This is my recurring gripe with these "mini computers":
Power cable? Not included.
SSD adapter? Not included.
Needs a mini HDMI to HDMI cable.
Needs a cooling case (absolutely required for Pi 5).
It feels a bit like Tesla’s "gas savings" pricing deception. The Pi looks cheap on paper, but the actual usable cost is buried under "essential extras" [1].
[1] https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-5-16gb/?src=raspb...
I feel like the Pi 4 and 5 have moved into a weird limbo area, where if you want it as a small computer there are better computers that include all the things you mentioned, and if you want it for integrating with electronics there are probably less powerful but cheaper options that would work just as well.
Not even limbo. If you need an ultra low power SBC, Pi is there. But if you want the cheapest option, it ain't.
A raspberry pi 5 8gb CanaKit. So pi, fan, microsd, cords, power. Comes in at $160 on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/CanaKit-Raspberry-Starter-Kit-PRO/dp/...
You can get any number of Intel N150 MiniPC's with RAM, SSD and power cord for $140? https://www.amazon.com/GMKtec-mini-pc-computer-n150/dp/B0CH8... Maybe less on sale. And an Intel N150 is going to score 2-3x on standard benchmarks what the RPi does. You can find older N100 based mini PC's for even less.
The pi still has its place, again, for those ultra low power use cases. But for "I just want a small computer", it's not the option. Mostly because of economies of scale. Everything in the MiniPC's is made at thousands of times more scale than the RPi. Also.... in Chinese factories for significantly less cost to start with.
The way I used my Raspberry Pi boards fits into two categories, either always on providing some network service (with a shield), which usually benefits from very low power draw, either needing SPI/I2C/serial to connect to random hardware. For both of these use cases x86 miniPCs are not adequate. They either lack the GPIO header either they draw way more power than ~3-5W (onboard chipset, RAM etc draw extra power)
Respectfully, not from my angle!
From a purely hardware perspective, I think it's always been in that "limbo" for almost every use case anyway.
For a hobbyist even in Ye Olden Days (before there were other single board computers) you were always able to pull up Craiglist or walk to the thrift store and buy a $50 PC that vastly outperformed a Pi anyway. Underclock that PC and it could be a fanless power miser too, albeit not quite down to Pi levels. (Pretty sure I remember people clocking 900mhz P3's down to 500mhz fanless, that kind of thing. Still faster than a O.G. RPi...)
So the Pi's hardware was really only a revelation if you needed that semi-embeddable form factor, or if you wanted to do something like manage a classroom of cheap low-performance PCs without the nightmare of managing a fleet of heterogeneous junk PCs.
It was always all about the objectively awesome ecosystem of support and peripherals, and deciding whether that ecosystem mattered for you and your use case. Sometimes that ecosystem is a massive boon and sometimes it doesn't matter at all.
Tangentially, it's always been annoying (and maybe slightly morbidly humorous) how the RPi has always remained a sort of barely-tolerable web browsing machine, even as the hardware's performance has massively increased, because the weight and complexity of web pages has also correspondingly increased.
The Pi 3 B+ is still available for $35, it's what I still use on occasion - as an ad-hoc networked sensor, or an LED or switch controller, or an weird eeprom programmer ...
Sure I could use an arduino in many cases, but the Pi running linux can be very convenient, with bash or regular python or even small unix C utilities (which I can tweak and re-compile right on the Pi!)
Yeah, the Raspberry Pi 4 is available at $35 too, and I like the less common Pi 3A+. The competitors at that price are only the rk3566 boards
The Pi 5 and the RK3588 boards is when I'd get an Intel N100 miniPC instead.
What I'd really like is an RPi4 or RPi5 that has an ATmega328P on board that can be programmed and controlled from the software running on the ARM processor. Basically a built-in Arduino UNO.
Just get a hat? They breakout into Arduino UNO style connectors and you can use hats designed for that on top of it.
Have you looked at programming the RP1 chip on board the Pi5? It’s not exactly a RP2040 but it has PIO and other similarities.
Not an ATmega328P (and not ARM), but the Radxa X4 has an Intel N100 with a RP2040 microcontroller built-in.
I remember someone testing that board (Jeff Geerling, maybe?) and there was significant lag on the GPIO because the MCU is essentially an external device with communication over serial (IIRC), it just happens to be mounted on the motherboard.
