Yeah right now there's zero reason to buy a raspberry pi compared to what else is available for the performance. The scalpers are selling these raspberry pis at absurd prices. When new supply becomes available, I'll reconsider it.

If you need to use the GPIOs, have size or power consumption restrictions then the Pi makes total sense. But for general purpose computing like a run of the mill home server, a low power x86 can replace a handful of Pis more efficiently.

A $3 esp32 can do a lot for a microcontroller

And you can probably do away with a 1$ ESP8266 for your GPIO needs.

The idea was that a Pi makes sense sometimes, and other times it doesn't. I know people using a Pi for one GPIO pin. This can be done just fine with an Arduino or an ESP8266.

I for one run a Pi with PiHole, Wireguard, Unifi controller, NVR, MQTT, etc. and a few more GPIO trinkets like Zwave. No ESP could practically handle all that, an x86 would be overkill in terms of size, noise, temperature, and power consumption.

On the other hand I use ESPs for things like "smartening up" my door intercom where even a Pi Zero would be overkill.

> No ESP could practically handle all that

You probably would be surprised what they can handle... See these examples:

https://github.com/ciniml/WireGuard-ESP32-Arduino

https://github.com/martin-ger/esp32_nat_router

I much prefer working on my fast Ryzen "NUC" to a Pi4, but for electronics tinkering, I miss it having decent memory-mapped GPIO+SPI+I2C. From time to time, I search around in case someone's done a nice PCIe (or M.2?) card with a handful of I2C and SPI buses plus a bunch of GPIOs, but haven't found anything decent.

Ironically, I'd be happy to pay much more than the cost of a entire Pi4 to get the same GPIO as an add-on for a fast, reliable amd64 machine.

I recently have sold and put up for sale my Raspberry Pis. I kept one for an embedded project, but I am in general tired of their endless availability issues and terrible performance for general computing.

In place of them, I got a barebones Intel Nuc that I populated with some DDR4 and an M.2 NVMe drive I had laying around. The performance from the Core i5 is great and leaps ahead of the most powerful Pis, and the footprint and cost is only a little more than a fully heatsinked and encased Raspberry Pi. My Intel Nuc is running Linux Mint flawlessly so far.

the problem for me is, intel NUC are EXTREMLY expensive. case in point

https://www.amazon.in/Intel-Core-Mini-NUC8i5BEH-500GB/dp/B07... (INR 52K or US$ 600) https://www.amazon.in/Intel-Performance-NUC11PAHI5-Thunderbo... (INR 42K or US$ 488)

or you can get a celeron https://www.amazon.in/Intel-NUC7CJYH-NUC-Kit-BOXNUC7CJYH/dp/... (INR 12K or US$ 139)

https://robu.in/product/raspberry-pi-3-model-a-with-official... (inr 2800 or US$32)

or https://robu.in/product/raspberry-pi-3-model-a/ (INR 2500 or US$29)

so the NUC are being sold at obscene prices....

i am very much interested in buying old tech because

1. it is cheaper and has seen a lot so it usually isnt flimsy. 2. no need for warranty as the local repair scene is pretty good with aftermarket spares readily available.

i broke 4-5 Pis last year because of a bad usb cable that was transferring data and i didnt realize until later the cause. anyway, i am stuck with pis with USB overcurrent problem.

At least in the U.S., you can get refurbished Dell OptiPlex Micro and Lenovo ThinkCentre M Series PCs for just over $100. I opted for the moderately more expensive Intel Nuc because I could buy the barebones version since I had some spare memory laying around that I wanted to use up. Plus, I only needed one such computer for my server needs.

NOS (New Old Stock) NUCs can be had for really nice prices if you're patient and don't mind having mildly outdated hardware (which will likely run circles around rPi anyway).

If you don't mind buying used, the prices drop even further.

Look for used Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q or M715q...thank me later ;)

> so the NUC are being sold at obscene prices....

A question I keep asking is what happened to the cheap NUC's?

This question has been bothering me since the $199 J1900 NUC disappeared years back and was never replaced by a comparative low power and low cost NUC. Instead we got $400+ i3/5/7 NUC's and some silly $1200 NUC with a skull on it for gaming. They were at one point cost effective but that suddenly stopped.

Few weeks back I picked up an i5 NUC on sale for $300 from Newegg which is the lowest I've seen a quad core NUC in a long time (maybe I'm not looking hard enough). It's hooked to my TV and is just another desktop that also happens to play Hulu.

Pi makes sense if you need the IO it provides, if you don't, well, that's just a shitty computer

There is a virtually unlimited supply of old corporate PCs, the mini ones being most interesting. https://computers.woot.com/plus/microsoft-authorized-refurbi...

Especially the Chromeboxes, some of them have i7s. Unlocking them is a bit of a hassle but once you get the hang of it it's only a few minutes.

Something like this but for Europe?

I just clicked and all of the computers for sale on that page appear to cost between $200 and $460, even for older ones.

Better than buying brand-new perhaps but not what I would call a great deal and certainly not a replacement for a pi4 in terms of price and power consumption.

Power consumption maybe, but RPI with a case, power supply and drive isn't cheap and a fraction of the power.

For a raspberry pi, not really, but you can get a cluster of VMs going on it and replace many rPis.

Agreed. I recently was going to build a home K8s cluster for fun, ended up adding another old rackmount Atom server instead, and swapping in Noctua fans ( https://www.neilvandyke.org/kubernetes/ ).

It takes up more space, and uses more power, but no paying scalper prices for hardware dependent on a dodgy microSD, wallwart, USB SATA adapter, improvised chassis, etc.

