The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan | Hacker News Reader

The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan

jeffgeerling.com

106 pointsgeerlingguy126 comments

As someone who's been obsessed with silent computing for nearly two decades, just looking at the picture of that fan makes my ears hurt. Tiny fans are invariably whiney. The surface area of the blades is barely larger than that of the motor. Running it at 3V instead of 5V will make it move barely any air.

The Pi 4 can easily be passively cooled, you just need a slightly bigger heat sink. It pains me to see that they went the quick and dirty way with that crappy little fan. That case has a huge surface area. It's what, ~9x7cm? Passive solutions would have been pretty easy, and probably not much more expensive than the $5 fan. And if you really want a fan, at least get a 50mm fan, so you can spin it slowly and still actually move air.

Fans are cheaper than the thermostatic equivalent of aluminum or copper.

And less over-design required for “rough-service” environments.

While inefficient. You could always put some 1n400x diodes in series with your fan and drop 5V down in 0.6V increments. Even cheaper 1n4148s could do as the current is small enough.

These days, I really prefer fans because they help cool everything. Bad caps are my nemesis...

When I went passive on my desktop 4 years ago after having to endure an extremely loud fan, I was constantly surprised at the beginning that one is able to do computing without noticing any sound at all. Now it's become a part of my normal expectations. I run a big workload and it doesn't make any sound. Beautiful.

Ha! I actually like the noises that the computer makes. They are sort of reassuring. A computer that is always silent regardless of whether it idles or churns a lot of compute, is very creepy. Give me clunky mechanical keyboards and noisy fans!

I miss the sound of the hard drive as an indicator of I/O activity.

Sometimes the motherboard makes a similar, but much softer, hum.

I’m surprised someone hasn’t made a SATA MITM that does this.

I once put an LED in series on a long rs232 link so I could see them flash when I/O was happening. But they have the spare voltage to work with.

Or the sound of a modem to let you know the internet is working? Nothing sounds better than two pulsing, clicking sine waves finding each other after long last, making love, and giving birth to white noise.

No thanks, I'll take all my computers and electronics as quiet as possible.

My little desk-computer has a pretty dirty audio path. I can turn up the audio to hear the chirps of the power regulators over the speakers; when the CPU is leaning on the PSU. Even just keystrokes in my editor cause a flurry of chirps as the clock-rate is increased and the systems races to idle within a few milliseconds.

When a process stalls I would already know whether it's IO or computation. Depending on the chirping I may reach for either ping or top to investigate further. Sometimes I leave these chirps on for hours. It's nonintrusive feedback to me about background tasks and when they clear.

I actually worry that my next machine will not have this flaw. And now I'm thinking of a syscall-chirp generator to get an even better feel for the pulse of the machine :-)

>And now I'm thinking of a syscall-chirp generator to get an even better feel for the pulse of the machine :-)

Nullsoft (the winamp people) made something like this back in the day. I encourage you you to write your own :)

Reminds me of the overheating cpu xkcd and the emacs programmer.

Oh it’s still around. I just bought a 14TB external for my desk and god it’s loud.

It’s a bad loud too. Old 160MB Quantum SCSI drives have that satisfying crispy whine and that sound like some tiny hamster is changing gears around inside of it when it does a seek.

Yup, I could tell by ear if my computer had crashed and I should hard restart or if there was still hope for the program if I waited it out.

Heh, I really, really liked that sound as well.

But I can't explain why really. Could be the sci-fi nerd in me similar to the way we tend to like the feel of mechanical toggle switches.

I've two machines tucked away near my desk & a sudden rise in the ambient hard drive rumbling has occasionally been an indicator that I should look into what's happening, usually it's just one of the larger torrents but it has also drawn my attention to a few bots going over my git server.

It draws attention to an alternate sense (hearing) when it comes to systems monitoring & information delivery, Phones are the common culprit of obnoxious beeping, whistles and tones but this sound isn't an intentional interpreted interrupting noise, it's a direct line from the machine.

Yeah for me sound is usually the first sign that something isn't right. A truly silent laptop seems pretty inconvenient. if the screen is black and power is on, there are tons of possible causes, but hearing a lack of coil whine immediately clues in that it's properly hosed and there is no point in being patient.

