Hey all, I’m looking to build a couple dashboards out around my house. I’ve done this before with rokchip boards and they are… fine, but not great. Is rpi the best option right now? Are there alternatives you really like? I’d like to keep it a single board to easily mount behind things where it doesn’t take up a lot of space, and I won’t lie I like the DIY feeling of it over something like a thin client.
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Many have said this. If you don’t need the GPIO, get a small PC.
Or if you do not care about power consumption.
The n100 and n200 have quite low TDP values for much better performance than a Pi.
They still consume way more power than the pi. My pi fully loaded uses less power than my N100 router idle.
Short answer: no
We’ve used a couple of different Pis and a couple of different Odroids. The Odroids have been excellent and trouble free, the Pis not so much. Initially we got a Pi because we thought with the bigger community and better software support it would be easier to troubleshoot issues. Except that they have been regular problems that we haven’t always been able to work around or fix. One of them got relegated to a retro game ‘console’ because it was more trouble than it was worth. We’ve had little issues with the Odroids that wasn’t easily sorted.
I think you need to provide the criteria you’re using to define “best”.
I can compare specs on my own, I’m looking for opinions here. I heard rpi wasn’t completely on the up and up recently, shipping problems, overserving corporate clients, etc. If people have had bad boards, bad customer service, things are overpriced for what you get, etc.
Right now it looks like the rpi5 is the best option, but $80 is a lot, and if I can get a couple of lower end boards for half the price with a better company rep, then I’d probably seriously consider those.
as long as it is something simple they work fine.
But compare their price to some 1L mini PCs on the second hand market. you will get a lot more guts at around the same price.
Second that.
RPis are still unbeaten in terms of power usage, but the difference to a low end thin client is small.
Cost isn’t really an argument either, you can get thin clients with case, psu and SSD for something like 40€.
RPis are still unbeaten in terms of power usage, but the difference to a low end thin client is small.
Not even close when it comes to tuned idle power usage.
My pi 3 idles at 3-4W, my Futro at around 5-6W. I’d say that’s pretty close.
You can get your 3b+ (and 3 even lower) to under 2W easily on idle. 3-4 is a lot. Check out some guides, basically disable BT, display out and WiFi.
So, basically don’t use it.
I mean, I get the effort, but if you account for your own labor, the power savings probably will probably take years to amortise - even with high energy costs like here in Germany.
Just as a rule of thumb: 1W of constant power costs is at most 25cents (40cent/kwh, which is even high for Germany).
