Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That

I often end up giving the opposite unpopular opinion: RPis are overkill for a lot of DIY IoT uses. Want to have something that opens your curtains or flashes some RGB lights in your hallway or whatever? Pick yourself up an Arduino / ESP32 with built-in WiFi, often an Ethernet port, tons of GPIO. It consumes milliwatts of power, boots in under a second, and is cheap enough to be disposable.

I typically see two kinds of raspi hate, and only one of them is reasonable imo. The first is stuff like this article, where you can probably get something better than a raspi these days for about the same price (especially when you consider scalper pricing) or just run a docker image in a server you can make with an old computer. This is very good advice, especially now that getting a raspi at MSRP is borderline impossible.<p>The second is most of the comments here, declaring that novices should just learn embedded programming and use an arduino for everything! If you&#x27;re in this camp, you should consider _why_ people chose to use raspis for project. and watch your ass because an EE is about to arrive to drag you for not just using a 555 timer in your projects.

I disagree with the author here. The vast majority of rpi users aren’t trying to purchase the optimal hardware for their project, they’re trying to tinker around with something fun. Literally all of my rpi projects have short lifespans since I know the rpi is able to do so many things, so I use it in many different projects.<p>Rpis are almost never the optimal&#x2F;cheapest&#x2F;best option for a project, but they’re almost always the optimal computer to reuse in 10 different projects over and over!

From the article:<p>&quot;I migrated my Pi-hole from an actual RPi&quot;<p>Can a RPI be a final solution? It sure can! Can an RPI be a bridge to something else? Yes and that is where it shines!<p>Having a RPI or two around gives you tools to experiment with. It can be a server, or it can act as an IOT device, or a USB HID device or...<p>Some of my RPI projects have been replaced with old laptops, or Beelink boxes, or ESP hardware. I think of RPI as a first step, that lets me play before committing to something (and spending).

My homelab, up until the beginning of last year, consisted completely of Raspberry Pi&#x27;s - gen 1 through 4. Because they&#x27;re so resource constrained, adding new services in my homelab meant adding more Pi&#x27;s. Pi&#x27;s themselves then became near-impossible to buy, which meant I couldn&#x27;t expand anymore.<p>I bought a set of four 10-year-old HP rackmount servers instead - 56 cores, 88GB of RAM, and 12TB of storage total (note: I pay for the electricity solely with home solar, so the ~400w idle isn&#x27;t a financial concern). They run Kubernetes for workload scheduling. All told, it cost about $500 to acquire all of the equipment.<p>Honestly, I haven&#x27;t looked back to the Pi days. Provisioning a new service in my homelab used to have a lead time of two weeks (acquire a Pi, image it, install services, etc.), and now I can deploy something new in 15-30 minutes. I learned a ton through running systems on resource-constrained ARM32 devices like those, but it&#x27;s ultimately not a great use for them.

I&#x27;ve been thinking about this for a year or so. I currently have 7 Pis (5 Pi0ws and 2 Pi3s) running various projects at home. I started collecting them on Pi day each year, and any time I want to try something new I just grab a new one and go. A few weeks ago I took one on a plane and installed Pi OS on a 0w using the plane&#x27;s wifi, then SSHed to the pi over USB and played with it that way. At home they&#x27;re hanging off various UPS and power outlets, I once forgot about one powered by my basement router and I didn&#x27;t notice for two years. It was still happily serving an old version of my cookbook.<p>Yeah, there&#x27;s things I want to move to more powerful hardware. But it&#x27;s a step up: it&#x27;s more expensive, more setup, a more persistent system (even if everything&#x27;s in containers). I wouldn&#x27;t steer people away from using Pis based on that tradeoff, they still have a high ceiling for what they can do and when you do bump into that ceiling it&#x27;s much easier to justify spending 10-100x for the right hardware. It took me 7 years of tinkering to hit that ceiling with my projects, I don&#x27;t regret staying on Pis for so long.

If you don&#x27;t need GPIO, then you don&#x27;t need a RPi. They are useful, but an old laptop can do most things a Pi can do, and putting them to use keeps them out of the landfill longer.

