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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>When you need a full Linux system Raspberry Pi is great.

Then you're much better off getting one of the endlessly available low-power X86 small form factor platforms either new or off the second hand market, available with Intel or AMD chips.

And unlike the Broadcom based R-PI, you'll have a much better time as you won't get locked into any specific chip vendor so you can easily migrate to whatever chip offers you the best price or performance or energy efficiency at the time of purchase.

The standardization of the X86 platforms is unbeatable by the current crop of ARM SBCs with their proprietary firmware blobs and weird boot methods.

Locking yourself into a very specific chip platform of a single manufacturer, just for running linux and a web server, is a huge mistake and we're now seeing the consequences of not having a competitor/dual source.

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It's a full linux system with a lot of IO and easy to embed in other devices. Since this thread is comparing arduino and Raspberry Pi I think most commenters are thinking about embedded/hardware controlling applications. Plus it has multiple form factors useful for prototyping and final product. And it's just the de facto standard for these applications. There are competing products with varying degrees of compatibility but with Raspberry Pi if you want to add a camera, sensor, motor driver etc you can always find a pre-made hardware interface and the code to make it work, at least at the prototype stage.

For a webserver an small x86 system is a good choice but it doesn't work as the brains of an IoT device or 3D printer.

Is a raspberry pi suitable as the brains of a 3d printer? You could operate the printer with far less than that. I suppose if you want a camera you could power a pi and a camera from the printer’s power supply, and it could be useful for receiving jobs to send to the printer, but it strikes me as the wrong tool for actually performing print jobs.

I’m prepared to be corrected, though. Maybe I’ve just used really dumb printers and I’m not familiar with the world of pi-based 3d printers.

As it happens I just got my very basic printer working after breaking it a year ago (fixed it in an afternoon, spent a year reaching that afternoon), and I've been learning all about this.

Fast answer: yes, you can use a Pi, most often running OctoPi, but only a Pi3 at least is fast enough - with a 2 or some Zero models, it will be unable to keep up with faster prints and possibly wreck em.

There's a newer, better firmware which I'm about to install on my printer called Klipper, which replaces the more typical Marlin that you find on most entry-level printers, and it depends on a Pi running alongside the printer's microcontroller. For that, it apparently is a huge boost in both speed and quality, so I'm checking it out.

Nice, thanks. I should dig into this stuff one day. I’ve only got a Zero W handy so I can’t try octoprint, but maybe when it’s possible to buy a pi again I’ll try this stuff out.

It’s so cool that tiny little microcontrollers can handle prints without much trouble (though you can get stuttering if they can’t hold enough instructions at once), but while a Pi, despite being far more powerful, can become unreliable and ruin prints. Given that’s likely because it’s talking over a network, handling a camera feed, running an operating system, etc. I just find it so cool how useful and capable microcontrollers can be in the right settings.

Not just that it's doing more. A small microcontroller will run in realtime with completely repeatable and testable operation, whereas a pi running linux cannot run a program like this.

Even though I claim pi is the de facto standard for getting started, a microcontroller controlling the stepper motors is a technically improved solution.

You will probably be interested to check out the beaglebone series of boards. They are less of a de facto standard but they are popular enough. Their CPUs have two 200Mhz 32bit microcontroller cores running in realtime. They can directly share the same memory as the ARM cores so you can have the best of both worlds on one computer.

I've been interested in the Beaglebones. They seem much better suited to the types of things I build, and while they aren't super affordable, they're much cheaper than a Pi right now.

Do you know of any obvious drawbacks with beagles? I can imagine the community is smaller, so there would be fewer peripherals and libraries to choose from. Generally speaking I don't really need that, though. Sometimes off-the-shelf solutions are even unappealing because I enjoy learning, or I don't want to hit edge-cases where it doesn't quite fit my use case.

You hit the nail on the head. The community and number of useful repositories is smaller. But certainly large enough that you won't be stuck. Aside from that, they don't have MIPI camera interfaces so for anything image related you are limited to USB cameras.

Depends on your needs. The raspberry pi may have poor stock right now, but when available they are cheap, low power, and have excellent documentation. I’m designing an open source autonomous farming robot and we’ve been using the Raspberry Pi CM4 as the main computer on the motherboard for a while now. It’s perfect for us. I feel like x86 would be a mess. The I/O on the CM4 is extremely important to us, and on the custom motherboard I designed we’re using every available pin of the CM4 to communicate to serial, SPI, I2C, and GPIO peripherals on the motherboard.

> Locking yourself into a very specific chip platform of a single manufacturer, just for running linux and a web server

Ah, yeah, I am very much not doing this and I’m surprised you didn’t start your comment with this stipulation. I use raspberry pi for robotics where the standardized documentation and abundant I/O are extremely helpful.

Yeah but what are you _after_ though? if you want a simple host of software, then yeah a VM/docker host on a low powered x86 machine is probably what you want.

but.

As soon as you start worrying about power, or GPIO, then it starts to get a bit messy.

There is still a sweetspot for the rpi. but as soon as you start wanting to do pure software, then you might want to think again. Its very much a spectrum.

>As soon as you start worrying about power, or GPIO, then it starts to get a bit messy.

7nm-10nm X86 CPUs from Intel and AMD are nearly as efficient as a R-PI, IPC for IPC, and GPIOs can be extended on them via USB in a standardized manner if desired.

Most people buy R-Pis to run linux, python, a web server or turn on some LEDs. Linux, python and web servers can be run on low power X86 machines, and LEDs can be turned on by an Arduino or R-PI 2040 microcontroller.

People stuck to using R-Pis out of comfort and inertia because it was the only thing they heard about and it was the best thing at the time when X86 was not competing in the space, but today it's no longer the only option or the best option. People need to start exploring the other options.

Thats true, but they are a lot more expensive.

I've been looking to replace my current intel 10watt server with a AMD ~10 watt device for a >3x performance boost, but they are all going to cost >$250.

I don't know about the power requirements, but you can get Intel-based mini PCs for $100 on Amazon.

My current ARM server runs samba, transmission, icecast2 +deefuzzer and nginx for less than 4 W, including the power for a 1 TB Sata3 SSD. No idea how its performances compare to a 10 W x86 machine but it idles all the time and 4 W < 10 W. It costs about 100 Euro.

> GPIOs can be extended on them via USB

Again, I am designing a farming robot. We absolutely do not want to use USB for anything critical (which is pretty much everything). On our raspberry pi motherboard I’m using SPI to talk to CAN bus chips to do motor control. I’ve had so many weird control USB issues in my life I would absolutely not want to use USB for motor control!

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