> My laptop “failed” again for the 4th time today. The first 2 motherboard replacements seemed odd, but I was given a completely new laptop from Apple on the 3rd failure. Just like before, the screen was pure black after clicking the power button and there was a slight fan sound. The only other indication that anything was alive was that the machine would still make an audible chime when plugging in power and the capslock key light could be toggled off and on. So after losing about 2 weeks of my time, >$10,000 in Apple warranty repairs (2 logic boards, new cables, and a complete replacement of a >$7000 computer), troubleshooting input from several Apple Geniuses, level 1 and 2 tech support from Apple Corporate, diagnostic tests at the Apple Store, and diagnostic tests twice at Apple’s repair facility in Texas; what was the root issue?

> The screen brightness was turned all the way down (not merely dim, but off).

https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/11/macbook-pro-problem/

My build emits some extremely slight coil whining, but for the most part, it's not noticeable, only if you put your ear within close distance to the computer and pay close attention.

Also upon boot, the bios makes its speaker emit a click. From that as well as the LEDs I can tell the computer is on. No need to listen for fan noise.

It'd be interesting to convert CPU/SSD/network/etc. activity into audio using some algorithm. It's pretty easy to do poorly, just by looking at stuff like utilization percentage, but ideally you'd base it on what operations the device is actually performing.

Nullsoft made an initial effort in the early 2000s: https://web.archive.org/web/20101031004813/http://www.nullso...

Are you using a mobile processor to keep the thermals down? Or underclocking a desktop-class processor and using a giant heat sink?

Underclocking and undervolting CPUs has been a mainstay of silent computing. AMD's Duron platform was excellent for this. Not suitable for gaming, but fine for daily computing. Big heat sinks with heat pipes work pretty well. Big, slow fans when there's no way around them. Plastic rivets instead of screws and rubber washers manage to keep vibration noise down (fans, spinning disks).

>"As someone who's been obsessed with silent computing for nearly two decades, just looking at the picture of that fan makes my ears hurt."

I bought 2 Pi4s with different cases. Both came with the same type of fan that looks like one in the article and set of heatsinks. As a person who actually tried it I can assure you that those are absolutely silent. No discernable sound comes out.

There are massive aluminum cases for Pi 4 that turn the whole thing into a giant heat sink. They work, but they aren't exactly cheap; and they still heat up a lot.

https://wickedaluminum.com/

I beg to differ:

https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case

What I don’t understand is why the external surface is flat.

Even worse, they polished them to a mirror-like finish!

You want to maximize surface area to radiate heat. Ideally they’d be rippled like a regular heat sink.

Edit: also standoffs! Don’t undervalue how much heat you can expel from the underside.

Something like this? https://www.coolipi.com/

https://desalvoinc.com/products/maker-block-case-for-raspber...

https://desalvoinc.com/products/housing-for-raspberry-pi-mod...

They offer one with a flatish top and one with hexes. I bought the flat because I think it looks better. I there is much difference in cooling because in either case you will have a lot more cooling surface than the processor without a heatsink.

As this is sufficient to cool down the pi even at max load, I assume they considered the esthetic next

But if it's already good enough to cool the pi at max load why go and make it ugly too?

The theory goes that the cooler something runs, the longer its lifespan.

“Cool enough” is highly dependent on ambient conditions. A cool basement floor vs on top of an audio receiver in a warm climate will have different results.

Pimoroni wins again if you ask me. I have too many Pimoroni cases.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/aluminium-heatsink-case-f...

I have both, and Wicked cases are quite a bit heavier and with more material inside, so presumably it's a better heat sink.

> The surface area of the blades is barely larger than that of the motor.

It looks like about 2.5cm blade vs. 1.5cm motor diameter, which is around 2.75× the area.

Enclosing the fan in plastic with no vents should help keep the noise down, though it makes little sense from a thermal perspective.

Tiny fans aren't necessarily whiny, but the quiet fans generally don't push a ton of air. My RPi4 has a Noctua 40mm x 20mm fan that is inaudible from more than a couple feet away.

Sure, it would be fairly easy to design a die cast housing to cool the RPi silently, and the part cost would be about the same as a fan, but the tooling costs are going to be fairly high for a product that really won't sell a ton of units.

Look up 'raspberry pi 4 heat sink case' and you'll find that a couple companies have already made these.

Not all tiny fans are loud. I built a very quiet Raspberry Pi IP camera[1] actively cooled by a little Noctua fan[2], and it's so quiet I can't hear it when I put my ear up next to it (as you'd expect from a fan that costs almost $1 per cubic centimeter).

