Yeah I am loving all these micro Linux computer options. Not much bigger than a raspberry pi but it’s a full computer. If you need gpio you can hook up an Arduino through USB and connect super easily. The one I have been using even has an integrated video card. All for around $100 and they are always in stock lol.
I was thinking more along the lines of battery powered operations. I can stick a Pi, a car battery, a solar panel into a weather proof box and set it in the woods if I needed to.
It’s just an example, but you can pull an old car battery from the junkyard and they have better temperature extremes. NiMH from a wrecked hybrid is also a good option for durability.
Such as? I’ve been looking to buy one recently. Are there any you could recommend for an amateur that wants to host totally random small services on a microcomputer?
I’m not the one you replied to, but I bought an Odroid when it was difficult to get a pi. I wouldn’t say it’s in the same category. It’s bigger, more expensive than normal pi prices and more powerful. It’s probably perfect for what you’re looking for. Where you might run into trouble is if you have very tight power consumption requirements or plan to use add on boards.
They now require a special power supply for it to work else it just crashes under load. Their use of USB C is insanely confusing because it doesn’t work with any normal USB C psu.
This power supply costs 15 bucks which conveniently isn’t included in the price. Also a heat sink that costs 6 bucks.
Also they stuck with micro hdmi which sucks. (even more special accessories needed)
The required accessories almost cost as much as just an old pi.
I hope the community jumps over to Rockchip based boards soon. Pi has taken the communities open source efforts and spit in their face.
Risc5 is also interesting but that seems to be a far bigger task since it need recompilation of a lot of existing stuff
Is there a RasPi alternative that’s competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.
I could say the Orange Pi 5, however Orange Pi’s ports currently tend to only work with specific accessories which they already wrote drivers for themselves. It’s not like they’re blocking other devices, but just like how RPI still needs a lot of work to support GPU’s with drivers, Orange Pi probably needs even more.
The integrated GPU is pretty good though.
Most alternatives to RPI use a Rockchip such as the RK3566 for mid range and RK3588 for high end stuff.
There’s also the new cheap 15 bucks LuckFox Pico with Rockchip RV1106 with a small NPU for AI projects, kind of a Pi Pico alternative.
Thank you for your recommendation. I’ve looked at some of those SoCs and they’re impressive but none of them do what I’m looking for. I want to make a graveyard for my old GPUs, but without the power overhead I have right now with them configured as essentially a mining rig that’s folding proteins instead of guessing the hash. I understand that the potential power saved by using ARM or RISC over x86/64 is a few dozen watts at best and chosing an SoC over a desktop platform hamstrings any opportunity for scaling, but it’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time. It doesn’t have to be practical.
Whenever I am doing different projects I go with RasPi alternatives. I agree they’re cheaper and superior.
Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it’s so sad what’s become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.
Yeah power seems like such a small thing but for an SBC it’s a pretty big deal.
The power usage is also pretty crushing for it the Pi’s usage in hobby Robotics. Finally we have some computing power but now it’s unusable because how are you going to get 5V5A from a powerbank? We could power the Pi4 from a decent USB C supporting powerbank, But this is no longer the case for the Pi5.
If they supported “normal” USB PD then at least a powerbank with quick-charge support (9v3a) would work and give you the same total 25W wattage. And the PD USB chargers would have been way cheaper because 9v3A get mass produced. This 5V5A is some Apple tier of “propriatary” standard and I really wonder why they did it.
I refuse to admit 5v5a is USB PD. This is like USB3.1gen2by4 Rev 9001
USB PD was meant for
15w = 5v3a
30w = 9v3a
45w =15v3a
60-100w = 20v3-5a
Phones that wanted to do it different made up their own name with blackjack and WOOX charging. I don’t need the Pi foundation single handedly screwing this up.
Even the recommended 5V3A supply for the Pi4 is non-standard and requires you to either buy the official power brick or wade through a sea of sketchy Chinese knockoffs that may or may not deliver their rated power. I don’t understand why they haven’t explored alternative connectors or slapped a voltage regulator on the board in order to use a 12V supply. 5V5A USB is just ridiculous. USB only makes sense when you’re using universal requirements, but this might as well be a barrel connector as you can’t use any normal USB charger with it.
I’m assuming it’s like the Nintendo switch USBC lead which technically is standard but doesn’t really work to charge anything else. but at least you can use normal USBC leads to charge the switch so it’s not too bad.
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.
They do not post any update guides for newer Debian releases and basically only support new deployments.
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 github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1224
I agree that the 3B+ was the best Pi but for other reasons:
The Pi 3B+ had the perfect balance between performance and price with the performance being good enough at the time.
Design flaws at launch. Remember the Pi4 CC1 & CC2? POE getting pulled from the market?
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.
They put big customers first and let everybody else starve during the shortage. This forced me to alternatives and I have to say they work just as good and cost less.
Jacking up retail prices: Even Intel x86 is now cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.
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 operating at 5V input might be a technical constraint for them. Compatibility revisions for existing hardware are a lot more difficult if the input voltage is 9x higher. Addressing that isn’t as easy as slapping a buck converter on the board.
