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by teaearlgraycold
3 days ago
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The PIO is super cool. I haven't had a good use case for it yet but will enjoy messing with it once I do. Party I am petitioning for passersby who might be wincing at the new prices for Pi 5s etc. for starter electronics/programming projects when they could save a ton of money with a Pico. I have to assume that a huge chunk of Pi 5 purchases from consumers end up with the computer either stuck in a drawer, having been used for a couple days, or running a workload they are completely overpowered for. Every time I see the new prices I wonder how much lower they would be if the consumers were better informed and demand was more appropriately redirected. To give a specific example of a misused Pi, I've seen an RFID access system made by a hobbyist (low stakes, no need for professional/commercial solutions) running on a Pi 3. When the system glitches (another matter entirely - messy code) and needs to be rebooted you need to wait a minute or two for Linux to start up. I'm planning to replace this system with a Pico 2W. All it needs to do is handle a couple of buttons, a small LCD screen, and an RFID reader. We can handle all of that and a WiFi-accessible web admin interface using a microcontroller. Not only is it wasteful (for whatever that's worth) to have a quad core CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a whole Linux OS to perform such a trivial task. It's also leading to issues with complexity and performance. |
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Perhaps they'd cost even more if the ones sitting in drawers were never purchased at all.
And, I mean... I'm not here optimize anyone else's money. It's theirs, and they can spend it however they want.
As a specific example: Back before the literal-shortages several years ago, I'd see people buying 8GB Pi4s to run OpenWRT or Klipper. "I want the very best," they'd proclaim. "I don't want any bottlenecks."
I'd try to steer them to what I felt was a more-efficient path. "Yeah, but OpenWRT uses less than a hundred megs of RAM. And Klipper is pretty light, too -- that's kind of the whole point of this kind of software. The smallest [2GB] version is already complete and utter overkill for these purposes now, and will remain so in any future it is likely to ever see."
And what I found, over and over again, was that these folks didn't reason themselves into this position to begin with, and that they thus couldn't be reasoned out of it.
So I stopped trying to change their ways, and started accepting it instead. I'm happier this way.