[1]: https://github.com/milkey-mouse/basket/tree/master/hw/case [2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NEMGCIA

Interesting to see first party support for this. It is somewhat unfortunate that the official fan lets you read the fan speed, but not set it. I put a Noctua fan on my Pi and it sucks in a surprising amount of dust; mostly an artifact of too much ventilation when the computer doesn't actually need the airflow. (I put a filter on it and it's fine now, but sometimes I wonder whether the dust is actually filtered out, or if it just reduces airflow by so much that you don't suck in any dust to begin with :)

While writing this comment, I decided to investigate whether or not speed control is even possible on a 5V fan with 3V3 logic and found this: https://noctua.at/pub/media/wysiwyg/Noctua_PWM_specification...

The answer is: I still don't know. They say that the PWM voltage is pulled up to "3.3V/5V" internally but the spec says the PWM signal has to be 5V, so I suppose the results are undefined (and they just left 3.3V in their document accidentally).

But, a first-party fan could make this work, so I'm kind of sad that they just chose some off-the-shelf fan that was cheap today in Shenzhen. If you could do better than Noctua, then there's value in making it first-party. If you can't, why bother? Everyone that wanted a fan already has one.

IMO I would interpret "External pull-up is not necessary as the signal is pulled up to 3,3V/5V inside the fan." as indicative of expecting to being driven by an open drain output. There also is no spec for "Minimum voltage for logic high". You should be able to test this by hooking the fan up to power, measuring the voltage on its disconnected PWM line, and finding a steady voltage (5v?).

I don't know enough about the RPi to know if any PWMs can be configured as open drain and 5v tolerant. If not you'd need to add a single discrete transistor.

I may have read your post the wrong way, but it seems that they did provide a way? The specifications on the product page [0] mentions it got speed control with PWM, I figured up to the Intel specs, to be able to use an off-the-shelf fan.

So if anything you should be able to connect the PWM pin of your Noctua fan to one of the GPIO pins, and use their software to specify the PIN number of your PWM output. What seems more complex is to get the input from the fan about the actual speed, which would be useful to detect that the fan is blocked and is not doing the job you ask it to do.

[0]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-case-fan...

No, I must have glossed over that. I saw 3 pins, and assumed that it was power/ground/speed output like other 3-pin fans.

I used a small Noctua fan on my Pi project (actually a relatively large box) that I'm controlling via PWM. Didn't need any logic level conversion.

Which cost more, the Pi or the fan?

The 3D printer to print the case with a fan hole.

This is why my pi's case is wooden.

>I put a Noctua fan on my Pi and it sucks in a surprising amount of dust; mostly an artifact of too much ventilation when the computer doesn't actually need the airflow.

I'm not sure what "too much ventilation when the computer doesn't actually need it" mean.

Either there's dust in the air/surfaces near the intake or not.

It needs active cooling for about 10 minutes out of every month. If the fan runs for the other 43190 minutes in the month, then that's dust being sucked into the computer for no real reason, and thus just makes a mess without providing any value in return.

For what it's worth, I resolved my Pi4 overheating issue by expanding the surface area of the heat sink with some folded aluminium foil [1].

Not the prettiest solution, but works just fine. The Pi4s on the picture are running at ~100% CPU utilization of all cores for months (using mlucas) now without any overheating events.

[1] https://postimg.cc/CzNzMb6B

Ooh, that's very clever! I'm definitely going to give this a shot...

Did you glue the aluminum slices to the existing ‘sinks or?

No, its malleable aluminium foil (I took it from the kitchen), that holds between the teeth of the original sinks merely by pressure of being jammed in.

Gotcha. Reminds me of an old story of someone using coins to bridge the gap between a CPU heat sink and the L2 cache chips with good effect.

How do you attach it to the chip?

I have glued on top the classic cheap heat sink [1], which came with the Pi. Once that was determined to be unsuficient, I slotted the aluminium foil (folded to achieve sufficient thickness to stay in place) between the teeth.

[1] https://www.buyapi.ca/product/aluminum-heatsink-for-raspberr...

I wonder how well several hex-head bolts superglued to the chip would work...

(Or some kinda metallic epoxy, even JB Weld is part iron oxide, but a thin layer of superglue may be sufficiently effective)

Small aluminum heatsinks are quite cheap. You'll spend more on shipping than on the heatsinks themselves at this volume. I'd sooner do that, unless you really need to pinch every dollar for some reason.