The Raspberry Pi 5 has also done something similar: the CPU no longer controls the GPIO directly, but through a RP1 southbridge. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? Don't see any mention of latency on Jeff's review on it, and I doubt the Radxa X4 is popular enough for any big in-depth review like that.
It looks like the RP2040 on the X4 is connected via USB. The RP2040's bootloader mode that enables flashing emulates a mass storage device over USB to transfer firmware, so it would be confusing to not connect it via USB.
Beaglebone Black with PRU
Honestly, the big thing that the Pi has is the support and mindshare. Compared to many equivalents (e.g., the Banana Pi) you'll find much better documentation and have a much more polished experience with a Raspberry Pi.
The only question, for me anyway, is how much value I put on that experience and whether the increased cost is worth it.
Yes, this is it. When I'm experimenting, I'm happy to pay an extra $40 for the name-brand device that has 1000s of blog posts supporting it, since it's probably this community is going to help me be more successful and learn faster.
I would reconsider the choice when I have a commercial product that I have some scale of production, where a few bucks off the BOM is important.
I think the mistake is the trend of trying to treat it like a mini computer. If you buy a Pi, stick an old SD card in it, plug it into an old USB charger you have lying around, and connect it to the network it's great for people learning how to use Linux, command line, and SSH.
You can connect things to the headers and experiment with it as originally intended.
In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to try to treat it like a mini desktop computer. Like you said, it's very expensive to add on all of the accessories: High power adapter, M.2 hat, SSD, special HDMI cables, and a case for cooling. By the time you're done, you've spent as much as a cheap x86 computer that would outperform it and come with none of the software quirks.
Just because you can outfit it will all of those things doesn't mean most people should. If you really want a mini computer, get a mini computer.
Completely agree. I jumped back in recently for some electronics work and was surprised to learn that the Raspberry Pi imaging tool allows you to set the root user, WiFi SSID, and hostname right when you're imaging the tool. You never need to connect it to a display like the old days! Makes onboarding a device for a specific purpose super easy. Been using mine to work with a simple LED matrix from Adafruit. But I am sure I will be acquiring more for all kinds of random projects in the time to come.
Also in the imager you can tell it to enable SSH, add an SSH key or have it generate one, and set it to not allow password authorization over SSH.
It does indeed make setting up a headless RPi quite convenient, although afterwards you do actually have to find the thing on your network.
By default it has the hostname "raspberrypi" and handles mDNS so SSHing to raspberrypi.local often does the trick, but could be a problem if you have more than one. You can set the hostname in the imager to deal with that.
Another common approach is to check your router's DHCP client list or connected device list. If you are lucky your router includes the hostname if the client sent one. If it only shows MAC address, IP address, and DHCP remaining lease you can look for something that just got its lease.
Personally, once I learn the Pi's MAC addresses either from my router's DHCP server or by logging on to the Pi and using "ip link show" I go to my router's DHCP settings and assign reserved IP addresses to those Mac addresses. Then whenever I re-image or boot from another drive with a different image it doesn't matter. It's going to be on the same IP.
I think that’s the real distinction: the Pi isn’t interesting as a "cheap desktop", it’s interesting because of GPIO + the huge ecosystem of HATs, sensors, and weird little projects.
If you just want a small, cheap computer, x86 boxes are better in every way.
But if you want something you can hook wires to, fry once in a while, and find 20 blog posts about someone doing the same, Pi still has a niche that’s hard to replicate.
All I’m saying is that Pi projects can get really expensive if you want to do anything beyond a basic install like Pi-hole and leave it as-is. Even simpler projects - say, connecting a motor or a servo require additional components like a power module or distribution board, which quickly adds up.
It is a bit expensive for this kind of "dangerous" experimenting. I wish there was a ESP32-like capable of running Linux. (Actually, there is: BeagleBoard. But these are even more expensive.)
What about Onion Omega?
Can you please recommend basic tutorials for working with Pi? I completely missed learning about it all these years. I have decent knowledge of electronics and programming.
It crossed the point where mini or barebone pcs are a better deal, unless you really want to use hardware/GPIOs/etc
Tesla is another story. They used to sell complete cars, now they put in a touchscreen and have taken away the dashboard, the buttons, and now the turn signal and drive select stalks. It's not minimalist or cost savings, it is cheap.
