[pdimitar]

Ah, education, right. I never had interest in the whole GPIO thing but I'll admit life has been pulling me in very different directions, hence this dropped off my radar. Thanks for the reminder.

Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount small (or big) fans, and all that.

And don't get me wrong, I love tinkering myself but after reading people's experiences for a while I just thought to myself "Why all this trouble? Get a $250 - $400 mini PC off of Amazon / eBay / AliExpress and put a 2-4 TB NVMe SSD and you have something 20x more powerful and with 100x the storage space".

Again, I love me some tinkering. But nowadays I want to get something out of it in the end. Like the mini PC I bought that I want to dedicate only to a PiHole even if it's a 50x overkill for it. Might add some firewalling / VLAN management capabilities to it down the line.

So yep, for education RPi and Arduino (+ its derivatives) seem mostly unbeaten.

[reactordev]

On a RPi I can control more aspects than I can a mini pc ITX board. I can boot straight to my program. I can write directly to frame buffers. I don’t need Linux. I don’t really need a kernel…

Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just putting the box outside the box):

Coffee table Digital Touch map.

Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiPo battery.

ADSB receiver also powered by solar and a battery.

Arcade Cabinet that sits on a bar top with a bill reader.

Mini JukeBox at the local hacker space.

Sailing autopilot using NMEA2000 connectors.

Wearables.

Playing with high density distributed computing. (More than 5 machines)

Where the mini pc really shines is:

Storage. (NAS included)

Media PC (TV sold separately)

Gaming Console

Personal Cloud (docker + nfs + caddy + <insert personalized preferences>)

General Autopilot (sensors that need GPU support).

You have left over old PCs and don’t want to open your wallet…

[LargoLasskhyfv]

It's just an illusion. You're still running under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

[reactordev]

Only for initial boot into Linux. But yes, technically it’s step0.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

As I understand it, that is incorrect. It's more like a hypervisor still running in the background. That may have rolled back more and more with recent versions, but in principle the hypervisor can show shit like temperature, voltages and frequency in wrong ways, or delayed to the 'guest', whatever that may be. Actually that was the case, for some time, as some low-level tinkerers and/or overclockers discovered.

Similar to anything running in SMM (System Management Mode) on X86/AMD64 since the times of the 386SL. Be it BIOS, APM, ACPI, UEFI, or whatever.

I repeat: "It's just an illoooshn..." (There is now raw iron/silicon for consumers)

[pdimitar]

Pretty cool, thank you. Those things have been not on my mind for a while, thanks for the reminder.

I was commenting in the context of why people choose them for servers but I recognize that I did not make that clear.