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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

Here's the protocol I use: for any new project first use the 8GB version. Let it settle for a while, then check what do I actually need, and swap the board for a cheaper one. Minimizing the specs makes sense it you have many RPis running a variety of projects. If you just have 1 board that is a catch-all device for your small projects/services then by all means go wild. But then I'd actually recommend an x86 NUC (if GPIO is not needed). You can buy a new or even better a used one very cheaply.

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> x86 NUC (if GPIO is not needed)

I'd be surprised if you can't buy a GPIO board that connects to USB for a few dollars on AliExpress.

Adafruit has one for $15 if you’re looking for something delivered relatively faster that past some sort of QC.

Good point. One potential drawback is that there's a metric ton of software already written for the RPi's GPIO. Plus all the HATs. Heck, you can even transmit straight from the pins [noisy and likely noncompliant] radio signals using some DMA tricks!

GPIO programming is relatively simple, so without much effort you could write a library that mimics the RPi GPIO libraries.

This only applies to simple stuff, but not to things like DMA, or framebuffer devices.

If you're going to be doing anything with it where strict timing is a concern (like bit-banging some random protocol), USB isn't going to cut it.

But yeah, if you don't care about timing, that will work.

I bought a used Asus Chromebox cn60 for $22, it has a 1 x Celeron 2955U @ 1.4 GHz tossed in 16gigs of ram for an additional ~$15 and a 256gig m.2 ssd for ~$18. All in under $60 for an x86 based cheap low powered home server running Debian. Running several docker containers for over a year and a half now, rock solid. Runs pihole, home assistant, an imgur clone for my wife and all runs through a cloudflare tunnel.

Rescue old hardware!

We have 2000 rpis and still choose the 8gb every day. Way easier to deal with.

Out of curiosity, what are you doing with these?

As someone who has worked with dozens:

I worked with high-power EV chargers.

Each system had 4 RPi 4s. (Some due to 3rd-party hardware, some powering touch displays).

The main system started out with 4GB, but 8GB was more convenient for developing.

The systems generated a massive amount of metrics that got buffered in memory.

8GB memory is convenient when your only alternatives are SD-card and EEPROM.

Sounds like this is a use case where none of size, power & cost matters very much, and faster development is desired. It may even prefer "heavier" libraries if it makes development easier. Which is completely different from most consumer devices and many commercial devices.

Well, if that's true, have to agree raspberry pi may be better than esp32.

running an electron app (and the x server and more) in a container

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