Unless you need the GPIO pins it is likely a better choice to go with one of the many x86 mini PCs on Amazon, although you need to ensure it is not totally no-name.
I got a GMKtec G5 which is about ~3"x3"x2", has an Intel N97 CPU, 12GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD (upgraded to a 2TB NVMe disk). No need to buy an additional power adapter (included, it's Type-C), HDMI adapters, or case/fan, either. I think it was about £110 with next-day shipping from Amazon.
It has remarkable performance; I tried GNOME on NixOS and it felt instantly responsive for all general purpose desktop use (web browsing, vscodium with my linting extensions, etc). The only area of my everyday workflow in which it clearly fell behind my M1 Max MacBook Pro was in Rust compilation which is obviously expected - I was just shocked how close it was for everything outside of that. This is in huge contrast to Raspberry Pis which suck to use graphically, even with the Pi 5.
It has happily been sitting on my desk running Forgejo, Mastodon, Vaultwarden, and acting as a personal storage server with that 2TB drive for the last ~6 months and I never even hear the fan. Sits at 0.1 load average, despite Mastodon with this many relays previously eating up the contabo VPS' CPU I was using quite handily.
If you need GPIO support on a mini-PC you can just use a cheap FT232H breakout [1] with either PyFTDI [2], which supports pretty much all the protocols you need (UART/GPIO/SPI/I2C), or alternatively use CircuitPython with Blinka [3] which gives you access to the CircuitPython drivers etc.
[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264 [2] https://pypi.org/project/pyftdi/ [3] https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-on-any-computer-wit...
Sell me the RP1 on PCIe!
Still no I2S.
Ahem, MicroHDMI to HDMI. That miniHDMI to HDMI from Pi3 just won't do .
I agree. The average Intel N150 system is significantly faster and cheaper since it includes stuff like PSU, storage and a case. The Pi is a poor value.
But no GPIOs or similarly low total power draw.
It's also significantly bigger too, so in applications where size matter the RPi wins.
The Pi 5 may look like a bargain at first, but once you add all the extras needed to turn it into a mini PC, you are already in the starter price range of NUCs or used ThinkStations and ThinkPads on eBay.
Hmm...
As far as power cables go, I think I only ever bought one proper PSU for a Pi, the rest were all powered from various bits of discarded PSU here and there, and in one case via a 5-way usb power thing. (Heck - I think only 2 of the last 5 phones I've had came with a power supply).
SSD - definitely nice to have, but I've not used one on a pi yet.
For display cables - most of my pi's tend to be headless, and I pre-configure the network bits when I image the sd card, so I don't often use the display at all.
Cooling case has become more necessary with the 5, although a heatsink alone can cope if airflow is good enough (e.g. if there's no case, of if the top is off).
But yes, if you want to use it in a desktop replacement scenario, then the extras do add up quite a bit.
I got a power-over-Ethernet splitter for my Pi 2B since being able to use PoE might be the only advantage it has over a mini PC. Otherwise it's just a very slow PC that takes 45 minutes to compile the single service I run on it.
Not sure if any of the newer Pi boards can be powered with a simple splitter rather than a PoE hat, as the 2B is quite low power.
Can confirm, I needed to buy a passive cooling case and HDMI to Mini HDMI adapter just to setup and work on my Pi 4. I already had a spare 32GB microSD laying around. Thankfully it's fully headless now and it can get power from basically any USB-C port.
For my case it wasn't too bad, maybe $30-40 to get up and running on top of the Pi 4 cost. But I totally get what you mean, especially if one wants more capacity, active cooling, dedicated PSU, etc.
I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. It occurred to me last week that the mini desktops I list might be better and cheaper than a Raspberry Pi in a lot of situations.
https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling/Mini-Desktops/_i....
They're all standard connectors though. The product is hobbyist enough that I understand that I won't get extras with the device and that's fine since I know have some laying around already anyway.
Kits are available for a little more, if you are just getting started and don't want to hunt for each individual component.
When I bought the original one, I also had to get a powered USB hub because it only had 2 ports and a lot of things would draw too much power and make it crash or power cycle.