I’ve got a bucket of old bolts, but not heat sinks :(

I swear I saw some guy just stack pennies on the chip and the extra thermal mass did wonders. JB-welding it would only increase the heat transfer compared to air between the coin faces. Or you can specialize and get some thermal epoxy made for permanent effective heat transfer: https://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Premium-Adhesive-ASTA-7...

Looks like US pennies will do a pretty good job (copper plated zinc). With JB Weld you could probably build a set of fins.

Most post-2000 Canadian coins are coated steel, meh.

I picked up one of these fanless cases, with aluminum heat sink built in, seems to work pretty well - https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case

I use these too! The case contacts with the CPU inside via a thermal pad and the entire outside of the case becomes the heatsink. It's a really clever design. Stays cool, no fan.

I've been very happy with these as well.

Do you know of EU delivery options?

Amazon UK has it, so maybe other Amazons too.

It's also sold at the aliexpress

https://thepihut.com

Dunno about the price of delivery

You can also check if a reseller of rpie for your coutnry has it from the official cite - https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/...

Just click buy and choose country.

If only they had a version that leaves the gpio pins accessible...

There is a gap for a ribbon cable, like this one: https://octopart.com/search?q=IDSD-20-D-06.00

From the site: "GPIO pins are accessible through the slot on the bottom of the case"

I wish there was a pic. If you find the one for Pi Zero, it shows a slot for GPIO access.

Ah that's useful, thank you.

I use this one a lot: https://www.kiwi-electronics.nl/aluminium-heatsink-behuizing.... I does get warm to the touch, but not close to throttling.

It seems to be available on Amazon if you do a Google Image search. I have Amazon domains blocked by DNS so I didn’t see the full URL

Have the same one form eBay, works great even with the pi4 overclocked to 1.9Ghz.

Yeah I was looking at that one earlier - are there holes on it to mount it to a wall? I can't quite tell from any of the pictures I can find.

Mine does not.

That's the Pimoroni RPi4 case. I don't want to spam the link a third time though.

Then you'll like the case I got for mine: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/aluminium-heatsink-case-f...

I have an Argon NEO:

https://www.argon40.com/argon-neo-raspberry-pi-4-case.html

It gets hot to the touch, so I presume that it's dissipating heat like it's supposed to.

Fans break in a couple of years, so for my home Network Attached Storage I chose Raspberry Pi over a PC because Raspberry Pi is cheap and does not need a fan. I use the Flirc case (mentioned at the bottom of the page) to dissipate any heat the Pi does generate. It seems to work well. I run Samba, MySQL, Docker, Jenkins and so on just fine on my 8GB Pi 4, without needing a fan.

> Fans break in a couple of years

Am I just incredibly lucky or hopelessly unlucky? I have never had a computer (desktop or laptop) last long to have a fan fail. Is fan failure really that common? In just two years?

I get why people hate fans. I have a hand me down switch behind my desktop computer and the fans on that thing is louder than the fans on all three of the computer towers that it powers. However, the switch is not made for desktop use and in a 1U chassis, something has to give if we want airflow. However given that space is not an issue, you can get the classic noctua fan and cooler like the NH-D15 and a full ATX case if you're building new and that the fans will probably last over ten years with no servicing.

I get that this is probably tremendously overkill but just thinking out loud...

It probably depends quite a bit on environment. I have multiple pets (2 dogs and 5 cats). Not only does dust build up but hair (dander?) Does as well. Things that also affect it might be whether you open windows a lot or use an internal forced air system with a filter.

And of course, how often you end up cleaning the fan and surrounds because of this. I bought a new case for my desktop system about 6 months ago. There has been visible dust buildup around the case inflow fan for a couple months now, and I should probably clean the outside and vacuum out the inside of the case.

I wonder if I’m lucky as well, I’ve had I think 1 fan failure in 25 years of computing.

My desktop has 3 80mm fans that are 18 years old and work fine. My switch is 4 years old, my server NUC is 5 years old, my laptop was about that same age, gaming pc has 10 year old fans - all no fan failures!

I wonder if it’s environment dependent; I imagine if you live in a dusty or sandy place it could decrease lifetime...

I think it also depends on whether the fans are ball bearing or sleeve bearing.

At higher temps, you get about 2x life out of ball bearing fans. I’m not sure what their cutoff is for “dead”.

Interesting to see that position doesn’t matter for ball bearings, but vertical is best for sleeve bearings.

