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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.

socphoenix ,

Man my home server IDLES at 76 watts per hour running x86. Now mind you I need the x86 to perform some of the functions I want. This thing works as an NAS, nextcloud, media server, kiwix, security camera (zoneminder), remote desktop (xrdp), runs home assistant, gpu AI upscaling for photos, and finally screeches along running a virtual pipe organ I built that takes 69 GB of RAM to run.

If I could do that with raspberry pi's I would in a heartbeat! the power savings alone would eventually pay for them. If it's doing what you want then don't worry about them. My pi400 works as a remote desktop client and one day I hope more of this stuff will work well on it/a future generation so I can ditch the tower, energy usage, and noise.

notfromhere , (edited )

What is that virtual pipe organ and why is it using 69 GB RAM when running?

socphoenix ,

It is software (grandorgue) that pretends to be a pipe organ (the instrument). In order to run fast enough it needs to load every sound sample into memory to play, as well as usually multiple kinds of sound endings. I play professionally on a "small to mid sized" pipe organ with 1,438 pipes. The one I load for use at home has more than that!

The instrument was from the 1960s and I rebuilt it with a pi pico that you can see here, and you can hear the before (analog sound cards) versus one of the organs I've loaded into it here.

nilloc ,

That’s amazing sounding! Worth the watts, even if I did get church ptsd listening to it.

socphoenix ,

Hahaha yeah…it’s in many ways unfortunate that if you want to play/enjoy this instrument churches are the only option most of the time :/

Definitely worth the watts though!

nilloc ,

I’ve been recently bingeing Look Mum No Computer’s rescue/re-build/midi-fication of an organ that had been shoehorned into an organist’s home, after the church had been converted. I’m more of an engineer than musician, but it’s amazing how much goes into the layering of sounds from so many different pipes.

My 6 yo loves learning with such a cool soundtrack too.

node815 ,
@node815@lemmy.world avatar

I got lost with setting up a nice inbox downloader to store all my emails on a HDD attached to my RPI4, but haven't quite mastered the SMTP server part or found the right software to run on it. It's currently powered off waiting for a reflash of the SD Card so I can try again. The end goal for mine is to set up fetchmail and have it grab from my inboxes then imap capabilities so I can read it in Thunderbird. (Don't talk to me about webmail, I know it's the way but I'm older than Star Wars (Original one) and am stuck in my ways. Now get off of my lawn!

Seriously though, I have tinkered with it before as an AdguardHome Server, but somehow, my latency increased so I dropped that. Most of it's life was spent hosting Home Assistant on it until I moved that to the umm...more controversial Proxmox VM method. I'm also on the fence about setting up the Raspberry Pi Nextcloud on it. (Maybe).

Here is a good resource for 36 different things you could possibly do with yours.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

SBC (specifically RPis) got more expensive. x86 got more powerful, more importantly more efficient, and cheaper. Also X86 has more software built for it than ARM.

There are a few X86 SBCs now though.

If you already have SBCs and they're doing what you need, I see no reason to switch.

snekerpimp ,

Jeff Geerling made the comparison in a video recently. Did not get to finish it yet, but he brought up pros and cons of both, and there are use cases for both ARM and x86. I still use mine even though I have an old dell tower as an x86 server, mainly for netboot.xyz and pivpn, because I can run it with poe. As long as the switch has power those services will be available.

empireOfLove2 ,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn't shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you're literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.

Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC's from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.

colt45 ,

Still got'em all. Pis are 3d printing, running small automation projects, running on solar in my back yard. I have far too many others that I took a hit on, honestly. Acme Arietta G25 is one that I've really only done some hardware dev on. I'll prob be buried with it. I had a Pocket C.H.I.P that was sick, but after the company fell, I ditched it. Omega Onion 2 hasn't seen any electrons since about. Two weeks after I received it.
But yeah, five liters of fun...

notfromhere ,

I have a small cluster of Pis running k3s kubernetes and running several services for my household. Yea they could all run on a single beefy server but I had fun learning it all.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
LXC Linux Containers
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex Brand of media server package
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC Single-Board Computer
SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
k8s Kubernetes container management package

16 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.

[Thread for this sub, first seen 24th Jan 2024, 01:45]
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MangoPenguin ,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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

It's because the price point is really high now. There's nothing wrong with the hardware you have.

CaptainBasculin ,

If you're not doing stuff with them; not much point.

Since these devices have ARM processors, they can be embedded to places that doesn't need high power and contain smaller volume; unlike PCs. You can host your a Jellyfin server on one, host a pi-hole so that you filter out every internet traffic from ads on another. Maybe a small FTP server that you can use as cloud storage?

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