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Comment by alnwlsn | Hacker News Reader

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alnwlsn

It would make a lousy desktop computer even if it was 10x as powerful.

- high current 5V USB power supply you probably don't have

- HDMI micro port you have like 1 cable for

- PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable + hodgepodge of adapters

- more adapters needed for SSD

- no case, but needs ample airflow

- power input is on the side and sticks out

GPIO is the killer feature, but I'll be honest, 99% of the hardware hacking I do is with microcontrollers much cheaper than a Pi that provide a serial port over USB anyways (and the commonly-confused-for-a-full-pi Pi Pico is pretty great for this)

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> PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable

We had a problem trying to bring up a couple of Pi 5, hoping they'd represent something reproducable we could deploy on multiple sites as an isolation stage for remote firmware programming. Everything looked great, until we brought one somewhere and untethered it from ethernet, and we started getting bizarre hangs. Turned out the wifi was close enough to the PCIe ribbon cable that bursts of wifi broadcasts were enough to disrupt the signal to the SSD, and essentially unmount it (taking root with it). Luckily we were able to find better shielded cables, but it's not something we were expecting to have to deal with.

I dunno, I brought a pi 500+ with an SSD, 16GB RAM, little screen, PSU, mouse and cables. It was around £300.

It's not super powerful but my young kids use it to surf the net, play Minecraft, do art projects, etc. (we are yet to play with the gpio).

I don't get on with the keyboard but otherwise would make a decent development machine for me, considering my development starts with me ssh'ing into some remote VM and running vim.

The whole lot is tiny and extremely portable, we pack it away in a draw when not in use.

All in it felt like good value for money for something that took about 3 minutes to get up and running.

You can get much more powerful PCs for much less, e.g.:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CFPRDQY8/

That's actually about the same price as the pi 500+ without the screen. Except that one has 500gb Vs 256gb SSD, but doesn't have the snazzy led keyboard.

Processor comparison too

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...

I never really understood how GPIO is a killer feature with them. There are so many ways to get GPIO, from $5 USB dongles to any microcontroller/dev board that's ever exists. What's special about Raspberry Pi GPIO that I'm missing?

The only case I can think of is very heavy compute that relies on low latency GPIO related to that compute?

The low latency is the reason why the PiStorm (Amiga CPU accelerator) project works so well on a Pi 2, 3 or 4. (Pi 5 is no longer suitable since the GPIO is now the other side of a PCI-E bus and thus suffers significantly higher latency than on previous models, despite being much faster in terms of throughput.)

In general the best part of the Pi is that it's so stable as a platform. Everyone has the same hardware and generally the same OS so guides online just work - it may be one of the if not the best Linux on the desktop experience I've used personally.

Along with that the gpio is there and ample so it's extremely easy to just start using it.

I do argue an esp 8266 or esp32 are better for a development microcontroller but you have to muck with cabling it up before you can even load a program on it which is a few more extra steps than a Pi

If it's a funky esp board, possibly. The esp8266 and esp32 boards I've used all have usb sockets for programming.

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