cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11106179

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.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    22·
    10 months ago

    Have their performance suddenly dropped like crazy?

    Can you no longer use them for the purpose for which you got them?

    If no, then why bin them?

    Two years ago, my dad and me set up a new project with a raspberry pi zero w, it is a water temperature meter to report the water temp at a swimming hole my dad enjoy.

    The Pi has a DS18B20 temperature sensor and is powered by a motorcycle battery through a timer, every half hour the timer turns on the Pi, it boots Raspbian, runs a bash script that grabs the temperature value, sanitizes the data, checks it for errors, sends it to a webpage, waits 30 sec, and then shuts down the pi.

    Just because there are more powerful options doesn’t make your existing devices less powerful.

    • RBGEnglish
      15·
      10 months ago

      But… the internet says they are not cool anymore. So your argument is invalid!

      • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
        10·
        10 months ago

        Ah, how silly of me!

        OP, just throw the devices in the gutter, and don’t feel bad, it is trickle down economics, your SBCs are trickling down to the less fortunate!

      • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tfEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Big Intel got to you too? The ARM-sistence will live forever! ^(or at least until RISC-V becomes viable)

      • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        There are modules ypu can use, but we didn’t need to as we could borrow a neighbours wifi that reached the spot.

        So LTE would only add power use and paperwork for us, but ypu can get lte modems for radpberry pis

  • QuarterSwede@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    10 months ago

    The price of pi’s skyrocketed and made second hand mini PCs be a lot more cost effective for home labs and servers. May as well get the performance for the dollar and be able to run VMs.

  • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tfEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    In most cases, for most people Pi is still the way to go, but you’re running a small army of Pi, it’s not a bad idea to consider consolidating and running a NUC.