> I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after.
They still fill a niche for me, just not a server niche. The easy-to-access GPIO in a close-to-vanilla Linux system really doesn't have a competitor at its price point. For a fourth grade science project last winter, I had a pi 4 already (but it'd have been about $40 at my local microcenter if I hadn't). We were able to source a few $2 sensors off Amazon. I showed her how to look up the pinouts, figure out which GPIO pin to connect the dupont connectors to, and helped her write a python program to log the data from the sensors to a spreadsheet. She had fun with it, learned some stuff, and it really sparked her interest.
I don't think anyone has outcompeted them in accessibility for that kind of tinkering and learning. Or, if they have, they haven't caught my attention yet, and I've usually got my eyes open for that kind of thing.
Ah, education, right. I never had interest in the whole GPIO thing but I'll admit life has been pulling me in very different directions, hence this dropped off my radar. Thanks for the reminder.
Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount small (or big) fans, and all that.
And don't get me wrong, I love tinkering myself but after reading people's experiences for a while I just thought to myself "Why all this trouble? Get a $250 - $400 mini PC off of Amazon / eBay / AliExpress and put a 2-4 TB NVMe SSD and you have something 20x more powerful and with 100x the storage space".
Again, I love me some tinkering. But nowadays I want to get something out of it in the end. Like the mini PC I bought that I want to dedicate only to a PiHole even if it's a 50x overkill for it. Might add some firewalling / VLAN management capabilities to it down the line.
So yep, for education RPi and Arduino (+ its derivatives) seem mostly unbeaten.
On a RPi I can control more aspects than I can a mini pc ITX board. I can boot straight to my program. I can write directly to frame buffers. I don’t need Linux. I don’t really need a kernel…
Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just putting the box outside the box):
Coffee table Digital Touch map.
Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiPo battery.
ADSB receiver also powered by solar and a battery.
Arcade Cabinet that sits on a bar top with a bill reader.
Mini JukeBox at the local hacker space.
Sailing autopilot using NMEA2000 connectors.
Wearables.
Playing with high density distributed computing. (More than 5 machines)
As I understand it, that is incorrect. It's more like a hypervisor still running in the background. That may have rolled back more and more with recent versions, but in principle the hypervisor can show shit like temperature, voltages and frequency in wrong ways, or delayed to the 'guest', whatever that may be. Actually that was the case, for some time, as some low-level tinkerers and/or overclockers discovered.
Similar to anything running in SMM (System Management Mode) on X86/AMD64 since the times of the 386SL. Be it BIOS, APM, ACPI, UEFI, or whatever.
I repeat: "It's just an illoooshn..." (There is now raw iron/silicon for consumers)
They still fill a niche for me, just not a server niche. The easy-to-access GPIO in a close-to-vanilla Linux system really doesn't have a competitor at its price point. For a fourth grade science project last winter, I had a pi 4 already (but it'd have been about $40 at my local microcenter if I hadn't). We were able to source a few $2 sensors off Amazon. I showed her how to look up the pinouts, figure out which GPIO pin to connect the dupont connectors to, and helped her write a python program to log the data from the sensors to a spreadsheet. She had fun with it, learned some stuff, and it really sparked her interest.
I don't think anyone has outcompeted them in accessibility for that kind of tinkering and learning. Or, if they have, they haven't caught my attention yet, and I've usually got my eyes open for that kind of thing.