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Comment by Legogris | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a compelling alternative to Rpi4B, and I'm happy they went without WiFi/BT. I really wish we saw more boards like this with PoE support, though - if nothing else as an optional hat to the board.

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I love the non-radio C4, my beef is that the fan kicks in a lot and is annoying. I’ve throttled back the parameters for the fan, but actually I’d lean toward passive cooling or a big constantly active case fan with a heat sync. I forget if if has video playback hardware for headed use, as I used it mostly for compute demos. IIRC it has multple processor cores with different strengths as opposed to the other tiny computers with uniform cores. Sadly unlike many of the boards out there, it doesn’t have the uniform RPi size/hat shape, unsure if C2 stuff works with C4.

raspberry foundation has a first-party PoE hat: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/

Yup, and so does Rock Pi (I think they're even cross-compatible). Unfortunately the official Raspberry hat maxes out at 2.5A, which starts being problematic if you add a single power-hungry peripheral, like an external USB disk. I've even gotten warnings on insufficient power in dmesg with zero peripherals attached on a 4B+.

So far I had no issues with DSLRKIT's third-party hats, though!

Why are you happy about no wifi/Bt? Genuinely curious.

Because I have zero use for it. Components add cost and footprint. I am uncertain on if the power consumption goes up from these modules being there idling when modules/drivers are not loaded, but that could be a factor. And the less black-box non-open components on my board, the better.

I'd wager that the addition of an additional wifi-free spec would actually increase costs. With the need for active cooling to prevent throttling, the pi4 veers much closer to an ultra-small desktop replacement and for that, the integrated wifi is better.

Oh sure, I'm not saying it was a bad choice to put BT and WiFi on the RPi, just that I'm happy that there are hobbyist/prosumer devices in the same range without :)

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