[canpan]

I wonder how they are positioned now in the market.

During covid I wanted a small low power always on server. I thought about Raspi, but at the time it was expensive and I went with an intel nuc, for a similar price.

Now if I wanted to do hobby electronics, I heard I should look into esp32 or stm32..

[hn_throw2025]

I use a Pi 4B as a 24/7 home server in a country where domestic electricity is expensive (and worsening).

Each Pi release is more powerful, but uses more energy. I found the Pi 4B to be the sweet spot for me, because it is the earliest model to support USB booting, gigabit Ethernet, and offer > 1GB RAM.

Perhaps a used one would fit your purposes and budget?

I currently use it to run PiHole, serve media via SMB, host Postgres & Redis, and run some custom written Dockerized apps. Home Assistant to possibly follow, too. The current load seems reasonable in htop, but I haven’t looked into burst scenarios.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

Well... "hobby electronics" is extraordinarily broad :)

It depends massively on what kind of DX you want. If you want to work with a 'regular' operating system, you're looking more in the RPi direction.

If you want to write straight-up C firmware, then yeah, the esp and stms are both great.

[platevoltage]

The things that keeps stopping me from using one for my server is the IO. the PCIe lane on the Pi 5 was a great addition, but it isn't quite sufficient.