I remember having to get composite cables!
i suppose having a standardized hw platform, standardized first-class sw platform (raspbian), plus the entire internet's worth of raspberry pi discourse is ultimately what you're paying for.
if the 'computer'-ey part of your project is a cost centre, the rpi starts to look attractive.
to me the wyse with an arduino ziptied to the top has always been a better pi than the pi (power savings nonwithstanding, at least I get SATA/NVme/Msata and x86's wide support)
So buy the desktop kit if that's what you want: https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-5-desktop-kit-us/...
Many people don't want/need all of it, and they can buy just the board without paying for stuff they don't need.
This is not a deception. Stop spreading misinformation.
what did I miss about EVs and gas savings?
meanwhile any N100 box on aliexpress...
I really hope we get a Pi 6 with on-board M.2. The PCIe 2.0 x1 over FPC is a bit of a weak spot in the 5 in my opinion. (I know it allows for interchangeable "hats," but you can get PCIe out of an M.2 slot too. Or if there are enough lanes, having both might be nice.)
I suspect selling the M.2 SSD now is establishing the product now in preparation for something with onboard support.
If so maybe it means the Pi 6 is closer than I thought. I was guessing mid next year.
Really the weak spot of the PI has always been the GPU though. It's always been a generation behind even cheap phone GPUs. I live in hope one day it'll get the upgrade it needs. I definitely think that the way they have been building infrastructure they might be developing the capability to provide something awesome, one day.
IMO, the GPU is actually a strength. It might not be the most powerful, but it is supported by the mainline kernel and libraries. Many other phone SoCs throw some binary drivers over the wall if you are lucky, and good luck if you ever want to upgrade the OS it came with.
That was the choice they made, support over performance. It was the right choice, but it doesn't change the fact that it is subpar performance. I am hoping in the future there will be options that allow them to offer both without sacrificing the other.
There's a 1TB Silicon Power SSD in 2230 form factor on sale on Amazon right now. PCIe Gen 4, far faster than I'd ever get over the wee PCIe lanes available on a Pi 5, so I can theoretically, and probably would go even cheaper.
So why should I get one from the Pi Foundation?
You didn't include the price of the one you found on Amazon, if it's this one, it's $69.97, the same price as the one sold by Raspberry:
https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-200MB-Compatible-SU01KG...
I'd buy the one from Raspberry just because I know they've tested it and it works well. (plus I prefer to not buy from Amazon, but that's just my personal preference)
Not to shill for a company, but probably because it's rated to work with it. Similar experience you get with "enterprise equipment".
"You could use any other drive, but our drive has been through rigorous testing" kind of situation.
Ideally we wouldn't need this since standards exist, but time and time again somebody is bound to take a shortcut and break things. Be it Raspberry in their PCI-E implementation or the drive manufacturer skipping a few NVME functions to save few kilobytes of firmware.
Think of it as a guaranteed "trouble-free" experience if you just want to plug it in and work.
I have been boiled by these cheap SSDs once, and it was a firmware related issue too.
200USD for half-assed 4TBs of SSD storage that may or may not work depending on what you plug it into.
PS: It was a Silicon Power SSD as well, so really do watch out for that stuff.
I've never had a M.2 SSD not work with a proper device, but I guess that might vary.
I see you've never had the awfulness of dealing with the weirdly-keyed SSDs or the SATA SSDs! They're terrible! I had one of those laying around in an older mobo and I wanted to just put it in another machine, nope. I found an SSD that's the same size, got an M.2 to USB adapter that handles all of them, then just used dd to copy the data over (since they're the same size, you can just dd it directly). Not fun.
Aren't SSDs notoriously one of the most counterfeited items? I'd trust one from the Pi foundation over Amazon any day.
Further to the technical points of a sibling comment, I imagine supporting the Pi Foundation is a motivator for many. I'd rather pay a little more for a product directly from them than not, if it helps to keep them going.
Most of the things are things people have already done. This is not the first SSD connected to a Pi.
The reason to get theirs is support or get something that's already tested and you know will work out of the box.
From what I've read that (assuming you mean this one [1]) has a decent reputation as a mainstream budget PCIe 4.0 SSD. It is $70.
However, also on Amazon right now on sale is the 1 TB Samsung 990 EVO Plus [2], which is generally considered to be a higher-end drive with better performance and longevity which is currently $65.
The Silicon Power is a 2230 and the Samsung is a 2280 so if one is using the official SSD hat the Samsung won't work. The official had only supports 2230 and 2242. However there are many 3rd party hats the do handle 2280, and I've also seen a base that goes under the RPi5 instead of on top.