Having worked on safety-critical, custom circuitry and programming, particularly in the entertainment engineering field, I find the prolific use of Arduinos, RPis, and ESPs, to be concerning. You pay more for an equivalent industrial board, but there&#x27;s been a lot more QA&#x2F;QC done on it. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I started with Basic Stamps from Parallax back in the 90s to control window display animatronics in NYC department stores. Great stuff. Fun. But with all the emphasis on high-integrity hardware and software, Rust (I prefer Ada&#x2F;SPARK2014 for such things until Rust matures in this field), and hobbyist programmers creating show control or machinery controls, I worry that people don&#x27;t realize that you don&#x27;t have the same assurances you do with industrial-grade equipment. I opened a very large box a vendor created to control their overhead rigging for a show I was running and found an Arduino and when I had the code audited found a state that would be unsafe. Most tech workers in entertainment would not catch this sort of thing. Yet, this is machinery being deployed above an audience. Greatfully, there are new standards being developed to catch this sort of thing, but these standards&#x2F;guidelines lag behind, and with the pace of production, I am sure there is a lot being done out there that is unsafe.

I know that you didn&#x27;t ask, but my $0.02 is that yes, RasPi&#x27;s are unreliable. If you use one for as an unattended remote server, it will do you well to include a hardware watchdog that power cycles the device after it hangs. But modern NUCs seem to take MINUTES to boot the BIOS.<p>I had been using various BeagleBones and found them more reliable than RasPi&#x27;s and faster to boot than the NUCs in the office.<p>But depending on the availability of a TI part is the road to perdition, so maybe I&#x27;m just using the wrong NUC models.

I generally agree, there are a few places I&#x27;ll throw a pi, because it&#x27;s small and easy to set up and just hack something.. Like a print&#x2F;scan server or an easy way to get a microphone or webcam hooked up to the LAN..<p>But a lot of times, an ESP8266 or even just ATmega part is just fine.. other times, some old laptop or PC is way better..<p>Currently, my only Pis in operation is the Pi400 on the living-room TV for retropie, and the one attached to the printer and scanner to network those without having to install weird stuff on the windows&#x2F;linux clients

Agree with this article - those little Prodesks are available very cheap and with some impressive configurations for power vs. strength.<p>I have an i3-8100T version which includes on-cpu video encoding, ideal for Plex. Runs unRAID. Replaced a much larger system which took much more power.

&gt; A complete Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB kit is admittedly cheaper — typically $150 these days<p>Raspberry Pi was great for $35. For $150 not so much.

RPi prices are so inflated they barely make sense at all, let alone for all these little &quot;give my plants half a cup of water every day&quot; projects.

Silence, volume and stability are 3 features they also have, atleast with heatsinks like these: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;move.rupy.se&#x2F;file&#x2F;cluster_client.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;move.rupy.se&#x2F;file&#x2F;cluster_client.png</a><p>SD cards are saturated by 2W TDP Raspberry 2, but the 4 has workload speeds for CPU intense operations.<p>This cloud hosting service has been running from my home fiber with better uptime than AWS&#x2F;GCP for the last 10 years: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;host.rupy.se" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;host.rupy.se</a><p>Longevity is the key value.

If your alternative to RPis are used NUCs or laptops, than you lost me.<p>I want reliable and quiet. I have RPis running for more than a decade everyday with not a single crash.<p>In what conditions are those used PSU? Who knows. I&#x27;m also not a fan of bringing other people&#x27;s dust and keyboard grease along.

For prototyping, RaspberryPis will get you where you&#x27;re going faster than anything else. The Linux environment gives you speed of development. The form factor let&#x27;s you toss it in a parts bin. The GPIO gives you direct, easy access to the physical world.<p>After prototyping, redeveloping for a different platform is often not worth the cost. If you didn&#x27;t use the GPIO, switch to a NUC or similar. Or don&#x27;t.<p>Raspberry Pis are in data centers now, occupying server racks. Don&#x27;t fight the signal; retransmit.

