this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Although the old 4s are now like $50. I remember when those were selling at stupidly inflated prices.
An old 3 or 4 is more than enough for my dumb little home projects.
Still running PiHole on a 3B.
The Pi 4 is plenty robust for Docker and a few small things depending on how much RAM your model has etc. Mine runs Immich well, unless you give it huge videos to transcode, which crushes the CPU and takes forever.
I use a little 3b for home automation stuff. That little guy is arguably overkill for controlling a thermostat and some other silly things.
You almost certainly could do it with an ESP32 (a microcontroller with Arduino support and which supports WiFi and bluetooth).
An ESP32 Super Mini board costs about $5.
Of course, forget about an UI other than web-based for the ESP32 or proper OS (like Linux) support, as that stuff is on the embedded systems side of things (though kinda powerful for one) rather than the Single Board Computer side.
I'm still running Jellyfin and the arr stack on an 8GB Pi 4 just fine.
I've used cheaper thin clients in the past. You can get them much cheaper than $50 and they come ready to go with storage, power supply, and case.
Pshh. A case? I have a perfectly good tea bag box here.
Thin clients are good if you don't need much storage. They usually don't have any way to add more except for USB.