Would be interesting to see if a 10yr old fan still spins at the same rpm or has same current draw.

https://www.newark.com/pdfs/techarticles/mro/ballVsSleeve.pd...

>Fans break in a couple of years

Having a Nespi+ case and can say that the Fan sounds louder than than a printing laserjet you can even hear the bearing rumbling (combined runtime maybe 2-4 weeks), small cheap fans live much less than 2 years.

Also use FLIRC cases for my k8s cluster. They feel hot but I've to remind myself the whole case is a heatsink. So far it's been keeping the temperature at 47C most of the time (room temperature is in the mid twenties).

I have half a dozen Pi4s running in heat sink cases (various brands), as HTPCs streaming from a NAS, Octoprint server, Home Assistant server, and various heavier load purposes. Since the earlier firmware updates I’ve never had any overheating issues at all, even after sustained heavy loads.

Outside over-clocking or extreme edge-case stuff I think the “Pi’s NEED a fan” stuff is mostly leftover from the early days pre-update and just stuck around.

What an interesting year 2020 is. MacBook Air lost its fan and Raspberry Pi found it. Strange times.

Ive run the pimoroni fan for as long as ive had the 4: https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-w.... (And use one of their “cases” too). It only runs when im really crunching along or watching youtube on the tv. And even then it cools down enough to not need it sometimes. With the pi, even setting up the fan turned into an adventure in customized settings to tweak how the fan runs. Not complicated, but enough to grab my interest for a little. Even still, the fan kicks on infrequently enough, and cools down quickly enough, I suspect a heat sink could easily take care of the heat in most cases.

You can connect the Voltage connector to the 3V over the 5V and run the fan at a slower speed and less noise. It will ramp into use for longer, but the noise difference is worth it and case of you will certainly not notice it's activity as much.

Been nice if they just had the fan and connector attached to a new top for the case and could of added some side vents with height, making things just that much easier overall.

I myself have a 3rd party acrylic layer stack affair with a top fan and heat sink with 3V and run it constant as well below whisper level. I'd measure the dB but other systems currently mean my noise floor is 50dB and with sound meter right next to it, I get nothing above that. Though when just that a running, it a faint breeze sound at best.

Why isn't it PWMed with feedback control?

You can't draw too much current from the 3.3V pin. I don't know what current this fan needs but it is safer to connect to 5V as it has some more room to safely draw current.

If you run into issues with the 3V3 line, you could take the 5V pin and put a couple 1n4148 or 1n400x diodes in series and drop it in 0.7V increments.

The right resistor might do too, you’ll have to figure out the draw on the fan to calculate what works.

Microphone for dB measurements should be put 1m away from the noise source. Not at 10cm and not at 5m. That's how the noise level gets defined.

I've seen noise levels on cheap indoor air condition units that have unbelievable good figures; only that they measure at 3m; go figure.

Smart phones indicated noise levels are irrelevant since they lack calibration. I don't understand why people discuss their figures.

I got one of those all metal passive cooling cases for the Raspberry Pi 4 off Ali Express and it keeps it at below 50°C idle and maxes out at 65°C with all cores running. No fans necessary.

Has anybody made use of a Pi as a casual workstation for personal projects? And if so, how does it hold up? The newer models seem on par with low-mid end consumer computers and would be much less of a pain than dealing with a dual-boot on my desktop

The Pi 400 has been extremely handy. It's nowhere near as fast as even a low-end new i3, but for things like "Do such and such task on Linux" it's compact and quick to boot.

If only it could work without occupying a GPIO pin pair...

I use a DVB-T2 TV hat and it doesn't leave any pins spare :-(

So I'm going to buy a USB fan, power it from a separate power supply and and glue it to a fan-less case vent holes. This isn't going to look nearly as pretty.

What I would like to have is a fan-cooled case with a circuitry which would take a high-power laptop-grade USB-C charger as an input and split that power between the Pi and the fan. Perhaps it could also split the USB-C port into a power input port and an actual extra USB port.

If anybody wants a fully printable fan mount for a Pi that isn't coupled with a particular case, I designed one as part of an OSS project. The CAD files are available here: https://astroswarm.com/blog/build

> A little unpleasant, and it has a high pitched whine that reminds of of the sound you get in an unbalanced audio system with a bit of electrical interference.

probably no worse than the rest of the home-lab stuff (that sits in a rack) but not so great for something in the living room or elsewhere

A fan is overkill for a Raspberry Pi. A passive cooling is sufficient, and most of all, absolutely quiet. A very good case is the "GeeekPi Argon Neo Aluminium", which I recommend

I agree; If an aluminum case were designed to integrate with built-in heatsink, thermals should be improved enough with no downside to noise level. Their decision to opt for plastic in the first party case makes total sense from a manufacturing and cost point of view, but I think a more premium metal case would have also been a nice accessory in addition.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331969

Now if anyone had a problem to my problem with Raspberry Pi: that it eats through SD cards like nothing else I have owned.

