Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM

Adafruit tends to be a bit more expensive. It's never bothered me since I like the company and its service, but I think pretty much anything you buy there ought to be purchased with the thought that you're prototyping and if you want to buy many parts for a final product, you'll eventually want to source parts somewhere else. (or, I assume, call Adafruit and try to negotiate a better price)

It's understandable enough why both companies are this way. Microcenter is a retail chain and can do things Adafruit cannot. (in truth, they are partners on some things, so it's more complicated than that - the point is that Microcenter is a much larger company)

Boards with both slots on them have started to be released due to this current ram squeeze. e.g. ASRock's H610M COMBO board[0] has 4 DDR5 and 2 DDR4 slots

[0]: https://asrock.com/MB/Intel/H610M%20COMBO/index.vn.asp#Overv...

If you're using the Pi as a microcontroller that you can run Python on, then just get the cheapest Pi that meets your needs.

If you're using the Pi for computationally expensive tasks then pay more money and get the fast one.

Personally I have a Pi 5 and it's perfect for me because I want small size but high performance. People say "just buy a real computer" but that would be higher energy and larger footprint.

The whole point of these things is that you use them for whatever you can imagine. Since different people have different imaginations it only makes sense that there's a range of different devices to suit everyone.

They really want to assure people that they can get a near identical replacement for years to come if they want to build a product or deploy one somewhere.

So a 61% price hike over 5 years, of which 24% was just inflation. If the total price really went up 200% in your country, that's exceptional and probably caused by policies unique to your country.

btw you can't compare prices without shipping because there was never an option to buy 100 at $15 each and amortize shipping. Retailers treated it as a loss leader with a limit of one per purchase, often forcing you to buy some extra junk to meet the order minimum.

I made a project for a band to use on-stage where it would switch between videos by tapping a bluetooth foot pedal. The stompbox-style foot pedal buttons were just wired into an ESP32 acting like a bluetooth keyboard sending 1, 2, or 3. The key bindings for mpv were setup to instantly switch to specific videos for each number. It worked perfectly.

I have also used it to real-time 1080p stream my gaming PC from another room using Moonlight so that I could play in more than one location in my home. That was also running directly from the command-line.

But trying to use something like X/Wayland and proper GUI apps usually performs poorly. 512MB of RAM and the 1GHz CPU clock struggle with that.

Yes, I think so. With strong caveats.

I used a Pi 3b as the primary video player for local media in my living room for a few years, starting a decade or so ago when that was the new hotness. The Pi Zero 2W is the same thing except with less IO and a somewhat-slower clock speed (but it can be overclocked to match the 3b).

I just put an appropriate build of Kodi on an SD card, booted it up like an appliance, pointed it at my network share, and used it.

The performance was proper for the time doing this in lets-sit-down-and-watch-a-movie mode. It was generally flawless with 1080p h.264 and lesser formats. It was not so good with h.265/HEVC, but that wasn't as common back then as it is today.

I was very pleased when I picked up a Pi 4 for this role once that came 'round. It does a very fine job with all of my 1080p media on my old dumb TV, including h.265 (which it has a hardware decoder for).

> What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?

No, not in my experience. There may be an incantation that I don't know, but I have not had very good success with these devices with browser-based streaming media. They have, for me, been resolutely disappointing in this role. I blame gaps in the video driver/X11/browser stack, but I haven't ever wanted to go very deep into this particular rabbit hole.

> I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.

If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.

I used thin client seems much better for this.

Long gone are the days when they would sell a Pi Zero for $3.14 on Pi day.

I migrated from Homey to HA, and with 2500+ entities across some 250-300 devices the HA Green performed well. It would sit at about 55% RAM usage with 5-7% CPU load, so in no way resource strained.

My storage however was not exactly doing well. I frequently hit 80% or more storage used (of the 32GB eMMC). The HA Green uses USB2 and has no connectors for adding more storage like the M.2 slot on the HA Yellow, so there was no easy upgrade path.

Compute wise and RAM wise the device did well. I ran HA, Mosquito, ESPHome Device Builder, Matter Server, OpenThread Border Router, Piper, Speech to Phrase and a couple other add-ons, and besides the speech stuff it worked well and responded fast to almost everything.

Speech in any other language than English is slow at best. English is a little better, but don't expect to have long conversations with it in realtime. For my use case, of making one way announcements, it didn't matter much if it spent 3 or 30 seconds preparing the announcement, it would arrive when it arrived.

The HA Green lives on in my summerhouse which has around 900 entities and maybe 50 devices. It works well there, sits at 2% CPU, 39% RAM, and 45% storage, so I guess it depends on the "size" of your installation.

At home I'm monitoring "all the things", EV stats, EV Charger stats, heat pump stats, TRVs, smart electricity meter, room level presence detection (Bluetooth LE), mmWave presence detection, Smart Switches, Smart TVs, Apple TVs, Sonos Speakers, everything. I also have around 100 automations dealing with various house states, like when the heat pump and EV charger both kick in at full power, an automation will tell the EV charger to chill a bit before it blows the main fuse, and once the heat pump finishes its cycle, ramp up the EV charger again.

The summerhouse, on account of being smaller, naturally has less stuff going on. It's a place for relaxation, and most automations and sensors there are targeted at detecting stuff when we're not around like water leaks, temperature drops, heating anomalies, motion detection by the cameras, etc.

Before you just vibe code, consider if it piques your interest. You might just enjoy learning, playing, and building with something new.

When you get stuck, hand it over to AI.

Less power consumption than the Pi 5 (and no heatsink), and it was the first to offer the combination of USB booting, more than 1GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet. And reasonably priced in 2019.

"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.

Dock can not handle an Ultrawide 1440x3440 display.

Right now it is a backup phone and my music player.

https://furilabs.com/

It was tiny, and the assumption was correct - most families had an HDMI capable TV and could afford the device and a usb keyboard.

A used PC still needs a desk and a monitor. This was far more accessible.

> The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel

NXP/i.MX are way better at mainline kernel than Broadcom that RPi is based on, come on.. and they have cheaper options like i.MX 9 series. Other vendors, yes, mainline support could be pretty spotty.

If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.

If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?

This is just very expensive for what it is.

The Pi 1 model B+ was released in 2014. They still make and support it today and will keep doing it until at least 2030. You can just buy that instead. They are not apple.

Kicking myself for not buying the Q6A at the beginning of the year (I wanted three and arace would only sell one per customer, but one would've been better than none).

Radxa does have a 16Gb board[1] on pre-order, coming in at $329. Though the Dragon Q8B appears to be quite a bit more capable.

[1]: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-dragon-q8b

Pi - 73 million sold

ESP32 - 1 billion sold

STM32 - 13 billion sold

For every 1 Pi sold, there’s almost 200 STM32s sold.

But, sure: It's definitely even cheaper than that to just sit back and complain about it.