There are better options at that price point
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Cool but the orange pi is like 20 usd
It's getting silly now.
Rather have a decent mini pc with power adaptor with a 2.5 Gbps ethernet.
I just wanted a 2.5GB nic :(
Or antenna headers. And don't tell me I can just DIY scratch up the PCB and make a solder point 1mm in diameter between two other circuits I'm not supposed to touch.
Aha, here comes the 16gb Pi 500 with a working M.2 slot. It never stops.
Do I feel sarcasm? Because I actually struggle to set up my Pi5 with the M2 hat I got 🥲.
Just curioys, why wouldn't you buy say a 50€ thinkcentre instead or a raspberry?
hmmm I'm not sure now 😅
I'm using the RPi for other projects but this one was for a server and I might not have put much thought for the hardware
But I've never seen a mini PC that cheap though?
It depends on when big companies throws out their pcs, like when they are 5 years old, or so it feels.
I did a quick search on ebay, it probably depends on where you live but I stumbled upon a 55€ one here
The problem with tinkcentres (tiny here) is that they are really easy to open and service, usually has place for a 2'5 drive plus a nvme and had two sodim slots, plus some funky stuff like small cards and CD player and so on so eventually it might cost more than 50€...
The problem with tinkcentres (tiny here) is that they are really easy to open and service,
Is that really a problem 😅
I'm actually in France, but somehow ebay is not really in my mind, so u totally miss those, I'll have a look because it sure looks like less trouble to go this way than with the raspberry pi, even the OS as it would be a 64bits and not ARM (if I looked well on the specs)
(edit) also, now that I look at my setups I realize that I don't even use much of the GPIo on the rpi4 because I have a stupid amount of Esp32 spread everywhere in my place that fulfill the need
Quel coïncidence :-D ! Bordeaux ici !
Do you control the esps from your network? I did some simple sever controlled I/O with esp8266 (IIRC, the first popular esp).
Same reason as any other mini PC.
GPIO.
Honestly there is no other reason to use pi. Just the simple ability ti connect and build your own connection stuff.
Pi is by far the easiest system with a well suppirted os and api for learning\experimentation.
When to comes to using as a desktop etc. There are loads of better options if gpio is not wanted.
Fair.
I always thought about the raspberries strength as small mobile devices. If I want IO on my PC I could buy an adapter/card. Or use my raspberry because I have one or two ofc. It sure is easy with them.
Best adaptor out there, atm. Is a pi zero with gpiozero on it. There really is not much in the way of adaptors with the support and flexibility for beginners that pi provides.
I meant an adapter for a classic PC, like a usb/serial port adapter.
So did I. Pi zero can boot via USB otg and act as a USB gpio port.
Have to tried it yet bout planning to.
Gpiozero is the library used.
But even with GPIO, there's other cheaper boards out there with better specs to boot
Yeah but non with better support. They all tend to have OSes with limited updates and/or community support.
That is a huge plus for pi. And likely the only reason they survive.
I tried the orange pi, and that was a hassle, I had to fix and compile some obscure library in C to make python control I/O work.
The comment was about the 500, which currently has non-working M2, as a money grab apparently.