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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

This combined with the main article shows the exact reason why Raspberry Pi is as popular as it is. When I'm starting a new project I can either worry about Arduino or ESP32 or other microcontrollers or various NUCs or getting a board fabricated from scratch...or I can grab a RPi from the drawer and know that it will just work, regardless of whether I need to toggle some RGB lights, browse the web, or run a Kubernetes cluster.

There is nothing else out there that hits the sweet spot in between price, power consumption, processing speed, extensibility, software compatibility, out-of-box experience and lots more.

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I guess that's true for a certain wealth target. If you consider the Pi as the sweet spot for price, have at it.

But https://pine64.com/product/pinecone-bl602-evaluation-board/ costs $4. It fits a different sweet spot for price, power consumption, etc. A drawer-full of 20 Pis could run me $2000. A drawer-full of Pinenuts would run me... well perhaps $2000 because I could fit 1000 of them in a drawer.

If I want to browse the web, PineTab probably beats Pi. And that's only considering a single vendor.

Not knocking Pi. If it works for you, that's fine with me.

That’s apples to oranges, more comparable would be a pi pico w, which is like $6, has better documentation, and is more likely to be available when you need one.

I have a bunch of pine devices, but if you think raspberry pi’s are difficult to come by, finding a pine device in stock over the last few years has been a challenge at least for me personally. Things have started to get much better though, it seems.

Not only are Pine hard to find stock of, but I've basically never heard of a well-built Pine64 product, and that's coming from someone with three of them. They're all buggy, flimsy, doorstops at this point. Whereas my biggest complaints about Pis are that (1) I broke a plastic case for one of mine while it was in a moving box, oops, (2) SD cards are a pain in the butt and fragile.

The smaller than a finger nail size ”user unfriendly SD card“ is replaceable with USB memory as boot device.

A 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 costs... $169 USD actively on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Model-2019-Quad-Bluetooth/d...).

I can find more powerful laptops for cheaper. I can get a Dell R720 which has drastically more computing power (32x RAM, much more powerful CPU) for twice the price.

RPI used to be economical. If it still cost $50 USD, I'd grab them in a heartbeat to do these types of projects, but as it is, on price, they are almost Apple levels of overpriced (if not more).

Pi Zero 2 costs $15. Pico series starts from $4. There are plenty of cheap options if you don't need the extra power.

The RPi starts at $35. The prices you’re seeing on Amazon are scalpers takings advantage of the chip shortage. When Adafruit, for example, has them in stock, they’re at MSRP.

If you can't order a dozen any day of the week for the list price, they aren't really available at the list price.

As far as I can tell, the only Pi that you can reliably buy in quantity 1 at list price is the Pico.

I mean isn't the truth somewhere in between? You can probably get one a lot cheaper than $150 or whatever it's selling for on Amazon if you don't need it today. At the same time you're right that it means something that you can't just go out to the store and buy one at anything remotely close to MSRP

It is the software compability. Things working out of the box, without hassle. Almost nothing beats that. Almost everything is secondary.

I find the lifetime effort of an AVR/ESP8266/ESP32 to be lower than a Pi.

I’ve had AVRs (of mine) running in the house for 9+ years without being touched (and ESPs for over 5).

Things do just work out of the box on them (often easier than installing Raspian, getting it onto wifi, setting up ssh, looking up the commands to set a GPIO, figuring out cron, rc.d, etc.)

It’s way faster IME to just use the Arduino digital_write() functionality in setup and loop. (I’m a long-time c/c++ programmer, which helps a bit.) The exploitable footprint is way lower, so you pretty much never need to do a security patch. If the power fails, you’ll never* end with a bad volume; it just boots back from flash and resumes working.

There's a lot of stuff you can do to Linux on the Pi to make it have some of the nice qualities you're describing.

I've set up my Buildroot project to copy "authorized_keys" and "wpa_supplicant.conf" from the fat32 formatted boot partition to their normal locations. So I flash an SD card, drag and drop the files onto the SD card, plug it in the Pi and SSH right in.

With regards to filesystem corruption on power failure, you can mount the root filesystem as read-only. If you need to write to files you could mount a tmpfs volatile filesystem.

You make a lot of sense except the part about price. Despite you being right that MSRP represents a great value for the advantages, the actual cost is way out of whack for what you get with a Pi, just due to the fact that they've been in short supply and thus mediated by 'scalpers' for 3+ years now.

I can still see how for some people it is still worth it, because, say an HP thin client decidedly isn't a good substitute if you want to, say, fit it in an outlet box and run off 5v USB power. For anything where you're not using the GPIO/"hats"/whatever though, unless size is a big concern, I would use a small older computer over a Pi.

If I am doing a project with a 'hardware' component tomorrow though, I agree with you, I'd (grudgingly) overpay for a Pi rather than those other things, because, of all platforms with interface GPIO pins that you can use to do cool stuff, the Pi is the one most likely to have "support" out there -- meaning either someone else has already made a tool to do some of the things I want, or someone else has run into the problems I'll run into and prompted a discussion about how to fix it.

I think it depends on the type of project. I found the out of box experience to be super easy with Arduino. You install the IDE, plugin the board via USB and can start writing code right away.

As a full stack web developer, I am always finding myself getting bogged down in activities to support the work of development (managing dependencies, deployments, builds, etc). I don't enjoy that part of being a developer.

The experience of being able to write a few lines of C code and have stuff happen right away is very pleasant and a breath of fresh air. Unless it's necessary, I would rather not complicate things by having to deal with an OS and everything that entails.

You can get an ESP32 (Seeed Studio Xaio) Arduino-compatible board for $5 from Digikey. Incredibly cheap for hobby-scale projects!

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