From a person who builds robots, three notes:
- Camera
Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions, you can access the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second. That’s impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.
- Optimized libraries
I know that Raspberry Pi has “WiringPi” (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got “WiringOP”. I don’t know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you’d have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO access frequencies instead of megahertz.
- Antenna socket
Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you’d connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.
Pistcow@lemm.ee 6 months ago
But i want to spend 3 hours trying to set up a NES emularor.
At this point, I’m not sure why someone would buy a Pi. I used my Pi 3 for years and got it super cheap on release.
Album@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
At the ever increasing cost of the pi and how limiting it is, the n100 is a no brainer.
lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Depends on the use case I guess.I prefer to have an ARM based SBC to play with (rather than an Intel based box) to test different Linux distributions and BSD without GUI.
SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Someone like me who heard how cool raspberry pi was and tried to get one for years and then finally got it this year, but turns out that there’s better stuff out there in the market now
Pistcow@lemm.ee 6 months ago
They were awesome when they were $30. Nice support, do niche things, but now they’re the same price as a decent Window micro PC without the Linux hastle.
lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
You mean why anyone would buy a new Pi that is not a Pi3 ? Pi4 can boot from USB meaning that the usage of a SD card can be omitted completely. Not sure a Pi3 can do that or do that easily ?
kueckieben@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
I’m using a Pi 3B+ this way, booting from a usb nvme enclosure. It probably works with the 3B as well.
vikingtons@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I deeply regret my pi5 purchase. Here I was hoping to use it as a low power application server but I cannot get Ethernet workind reliably after a hot reboot. Seems to be a distro agnostic issue, though I acknowledge this could be a part failure.
sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 6 months ago
I’m the opposite, my Pi 5 is my favourite thing!
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
I don’t know if you’ve already tried this, but I’ve had weird behavior with older Pi3s when the power supplies weren’t up to snuff.
A good 5V/10A (yeah I know they only need 5A) sorted out one of mine that had a heavy load of Neopixels running on it, even though the neopixels had their own 5V supply.
I haven’t needed to get a Pi5 for any of my projects and really use them as big arduinos in certain uses (better for camera detection and remote reprogramming).
lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Before you throw the pi5 out, buy a USB Ethernet adapter ? I have a few of them and they work well with Linux and BSD.