There’s a lot of people in this discussion taking about how raspberry Pi and the pi foundation isn’t worth your money, whether on principle, or just dollars per unit of compute.
I get it, but I have a question. Is there a competing SBC that has official PoE support? I know there’s half baked ways to sort that out separate from the device, but I have a few edge cases where the last viable option was the pi 3B+. The official pi 4 case is horrendous for airflow, and third party cases usually either assume you want no protection (and all the airflow) or you want to handle thermals by contact pads passively (making it difficult or impossible to use the PoE hat), or are just as bad as the stock case for airflow, but they have enough room inside to add a hat, in which case, why go third party when the official case is equally terrible?
The pi 3 had a PoE hat, and a case you could take the top off and get decent airflow. Too bad the fans in the first gen PoE hat are unicorns in terms of power draw, with no way to adjust the power curve for the fan connector to suit a different fan, and since they’re unicorns, you can’t find them for purchase, and if you find something remarkably similar, they’re still slightly different enough that they don’t work (I’ve tried). So the fans burn out and IDK, good fucking luck I guess. Buy a new PoE hat?
Then there was the gen 2 PoE+ hat which released alongside the pi 4, which supposedly works with the 3 as well, which I haven’t tried yet, but I’m planning to.
In every case, I have done network monitoring and service nodes that aren’t exactly local to a power receptacle and they need PoE. The pi 4 eliminated itself because of the garbage case design of the official case and the lack of thought by those doing the third party cases… so I’m looking at the 5 like, finally, they got it right.
Now everyone is talking shit about the pi foundation, which I can completely understand, but for the application I need these for (and my pi 3’s have been in service for like ~5 years and probably need to be refreshed), what other option do I have? What’s decent with a good case and PoE input? PoE or PoE+ doesn’t matter, I just need to be able to package it up into a relatively small footprint for the application.
Anyone have any suggestions? I’m all ears. I’ve googled till I’m blue in the face and I can’t even find an SBC that has an option for PoE, I never got to looking into whether it has a decent case or if it will run my software…
It’s the lack of hardware AV1 that concerns me, as well as droppong h.264. Raw CPU means it’ll still handle the latter, but since streaming will be moving to AV1 it’s kind of questionable whether this will be a reasonable media center.
Any Intel CPU 8th gen or newer with quick sync can do like 20 simultaneous 1080p transcodes. You could get a Celeron and have a powerful plex box. Look up guides for the HP 290 as a starting place.
I use a J5040-ITX ATM. I know it says Pentium but don’t take that for granted. This chip is really just a lower binned i3 throttled enough to be passively cooled.
I run Plex as a docker-compose workload and bind mount /dev/dri which passes Intels quick sync accelerator into the container for Plex to use.
This enabled hw encoding. I also make sure I can direct stream from all of my clients. This setup can handle a few 4k streams and several 1080p streams.
I mainly use it hoard to losseless music and hard to find cartoons / movies.
I have an upgrade to a Pi Cluster planned but I don’t recommend it unless you specifically want to run Pis.
So, the pi is $80. That is without a case, power supply, or hard drive. Once you add these things to the Pi, you are into the $100-200 price range. At that point, you can just get an old desktop or a micro desktop. There are some youtube videos about it. I think they are maybe twice as big as a pi, but have intel processors in them.
They will be cheaper or similar in price and have better performance.
I just use an old desktop that has a 4th gen i5 and it runs significantly better than the pi4 does. Plus, I can just throw all my drives in the case and not need to worry about USB connected drives.
Yes, this is exactly what I did, with a 1TB SSD. I tried to host a Jellyfin server as well, but it didn’t have the oomph for that. A plan for my 10yo Mac Pro once I finally retire it lol
I have pre-ordered one for delivery in October. If you look at rpilocator.com you will find various models in stock at the official price. The Raspberry Pi clearly isn’t the tool for you
I’m pretty glad I got myself a Pi 4 for the normal price when it was relatively fresh on the market. I’m tempted to try and get a Pi 5 to replace it and use the Pi 4 for something else at some point. I’m not sure what that might be though, and I feel like the expected scarcity is what even makes me consider it at all. I use my Pi 4 for Kodi on my trusty dumb TV and have recently put my old 3B+ to use for my 3D printer. I’m now left with no spare Pi for whatever might arise.
Might as well add some picos to scratch that itch. And the rabbit hole that micro controllers bring… next thing you know, your work desk is also a solder station, a hot air station, PCB design, circuit design, and you’ve got two extra diy printers in various state of being built/rebuilt
I started out the same way and now my desk is cluttered with partially completed projects and devices in various states of taken apart. But for me the fun part is learning something new along the project journey. The microcontrollers were a game changer due to their low cost. I’m not trying to fry them, but hey if I screw up who cares it was a couple bucks anyways.
For circuits I design I’ve mostly been having them created overseas and I’ll solder on the components but I’m really curious about hacking a toaster into a refry oven or whatever their called and soldering surface mount components. Not that I need the small form factor or I’m making enough circuits to warrant trying to save on cost, I’m just curious and want to try haha. Gonna need a bigger desk…
Honestly, get the flux and a hot air station instead, imo. Then again, I prefer being able to have control over where the heat is going instead of reflowing everything at once
While I love Raspberry Pis and have a few older ones, it’s a shame that the latest ones were very hard to come by and far exceeded the $35 price point.
I was looking to upgrade to a Pi 4 a while back but prices were outrageous or it was sold out completely. I eventually discovered tiny form factor PCs.
I bought some used Lenovo Tiny ThinkCentres (which are about 10x more powerful than a Pi 4), off eBay for ~ $70. I upgraded the Ram and SSDs and they are quite capable, low power units!
So to anyone looking for a low power computer to run Linux, consider buying used off eBay. You can get some pretty good deals on used hardware that’s more capable.
A friend of my dad’s old PC recently shit the bed and recommended such a ThinkCenter purely by specs and price point. I did some remote setup last night and I got the impression that it was pretty snappy running Windows 10. Such a tiny computer is definitely on my list for the future.
That would be more than capable. Retro emulation can run on very low end hardware.
But here’s an ebay listing for same model that I bought earlier. It doesn’t include an SSD but you can buy M.2 SSDs for very cheap which I also did. Plus they’re much faster and more reliable than micro SD cards.
It’s very easy to open the machine up which I liked.
RAM upgrades are cheap too but 8GB is a lot for most cases.
A lot of corporate environments use these so when they upgrade you can find them used for dirt cheap, if you don’t mind some possible cosmetic defects. Mine are just stacked on a shelf and I just use them as servers for docker and whatnot.
I think it was a mistake to remove hardware video encoding. Even the hw encoder for H264 1080p 30fps was better than no encoder. Apparently they think sw encoding can replace it…yeah… the cpu is more powerful, but not that much more. I think intels N100 processors will be more competitive for applications involving video/webcam
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