So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers?

I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

baatliwala,

I thought this was about FIFA

JackbyDev,

I don’t understand this post. Whatever you bought then for they’re still good for. People’s opinions don’t make them less useful.

c0mbatbag3l,
@c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world avatar

Sir, this is Lemmy. People treat the applications and hardware you use with ethical alignment and switching to FOSS literally has approval on the level of religious conversion.

It’s no wonder people around here care so much about random people’s opinions, the place practically filters for it.

JohnFoe,

If you’re not into the whole Google Home/Alexa/Apple Home echo system, and have Home Assistant already running, you could use them to build a bunch of smart assistants with Open Thread Border Routers.

I was just looking at doing this in my house but the cost of Pis vs used Google Gen2s with Thread Border Routers built in was cost prohibitive for me.

philpo,

Attach a small camera to one of them and attach it to a bird feeder. Set another one up with frigate.

It’s a fun use and actually good for the environment.

spez_,

I have 1 RPI 4 (8GB RAM) running:

  • OpenMediaVault
  • Transmission
  • ArchiveBox & LinkWarden (testing between the two)
  • Gitea
  • Audiobookshelf
  • FileBrowser
  • Vaultwarden
  • Jellyfin
  • Atuin
  • Joplin
  • Paperless-NGX
  • Immich

On another RPI (4GB) I have Home Assistant

RootBeerGuy,
@RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Out of interest from someone with an Rpi4 and Immich, did you deactivate the machine learning? I did since I was worried it will be too much for the Pi, just curious to hear if its doable or not after all.

spez_,

I didn’t deactivate the machine learning. It’s definitely doable

cashews_best_nut,

Your Pi runs all that?! I’ve setup Homeassistant on a Tinkerboard and it’s slow as shit with nothing else running. :(

owenfromcanada,
@owenfromcanada@lemmy.world avatar

Not sure what kind of tinker board you’re working with, but the power of Pis has increased exponentially through its generations. There are tasks that would run slowly on a dedicated Pi2 that ran easily in parallel with a half dozen other things on a Pi4.

The older ones can still be useful, just for less intensive tasks.

ikidd,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

I’m just going to say, I shit on them all along. ARM is relatively expensive, bespoke and difficult to compile for because of that. Anyone can puke out a binary for amd64 that works everywhere. And way, way faster than some sad little SOC. Especially weird is spending $1000 on a clusterboard with CMs that had half of the power of a 5 year old X86 SFF desktop you could pick up for $75 and attach some actual storage to.

Maybe RISC-V will change all that, but I doubt it. Sure hope so though. The price factor has already leaned the right way to make it worthwhile.

possiblylinux127,

Pine64 makes some cool devices that run on 100% free software.

shalva97,

Don’t bin them, sell them

JoeKrogan,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

I have a microserver and various pis ( zero w, 2x 3b+ and a pi b)

With the exception of the zero w they are all still in action.

The pi b connects to the pi touchscreen and displays photos from a directory every 5 minutes.

The 2x3bs are running kodi to stream from my server.

The zero w was a camera recording and streaming 24/7 but I stopped it as I wanted to do other stuff with it.

cashews_best_nut,

I kept buying Pi Zero Ws, hats and phats then put them all in a drawer cos I couldn’t decide what to do with them. I think I’ve got about 7 or 8. I really should do something with them.

bfg9k,

pwnagotchi family

cashews_best_nut,

Holy shit!! I didn’t know I needed this. I’m so building some - thank you! 👍

akrot,

Link for the lurkers github.com/evilsocket/pwnagotchi

Pwnagotchi is an A2C-based “AI” leveraging bettercap that learns from its surrounding WiFi environment to maximize the crackable WPA key material it captures (either passively, or by performing authentication and association attacks). This material is collected as PCAP files containing any form of handshake supported by hashcat, including PMKIDs, full and half WPA handshakes.

haui_lemmy,

I have a pi which I use as an apple tv/firestick alternative which works very well and would be pretty pointless with a larger pc imo. Servers I dont do with small PIs but indeed old computers. I think all kinds of ultra movable devices will be good with PI and derivatives.

