this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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okay so now it's just a shitty netbook from 2012 except with many, many parts missing.
I thought these things were for hobbyists to make little robots and shit?
I have a couple pi’s that I use for a few different things.
a 0w runs piVPN. a 3b runs a couple curl scripts to poll my CPAP machine every 30 min and update my data on a dashboard and OSCAR. a pi4 has two SDR’s that I use for ADSB and monitoring my water service meter, my gas service meter, and my electric service meter. another pi4 has two SDRs that I use one for general fucking around, and the other used to pull data from NOAA/METEOR satellites (USG recently decomissioned some functions on the POES satellites) so I am repurposing this to pull GOES data instead. It also has a wifi dongle that is capable of packet injection which i use to deauth the asshole a couple doors down whenever i get bored (his truck is rife with FJB, fuck Beto, fuck your feelings, and maga stickers, so he deserves it more often than I get around to it frankly)
I use them because they are low power enough that im ok with leaving them running perpetually. I purchased the 0w, and one of the pi4s, the others were given to me by someone cleaning out some storage. I have no need for the GPIO functions, and frankly a ten year old dell thin client would have more horsepower and better USB bus capabilities (i have a few ancient thin clients too, doing various crap) not to mention running x86 linux which is a whole headache you dont have to deal with running ARM crap.
Ill never buy another one, microcontrollers have better GPIO options and if I want a small form factor for general computing Ill just get a ten year old NUC or a thin client and be done with it.
I think usually you just buy them and plug in a micro SD card and put it into a box with your other ewaste. I think the range of projects where a regular sized raspberry pi is actually a good choice is fairly slim.
That's more Arduino etc, raspis are a baby general purpose computer. You could use them as web servers, or to host bots, or as file servers, or as home automation controllers, or as network-level ad blockers, as proxies or VPNs, as SDRs, as game consoles for retro games, as weather stations, as security hardware (e.g. network scanning for open wifi), and so on
The problem with a respberry pi (especially at this price point) is that everything you can do with them you can do easier and better with the shitty old laptop you already have sitting in a drawer collecting dust.
Built-in UPS, already have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, (not as much of a problem now but) x86, storage
GPIO is all i can think of that disagree here
My personal favorite RPI feature is the Linux USB gadget mode on the RPI 0W. Very versatile.
You can have the pi act as USB network card and just ssh (or any other IP) into the pi via a single micro USB cable. I've also hosted a browser version of vscode like that before, so you get a text editor with terminal that let you work on the pi's system remotely/over USB.
You can make your own human interface devices like keyboards very easily. Of course you can just simulate key presses, no need for actual buttons.
You can have the pi pretend to be a storage device.
Have you been able to do this in a way that doesn't involve waiting 1-2 minutes for Linux to boot after plugging it in? That was the main thing stopping me from actually using it in my experiments.
I don't remember it being that bad
They just sort of played us for fools.
How is it better for children learning coding? It's only really useable if you already have all the electronics you would need for a child to learn to code. You need all the expensive periphery, you need a second computer to write SD cards.
How is it better for tinkerers than x86? An ecosystem where you have motherboards with interchangeable CPUs, RAM, daughter boards. Sure the GPIO is nice but generally I'm too worried about frying my 50€ board, I'd rather use a 5€ microcontroller for that stuff. Back when the first raspberry came out it was actually the cheapest way to get an easily programmable device with ethernet capabilities. But now I can get a nice esp32 board for 5€.
Self-hosting, I'd rather use a computer where my distro of choice works. Not a raspberry pi where mainline support is still a struggle after many years. And device trees are still more pain than I'm usually willing to deal with.
The unique selling point for me has been hands-on experience with Linux on ARM and it generally hasn't been a great experience.