I recently started using an old Fujitsu Primergy s100 1u server with a Xeon cpu. I was supprised it usually runs on moderate load at (self reported) 35W (including two spinning hdds and a max-clocked Google edgetpu). For me this was a pleasant surprise.

As we learned in Europe in 2022, electricity isn't some infinite resource. When it gets rationed, the price goes way up.

A raspberry Pi costs up to 1€/month in electricity to keep running as a server, while any used computer will cost quite a bit more. When suggesting old hardware for server use, make sure to consider the total cost, not just the cost of the hardware itself.

It isnt 2005 anymore. Old hardware nowadays is "Lot of 5 LENOVO THINKPAD YOGA 260 i3-6100U 4GB Ram 128GB SSD Cracked Screens" coming down to $40 a pop. 2x TDP (15W vs 7.5 of rpi4) but at the same time >2x CPU power, >10x GPU power. Not to mention you get real SATA SSD storage, real DDR4 sodimm slot, keyboard, and battery backup.

Not anywhere in Europe. People tend to sell used stuff for more than the new. Maybe I'm looking in all the wrong places.

I find that Microsoft Authorised Refurbishers are a good place to start to find cheap old corporate machines - eg I can typically get something like an Intel i5 8500T based Lenovo/Dell/HP mini PC with RAM and SSD for less than £200.

I actually bought a Lenovo M910Q with i5 6500T, 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM for ~£100 in the last year.

It'll absolutely demolish a Pi 4 at CPU & GPU performance, can take much more RAM than a Pi, idles at <10W on 230V mains, you get the bonuses of easy software compatibility as it just runs any mainstream Linux distro & and it runs x86_64 code, it has real storage interfaces (SATA & NVMe), and has an Intel NIC.

For home server uses, they're really nice machines.

The keyword here is "cracked screens".

A laptop I use for this function draws 10W on average, and that is without any additional tooling like:

https://github.com/AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq

TDP is not something you should look at.

It's just the top, not how low it can go on idle. My VM server has ~35W TDP but gets 20W with SSD/dual NIC and acting as WiFi accesspoint. CPU usage is less than half of that, at those levels motherboard is often the element with highest power consumption and it is hard to get data on which motherboard is most power efficient.

Probably easier with laptops as in theory you can just get run time on battery, battery size and calculate power usage off that.

Right. And then go back to your gaming PC with the 250 watt GPU running inside. /s

or get beagleboard or other open source hardware alternative. Why isn't all hardware open source (without out firmware blob)

UPS for small devices is an untapped niche. I don't understand what's going on with that. There're thousands of huge 220V UPS devices in the market and there're almost none 12V UPS devices for tiny devices like routers, raspberrys, etc.

Some people use power banks for that, but that's not really proper use and some power banks don't allow seamless power switch.

I've been using a little 100wh mini 12v UPS from talentcell. I own three and am happy with them.

It has an important caveat though: both the USB and 12v outputs are unregulated, so the device you're feeding into must be able to handle a wider voltage range, or you can buy a fairly cheap ($15 or so) step up/down converter to put in-line with it.

How does the average consumer feel about plugging something other than the OEM adapter into a router? Things always say "Use only the original power supply", maybe they underestimate people's intelligence and think they will be too afraid to put the UPS in between?

I'd really like an affordable 5v/12v UPS though. Maybe it will happen when more things adopt USB-C and there's more of a market for power banks designed for seamless switching.

Belkin makes a 12v UPS for residential gateway devices. Some ISPs here in the US have been distributing them with their equipment to consumers for several years. I use mine as power backup for devices in case of hurricanes and such.

I'm using PowerWalker 12V DC UPS (which actually is just a 18650 cell) with my routers and it works fine, keeping the connectivity up for intermittent power shortages. In fact works much better for this purpose than cheap AC UPS I tried.

There is UPS Pico [1] for rPi3/4 that does that job well + a bunch of other features (fan control, some extra IO, supercap+battery support, watchdog and few other).

There are also few simpler ones that do "just" supply power and "power good" signal.

There is also plenty of DC UPSes, although often targeting the industry, which means "expensive"

In-between is [2] OpenUPS but I didn't used it. It's just pretty niche product and niche is also one of the "it will be expensive" keywords.

Soo yeah, they are out there and work fine, go and buy one. Oh, don't want to spend more than rPi ? Well, that's the price of niche products, even if parts are not super expensive it need to cost enough for NRE costs to amortize.

Or, slap a power strip and few power supplies into normal UPS and call it good enough

* [1] https://pimodules.com/ups-pico-hv4-0b

* [2] https://www.mini-box.com/OpenUPS

My problem with old hardware is the higher power consumption.

Also space and noise

Except I tried that recently, thunderbolt doesn’t work properly, Ethernet adapters with no support, and no sound.

You mean used, right?

I must have a lower tolerance than most, but the idea of typing on a used keyboard seems gross. Besides, how do I know how well was it handled? That the power supply will not fry a few weeks in, just after I set everything up.

I have a Raspberry Pi running nonstop for over a decade. No fans, just working.

Fwiw - I've been buying used and refurbished ThinkPads for a decade. Maybe because they're typically used for business but they've aLl been in immaculate shape (no gritty keyboards) and have them lasted for many many years. None of them actually failed me, I just eventually moved on. I still use a t420 and two t420s ThinkPads which I got used and are now coming to 11 years old. I just got a t440 which is probably 8-9 years old.

Refurbished from Lenovo itself? Or third party?

First party refurbished are usually as good as new.

Both, plus used from Kijiji or Facebook marketplace