For folks that want to get into it: pine64 is open source but I havent tried it yet. Thinking of it though. They even have a watch.

possiblylinux127,

The two things to keep in mind with pine64 is that they ship hardware before the software is ready and because they are less popular there is less support.

I like there hardware but its just something to keep in mind. The good news is that to my knowledge all of their single board computers can run regular linux.

haui_lemmy,

Thanks for mentioning that. Iirc they use risc-v chips and linux supports it so it should work I guess. Will check it out.

possiblylinux127,

If you are unsure what to get definitely don’t get Risc-v as the user land software is not well supported.

I would get a rockpro64

haui_lemmy,

I‘m hearing mixed things about risc-v. Its community supported. Do you have experience with the shortcomings?

possiblylinux127,

The main shortcoming is that the software hasn’t matured yet. Its true you could use Debian or Gentoo and get a decent machine but I would hold off using it for anything important. You won’t find Risc-V images on docker hub and flathub only barely has arm support.

haui_lemmy,

Got it. So except the OS, software is going to be pretty tough. Would that mean installing from source still works or not?

possiblylinux127,

It should

haui_lemmy,

Ok. Thanks. :)

MigratingtoLemmy,

The only reason SBCs were ever relevant is because of the excellent pricing, which has now been matched by used x86 computers. That and if the SBC had an open-source design/implementation (open schematics on RISC-V)

cyclohexane,

Not just the pricing, but also the low footprint, tiny size and fanlessness.

Djtecha,

Low power too. I replaced a x86 server with 3 PIs in a k8s setup for about half the wattage.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

What happened is that people realized what I’ve been saying since ever - that the RPi and others are a money grab because of all the required accessories while a MiniPC will get you way more power, stable hardware , case, power supply and everything in between for the same price (if you go for second hand). Here is are examples of such posts: lemmy.world/comment/5357961 , lemmy.world/comment/4696545

For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.

Either way, Pis have their use cases however in my opinion it was an overhyped product that sits on the middle of a market:

  • They tried to make the Arduino easy by adding an operating system and high level programming languages such as Python. It never made much sense, why would you want to have GPIOs directly on a “computer”? not reasonable at all. Nowadays we’re seeing a raise of the ESP32 devices that have 30-40 GPIOs and Wifi for 2$ each. Cheap, easy to develop and deploy and eating away on the Pi’s market.
  • Another typical use case for a Pi is some low power server, but while it is great in theory then it lacks the CPU performance required for the container-based absurdities people want to run and the I/O sucks. USB wasn’t ever a good way to connect to storage, let alone a USB/network shared bus like we had in the past. The new PCIe is questionable (look at the NanoPi M4v2 from 2018) and requires… more adapters;
  • Price-wise it doesn’t make much sense as well because a second hand x86 will be 10x faster at the same price point… and way more stable with more expansion.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox

Proxmox isn’t a new thing, in fact it is a pile of crap and questionable open-source that people still run because they haven’t discovered LXC/LXD yet. Read more here: lemmy.world/comment/6507871. FYI you can run LXD on your Pis and get both containers and virtual machines with it in the same way Proxmox people do with x86.

The irony of this comment is that people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD in the same way they used to when I said that Pis were a money grab and x86 MiniPCs were way better.

akrot,

The mian issue with Mini/used PCs is the power efficiency. It’s just a waste of wattage and performanve/Watt is very bad, especially at idle.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I would agree to a certain point. If you get a 10th gen CPU it is power efficient and there are a lot of gamers and whatnot selling those. Also there are a lot of MiniPCs that come with mobile “T” CPU that are very decent at idle.

akrot,

But idle still would run much more than 15w. There a very good compilation google sheets for the most efficient X86 cpus, but once you start factoring hdds and ssds, it’s only natural to go higher (20w-30w) at least. That’s at least double than rpis

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

But idle still would run much more than 15w

This isn’t true.

