I have 2 pi 4. One of them runs Vaultwarden as my self-hosted password manager. The other runs TPLink Omada SDN management software to manage my switch and WiFi APs.
I started my home assistant journey with 4 smart globes, a Google home speaker with a pi 4. I learned how to use it and started integrating things I don’t need hardware for, such as shopping/Todo lists, weather, Spotify, last.fm, calendars, basically anything I can learn without hardware. Right now I’m working on getting a shopping list sent to me when I enter the shops zone.
Then I bought a bunch of NFC tags (they’re cheap) for medication reminders, kitty litter reminders/tracking. I have a music poster in my house I’ve stuck an NFC tag to and it opens up the album on Spotify, turns on Bluetooth and connects to my speaker.
I’ve slowly been adding more devices as I go along due to cost constraints. Not that smart home stuff is expensive, I just can’t afford to do it all at once. Which also gives me time to consider/research smart devices before I buy.
I’ll add as well, that there are open source and free alternatives to volumio that you can run alongside home assistant on a pi 4 easily, that will still let you use the audio output. As well as the built-in media player functionality.
Also definitely agree on the addicting part. I recently picked up some cheap bulbs at Costco that are susceptible to the Tuya Cloudcutter vulnerability. So now I have a bunch of new ESPhome devices to play with.
I got 12 bulbs for AUD$10 each so I was really happy. Definitely check out if there’s any compatible Tuya stuff for cheap locally to you. They’re a Chinese company that makes white label smart home stuff that a lot of department stores and cheaper brands sell.
It’s a light globe for the house that has some sort of connectivity with it. Like wifi, bluetooth, zigbee so that you can control it remotely or automate it.
Yes, here the question is if you really need to upgrade to 5, and if you really need, why not buy a dedicated NUC for example that would be a lot more powerful and extensible than the 5, while also consuming not too much more power.
I can’t speak for the OP, but in my case… It was very much a resounding YES!!! If your using Pis as general home servers, like I was, you can very quickly run into resource constraints. I wound up replacing 5 Pi 4’s with a pair of 4th gen Intel boxes and I’m still hit resource limitations from time to time. Though now it is more io related then ram or cpu.
You didn’t blindly upgrade to the next Pi. Not upgrading or upgrading to something you know meets your demands are the right things to do. I assume upgrading to a Pi 5 is not that for most people
On the other hand, they’re relatively cheap and it gives you a spare to tinker with, or at least that’s what I told myself last week when I ordered another Pi3 since I saw they came back in stock on Digikey after all these years.
In my case I need the 5 for the extra power. It will exactly meet my demands, and the 4 ‘only’ does 90% of the time.
And if I could find something cool for the 4, I would buy the 5 immediately. But I think I need to know that I can use it for something. Otherwise I will feel bad buying the 5.
I had a bunch of Pi 3Bs sitting around, so I made piholes for a few friends and family, I made a dedicated MAME emulator that I never have time to play, and I gave one to each of my kids to learn about computers and linux. I also use one for work as a linux test environment for our software, but the 3 hardware doesn’t really keep up.
Since none of these require a Raspberry Pi to run, I would suggest using a mini PC (with an Intel N100 or similar) instead of a Pi 5. With all the accessories needed for the Pi, a mini PC can actually be cheaper and of course a lot more powerful. Since the Pi 5 is very power-inefficient, a mini PC can even be better in that regard too if that matters to you.
Especially for Jellyfin a PC with an Intel CPU with integrated GPU is awesome, since Jellyfin supports hardware transcoding with that.
Compared to other SBCs, Raspberry Pis have been pretty inefficient for a while. A Pi 5 idles at about 3 W, which is pretty terrible for such a board, compared to other similar devices. You can get X86 PCs that idle at 3 W which are way more powerful. Other ARM SBCs use less than half that at idle and similarly less under load.
There are probably multiple reasons for that. The Pi's SoCs have always used rather old process nodes, which are more power hungry than more modern ones used by other single board computers and PCs - 16 nm for the Pi 5 SoC and 28 nm for the Pi 4. Also, with the Pi 5 there is this additional "south bridge" chip which is attached via PCIe. This consumes additional power and for some reason the PCIe link is configured such that it never enters power saving states. I don't know why.
Also, the power supply circuitry on the Pi 5 is far from ideal with its 5 V / 5 A power supply. Such a low voltage at such a high current can easily cause additional losses on the wire. That's mostly relevant under high load though.
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