I still use Pis in my 3d printers. Laptop would be too big, and a ESP could not run the software. "China clone" might work, but the nice part of the pi is the images available. It just works™
I'm also currently building a small device with 5" touchscreen that can control a midi fx padle of mine. It's just so easy to find images, code and documentation on how to use the GPIO pins.
Might be niche, but that is just what the Pi excels at. It's a board for tinkers and it works.
You can run Klipper on any Linux SBC with a USB port, RPi works but so does an old router that supports OpenWRT, a cheap Android TV box that could be flashed to run Linux, or any of the OrangePi/Banana Pi/Alliwinner H3 boards. You don't really need hardware UART because most of the printer boards you'd be using have either native USB or USB to UART converters. For that pedal, would an old Android tablet that supports USB OTG work? Because that's got to be much cheaper, and with much better SDK.
Correct. But when I looked into it a few years back fir OrangePi it was not as easy as downloading raspbian. All the images made for the pi would not work, you had to download a kernel from another place or something like that? Sorry I don't remember the details, but it was not as easy as a pi.
How much cheaper then 50 bucks can a tablet get? With the pi I can quickly in a hacky way connect rotary encoders with female-female dupon cables, use a python GPIO library made for raspberry pi.
See my other comment, pi5 2 GB is about ~10% more expensive then when 3 or 3b got released when factoring in inflation. ~60 EUR including 25% VAT.
With PSU it's 77 EUR including 25% VAT right now.
4 GB version + case + 64GB SD + PSU = 135 EUR, but I don't need that much ram, disk space or the case. When I put it into a 3d printer I also don't need the PSU.
> When I put it into a 3d printer I also don't need the PSU
Unless you want your printer to power up on demand, then you need a separate PSU and an SSR (and you still need a buck converter because printers don't supply 5V at required amperage).
Yeah, Pi 5 2gb is ~20% more expensive compared to pi3b on release, factoring in inflation (Both in including VAT and local prices)
It's 10 bucks more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Still half the price that I see intel NUCs for sale. Which of course are way more capable. But still, I don't mind the price that much.
I could go with a cheaper alternative, but then AFAIK you might have to fiddle with images, kernel and documentation. For me that is worth 10 bucks.
2. Testing software on ARM64 Linux. Pis are still cheaper than used Apple Silicon Macs, and require less fiddling to run Linux. I currently have a free Oracle Cloud instance that would work just as well for this, but it could go away at any time and it's a PITA to reprovision.
3. Running Mathematica, because it's free on Pi, I only use it a few times a year, and a fully-loaded Pi 5 is cheaper than a single-year personal license to run it on any other platform.
4. Silly stuff like one Pi 3 I have set up to emulate a vintage IBM mainframe.
>Yeah, Pi 5 2gb is ~20% more expensive compared to pi3b on release, factoring in inflation (Both in including VAT and local prices)
I don't really care how it compares to past models or inflation to justify its price tag. I was just comparing to to what you can buy on the used market today for the same price and it gets absolutely dunked on in the value proposition by notebooks since the modern full spec RPi is designed to more of a ARM PC than an cheap embedded board.
60 Euros for 2GB and 100 for 8GB models is kind of a ripoff if you don't really need it for a specific niche use case.
I think an updated Pi-zero with 2GB RAM and better CPU stripped of other bells and whistles for 30 Euros max, would be amazing value, and more back to the original roots of cheap and simple server/embedded board that made the first pi sell well.
Yeash, but not as good as an alternative to a PI back then, since 8 year old notebooks 10 years ago (so 18 year old notebooks today) were too bulky and power hungry to be a real alternative. Power bricks were all 90W and CPU TDW was 35-45W. But notebooks from the 2018 era (intel 8th gen) have quite low power chips that make a good PI alternatives nowadays.
The mobile and embedded X86 chips have closed the gap a lot in power consumption since the PI first launched.
Now you can even get laptops with broken screens for free, and just use their motherboard as a home server alternative to a PI. Power consumption will be a bit higher, but not enough to offset the money you just saved anytime soon.
You can get a 5-year-old laptop with a perfectly working screen for free if you're on good terms with the owner of a company who has a stack of them sitting in a storage closet waiting for disposal. :)
Which is basically just cutting out the middlemen in a transaction that might cost $100 on eBay.
Used corporate laptops are particularly cost-effective if you're interested in running Windows, as unlike Intel NUCs and most SBC products, they typically include hardware-locked Windows 10 Pro licenses which can be upgraded to Windows 11 Pro for free.
5-year old laptops for free aren't really a thing in most of Europe unless maybe you're in Norway or some super rich country where 100$ is pocket change. In most large places I worked in Europe, laptops are leased from a service provider, not owned by the company. When they're obsolete they get sold in bulk locally or abroad. But never for free.
That comparison was true back in 2012 when the first version was released, too.
Things like used PCs and forgotten closet laptops were running circles around brand-new Raspberry Pi systems, in performance per dollar, for as long as we've had new Raspberry Pis to make that comparison with.
Those first Pis didn't even have wifi, and they were as picky about power supplies and stuff back then as a Pi 5 is today.
The primary aspects that are new are that the featureset of new models continues to improve, and the price of a bare board has increased by an inflation-adjusted ~$10.
(Meanwhile: A bare Pi 3B still costs $35 right now -- same as in 2016. When adjusted for inflation, it has become cheaper. $35 in 2016 is worth about $48 today.)
I'm also currently building a small device with 5" touchscreen that can control a midi fx padle of mine. It's just so easy to find images, code and documentation on how to use the GPIO pins.
Might be niche, but that is just what the Pi excels at. It's a board for tinkers and it works.