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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

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> thanks to every US public school deciding the entirety of their pupils must code --and do so on a pi-- the average price surged in the states to nearly $450 a unit

Wow. Messages from an alternate reality. There are at least three assertions in the above message which are untrue.

Anecdotally, my local school district decided to do what the GP post says, and they're the last district I would expect to do that. I've never seen $450/unit, though.

> HN users should be building KVM hypervisors and homelabs

I'd rather not. Working with real hardware is much more fun and SBC's barely draw any power.

I just wouldn't buy Pi's.

Buy a Pine64 or RockPi or Milk-V or something similar.

The price some of these smaller boards go by is staggering.

I just recently got my first RPi for my home automation needs, so I have no emotional attachment to the RPi ecosystem of the past. Frankly I don't get your rant at all, nor do I see any reason to reassess the approach.

I've also got one for that. Reolink doorbell camera + RPi is what I'm hoping to get to work together.

My apartment has old radiators with manual temperature control, so my goal is to automate that with some temperature sensors + Zigbee radiator controllers. And liberating my Hue lights as they keep nagging that I'll soon need a cloud account to control my lights at home.

Nice I've been contemplating doing some home automation for heating, I have a dual fuel forced air furnaces, with only 1 thermostat and a fairly large house. There's a large temperature gradient between the floors, so I was thinking automate booster fans on the lower floor to pull more heat, and or cycle the recirculate fan when the temp gradient is above X.

Check out home-assistant.io

That's exactly my plan!

What your critique does not address is the hardware aspect of the pi. GPIO pins engage many people who are interested in seeing tangible results of programming.

For most hardware projects I reach for Arduino first. They are a lot cheaper (especially the knock-offs), actually in stock, and easier to reason about (fewer layers involved in the software stack, more direct hardware access)

Raspberry Pis are great if you want easy internet connectivity in your hardware project, or need an OS or lots of computing power.

If they were readily available and $20 each I'd grant them that they are more convenient. But at real prices and availability that's more difficult to justify

I agree that the availability has always been a big program. I always wanted a pi zero w but never could find one at list price.

Eh? I bought a Raspberry Pi last October through Amazon in the UK and it cost £62.57 (excluding extras like a power supply and case)

Yeah, honestly I have become pretty disillusioned with the entire ARM SBC market.

For awhile they were super cheap and so it was easier to justify, but when they’re getting into $200+, at some point I feel like you’re going to get a better deal with a mini x86_64 PC, with considerably better performance (if not per watt, at least total performance).

I had some used thin clients with AMD CPUs a few years ago. They were $50 each, and only ate like 10W of power, even under load. No, there wasn’t GPIO built in, but even three years ago there was USB 3.0 and it blew the Raspberry Pi out of the water at the time.

I was running a full rack mount server for a few years after that but since cheap mini gaming PCs have been coming out on Amazon semi recently, I bought one of those to save power usage, and I have extremely happy with them. They have a GPU where I have been able to VAAPI transcoding fully working and they have a considerably faster CPU, and since RPis have gotten so expensive with spiked demand, it wasn’t even that much more expensive for a home lab.

What are you talking about, you can easily get all models same or next day at typical reseller markup. I keep seeing these comments but not experience this problem. So what gives? #fakenews

And children should learn to program edge devices, they are entering a world flooded with them...

> And children should learn to program edge devices, they are entering a world flooded with them...

Which means little unless laws substantially change to allow them to do anything with them. Right now, edge devices are protected from "tampering" and "unauthorised use" by both technical and legal means.

Haha. If you can code then you can create your own devices from scratch. People won't whine about a locked down cloud-only doorbell... they'll make their own.

Or you could do that now.

lol, thats the most anti-hacker comment I have ever seen.

Protected from tampering? What?! "Attempting to prevent tampering".

Sorry, I'm depressed about SaaS, IoT, secure computing and remote attestation. And everything being rented instead of owned - from the edge devices in question to apartments they're installed in. Good luck with parents letting kids hack on stuff when it violates multiple lease agreements.

Even more of a reason go encourage kids to explore their rented environment and take ownership of their devices.

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