  • HP Prodesk 400 G5 i5 9500T > idles at 4.5W
  • Optiplex Micro 3080 > idles at 7W
  • Unbranded Mini Atom C3758 > idles at 3.5W

Either way, quick math, on a 7W range were talking about less than 10$/year to run the device.

Squizzy,

Quite the teardown fair play

jkrtn,

Do you think the used server market is worth the cost? It looks like I could have a giant chunk of DDR3 for not so much.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t (specially DDR3-era stuff) because old server hardware is way more expensive, won’t be of any particular advantage and older hardware, compared to new stuff, will use a LOT of power.

Instead use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll probably be more than enough for homelabs. You can a good 9-10th gen Intel CPU and motherboard that is perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. Modern hardware = less power consumption, cheaper, more performance.

If you go really low end, let’s say i5-6500, this will probably cost around 80€ second hand with RAM. You can use www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ to compare CPUs the server hardware you can get with modern hardware if you’re interested.

Most DDR3-era server hardware comes with RAID controllers/cards and other things that nobody uses anymore, people have moved on the software RAID be it BRTFS or ZFS and you will want to do the same. Servers make a lot of noise - impractical for a home - and a CPU from that era will be around 150-200W, you can get a recent i5 with more performance that runs around 50W.

Another thing to consider: you’re trying to build a NAS get a basic motherboard with 4 SATA ports and then add a PCI to 5 SATA port card and it will be much cheaper than whatever server hardware. BTRFS as your filesystem and its RAID if needed. Now you may be thinking something like “I want a faster CPU in order to have fast SMB”, just don’t - your gigabit network will saturate before an i5-6500 or any mechanical drive does and when this happens you’ll be at something like 10-20% CPU usage. Just don’t waste your money.

jkrtn,

Thank you, really appreciate your advice. I was just struggling to install Proxmox on a new machine, and you made me take a step back. The kernel is messed up, do I really want this? Why am I jumping through hoops for this when Debian has zero issues installing? I’ll be trying the container software you mentioned instead.

1371113,

I’ve done the same thing as the person you replied to is suggesting for around 10 years now. It works very well for a home user because parts etc are readily available. Most hypervisors will run on x86/amd64 hardware without issue. Check out something other than proxmox. LXC is one suggestion. If you’re going to stick with Debian look into SAMBA with BIND to ensure ease of sharing and cross platform integration.

Another reason to not get an old server is power, noise and thermals. They’re designed to live in an air conditioned room. Anyone who works in server rooms for any length of time will tell you to wear ear protection.

chunkystyles,

people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD

From reading your comments I understand why. It’s in your delivery. You’re abrasive and you don’t explain why. You’re also telling people not to use something they know, to use something they don’t know, and not explaining how that would be beneficial. As far as I can see, you’ve only explained how LXD, when setup correctly, can do what Proxmox does.

You’re essentially telling people to use something that is at best a side grade for reasons, and being salty about it.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Ahaha I don’t explain why 😂😂

I wrote dozens of posts replying to every single question people had about LXD/Incus. Gave out printscreens, explained how it works, what it does, described useful features and pointed out multiple issues of Proxmox. I can show you what roads you can take and why but you must do the work yourself.

The same applies to the MiniPC vs Raspberry discussion as my price, performance and feature breakdowns and proved countless times that for a large number of use cases a MiniPC is better. Unsurprisingly this is the first of such breakdowns that got upvotes, and do you know why? Because a known youtuber in this space recently came out with a video saying the exact same things I’ve been saying and now it became “acceptable” to criticize the Raspberry Pi money grab.

to use something they don’t know, and not explaining how that would be beneficial you’ve only explained how LXD, when setup correctly, can do what Proxmox does.

Even if that were true, what’s was the issue then? Isn’t it obvious that a true open-source solution that is available on Debian’s repos from a fresh install is better than a half proprietary solution that asks you to buy a license at any turn? Use your common sense.

Besides my comments aren’t a marketing campaign there’s no “LXD will make you rich today and solve all your family drama” as soon as you complete our three step formula:

  1. apt install lxd
  2. lxd init
  3. lxc launch debian debian-container

The advantage of using LXD/Incus are on the details, not on a flashy and shinny feature. It’s about running a clean Debian system, a non twisted and mangled kernel that will conflict with everything and not run stuff like OVPN properly, it’s about the license, the tools, not depending on a company, not having to wait 3x the time before your cluster is online. It’s about having a decent API for once and so many others.

