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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.

luna ,
@luna@lemmy.catgirl.biz avatar

Sbcs are neat and raspi is still cool imo, i guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too and the recent releases with 6, 8, 12, cores are enticing to a group of people. Really depends on what you want to do, right tool for the right job etc

FutileRecipe ,

I guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too

People always knew x86s existed. I think the main culprit is the price gap between them and Pis is decreasing. Pis used to be around $35, which has skyrocketed to 3-5x MSRP, plus they were unavailable for a long time. Now the Pi's performance to price ratio isn't justifiable to most, so people pay a little more for the x86 but get so much more capability.

JustUseMint ,

This is the answer I've found as well, bang on

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.

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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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?

iluminae ,

I am nearly complete migrating my ceph cluster and nomad compute cluster to arm :shrug:

qjkxbmwvz , (edited )

I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.

Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding --- so it presumably won't draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I'm guessing it's ballpark accurate.

Works flawlessly for Immich of course.

The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.

For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!

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.

Haha ,

I bought a dozen of pi4 when they were so cheap but i actually dont know what exactly to do with them. I actually would love some ideas

taaz ,

I had the same question few days back here

https://biglemmowski.win/post/546746

Haha ,

I’m more lost reading this hahaha

PrettyLights ,

The next pi I get will be turned into an MT32-Pi for use with my Mister retro setup and classic PC games.

https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi

It can also be used as a midi synth if you're into that

Haha ,

Hell yeah! I had bought a front end called lunchbox a long time ago but i havent got to install moonlight streaming either :) for midis that’s an awesome idea too. Maybe one raspberry PI for all music stuff… thats one way to organise things too

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