Yeah, I gave up on Raspberry Pi when they prioritized volume commercial customers over long tail users like me that needed just one.
The real question is “what’s next?” The niche is “a single board computer for hobby or technical experimentation”. So:
- low cost
- low power
- as much compute as you can get for that low power
- built-in standard peripherals, ditto above — with respect to radio you can get for that low power
- extensible (I/O pins are nice but what’s really needed is a standard bus people can build on)
- wide support infrastructure (IDE, libraries, circuits, hats, etc.)
- hate to say it, but “AI ready” in the hushed tones of people running 28.9M parameter Large Language Models (LLM) on an $8 microcontroller (ESP32-S3) https://github.com/slvDev/esp32-ai/tree/main to push the inference to the edge
I’m thinking it will be RISC-V and not based on proprietary System on a Chip (SoC) technology.
I’m keen to learn what readers think it will be.
Change my mind.
for the current price, yes
They started out as a great option for kids from poor backgrounds to learn to code. Schools usually have really locked down PCs and a raspberry pi let them sidestep a lot of that.
I managed to (just about) run a home media server off one for a few years until I could afford a better setup. Now I have it running as a replacement for my ‘smart’ TV’s spyware riddled OS which even has HDMI passthrough for the remote control input.
They are useful, versatile, and still fairly cheap considering the cost of components now.
I remember I would get upset with the association it was for children. I would assure people this is for cool adults as I show them how well super tux cart runs. But for real it is kind of like the model train of the PC world, toyish and educational in nature.
I did feel dumb though when I first got a pi and it was a 50/50 chance if the tutorial on youtube was made by some 12 year old in India.
I managed to get one second-hand from a friend who had upgraded. It was my first entry into self-hosting and running 24/7 automations, like public media archival scripts. Due to the popularity and forum support, it was pretty low-friction which allowed me to dive in easily without a mentor or excessive barriers. I had no hardware experience beyond assembling a PC from parts, so the accessibility was what gave me confidence to start.
A mini-PC would have been far more than needed, to the point it’s wasteful for this kind of work, and the better embedded options (I’m sure there are plenty, and cheaper) were just too intimidating or manual to have drawn me in.
Esp8266/Esp32-gang-with-asneeded-add-ons riseup!
ESP32 + Arduino + Raspi: The ultimate dustgatherer collection because they’re cheap and you realize you don’t really need em
It’s cool because it draws next to no power at all… Unless your specific use case needs to survive on a bare trickle of electricity there is no reason anyone should be buying a pi over an off-lease 1L mini-pc
if you’re not doing IoT or embedded stuff like you just want a tiny linux desktop, miniPCs are probably a better deal
Ancient cat at least walked into your home and killed pests
when you gould get a decent tiny computer that is capable of real tasks for $60 it was great. $200 not so much. especially when you can get a used enterprise thin client for the same price
My first Raspberry Pi was the model 3B which my dad bought for 35 euros. I spent a week on that thing trying to get a desktop installed with Archlinux only to have it run like shit. Good times
Stephen Crowder memes should be reserved only for mocking fascists fuck that guy. Thanks for making me see is smug fascist face…
Agree with the revolutionary access to simple computers for hobbyists.
I haven’t used them much myself but now that I am thinking more about automation at home I’m realizing there are much cheaper and safer (lower current) options for things I want to achieve as compared to electronic or electromechanical control systems I am familiar with from industrial settings.
I think Raspberry Pi played a big part in creating the environment where there was a market for all this other innovation.
When Raspis first came out they were genuinely a massive innovation in having small computers people could learn on or build hobby projects from very cheaply.
Over the years this has changed as they have gotten expensive to the point of being out of this price range these days. There are cheaper alternatives.
I still think they are pretty cool pieces of technology for what they are but probably more niche than they used to be now.
Seems like the ESPs are filling the raspi niche anymore.
God the PiFM software was amazing. You could broadcast anything from 1-250MHZ with just a wire stuck to a GPIO pin and it was actually decent. It was essentially a software defined radio transmitter for $25 at the time. It was absolutely the most fun I’ve ever had with a $25 purchase
They’re just better in many ways. Raspberry pi was clunky and bulky.
I got 3 raspberry pis over time when the 4 was brand new. Mainly because I didn’t know what i was doing but also because that’s what I knew. Everything was made for the pi, the pi had the most tutorials and community everything just made sense.
But now pis are around 200 dollars and only really good when you need an actual little computer. But working with micro controllers everything’s just so much straight forward. I hated working with the pi and zero, if you ever had to debug it was like a 10 minute processes due to booting and how slow it was.
With the esp32 they just boot right away, no loading up a operating system you plug it in, see if it works and if doesn’t flash it over air and do it again. It just does what it needs to and in many ways better.
Would agree with that. I have a handful of ESPs now and don’t really use raspis for much these days. Well except for my home assistant box.
Maybe? Idk, didn’t the BeagleBone boards already exist? It definitely made an impact and got more people into it, but I can see how hobbyists might think they didnt add all that much
They existed at 4x the price.
I think raspberry pi really shone on the software side of things. ARM boards often tend to be a bit of ship-and-forget. RaspberryPi OS still supports the OG 14 years later, while most other distros have left 32 bit support in the dust.
Thats a really good point on both sides. I thought you might be overstating it on the price, but I looked it up and the XM in 2010 was at $150! BeagleBone in 2011 launched at $89 and in 2013 the BeagleBone Black came out at $45 so they were definitely playing catch up on the price. Raspberry Pi OS support has also been fantastic, with a bunch of flavors still hanging around. I used to use Arch for Pi because Debian didn’t have MongoDB packaged in the version I needed 😄
EDIT: For clarity Raspberry Pi launched in 2012 at the famously cheap $35
Personally I got into hobby electronics and self hosting stuff when I got my first raspi in high school. My first server where I learned so much was a raspi!
I’ve learned a lot from the pi too! I think its a great little machine, but also it looks like the BeagleBoard beat it to market by about four years, so maybe it wasn’t the pi itself that was so revolutionary and more the cultural movement around it
