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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I think the mistake is the trend of trying to treat it like a mini computer. If you buy a Pi, stick an old SD card in it, plug it into an old USB charger you have lying around, and connect it to the network it's great for people learning how to use Linux, command line, and SSH.

You can connect things to the headers and experiment with it as originally intended.

In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to try to treat it like a mini desktop computer. Like you said, it's very expensive to add on all of the accessories: High power adapter, M.2 hat, SSD, special HDMI cables, and a case for cooling. By the time you're done, you've spent as much as a cheap x86 computer that would outperform it and come with none of the software quirks.

Just because you can outfit it will all of those things doesn't mean most people should. If you really want a mini computer, get a mini computer.

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Completely agree. I jumped back in recently for some electronics work and was surprised to learn that the Raspberry Pi imaging tool allows you to set the root user, WiFi SSID, and hostname right when you're imaging the tool. You never need to connect it to a display like the old days! Makes onboarding a device for a specific purpose super easy. Been using mine to work with a simple LED matrix from Adafruit. But I am sure I will be acquiring more for all kinds of random projects in the time to come.

Also in the imager you can tell it to enable SSH, add an SSH key or have it generate one, and set it to not allow password authorization over SSH.

It does indeed make setting up a headless RPi quite convenient, although afterwards you do actually have to find the thing on your network.

By default it has the hostname "raspberrypi" and handles mDNS so SSHing to raspberrypi.local often does the trick, but could be a problem if you have more than one. You can set the hostname in the imager to deal with that.

Another common approach is to check your router's DHCP client list or connected device list. If you are lucky your router includes the hostname if the client sent one. If it only shows MAC address, IP address, and DHCP remaining lease you can look for something that just got its lease.

Personally, once I learn the Pi's MAC addresses either from my router's DHCP server or by logging on to the Pi and using "ip link show" I go to my router's DHCP settings and assign reserved IP addresses to those Mac addresses. Then whenever I re-image or boot from another drive with a different image it doesn't matter. It's going to be on the same IP.

I think that’s the real distinction: the Pi isn’t interesting as a "cheap desktop", it’s interesting because of GPIO + the huge ecosystem of HATs, sensors, and weird little projects.

If you just want a small, cheap computer, x86 boxes are better in every way.

But if you want something you can hook wires to, fry once in a while, and find 20 blog posts about someone doing the same, Pi still has a niche that’s hard to replicate.

All I’m saying is that Pi projects can get really expensive if you want to do anything beyond a basic install like Pi-hole and leave it as-is. Even simpler projects - say, connecting a motor or a servo require additional components like a power module or distribution board, which quickly adds up.

It is a bit expensive for this kind of "dangerous" experimenting. I wish there was a ESP32-like capable of running Linux. (Actually, there is: BeagleBoard. But these are even more expensive.)

What about Onion Omega?

https://onion.io/omega2s/

A Pi Zero is not much more expensive than an ESP32

Can you please recommend basic tutorials for working with Pi? I completely missed learning about it all these years. I have decent knowledge of electronics and programming.

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