Raspberry Pi 4 released, starting at $35

@FeralRants LibreElec is what I’d recommend- with the latest release, they’ve rolled in some emulation stuff.
Otherwise, RetroPIE or EmulationStation would be great choices for emulation-focused boxes.

Works pretty well- if you’ve got a TV around, your TV remote will probably also work with the Raspberry Pi (to some extent) thanks to a technology called CEC.

@therealjrn A full PC doesn’t fit on a single circuit board that is only a few inches across. The price is between $35-55. Quite a deal for people who don’t need much processing power, or plan to use it as a tool in a different project.

I personally have used the previous Pi to filter ads on my home network, set up signs, media servers, as a retro gaming console.

It’s not normally something you buy for use as a general PC. Though, this one seems much more capable of this as it has a 4GB RAM option that would be able to handle web browsing decently enough.

So in short, size and price/performance ratio are good.

Quick google pulled up some other things people use them for. Here.

@FeralRants @therealjrn

I know people who have happily used them for routing/networking and as media servers.

@f00l @FeralRants @therealjrn
Another aspect: power consumption. A few watts versus 100+ for a desktop computer.

@f00l @FeralRants @therealjrn
As others have noted, people use them for … reasons.

Another reason is that the RasPi4B only draws 7.5 Watts under load, about the same as a night light. Idling is half that.

Where I am, electricity costs $0.12/kWh. My power cost for this device running full-blast 24x7 for a year costs me 44kWh/yr or $5.28 for a whole year. Idling is half that. The power supply is rated at 5.1V 3A DC. That means 7.5Wh @5.1V (1 hour under load) uses about 1500mAh in battery capacity terms.

Put another way, 6 AA batteries (1.5V, ~1500 mAh @7.5V in series) should easily power this thing for an hour (under load). A 20K mAh (or 2Ah) average power brick with a 2A supply would easily power the device for a day at full load. A typical car battery runs about 45Ah, so it would power one of these bad boys at full load for about 3 weeks, or 6 weeks or longer idling.

That’s pretty low energy consumption as far as computers go, and extremely cheap to run as an appliance (no keyboard or monitor) or IoT (Internet-of-Things) device.

@f00l @FeralRants @mike808 @therealjrn
It’s a hobbyist thing.

You do all sorts of weird experimental things, and if you break it, you’re only out $35.

@therealjrn Diskless, noiseless, open source, DIY friendly, runs a ton of stuff, all in a package the size of a pack of smokes for under $30 (Pi3).

@FeralRants @therealjrn Yup, small, cheap and easy to use for projects where a full pc or even a laptop would be way too much overkill. I just helped my niece setup a pi camera to take time lapse photos of her crystal growing project on the kitchen counter over a period of weeks. Just needed a small amount of space, a usb charger for power and we could retrieve images over wifi as it progressed. She also enjoyed the process of building the device, as little work involved as it was, but it helped to build more interest vs just propping up a tablet or laptop.

KuoH

@FeralRants @kuoh Thank you KuoH! Very helpful!

Or maybe I bought a cool case(s), and then had to get a Pi(s) to put in it.

@therealjrn I’ve used them to power spot monitors for ip camera systems. When the CCTV company said they couldn’t do it I made my own way. It’s a tiny computer that will mount to the back of a monitor and pull the stream off the desired camera for display - not that you couldn’t do this with a regular computer, but you probably wouldn’t want to deal with the space and power requirements to do it.

Seems like I might need to order a few pi4s for research purposes

@djslack Ok, ok…I’m beginning to understand. The two big take-aways for me are the power requirements and the portability. I don’t know if I’ll ever buy one, but it’s making a little more sense to me now.

@therealjrn Also, having bought old pcs, to get a decent one for $35 is still pretty rare

@spitfire6006006 Ok, y’all can quit piling on now. You sure as shit can buy reclaimed laptops and desktops all day long for $20 where I live. We have a strong recycling community here. They won’t have Windows, but one place in particular loads them with Linux–which is what these little charms use. Thanks for the information everybody!

@tinsami1 When I bought my 2, the 3 came out one week later. When Raspberry Pi said the 4 was not due until next year initially, I bought a 3B+, but at least I got 6 months out of that before the shiny newness was released. It was running a Bitcoin core, not mining, just participating.

I had to take it down after a threat from comcast since we don’t have business class service and it is nominally a public server.

I’m thinking of a Plex or other media server for its new purpose.

@cengland0 sounds like maybe a good reason to hold off unless you get a working cable with the unit…

@duodec I used to be that guy who would buy items as soon as they are announced and released to the public. I now like to wait until all the bugs have been worked out and people leave feedback.

@cengland0 @duodec ehh just think of it as an early adopter tax

if your current type c cable/brick doesnt work you have to pay the tax of buying the official raspberry charger

@dashcloud Coollllll…

@dashcloud Was talking to my son and is there a place to buy used pi? He is having trouble setting up his 3 and he is not sure if he has released the magic blue smoke or just done something wrong – he says end result is the same (Nothing!!)

@mikibell Do you have a good charger? That’s a thing to check. Otherwise, the microSD card is also something you should check.
Here’s the page with all of the stuff on troubleshooting/figuring out what’s going on: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/
There’s a section on boot options you can set to troubleshoot problematic displays:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/README.md

Amazon & eBay both would have older Raspberry Pis- there’s ton of kit sellers, so if you actually want a used one (like I did), you’ll need to sift through lots of them to find an individual seller.

@dashcloud awesome… thank you!

POKER! JOKER! NOT MEDIOCRE! AWESOME!