It&#x27;s unfortunate that people don&#x27;t include nuance in their discussions. These &quot;do&quot; or &quot;don&#x27;t&quot; type articles make broad generalizations, sometimes as arguments in favor of their position.<p>For instance, using SD cards for storage is problematic for certain uses, but that doesn&#x27;t include the popular practices of using a small USB-attached SSD, nor of logging to RAM, nor of logging &#x2F; writing to NFS. That by itself is just a factor, not a reason.<p>Likewise, price and availability make the assumption that we&#x27;re talking about Raspberry Pis, which we know have gone commercial and are way too expensive and hard to get. There are many, many other kinds of Pis like Orange, Nano, Rock, et cetera.<p>There are plenty of other factors which are good or bad, depending on your situation, like power supplies - a single NUC power supply brick can be HUGE, but a single IKEA USB power adapter can power several USB devices - so it depends on your use case.<p>These are nitpicks, but what really irks me is when people make comments like this:<p>...&quot;don’t have to put up with the quirks of Raspian or running an alternative distro that has zero community&quot;<p>That&#x27;s dismissive, reductive, and a rather shitty take. Perhaps this author shouldn&#x27;t be running Linux at all because of all the quirks in each distro. Perhaps they should run Windows. Oh, wait! Windows has even more quirks, and arguably a community so large and disparate that I&#x27;d consider it worse than any community of any OS project with &quot;zero community&quot;.<p>Oh, well. My take is that Pis of all sorts are wonderful little devices that have an assortment of advantages and shortfalls for many, many use cases, and you can learn lots using those advantages and overcoming those shortfalls, if you want. That last part - &quot;if you want&quot; - means more than anything. It&#x27;s personal, and others shouldn&#x27;t tell you what you should or shouldn&#x27;t want.

Certainly agree that the Raspberry Pi&#x27;s SD card is unsuitable as a boot device if you have any issues with power failures or voltage regulation. You can boot from a USB but by the time you pay for the USB drive you are in the same price range as other Micro computers.

IMO it&#x27;s &quot;You don&#x27;t have to use a Pi for that&quot;<p>Also the later generation thin clients (i.e. Dell&#x2F;Wyse 5060, 5070) are cheaper still and also pretty good. They&#x27;re reasonably responsive for desktop tasks and can even drive 4k60 over DisplayPort.

I&#x27;ve seen people waiting months to get their hands on a Raspberry pi 4 to self-hosting bunch of apps. Not sure why. Something like an HP Elitebook G2 with a i5 and 8gb ram can be had for $110 on secondary markets like Amazon renewed or ebay. About 10x the performance compared to a Pi 4. Only thing missing is GPIO port. But even that is a easy fix for another $10-15. Only down side is the power draw. Compared to a Pi4, you&#x27;re going to see an average power draw of 20-40 watts.

I run a Mastodon server. In one of the giant floods of new users, I installed Docker on an RPi that I already had laying around and used it to increase my asynchronous worker capacity. I doubt I would have gone out and bought an RPi for that, but I had one up and running anyway, and it turned out to be perfect for the job.<p>Note that I <i>could</i> solder my own boards together from bare PCBs and components. I just don&#x27;t want to <i>have</i> to when someone else has already done the hardware work for me.

1. Too expensive. Maybe in 5-10 years, pricing will return to normalcy. When inventories are tight, they should backlog fulfilling corporate orders because they drive scarcity with deep pockets that harm innovation and accessibility for average retail customers. Have a preorder waiting list rather than unactionable &quot;out-of-stock&quot; indications that lose sales.<p>2. Probably can do the same (electronics) with an Arduino or run (a lightweight job) in a container on an existing computer.

Comparing off the shelf USED hardware to new one isn&#x27;t exactly fair.<p>Yeah, it&#x27;s option to consider but I don&#x27;t think price comparison is fair or even important here.<p>What is however is that you can just generally shove an SSD to NUC and forget about it for forever and not worry about microSD woes, finding the right case and power supply for rPi etc.<p>I think pi only gives real benefits when you actually are using the IO it provides over &quot;normal PC&quot;; or if you really need to shave that few watts off.

I am getting access denied from India.<p>“You do not have access to set-inform.com. The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site.”<p>I got an error when visiting set-inform.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;24&#x2F;unpopular-opinion-dont-use-a-raspberry-pi-for-that&#x2F;. Error code: 1020 Ray ID: 7ac01a0f4d06415e Country: IN Data center: bom06 IP: 49.37.133.177 Timestamp: 2023-03-22 17:19:49 UTC

I wanted to give my girlfriend the option to watch streams on her TV.<p>An important point was that the solution had a regular browser that worked with every streaming website out there.<p>So, I got an Asus TinkerBoard, because it had good video rendering. I constantly had issues with that thing. Updates, connection problems, etc.<p>Then the FireTV stick was released with the Silk browser. I bought one, and never went back.

I&#x27;ve been pricing out small systems recently for a light weight server at home (to use in part with a weather station). Given the lack of availability&#x2F;expense of RPi 4s and the expense of a decent NUC, I&#x27;m leaning in the direction of an M2 Mac Mini, which has better idle power than AMD64 options, and not much worse than an RPi 4.

