No GPIOs, no I2C, no SPI. If you are purely in search for a small light seever, this is a suitable choice, but Raspis are popular also for the more unusual (for consumer/office devices) IO.
Good you could add a serial comnection to a microcontroller etc, but then the solution won't be as elegant.
Sorry I don't really understand the question, but:
- if you ask whether the way of using GPIOs on a Raspi is elegant, I would say, yeah quite. Python and gpiozero are a good elegant way to go that route
- if you ask whether it is elegant to use GPIO on a Raspi in principle, I can't answer your question because that depends on what you use it for. There are extremely elegant ways and there are ugly hacks that shouldn't exist.
That being said if you quickly need analog input you can just add an ADC to the gpio and you have it. That is more elegant than having to add an usb peripheral.
Last year I've migrated my Kodi media player from a RasPi 4 to a N3350 mini PC and didn't look back, then recently also moved my NAS (N5105) and services (3215U) machine to mini PCs and unlocked Chromebooks I got used on either Ebay or flea markets. They're cheap and the computing power is on another planet compared to the PI while still maintaining a low power consumption.
I have a Dell Optiplex 7050 I'm using as a video streaming server and even that generation has hardware transcoding capabilities for all modern formats except AV1, and can do them fast enough for basic streaming too. Six 1080p simultaneous video streams from personal testing before any lag or stutter begins to creep in. And I know that the Intel integrated gpus of the generation after — so what would be in the 7060s I believe — got like a 4x boost in video transcoding performance as Intel kind of figured things out and optimized things, so yeah 7060 would probably be really good.
Same. Bought a Dell refurb and I’ve had so many fewer hassles. The SD card was perhaps the biggest source of issues and after factoring the cost of outfitting a RPi with something like an SSD, it just wasn’t cost effective anymore.
This I never understood. I have 3 different RPis running since they were available to buy. A 2, a 3 and a 4. All with the OS on microSD and no optimisation like writing log files to tmpfs or similar. It’s plain Ubuntu Server for ARM.
And in all these years, I had maybe one microSD going read-only on me. Cloned that to a fresh one, did an fsck and the Pi was up and running again. That’s it. No other issues despite various sudden power losses etc.
I don’t understand where these rumours about bad reliability of SD cards in Pis come from.
Pi 1 a/b were really fragile but since pi 2 this problem is mostly solved. Still if I need to write a lot I would use a external drive.
We have >300 pies running 24/7 on 52 sites all over the world.
Even though we use no name brand microSDs we had only 2 failures because of a broken SD card in 4 years.
Our partner company was using our hardware as a basis for something. After 1 month they asked us what SD cards brand we were using because they had a high failure rate. Our secret. We use a self made distro with minimal writes, they used default raspian and were writing permanently to the SD card.
I've always used noatime for filesystem, journald set to ram logging, etc. Usually everything seems fine until a reboot triggers a fsck. Most were ext 3/4 filesystems.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe DietPi isn't maintaining the necessary kernel forks many of the devices require, and is dependent on upstream kernel fork changes from manufacturers/vendors.
Most of those boards can run mainline Linux, but certain features and integrations only exist in external forks that weren't put into vanilla Linux.
The end result is either that you're still dependent on someone maintaining bespoke Linux kernel forks in perpetuity, or you ship relatively up-to-date kernels that lack features, drivers, etc that only exist in the forks.
Similarly, I saw some youtube videos just the other day talking about intel's (newish?) N100 chip. You can pick up a small mini pc for under $150 new, runs windows or linux, and is on-par speed-wise with the 8500 iirc. Plenty fast for small server use cases, although you do give up the raw GPIO pins.
Also of note, it's x86, which has me interested as a field-portable ham radio computer. Most software runs on rpi (my current setup), but x86 is universally supported by stuff. Just need to figure out the monitor situation.... maybe vnc from an ipad? :)
I did a portable NUC for a while, just powered off some no-name li-ion backup battery (a slightly bigger one because you need the 12-20v out).
There are plenty of decent portable monitors out there. I ended up with an MSI one, but I think any laptop brand can make a monitor (I also had some no-name one which had a nicer resolution but ended up breaking pretty quickly).
Anyway, I eventually concluded that I was wasting time re-inventing the laptop. It was nice to be able to put the unnecessary extra stuff, like the monitor and battery away, when using it in desktop mode (saving desk space). And the ability to pick a proper keyboard is nice.
But buying part-by-part has some downsides. You pay extra because this is all niche stuff, it doesn’t slip as nicely into a backpack (otoh if I only needed to bring the NUC somewhere, it could fit in my cargo shorts or bike under-saddle bag which was neat). And random integration things—you need to bring all the right cables, the battery probably doesn’t talk to your OS so you have to check it manually.
I also did SSH and VNC from an iPad, it works fine, you’ll probably want a keyboard and end up with something like a laptop, but extra latency and your SSH/VNC client will waste some pixels. I also did SSH and VNC from my iPhone, got a little stand and everything. That combo actually got interested questions in a coffee shop, so nerdy niche computing mission accomplished, haha!
So, I hate to ask the boring question because it was a really fun project and I got years of use out of it, but: Why not a laptop?
The best solution would probably be one of those micro "laptops" like a GPD Pocket. I think it has the ports needed... a few usbs really.
My current setup is VNC from ipad to the rpi for ham radio stuff. It works well enough, with the ipad being keyboard & screen in a small space. And lets me take an ipad with me for other uses. But the rpi4 is so darn slow at a full desktop experience, especially when then feeding it over a network connection.
