Cool project, but over time I understand the appeal of the raspberry pi less and less. It seems like a compromised device with perpetually terrible retail availability and bait-and-switch pricing.
An x86 mini PC from the likes of Beelink is going to be way better at the computer stuff. Or choose some other microcontroller like an Arduino, or maybe just add GPIO to your PC.
Some of this won’t apply to the 400 because it’s in a case but…
They’re cheap. If you want to play around with another OS or something you don’t have to risk your main computer. You can also run them 24 seven even if your main computer is a laptop that you turn off or move from location to location. The Pi can just sit there. Also great if you’re gonna put it somewhere it might get damaged like outside for a project. It’s something happens you won’t lose too much money.
They are a known quantity. Sure there are lots of little x86 boxes but everyone knows exactly what’s on a Pi 7B++. That means pre-configured images for lots of Linux and BSD flavors and probably other things. Plus you can write your own OS!
Lots of expansion stuff is available too in the form of hats, on top of the built in I/O.
All the above gives it a big community. If you need help with a project or want to find out how to do something there are people and parts ready to help you.
Of course it’s quite efficient. I have a tiny GMKTek computer but it uses quite a bit more power IIRC. Need to run it off a battery or solar power? That’s very useful.
Until the clone boards started to show up wasn’t it also basically the easiest and cheapest way to get a modern ARM computer at all?
I’m not sure it’s a silver bullet for anything. But it’s a decent option for a lot of things especially.
> Other than PI, what PC actually drives its own GPIO?
They used to be able to using parallel ports. When the controller was on the southbridge and accessible via DMA, you could get hard realtime even on Windows using device drivers and interrupts (pre-Vista, which changed the security model). There was software like Mach3 that could control a whole CNC off of a parallel port and lots of hardware companies used Wintel instead of SBCs or rolling their own PCB. San Francisco BART still uses parallel ports to control their trains and they have to hunt down for replacement parts on eBay [1].
Nowadays a PCIe GPIO card is at least a few hundred dollars and you're unlikely to get hard realtime guarantees unless it supports uploading custom firmware. Sharing functionality with the most common printer interface was a boon for PC GPIO but that's gone now.
Back in the late 80s before ubiquitous digital audio, someone published a design for a sound card that used the parallel port and a super simple circuit with just some resistors. I found a similar recent one:
No, the controller used to be part of the motherboard chipset in a way that allowed DMA access to GPIO registers (so the CPU didn’t need to actively bit bang the port, drivers could just fill a buffer and offload it to the hardware) and interrupts that had priority over all other processes.
Not sure I see that, aside from during the chip shortage when CM4 in particular were like hen's teeth. Aside from post-release shortages, I've always been able to get whichever model I need, at a non-scalped price, typically with next day delivery.
Intel N100 and N95 MiniPCs are cheap as chips, the last one I bought was $60 and had 8GB of RAM and 256GB of NVMe SSD, plus it included the power adapter and two ethernet ports.
Mind sharing which one you bought and from where? I was looking around at a few and they seemed to start at around $120 shipped with no RAM nor storage.
It's because beelink is building up a name that makes them able to market their products at a premium price. Many other brands of these are much cheaper. My 8/256 one was 120 and that included an nvme. The pi with adapter comes to about the same and does not include storage and is also much slower than an N100.
Not really! I found one for $129 at 8GB RAM/256GB SSD. To get an equivalent RPI you start with $80 for the device, get up to $100 for the power supply and case, get up to $114 to add the m.2 hat, and then you still have to buy your SSD.
As someone who has purchased a half dozen SBCs over the years but who has also switched to mini PCs the other thing that you start to miss is having a real BIOS so you can install a vanilla operating system. With the SBCs, there is often a single Linux distro that is supported, and which rapidly stops getting updated. Even using stuff like Armbian, it's challenging to use an SBC that is more than a couple years old, and I've had bad experiences where the NIC stops working after a software update.
I think this post is a good example of why people buy rpis: network effects. Are people writing articles like this about the competition? Especially if you're in to modding, hacking, etc the community around the product is an important consideration.
The n100 is comparable to a pi5 performance - up to 2x for certain workloads. Where are you getting 5x from?
Most people are buying pi for the form factor - I don’t think I’ve seen an n100 that isn’t more than 3x the size of a pi in a case - and the smaller size ones come with a hefty premium.
I think some people cherry pick a certain benchmark or reference point and build up the N100 as some sort of monster chip from that.
It's faster, yes. Also less efficient. But in many tiny builds it's only marginally faster because it has to be thermally constrained. Otherwise you require a larger power supply and bigger fan/heatsink.
Also, some configurations end up slower due to cheap shortcuts manufacturers make in their tiny builds.
The N100 is great, but it's not as great as I think some people think, for all uses and purposes!
An x86 mini PC from the likes of Beelink is going to be way better at the computer stuff. Or choose some other microcontroller like an Arduino, or maybe just add GPIO to your PC.