I have been running my homelab for 2 ~ 3 years, and I never considered rpi to be one of the servers ... It is just for toys or some &quot;high school robots&quot; stuff, with 0% availability and are very fragile. How many times your SD card fail &#x2F; filesystem break &#x2F; undervolt occurs &#x2F; accidentally short-circuit? If you want to have a host running Linux 24 * 7, go with a used Thin Client on eBay (they are at least x86). If you are like me who want to build a rack at home, go with some used PowerEdge &#x2F; ProLiant gears from eBay. They do way better things than your Pi (with BMC, Xeon cores, and ECC memory, possibly), and they are cheaper as well (my PowerEdge R520 servers only cost less than C$200 each). These machines have proper CPU, hard drive, and power supply. Do not use a Pi unless you are building some IoT experiments that require GPIOs.

Why am I getting a cloudflare error? Visiting from India via Chrome. Msg: I got an error when visiting set-inform.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;24&#x2F;unpopular-opinion-dont-use-a-raspberry-pi-for-that&#x2F;. Error code: 1020 Country: IN Data center: fra08 Timestamp: 2023-03-22 13:33:46 UTC

This is a letdown of the current state of technology - guess most of us expected to be able to run a (regular distro) Linux on $2 chips that could even embed a &quot;real time processor&quot; to do the bitbanging. The opposite happen: a Raspy Zero price rivals the NUC.

The article is right, if you need a (very) low power server the rpi is unbeatable. I have tried a lot during the years to make it as robust as possible, however I find that there is only a matter of time until a power failure, regular update or even a simple reboot will render a pi unusable. And you&#x27;ll be powerless to fix whatever flavor of boot error is occurring half a world away. Never had these kinds of issues with regular servers. Perhaps if there was a way to &quot;boot to ssh&quot; to fix these...<p>Some recommend the miniPCs from Dell, Fujitsu etc. But they also have custom firmware with their own set of problems and strange design decisions which you won&#x27;t be able to change if you needed to.

The big benefit of something like a pi is that it offers the flexibility of a linux-bootable computer with the IO pin interface of an MCU. That being said, maybe there&#x27;s a cheap, easy way to get a GPIO interface on a NUC? I know there are USB to GPIO boards you can buy, but I have no idea how easy they are to use, and what the drawbacks might be. There are also extremely expensive GPIO interfaces that negate the cost-savings of using a cheap NUC.

I fully agree. We built our app testing parcour with about 10 phones, 10 nfc simulators and a Raspberry to orchestrate the whole thing.<p>The Raspberrys USB ports sometimes did not work properly and we feared that we could quickly kill the SD card. Additionally the processing power was not that great.<p>In the end we switched to an Intel N5000 notebook with a broken screen (working HDMI) that we had lying around (used price under 100€,in this condition maybe under 50€). The system now has aN uptime of over 100 days and works much better.

When you&#x27;re chasing minimum power consumption, tho, a Pi4 (in my case, a CM4) with a 200MHz base clock, a USB3 card, a SATA card with 6 SSDs attached, running 3 Alpine VMs and a couple Docker containers will idle at 12W <i>and</i> perform surprisingly well when asked to while drawing no more than 27W with every system running at full tilt. I didn&#x27;t expect it to be as good as it is, and I can&#x27;t find anything else that can touch it. But my use case is narrow and specific.

Without disputing anything in the article, I often see little to no value placed in consistency, simplicity, and repeatability with these kinds of analysis.<p>In this case, I would prefer to manage 1 set&#x2F;type of hardware for all my uses unless I really needed to deviate. If the difference is $100 in overkill for a Pi-hole, but right-sized for other use cases, I find value in the consistency.<p>1 form factor, 1 OS, 1 set of hardware compatibility, if a script works 1 place, it works everywhere, etc.

My house has one Raspberry Pi 2b for DNS (Pi Hole), and then everything else (including a second Pi Hole) is in docker containers on my file server. Between the two, I&#x27;ve been very happy.<p>The file server is an old i7 2600k that used to be my desktop PC before I added some hard drives and installed Unraid on it. Unraid makes managing docker containers incredibly easy, especially with the Community Applications and Auto Update Applications plugins.