Most people say they don’t want to be put in the same situation they were put about the the CentOS/RedHat licensing change, but then they proceeded to replace CentOS with Ubuntu and still use Proxmox. All questionable open-source that is as likely to fuck you over as RedHat did.

So eventually there will be a video from some youtuber stating that LXD/Incus is much better than Proxmox and people will flock to it without questioning anything. :)

TrickDacy,

I missed this sentiment. Just bought my first RPI (5) and it’s a neat little toy. I have some pretty specific requirements I’ll have to work toward but I like tinkering with it. The size, price and low power consumption beat any of the mini PCs I found. Then again I’m probably out of the loop

sabreW4K3,
@sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf avatar

I’m the same. Took my sweet time getting my Pi5 and now I’m a zealot!

halm,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

So SBCs are shit now?

Nothing changed, the hardware is the same as before. Your little pi servers are still doing the exact same work they did before. The only variables are prices on SBCs vs used small factor x86s, and the short, short attention span of terminally online hobbyists.

Use whatever you like, no need to race after others’ subjective (and often hyperbolic) judgment.

Bizarroland,
Bizarroland avatar

Very much this. The allure of raspberry pis was that they were $30 toys that could actually be used to do things that were equivalent to much more expensive computers and computer control systems.

Somewhere along the way they lost the plot, probably when supply chain issues drove their prices sky high along with the compute modules being used for home lab servers, and now cheap knockoffs based off of Rockville chips or ESP32 are just as capable as raspberry pis for a fraction of the cost, and at the same time actual desktop computers in miniature form factor have become so cheap on the second hand market that they are incredibly competitive with the raspberry pi.

Don't get me wrong, pi is a great platform. But the use cases in which it leads the pack have become incredibly narrow.

Actually I can't think of anything that raspberry pi does that can't be done better by a less expensive alternative.

Even the pi5 with the nvme hat is not currently price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor as far as I know.

const_void,

price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor

What’s the model number for that?

Bizarroland,
Bizarroland avatar

Elitedesk 800 g4s can be picked up for ~$130 or so depending on where you look

Valmond,

Yeah, make a Pi with 1GB RAM, video & ethernet for like 20-30€ and you’d ruin me.

I know about the banana, orange, whetever-pis but in my experience they always needed lots of extra stuff to work (like fucing and recompiling libraries). The Pi “just worked” IMO.

aard,
@aard@kyu.de avatar

Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.

That has been true even before the price increase - what still makes me use pis now and then is that just so many people are familiar with them, the standardized form factor with lots of extension modules, and the software support - pretty much any software targeting that kind of use has been tested on pi variants.

I’d nowadays go for using compute modules, though - they’re smaller, and you can get them with flash, eliminating the SD card problem many pis had. You can get carrier boards for the compute modules in the classic pi form factor, so you can have the best of both worlds.

Valmond,

What’s the benefits of compute modules, except the sd card? Doesn’t it have to have hardware support to work?

aard,
@aard@kyu.de avatar

A small form factor, small high density connector. Most interfaces are not populated, as on the regular pis, but just lead out via the connector, so you can decide what you want to expose on your compute module carrier. It has a gbit ethernet chip on board, and a pcie chip - rpi4 also has pcie, but it is hooked up to USB3 there. With the compute module you can decide what you want to do with that.

Linkerbaan,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

Rockchip based boards are gaining traction. Whlie still not as easy as Pi’s, the community is starting to jump after they got ditched for corporations during Covid. Orange Pi is offering good value these days but it can still require tinkering if your use case hasn’t already been done by someone before.

mhzawadi,
@mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud avatar

If I had all the time I wanted to homelab, I would get me a Nas box and run like 10 pis of different vintages as purpose built servers.

A pi to run PHP, a pi to run mysql, a fleet of pis as docker nodes.

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