On Sun, 04 Feb 2018 09:45:51 +0000 Ethan Grammatikidis <eeke...@fastmail.fm> wrote: Ethan Grammatikidis writes: > On Sat, Feb 3, 2018, at 11:46 PM, Bakul Shah wrote: > > > > Not to mention The RasPis are poor at > > reliability. Even a xenon flash or near a RasPi could power a > > RasPi2 down! And since they do no onboard power regulation, > > people had lots of problems early on -- add one more USB > > device and the thing can become unreliable. > > This is probably an impossible question, but I've got to ask: Why do people > even buy RasPis? Like, for anything? Even when the first RPi was new, a second > hand laptop could offer far more processing power and reliability for the same > price, sometimes excepting the disk of course. Add a base station with the > old printer port and there's some GPIO; not as much as a RPi, it's true, but > there are ways around that. One alternative for GPIO is the actually cheap > boards from Ti or whoever which exist to interface Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, > or USB on one side (depending on the board) to GPIO and serial on the other. > I think they're programmed in Forth, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can > Just download programs for them to do anything you'd want with remote control.
They're all right if you understand and stay within their limitations. Make sure you supply more than enough current for their intended use & Raspis will last a long time. The "flash" problem was for a particular model only and did get fixed (sorry, I over-egged it a bit). If all you want is a laptop/desktop pis don't offer much, especially if you can afford more expensive laptops. But their low cost, small size, low power, GPIO & camera connectivity, standardized models and easy availability open up a lot of new applications. This is over 18 million Pis have been sold. Even though they are supposed to be "educational" devices, they are selling like quite well in the commercial market. I suspect for many embedded device mfrs just use a Pi + their custom h/w to get to market fast and at a low cost. Things like giant wall video display using many screens, 3d scanners and printer, TOR routers, media servers, servers for DHCP/boot/ftp/print/smtp/imap, s/w radios, robots, weather stations, used in weather balloons, various controllers, security cameras, toys, etc.