The value of the RPi is its versatility. It&#x27;s not the optimal tool for any task, but I can be confident it will work well enough for an extremely wide range of projects. Some projects you might know exactly what you need at the start, but most times you don&#x27;t, and when you prematurely optimize you often find yourself bending over backwards to make the wrong thing work.

For me the main issue has been the storage reliability.<p>But what if there was a &quot;Pi&quot; that would boot from the network. Not local, but from Internet. With some tinkering, you could add a small network mounted drive for persisting things like configuration information. Bootup times would be long, but quite often these type of devices are not constantly turned on and off.

The thing that makes the RPi such a great choice when there are so many choices is the community and the plethora of information about the platform. Here’s the hardware and the software that we know works, and piles of people have it running right now. Mix in an unknown element and who know how it’s going to behave. Let alone where you can get help.

the rpi foundation is another example of openai-like evolution of an org - started out with a noble cause but switched course when faced with the realities.<p>the whole supply-chain fiasco was a great example of their current priorities when their arm was twisted. they started out with promoting cs education but ended up being more loyal to their corporate partners.<p>but to be fair to them, half the problem was us, who want it for cheap computing. the &quot;hackers&quot; in this site could easily achieve similar results by repurposing an old phone than to buy another one of these sbc for their home lab. to be honest, we are spoilt by the rpi ecosystem, and we choose it even when overkill because we can (or at least could until they became over $100).<p>at the end of the day, you do what you want with your wallet.

Given in Canada it&#x27;s cheaper to just buy a small Intel PC than a raspberry pi 4 of late, I&#x27;ve been exploring alternatives lower down ... ST-Micro&#x27;s stuff as an alternative to Arduino (which is also $$$ here).<p>I guess it depends on what you&#x27;re doing. I like working with hardware and low-level software.

yeah, you can use an old refurbuished pc for most of it. But running on 5W .. no. Putting it literally into the wall, no. Arduino is to much overhead upfront. It is the ideal middle ground.<p>I went with rockpi because of the shortages .. works just as well and has a little more punch.

And instead of buying more powerful hardware you can try to get the always free oracle VPS (4vcpu ARM, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage), do your compute stuff there, and keep the RPI as pi-hole&#x2F;home assistant only. It will save you on electricity bill as well.

PiHole shouldn&#x27;t be writing much to the SD card if at all; Something seems wrong there. Once it boots (a read only affair), it should be running exclusively from memory, no? Maybe periodically updating the rules and saving to disk?

I have noticed that this website is blocked for some reason in India. For affected users, here is the archived copy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;HmDQz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;HmDQz</a>

Please start here. Tons of thinclients<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.parkytowers.me.uk&#x2F;thin&#x2F;hware&#x2F;hardware.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.parkytowers.me.uk&#x2F;thin&#x2F;hware&#x2F;hardware.shtml</a>

Yeah the value proposition ist quite out of whack at the moment on most SBCs in the rasp 4 class.<p>Not a particularly unpopular opinion anymore though. Most subreddit for example are already steering people towards minipcs

I tend to try out a lot of Raspberry PI projects (PI-hole, WeeWX, etc) then eventually migrate them to a VM in an ESXi server. Much easier to manage and more reliable.

While his arguments of performance to power might have some truth, I strongly dislike that he&#x27;s using the current pricing as a comparison point.<p>Sure, buying one now is (relatively) expensive for what it is, but I bought my Pi&#x27;s back when they were MSRP ($45-54 USD for RPI4 4GiB and $35 USD for RPi3B+). Nothing can compete at that price point. While there are cheaper options or more powerful options for a bit more, none of them have the same support the Raspberry PI has.<p>As for reliability, dropping ~$25 USD for a drive enclosure and having it boot from that is doable with the Raspberry Pi 4 (and the 3 but I&#x27;ve never tested it).

I agree that you shouldn&#x27;t use the pi as a server. The biggest drawback is that arm is still not as well supported as x86 and isn&#x27;t as heavily optimized.

&gt; You do not have access to set-inform.com. The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site.<p>Anyone else get this?

I&#x27;ve found an Intel Compute Stick for $30. I&#x27;m tempted to buy it and find an use later. PiHole, mail server.

Ha! I was building OpenCV on a Pi and I remembered I had a 6500T thin DELL I could use instead.

The reason not to use a Raspberry Pi is that you can never buy them.

Do NUCs have GPIO or do I have to stick to a SBC for those?

ESP8266 is more than enough for many of my projects.