• Valmond@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    Just curioys, why wouldn’t you buy say a 50€ thinkcentre instead or a raspberry?

    • whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works
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      7 hours ago

      hmmm I’m not sure now 😅

      I’m using the RPi for other projects but this one was for a server and I might not have put much thought for the hardware

      But I’ve never seen a mini PC that cheap though?

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        It depends on when big companies throws out their pcs, like when they are 5 years old, or so it feels.

        I did a quick search on ebay, it probably depends on where you live but I stumbled upon a 55€ one here

        The problem with tinkcentres (tiny here) is that they are really easy to open and service, usually has place for a 2’5 drive plus a nvme and had two sodim slots, plus some funky stuff like small cards and CD player and so on so eventually it might cost more than 50€…

        • whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works
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          2 hours ago

          The problem with tinkcentres (tiny here) is that they are really easy to open and service,

          Is that really a problem 😅

          I’m actually in France, but somehow ebay is not really in my mind, so u totally miss those, I’ll have a look because it sure looks like less trouble to go this way than with the raspberry pi, even the OS as it would be a 64bits and not ARM (if I looked well on the specs)

          (edit) also, now that I look at my setups I realize that I don’t even use much of the GPIo on the rpi4 because I have a stupid amount of Esp32 spread everywhere in my place that fulfill the need

    • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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      18 hours ago

      Same reason as any other mini PC.

      GPIO.

      Honestly there is no other reason to use pi. Just the simple ability ti connect and build your own connection stuff.

      Pi is by far the easiest system with a well suppirted os and api for learning\experimentation.

      When to comes to using as a desktop etc. There are loads of better options if gpio is not wanted.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Fair.

        I always thought about the raspberries strength as small mobile devices. If I want IO on my PC I could buy an adapter/card. Or use my raspberry because I have one or two ofc. It sure is easy with them.

        • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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          35 minutes ago

          Best adaptor out there, atm. Is a pi zero with gpiozero on it. There really is not much in the way of adaptors with the support and flexibility for beginners that pi provides.

      • Grapho@lemmy.ml
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        7 hours ago

        But even with GPIO, there’s other cheaper boards out there with better specs to boot

        • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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          38 minutes ago

          Yeah but non with better support. They all tend to have OSes with limited updates and/or community support.

          That is a huge plus for pi. And likely the only reason they survive.

        • Valmond@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          I tried the orange pi, and that was a hassle, I had to fix and compile some obscure library in C to make python control I/O work.