cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
blaurascon
@blaurascon asked:

given your Little Guys™ series, thought you might enjoy this article that showed up in my rss feed this morning: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/what-i-learned-when-i-replaced-my-cheap-pi-5-pc-with-a-no-name-amazon-mini-desktop/

relatedly, i plan to (eventually) get a physical pihole set up for my home network, and the little guys vids have me curious if i could find a little guy that would work for that purpose. the thought of a very overengineered (comparatively, for my purposes) little guy, like the logic from ep 1, hanging out in my network shelf blocking ads fills me with joy and i'm excited to someday try it out. cheers!

there are so so so so so many little guys that obliterate a pi 5 in perf but are built better, have more useful IO, will run more software, etc. that i can't think of a single reason to own a pi unless you really do need that gpio. you just need to find the right eBay search terms. you don't even need to get all that little - for thirty bucks you can get a lenovo thinkcenter tiny and it's just a PC with m.2 and dual DisplayPort and whatnot, might even include a Windows license if you're into that. i think corps have thrown away more of these things than the number of raspis ever made


ctrl-salt-del
@ctrl-salt-del

they're good computers bront


WebsterLeone
@WebsterLeone

I was looking up the thinkcentres and saw the DC socket and immediately realized that's what the weird-ass rectangular connector adapter we got a million of at work are for.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

I also struggle to think of cases where you need that GPIO to be built in, instead of using something like a Teensy or even a Pi Pico over USB. Unless you're doing absurdly-high-speed stuff or need the smallest possible footprint or doing something inadvisable with the buses, those are probably good enough.

One of the original use cases/ideas was that it was going to replace the need to have both a laptop and some sort of FPGA device (BASYS BOARD) in classroom settings. It was an all-in-one solution for what my university called Digital Devices and Logic Design class that sophomore students take for EE and CS.

I know you didn't enjoy your time with the Wyse 3040 very much, but as you surmised I think it's the perfect option for a Pihole - 8GB of space and 1GB RAM is more than enough to run Debian/Alpine and plop AdBlock Home on top with space to spare.

the thinclient world is an excellent supply of cheap Little Guys that annihilate any raspberry pi product in terms of performance per watt. some even have upgradeable memory and storage, or undocumented ECC support! I have a $20 HP T530 running my home automation/climate monitoring garbage, and it only uses ~3-5w, with plenty of horsepower to spare.

a thinkcentre tiny marketed as Home Computer would be killer. I sent one to my parents back home and they paid like 0 import tax bc the customs man thought it was an old dvd player

As somebody who uses a pi400 regularly the only real advantage I see is the continued long term support of this hardware from its manufacture. Plus the amount of solutions I can get without having to put effort into cad and instead just go on Thingiverse having ready made cases and accessories I can just 3D print.

But at the same time, since the pi 4 and 5, I think the whole project kind of fell apart from its original purpose of being a one size fit all solution to low cost IoT devices. The pi Zero 2 fits that purpose so much better, and for $15. If I needed a thin client/portable PC I can find a solution real easy on eBay for anywhere from half to a third of the price of a new pi 5, and I don't have to deal with scalpers.

Yeah, I use Zero 2 Ws to do minor home automation and couldn't imagine how much it would cost to do this with a pi 5. The pi 5 with its fancy new GPU is overkill for the purpose of setting up an automatic system for a pool, temperature sensor, or a garage door, but that's still what they kind of advertise the whole pi lineup as. Even if you advertise it as a learning device, a lot of university programs are moving away from ARM to RISC V (if they ever had ARM based programs, I don't think a lot of them moved away from the old BASYS FPGA boards) and those devices at least make sense from a price standpoint as well as a truly open architecture. I know they have a lot of industrial partners, and that seems to be their primary focus now, but the community at large still seems to treat them as "aw shucks I'm just a little guy providing little computers to hackers and makers" when that hasn't been the case for a while, at least not since the pi 3.

in reply to @ctrl-salt-del's post:

the wild thing about the Tiny is that there's really just no downside. it's not like when someone tells you to Just get something and it turns out that there's a bunch of weird gotchas. it's just a nice midrange business laptop without a screen.

i got dimly aware of this sort of thing a couple months ago and i got disappointed at myself it took me so long. "wintel" has wormed it's way into every segment and dominated it on price/performance, of course it'd get into the very small fellows market. it's so obvious

i guess part of me really wanted the pi to be good because it was a risc computer with a linux on it that was cheap and not from the 90s.

the way it's been explained to me, and I can't verify this (and it has the energy of conspiracy theory that I'm always wary of) is that basically qualcomm has fucked the ARM market for a whole host of reasons and through a whole host of methods, and the result is that nobody is even trying to compete with them except apple. you can't buy apple silicon, everything that isn't literally a Qualcomm Snapdragon is a pathetic waste of money, and Snapdragons are 2/3rds of the cost of every device they go into, so if anyone made a pi with one - assuming they could even get them - it would cost more than a full size desktop PC. so yeah, my take is that we're never getting good ARM and should abandon the fantasy.

i guess part of me really wanted the pi to be good because it was a risc computer with a linux on it that was cheap and not from the 90s.

I think you might want to shift your attention to RISC V for that front, at the very least it's getting way more adoption on the education side than anything else, especially due to the price/availability of RasPis.

I'd have to check this, but I have the whole thing hooked up to a UPS and IIRC with these four dudes (running proxmox + muliple VMs per), an old Optiplex, and a network switch, I was averaging in the low 40w range.

(I've since plugged my big gaming PC into the same UPS which has thrown all of that off)

I am still steady rockin’ the HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Mini that I bought as a barebones system for $25, all I had to bring to the party was some RAM and an SSD. If you have some old hardware laying around, these things are an absolute steal.