News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis. Parent comment

Re:Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis by userbinator on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @09:31PM (#45034440)
looking for a cheap computer to do their hardware hacks with

A free standard PC, of which a depressingly large number are thrown out every day, easily beats the price and performance of an RPi, in addition to being far more open.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis by matthewmacleod on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @02:38AM (#45036140)
…while being hundreds of times bigger and also not offering the scope to implement hardware hacks (e.g. interfacing through GPIO/I2C/SPI/Serial without additions that cost more than the entire Pi).

Yes - obviously you can use an old PC for many different PoCs and prototypes. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of those you can’t.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis by kees99 on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @11:54PM (#45048203)
> not offering (...) GPIO/I2C/SPI/Serial

Nearly every "old PC" does offer built-in easily accessible I2C - as "DDC channel" of a monitor plug - VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort - all have it. Linux exposes those as regular /dev/i2c-*, so any I2C software that works on a RPi or other Linux SBC, will run with those too:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120903090802/http://www.painty...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis by jki275 on Thursday August 28, 2025 @12:08AM (#45048289)
Also there are usb devices that can run gpio/spi/i2c/uart for a few bucks.
[ Parent | on HN ]