Wouldn't that be a problem with what you're running on the pi and how it uses the card? Or is it not a use thing and it's actually frying the cards somehow?

SD cards can die within a few months through repeated power cycling, or writing logs to disk instead of to RAM. There are techniques that one can use to lengthen SD card life, but the average person buying a Pi and slapping a media-center distro on there might not know about them or be willing to e.g. invest in an UPS and use the command line to hack logging.

Yeah, I know about wear leveling and maximum writes, which is why I mentioned what you rub on the pi. These days anything meant to be a device os that doesn't make allowances for the non-vilatile memory it will likely be running in (even if just the base is and not media mounts) as needed in some way is really doing users a disservice.

The power cycling is new to me though. Is that also based on bad defaults (e.g. not using noatime mount option etc.) or is it actually based on power? Because that seems weird given their designed use case (constantly getting and losing power as they go in and out of devices).

I’m an average person buying a Pi and slapping a media centre distro on there with default settings. I’m pretty sure LibreELEC takes care of the logging issue: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/15079-rpi-logging-to-ram/

While the logging issue might be solved on LibreELEC, writes to the Kodi database can be just as bad in the near long-term.

Have you tried setting up your Raspberry Pi to boot from USB memory?

log2ram and fanotify are really handy to extend their lives.

1. Use good quality cards

2. /tmp on tmpfs

You're welcome.

Other than breaking a couple of cards by opening the cases without removing them first, I haven't had any serious trouble with them.

But I do disable all logging and swap in the hope that this will extend their lifetimes.

Three solutions:

1. Use an "endurance" SD card, usually sold for dashcams.

2. Use a USB stick instead of an SD card.

3. Netboot from a TFTP/NTP server.

For #2, I’d run it on a USB extension cable.

The thermal images in the link still show whatever is plugged into USB runs pretty hot.

I did of course mean "NFS" and not "NTP".

Are you letting it swap? SD cards come in all quality levels, and some have trouble being written constantly.

My experience is that the microSD last for a really long time, while the SD ones died like fries.

It's generally a power supply issue. Either get a better PSU or alternatively a UPS.

Cool design, but is this novel? Canakit has been doing this for the whole year.

The thing that's novel is the fact the Pi Foundation finally (tacitly) acknowledged their official Pi 4 case causes CPU throttling.

What's wrong with the Flirc case, which is an incredible heatsink?

the lengths people are going to make this awful videocore soc not annoying to use

This incredibly cheap, low-energy-consumption soc with an incredible community behind it, yes. Like... yes, the chip is all kinds of weird and messy under the hood, but in practice it works well for people.

I have no doubts about the community, which is the main reason why Raspberry Pi is recommended to all people without much experience with such small computers.

However "incredibly cheap" is not appropriate when referring to Raspberry Pi.

Its price is OK considering its performance, neither cheap nor expensive for what you get.

There are a lot of applications for which Raspberry Pi is fast enough, but almost all of those could be implemented using even cheaper microcontroller boards, with prices around $10, but programming those requires more knowledge, so they are less accessible for most people.

Besides clones more or less equivalent with Raspberry Pi, there are also a lot of models that are more expensive than Pi, but those are also proportionately faster than Raspberry Pi, so their higher price is justified.

I have experimented with Raspberry Pi, but eventually I did not use it for anything, because all my applications happened to be in those 2 categories mentioned above, i.e. either suitable for even cheaper devices or suitable for faster but also more expensive devices.

So Raspberry Pi can be a good solution for some people and it has a decent price for its features, but there are a large number of other devices with similar or better power consumption and price/performance ratio.

The barrier to entry with a microcontroller is at least one order of magnitude beyond "I can plug a keyboard and monitor in and type in some basic Python to do whatever I want."

If that's all you want to do then you should get a Pinebook instead. It's far less expensive than buying a monitor and keyboard separately. (Yes, I didn't even include the cost of the Raspberry Pi, PSU and SD card).

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