The 2 TB Samsung is also on sale for $120, compared to the 2 TB Silicon Power for $140.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-200MB-Compatible-SU01KG...
If I had to guess, it's so companies can order 1000s of them through the same channels they're getting the Pis from
Because marketing?
I suppose if you're buying something for someone who is new to all of this, it might be worthwhile to have many things be RPi branded so if there are issues, there's only one party to worry about.
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/z3lziq/thoughts_o...
"Silicon Power has the highest failure rate of any brand we've used."
"I'm very late to this thread but I wanted to say their SSDs are garbage."
2230's are not all that common, so having another non-amazon source for them is a good thing.
That's like saying there's a $25/hr. dev who knows Rust and is based in Los Angeles. So why hire better?
I actually love the bumper. Solves a nitpick I have when tinkering.
I love the excerpt from the article
> 20-30 AAA Games.
Perhaps some years ago. Now AAA games are in the range of 70-100 GB, so hardly you can now fit 10 games in it
I wonder what the Apollo missions would have done with this much storage?
Isn't that similar to "what would Jaws be like as a movie is the shark worked"? It's not always a good thing. Spielberg has said he believes he would have made a worse movie and included more of the shark if it wasn't so finicky. Similar to today's bloat software that doesn't do any kind of refactoring because storage/memory is cheap. If there was that much storage, they would have figured out how to do unnecessary things that were not mission critical.
Sometimes, strict limitations are not a bad thing. It can be a weed out course level of filtering (since classes just started up again)
I've never heard that anecdote about Jaws, very cool. It's almost like "necessity is the mother of invention". Maybe "Limitation is the mother of innovation"?
Filled up a small portion with lookup tables and complained bitterly about being compute bounded?
Does anyone else find it bizarre that Raspberry Pi didn't include an M.2 connector on the bottom side to the single lane of PCIe instead of the no-power FPC on the top side?
This is why I’ve become sour on Raspberry Pi. By the time you obtain all the parts you need to turn it into a usable computer you’re spending more than you would for a used mini desktop PC that is more compatible and often more performant. Unless you really need an ARM processor for some reason, it’s hard to justify it.
Its not supposed to be a usable computer. I've never hooked up any of my Pis to a monitor longer a few minutes other than to enable SSH, which now you don't even need to. Either way, I'm fine leaving out all the accessories.
The best part of the Pi ecosystem is that if one dies, I can easily find a replacement and just swap out the SD.
The Pi has ended up in a strange zone where most of their customers are using it for things it isn't even good at.
It used to be positioned like an upscale microcontroller that cost a little bit more, but you could control hardware using the GPIO and you were afforded a whole linux OS where you could use higher level languages.
But then people started using it just for running fat linux applications like a PC. Then of course they started demanding more power, and so we've ended up with a bad mini-pc, rather than a platform for tinkering with hardware.
The old Pis made a lot of sense as an Arduino+++. But instead people are using them as a PC---
I don’t think most of their customers are using it for things it isn’t good at, just that those who are are very vocal online. I imagine most of their sales are to customers who are using them for projects where a reliable, supported SBC with GPIO is useful.
Raspberry Pi seem very engaged with their market and what they’re doing. They’re just not interested in making homelab media servers.
You seems as somebody who has inside information, or maybe you're just speculating, too? People are right to question RPI offerings because most of us still remember the core idea from the inception of that project. Luckily there're still Zero's and Pico's that make for something intriguing (and the CMs, too). The core product for the most people (yes, really for most) has become too far away from attractive.
Is the RPi reliable when it comes to high speed storage?
It's only officially rated for PCIe gen 2 speeds, but you can bump it up to gen 3 speed with a configuration flag.
I've done that for both of mine, combined with ~$15 256GB SSDs off of ebay, and I haven't had any trouble. It's noticeably faster, and probably a little more reliable than a microSD.
Reliable in what way? The Raspi 5 PCIe interface to NVMe is only a single gen2 lane (5Gb/s physical, 4Gb/s data due to 8b10b encoding) but that's still plenty fast for lots of uses. I've had no problems using a Samsung NVMe with a 3rd party NVMe hat for the past few months. You can boot directly from the NVMe so you don't also need an SD card.