 20% of the 256MB RAM.

node815,

I got lost with setting up a nice inbox downloader to store all my emails on a HDD attached to my RPI4, but haven’t quite mastered the SMTP server part or found the right software to run on it. It’s currently powered off waiting for a reflash of the SD Card so I can try again. The end goal for mine is to set up fetchmail and have it grab from my inboxes then imap capabilities so I can read it in Thunderbird. (Don’t talk to me about webmail, I know it’s the way but I’m older than Star Wars (Original one) and am stuck in my ways. Now get off of my lawn!

Seriously though, I have tinkered with it before as an AdguardHome Server, but somehow, my latency increased so I dropped that. Most of it’s life was spent hosting Home Assistant on it until I moved that to the umm…more controversial Proxmox VM method. I’m also on the fence about setting up the Raspberry Pi Nextcloud on it. (Maybe).

Here is a good resource for 36 different things you could possibly do with yours.

helenslunch, (edited )
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

SBC (specifically RPis) got more expensive. x86 got more powerful, more importantly more efficient, and cheaper. Also X86 has more software built for it than ARM.

There are a few X86 SBCs now though.

If you already have SBCs and they’re doing what you need, I see no reason to switch.

snekerpimp,

Jeff Geerling made the comparison in a video recently. Did not get to finish it yet, but he brought up pros and cons of both, and there are use cases for both ARM and x86. I still use mine even though I have an old dell tower as an x86 server, mainly for netboot.xyz and pivpn, because I can run it with poe. As long as the switch has power those services will be available.

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