The Raspberry Pi Interactive Timeline · 2006–2026

mmariuz about 2 hours ago 20 commentsRead Article on raspberry.tips

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55% Positive

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Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

XCSme•1 minute ago

Cool, I started using a RBPi4 at I had purchased 3 years ago and never used. I use it to be able to start my "AI-agent" PC remotely, to send wake-up-on-LAN signal from anywhere. I am also thinking now to add a tasks queue on PI itself, so I can send requests directly to the PI, it stores them, and maybe once or twice a day, it turns on the PC, sends all the tasks, then turns it off.

lukeh•2 minutes ago

CM4s are very tricky to find right now. Should have stocked up… :(

walrus01•about 2 hours ago

I know RAM prices aren't under control of the raspberry pi project, but something has gone dreadfully wrong in the economy when individual 8GB+ raspberry pi are now costing $200 to $300 for just the board before you add USB-C power supply, heatsinks, case, etc.

If a person doesn't need GPIO pins or other direct access to hardware [1], I don't understand why people are trying to use them with 1080p and 4K displays, keyboards and mice as general desktop linux computers. You can get a far more capable small form factor or ultra small form factor used Intel Core i5/i7 something corporate desktop with 16GB of RAM and a real SSD for like 150 bucks on eBay (USD). It'll be significantly faster.

Install barebones debian amd64, 'sudo apt install xfce4-desktop', it'll pull in all the xorg and other dependencies and also install a GUI login screen.

20 seconds of searching turned up something that doesn't suck: https://www.ebay.com/itm/820084016851?_skw=dell+optiplex+16G...

The one raspberry pi model which is still close to the original's $35 price is the raspberry pi model 4 1GB which is $49 in Canada. Accounting for inflation and difference between USD:CAD, that's about the same as 35 bucks. I think there are still a ton of uses for raspberry pi 3B+ or model 4 1GB particularly because you can power them off an 802.3af power over ethernet switch and cable, to stick one in a weird place with power and ethernet in one cable, with a basic $15 PoE splitter to USB-C power on the load end. [2]

[1]: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/rpi-gpio-pins

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/UCTRONICS-PoE-Splitter-USB-C-Complian...

sdcfgy•about 2 hours ago

I’ve always said that. If you want basic GPIO you can always shove a smaller MCU on the end of a USB cable and talk to that. Most of the embedded stuff I’ve done in the last decade has worked like that.

They are also terrible in education. Unreliable, huge set up time, no education software runs on them properly.

On the unreliable thing I got booted off their forums for writing a technical evaluation of the RPi 1 brown out issues with USB. That really put a bad taste in my mouth. Refuse to use any of their products since.

dumberquestions•about 1 hour ago

Raspberry Pi's are essential for a certain class of robots, they're small, light and mobile enough while still being computers, and they have all the pins you might need, most people who don't understand them are usually actually looking for a stationary mini pc or an mcu and are wondering why an RPi isn't those.

mrheosuper•37 minutes ago

What kind of class you are talking, most of the time, we use MCU for real time stuff and a generic computer for Heavy computing stuff, they can communicate through whatever bus they want (Serial, USB or even wireless like bluetooth). E

marcus_cemes•24 minutes ago

Small anecdote on the mobile/robotics part, two years ago I was tasked with a small research sensor/timelapse platform. I reached out for the Pi Zero 2 W, the new Pi camera, and the largest USB battery I could buy. Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations, but I was surprised how much power it draws, even at idle. The napkin math said about 6 days (0.5 W idle, 2 W loaded), in reality it was only 1-2 days.

In comparison, my older laptop idles at around 5 W, even with multiple applications open. Similar experience more recently when looking at setting up a small home lab, the new Pi 5 seems to idle at around 5 W. A friend told me he has an Intel-based mini PC that draws less power. I'm tempted to try re-purposing an old phone, that should in theory do better.

sdcfgy•25 minutes ago

There are a million small embedded systems that are designed for that application and aren’t made to the lowest possible standard that they could muster. And those have RTOS on bare metal. The Pi is a fat and slow computer.

mrheosuper•about 1 hour ago

It's more like for web people that wants to do embedded stuff and don't bother learning.

I've seen someone used the entire raspberry pi zero(dual core 1Ghz cpu with hundreds of MB ram) just to do some http request and display on a simple LCD, with python no less. All can be done with a simple esp32.

But hey, as long as it works, right ?

Joeboy•29 minutes ago

For the people who are sad about the high prices of the Pi range, I want to mention that I'm having a lot of fun with the Pi Pico 2. It's obviously not quite the same thing (ie. not a regular desktop computer), but it's ridiculously capable for its few-dollars price point. There's a lot you can do with it.

If you just want a cheap computer the Pi's don't seem so great these days, but the Picos are where the fun is now.

ahepp•21 minutes ago

The zero 2 (W) seems pretty great if you just want a cheap linux device.

merpkz•22 minutes ago

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is the sweet spot these days for price/performance, but it's nowhere to by found in stock, sadly despite the fact it has LPDDR2 type of RAM

walrus01•19 minutes ago

It would be a heck of a lot more useful if it had a basic (even 100Mbps) wired ethernet interface on it, then you could put it places without worrying about its horrid 802.11n-only 2.4 GHz only wifi with tiny antenna, be assured it had a reliable ethernet connection, and power it by a cheap 802.3af-to-MicroUSB 5V2A PoE splitter.

It's weird there's cheap and plentiful STM32 series things with physical ethernet ports (but they're very weak microcontrollers with little CPU or RAM) which do manage to have real ethernet ports on them...

throwaway63467•about 1 hour ago

Broke off my Pi 4Bs USB C port when using it to test link speed for new LAN outlets, when I wanted to reorder I realized the 4 GB version is now 120 EUR… Damn.

nusl•41 minutes ago

May be possible to repair the existing one?

m4rtink•19 minutes ago

Yeah, should be trivial to solder it back on or with wires to a USB-C breakout board.

ricardobeat•24 minutes ago

> 2025: For $120, the Pi 5 is now available with 16 GB

good times

stonecharioteer•about 1 hour ago

The Pi makes no sense anymore at these prices. But I love that I got to experience them when they were affordable. I owned multiple 4bs at one point, and even have a 2b and 3b lying around. I have a clusterhat that I tried to setup again, but realized that the Pi0Ws have only 512mb RAM each and that's useless now.

mrheosuper•36 minutes ago

with headless debian, i think you have around 400MB ram left for yourself, enough to run light stuff like pihole or Wireguard