I got an N100 fanless computer for about $100, with the right Aliexpress deals. With 4x i266-v (2.5GbE). Just needed RAM and M.2. The total power draw is also quite low, I've seen people measure 7w total from the wall. At about $.32/kWh, this is saving me a lot over an eBay computer.
The CPU is enough for my needs, currently running Proxmox with OPNsense. And x86 was a major draw for me over the RPi.
I recently migrated my NAS from a Mini-ITX mainboard to a mini PC. Although there are m.2 cards with multiple SATA ports on board, they would require either to keep the PC open or mount it into a bigger case with multiple disks bay. I chose instead a more costly but potentially more stable solution with a IcyBox IB-3780-C31 enclosure (8xSATA to USB3.1) which is well supported by either Linux and FreeBSD, which is important as I use XigmaNAS. The mini PC I used was the only one with a USB3.1 port on board CPU is a N5105 which is more than enough for 4 ZFS mirrors. Feel free to ask if you need more information.
I've lost data by having as my home directory an external drive connected via USB (on an ext4 file system). Then I found a comment on this site saying that Linux's USB driver is known to be unreliable when layering a file system (terminology?) over it.
these types of enclosures are going to be using UAS, USB attached SCSI, which is relatively new. It should deliver a more reliable and manageable experience for external drive enclosures in general (e.g. proper addressing of which drive you want to talk to). If nothing else it's a different code path though.
I've been using a multi-drive UAS enclosure over USB3 as the storage for a VMS for some time, it feels a little weird given USB's history but it has been very reliable and easily saturates the drives from a bandwidth perspective. I'll probably go the same route for bulk storage in the future, since it's a lot easier to get small machines with USB than small machines with 4+ SATA channels.
The internal RAID is neat and I used it for a while, but lately I've had it configured as a JBOD and I let the VMS manage which drive it puts things on. But probably the best thing to do would be to configure it as JBOD (it has DIP switches to choose the mode) and use it with whatever software volume manager you prefer, lvm or btrfs or whatever.
What I do is I keep using the same (Samsung T7) external drive I lost the data on, but now I use it only to transfer data from one computer's internal drive to another computer's.
The Dell Optiplex 7050 I have can take two SATA SSDs or one SATA HDD and one SATA SSD (my current config). Its processing power is pretty great (esp compared to an RPI), plus it's reasonably sized, sturdy, and it also has a low TDP. I use it as a server for several services (A discord clone, Nextcloud, my blog, video streaming). Got it for $20 at a surplus store, plus $80 for the HDD and $60 for the SSD (I went for very high quality ones) lol.
What is your use case? You can fit a few terabytes in the internal slots; if the additional storage were in the form of USB drives, would that be a problem?
another option in this vein is a used google chrome box. they're rated for 24x7 operation in dusty high vibration environments. can change the boot loader and install any distro. low idle power, std sodimm and nvme drives. super cheap used. usb-c and ethernet
$150 PC Engines APU2 (RIP) has 4GB ECC soldered RAM, SATA, mSATA and mPCIE.
$650 QNAP TS435XeU 1U NAS supports 4GB-32GB ECC SODIMM, 4xSATA, 2xNVME, based on Marvell/Armada CN9130 Arm SoC. Debian for Arm64 can be installed via serial console.
Boards based on the Broadcom VideoCore 4 family, such as the Raspberry Pi, require non-free software to startup, although signature checks are not enforced. A free proof-of-concept replacement firmware has been developed, but it is not in a usable state, and development has halted.
By default, the GPU requires a blob running in this same startup firmware. However, Broadcom also supplies an "experimental" free software stack, which could run without blobs, if the startup firmware were free.
A boot-loader or GPU driver blob is different from an entire copy of Minix OS running on the Intel CPU that will boot-loop the hardware every 20 minutes if wiped.
The RISCV also offers something unique over Pi ARM chips, but little economic incentive to stop the shenanigans. ;)
> a lot of corners were cut to save time leading to what I believe is poor ARMv7+ Cortex IP integration (GIC, TrustZone, etc). So I stopped working on it. If those things were not the case (GIC working, "TZPCs" working, security working as intended, instead of NS forced to high on bridge, at least in my understanding) I would still work on it ...
ARM isn't a second class citizen on this platform, it's a third class citizen since BCM2709 (again this is an opinion) ... the features I wanted to tinker with the most are absent by design (cutting corners) and I'm not willing to resort to SW emulation of them through clever uses of the VPU.
Hopefully RPi 5 silicon offers a better foundation for open firmware.
Here in Europe I don't see any of them for less than $100. And for a small server something like OrangePi 3B (with nvme etc.) would be be reasonable at half the price and half the power.
When I switched from Intel Mac to the M2, I was easily able to get my Linus and windows VMs running again.
As well as my intel apps. Was pretty smooth and the speed and power efficiency gains are obvious. My mac book air draws about 5w total while the DAW is cool as a cucumber.
Not OP but I am in the process of upgrading my M93P Lenovo Thinkcenter. Uses laptop ram and simple to replace hard drive and RAM. I am far from a hardware guy.
And you can get them dirt cheap nowadays, has proper casing and cooling etc https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...
I have one right next to me, i5-8500T, 32GB RAM, 2x SSDs and currently 5W at idle with powertop auto-tune https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/powertop