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.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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

Fuck, if you can’t figure out what to do with them, give them to me and I will! There’s so many fun art projects you can get up to with Pis.

spez_,

I say bin them. Throw them into the ocean

TrickDacy,
@TrickDacy@lemmy.world avatar

Username checks out

shalva97,

Don’t bin them, sell them

empireOfLove2,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn’t shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you’re literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.

Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC’s from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.

MangoPenguin,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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

It’s because the price point is really high now. There’s nothing wrong with the hardware you have.

JoeKrogan,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

I have a microserver and various pis ( zero w, 2x 3b+ and a pi b)

With the exception of the zero w they are all still in action.

The pi b connects to the pi touchscreen and displays photos from a directory every 5 minutes.

The 2x3bs are running kodi to stream from my server.

The zero w was a camera recording and streaming 24/7 but I stopped it as I wanted to do other stuff with it.

cashews_best_nut,

I kept buying Pi Zero Ws, hats and phats then put them all in a drawer cos I couldn’t decide what to do with them. I think I’ve got about 7 or 8. I really should do something with them.

bfg9k,
@bfg9k@lemmy.world avatar

pwnagotchi family

cashews_best_nut,

Holy shit!! I didn’t know I needed this. I’m so building some - thank you! 👍

akrot,

Link for the lurkers github.com/evilsocket/pwnagotchi

Pwnagotchi is an A2C-based “AI” leveraging bettercap that learns from its surrounding WiFi environment to maximize the crackable WPA key material it captures (either passively, or by performing authentication and association attacks). This material is collected as PCAP files containing any form of handshake supported by hashcat, including PMKIDs, full and half WPA handshakes.

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

possiblylinux127,

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

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.

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.

colt45,

Still got’em all. Pis are 3d printing, running small automation projects, running on solar in my back yard. I have far too many others that I took a hit on, honestly. Acme Arietta G25 is one that I’ve really only done some hardware dev on. I’ll prob be buried with it. I had a Pocket C.H.I.P that was sick, but after the company fell, I ditched it. Omega Onion 2 hasn’t seen any electrons since about. Two weeks after I received it. But yeah, five liters of fun…

haui_lemmy,

I have a pi which I use as an apple tv/firestick alternative which works very well and would be pretty pointless with a larger pc imo. Servers I dont do with small PIs but indeed old computers. I think all kinds of ultra movable devices will be good with PI and derivatives.

For folks that want to get into it: pine64 is open source but I havent tried it yet. Thinking of it though. They even have a watch.

possiblylinux127, (edited )

The two things to keep in mind with pine64 is that they ship hardware before the software is ready and because they are less popular there is less support.

I like there hardware but its just something to keep in mind. The good news is that to my knowledge all of their single board computers can run regular linux.

haui_lemmy,

Thanks for mentioning that. Iirc they use risc-v chips and linux supports it so it should work I guess. Will check it out.

possiblylinux127,

If you are unsure what to get definitely don’t get Risc-v as the user land software is not well supported.

I would get a rockpro64

haui_lemmy,

I‘m hearing mixed things about risc-v. Its community supported. Do you have experience with the shortcomings?

possiblylinux127,

The main shortcoming is that the software hasn’t matured yet. Its true you could use Debian or Gentoo and get a decent machine but I would hold off using it for anything important. You won’t find Risc-V images on docker hub and flathub only barely has arm support.

haui_lemmy,

Got it. So except the OS, software is going to be pretty tough. Would that mean installing from source still works or not?

possiblylinux127,

It should

haui_lemmy,

Ok. Thanks. :)

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

luna,
@luna@lemmy.catgirl.biz avatar

Sbcs are neat and raspi is still cool imo, i guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too and the recent releases with 6, 8, 12, cores are enticing to a group of people. Really depends on what you want to do, right tool for the right job etc

FutileRecipe, (edited )

I guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too

People always knew x86s existed. I think the main culprit is the price gap between them and Pis is decreasing. Pis used to be around $35, which has skyrocketed to 3-5x MSRP, plus they were unavailable for a long time. Now the Pi’s performance to price ratio isn’t justifiable to most, so people pay a little more for the x86 but get so much more capability.

notfromhere,

I have a small cluster of Pis running k3s kubernetes and running several services for my household. Yea they could all run on a single beefy server but I had fun learning it all.

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