The first thing I thought when I read this article was how raspberry pi’s just make this kind of thing more difficult and annoying compared to a regular normal PC, new (e.g. cheap mini PC) or used (e.g. used business workstation or just a plain desktop PC).

And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32 and that a raspberry pi is essentially overkill for many of those use cases.

The Venn diagram for where the pi makes sense seems smaller than ever these days.

Used Intel 8th gen based mini PCs seem like a pretty good value. 100-150 bucks for a pc from a somewhat reputable brand (lenovo, dell, hp) with slightly better multi core than N150 and ~6W idle if you manage to get it to stay in C10. Some of them have a low profile pcie slot, like M720q and M920q. Also the CPU is socketed so you could technically upgrade it to e.g. i9-9900K, at least the M920q is known to take one as long as you use a powerful enough PSU. Few of them (at least M920q) also support coreboot due to an Intel Boot Guard vuln which could be fun, I'm planning to look into whether it could be ported to my M720q as well.

Yeah have a collection of minipc - they are indeed great. This build was more NAS focused. 9x SATA SSD and 6x NVME...minipcs just don't have the connectivity for that sort of thing

>Imo, Raspberry Pis haven't been cost competitive general compute devices for a while now unless you want GPIO pins.

I have a bunch of rasp 4Bs that I'll use for a k8s HA control plane but yeah outside of that they're not idea. Especially with the fragility of SD card instead of nvme (unless you buy the silly HAT thing).