Not saying requiring 5A was the right call, just that I can see reasons for not using USB-PD.
We are not talking about 9 times higher. 3A at 9V would be enough.
I am currently looking in the Docs and it is really confusing. It states that the PI 5 has a PMIC on board but still saying it boots up only when the 5A is present… So not sure what is going on here.
And looking at the PD 3.1 standard it looks like 5V 5A is actually in the spec in the new Version…
Completely abandoned their original hobbyist customer base and sent all their inventory to B2B sales channels and scalpers for several years.
And now that they’re finally providing B2C vendors with stock, they’ve jacked up the prices by 100% to 300%.
Don’t forget the Raspberry Pi foundation was supposed to be a nonprofit and the only reason they’re the premier SBC is the community. Other boards have better specs, at a better price, with better features. The community support, the hobbyists, are the primary reason why they are what they are.
That’s just one bad action, but their had been plenty others recently. Some other comments here have provided information you should read, such as hiring police officers who specialized in using Pi’s for surveillance…
Tbh I can understand why they dedicated all of their stock to industrial customers instead of individuals. If back then they’d put all of their stock on the open market, it would’ve been scalped instantly. But what’s even more important is that there are businesses who’s products rely on the Pi being available, and tbh I’d rather have businesses using a Pi for their products instead of having to switch to a proprietary solution that nobody can service in 5 years.
Also: if you ever really needed a pi, you could’ve asked them via e-mail and they’d hook you up with one or a couple
The issue was they didn’t direct the stock to the industry. They directed the stock to large customers and the small companies had no inventory at all for years or were squeezed (by the market) to the limit with a Pi4 going for $200 and more instead of $50.
The Pi CEO already went out in an interview and was like we did the right thing and would do it again. As such it was pathetic (to me) when they launched the Pi5 and were like community first. To be honest, they probably know that they need initial community support/software packages to sell it to their primary customer: Big companies.
I’ve been feeling this as well. I’m not too into the Pis but I have one on my shelf for a “one day” project. Looking at the pi5 it’s way too expensive I feel like it’s lost its true niche and sold out being “too mainstream”
I need to look further into single chip computer things cause I’ve seen some competitors come out on my feeds. Hoping there’s an affordable alternative to the Pi5 that beings back the Pi3 feeling.
I’ve bought, owned, and used, Pi’s since the original. The Raspberry Pi 5 is the first version that I will not purchase and deploy, so fuck off with your bullshit and go back to shilling for YouTube advertisers, or whatever other corporate interest tickles your fancy, just take it somewhere else.
I thought I would love a power button but after installing my pi4 in a case with one, I found myself setting the jumper to “always on” after every small power outage took my server offline and I had to drag my lazy butt to my pi to turn it back on.
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. www.banana-pi.org
Most alternatives use Rockchips such as Rk3566 or 3588 which are better in every way to the Pi chips of their respective price points. As long as they don’t use the Allwinner chips it’s usually decent out of the box but still a bit lacking.
I like Orange Pi more. They have pretty good out of the box documentation and a good range of hardware.
Radxa is also an option but they seem to offer the same stuff as Orange Pi but more expensive.
I used a lepotato on my last project in place of a pi3 but libre computer totally has rockchip boards available as well. Price wise seemed decent, documentation was decent enough for me and more importantly I could actually get one.
I don’t expect it either, which is why these things don’t make sense anymore, and why I actually recently passed them up for an X86 competitor. Prices of RPi’s have inflated, supply has gone down to nothing, and all the while all sorts of competition has entered the SBC scene that provides a much better value.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the RPi and I feel like a real cool nerd with bare PCBs sitting around my house, but they’re just too expensive now.
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
Biggest benefit of those things is that they come with SATA ports so you can use them to build a <$100 2-bay NAS which is about half the price of popular competitors but with way more power.
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.
The cheapest rpi that isn’t a zero or pico started at $35. You can buy a Pi 4 Model B 1GB for $35 on pishop.us right now.
The pi 5 won’t ever be $35 because that’s not the price point it was designed to hit. That’s why they have a range of products, so you can buy the one that fits your budget.
Of course the pi 4 is still part of the product range. It’s still being actively manufactured and sold. Same for the pi3.
As far as memory size, that wasn’t part of your original complaint. You want a $35 computer, that’s how much you get. The original pi was $35 and had 256mb of ram.
-edit also, $35 in 2012 is $47 today with inflation. The pi 4 is a crazy good deal and readily available. This complaint just has no merit.
Of course the pi 4 is still part of the product range. It’s still being actively manufactured and sold.
Its a 5-year old product. With 5 year old specs.
As far as memory size, that wasn’t part of your original complaint.
Yes I also didn’t specify a clock speed, storage size, network speed, etc. What I meant was a modern version of an old product with similarly modern specs.
$35 in 2012 is $47 today
And yet the Pi5 starts at $60.
You’re also missing the other half of this conversation where other SBCs have come way down in price.
Le Potato, Orange Pi, Zima products, Rockchip, not to mention all the X86 mini PCs, old office PCs, etc.
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