this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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The power constraints are more important to most than the size constraints honestly.
Yeah, my pi sips energy very sparingly. Even an old laptop is going to be drawing more just to power itself, never mind what I run on it.
That said, pis are a poor value proposition nowadays and there are better options for the same use case
Oh absolutely, it really upsets me that they never dropped the prices down after covid supply issues were resolved. They were really proud of being accessible price-wise once upon a time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What are the better options?
Pis have great software support so for GPIO experimentation it's so useful.
Not super familiar with the gpio side of things, and I also haven't dug that deep into the space lately since I already own my rpi and it works for me so take all this with a pinch of salt, but I found some options that seem reasonable
It's been a while but I remember Orange Pi having terrible support? I haven't heard of the others.
Whereas the RPi has the amazing compute module if you need it too.
Sometimes paying more is better.
Oh, for sure. It depends what you need it for. A lot of people just want a pi for something like a pihole or a stats dashboard of some kind (that's my use case, anyway). You get what you pay for and sometimes you've gotta pay for what you wanna get.
There is quite a range of devices out there now with varying capabilites. Things like the Onion Omega2+, Oranage Pi, and more.
Raspberry Pi also remains good. While the Pi5 is expensive and more powerful - raspberry pi also makes the Pi Zero boards which are cheaper less capable boards which are closer to what the original raspberry Pi was but newer hardware.
I'd say the Pi5 is a heading more towards a full PC like device (hence the comparisons to cost and capability minipcs pepple are making in thia thread). But there remain plenty of lower spec machines out there now similar to the original cheap Raspberry Pi concept. And we've had high inflation recently - to some extent the cost perception avtually reflects money being worth less than it was and buying less for $10 or $20.
Yeah, the Pi moving to full computer thing is weird because the SD card is still a massive bottleneck on normal day-to-day usage.
Not the person you're asking but personally I use Jetson nano for some work stuff (and when I upgrade the "old" one is mine), odroid I've used for some misc creations and testing, and I'm personally looking forward to trying the radxa x4 as an htpc.
What I am really excited about right now is tossing my recently acquired spare jetson nano on a drone, right now I'm setting it up to walk around with it and test CV before it gets mounted up on the drone.
Will you use a separate flight controller chip or try to do it all on board?
Going separate for now, maybe later I'll go for all on the same