The first thing I thought when I read this article was how raspberry pi’s just make this kind of thing more difficult and annoying compared to a regular normal PC, new (e.g. cheap mini PC) or used (e.g. used business workstation or just a plain desktop PC).
And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32 and that a raspberry pi is essentially overkill for many of those use cases.
The Venn diagram for where the pi makes sense seems smaller than ever these days.
> And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32
I often us an Arduino plugged onto a spare USB port. There's a whole lot of GPIO pin related projects that suit 5V better than 3.3V, and Arduino IO pins are practically unbreakable compared to ESP32. I've got Arduinos that still work fine after accidentally connecting 12V directly to IO pins. I've has ESP32s (and RasPis) give up the ghost just from looking at the IO pins while thinking about 12V.
You're right that the Venn diagram is smaller than it was 5 years ago, but there are still some folks whose primary concern is electricity usage. Even the pi 5 shines there (as long as you don't need too much compute).
I would argue that something like an Intel N100 mini PC isn’t doing noticeably worse on your power bill, and more powerful x86 mini PCs will give you a better performance per dollar at close enough performance per watt.
And then you get all the advantages of the x86 ecosystem, more modularity, etc.
Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the base model M series Mac mini is competitive so long as you can get Asahi Linux to do what you need.
Maybe five years from now we will see ARM or RISC-V mini PCs further narrow the Venn diagram for raspberry pi systems.
And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32 and that a raspberry pi is essentially overkill for many of those use cases.
The Venn diagram for where the pi makes sense seems smaller than ever these days.