I am interested in this, I have been using Raspberry Pis for various projects and home servers since the original - Currently one is hosting my navidrome music server, my password manager, and several other local network servers.
I feel the upgrade each time, and then get used to it, as I suppose we tend to do. I still remember the upgrade from 1 to 2 being the most impactful to me personally though. (I think maybe because that's when game emulation became viable?)
My applications have remained the same for many years my octoprint and retropie don't require more FLOPs as time goes on but I'd really enjoy a modern board that has fewer headaches. Works on any normal USB port instead of requiring specialized power supplies, doesn't brown out and reset as much, doesn't heat up as much, etc. I suspect "a pi 3, but now with fewer headaches" would sell better than "a pi 3 but even more headaches and bigger numbers that you don't want".
When I did that on Pi3 when it first came out you could crash the system because the thermal throttling wasn't fast enough (the temp sensor was on the GPU not CPU). When I reported the issue on the pi forums the answer was essentially "why would anyone ever want to do that"
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
With all due respect to Raspberry Pi and everything they’ve accomplished in the educational and hobby space,
I felt that one in my bones. I suspect a lot of people with embedded experience who worked with Raspberry Pi over the years feel it too.
Except it's not even fixed function blocks, it's the 12 core VideoCore IV GPU running software that does the decoding.
VideoCore is the real Raspberry Pi, the ARM block running Linux was just a subprocessor that VC controls.
It’s a single-core 700MHz ARMv6 chip with 512MB of RAM. It's a fossil—a Pi 5 is 600x faster (according to the video). But for the 'low-bandwidth' task of routing some banking traffic or running a few changedetection watches via a Hetzner VPS (where the actual docker image runs), it’s rock solid. There’s something deeply satisfying about giving 'e-waste' a second life as a weekend project.
Nice! Even though I've got a Proxmox serve at home running on a real PC (but it's not on 24/7), I do run my DNS, unbound, on a Pi 2. It's on 24/7 and it's been doing its job just fine since years.
* They have full sized HDMI ports
* They will happily run using any random old USB charger and not overheat.Then again we use a kW or two to microwave things for minutes on a daily basis so who really gives a shit.
steeleduncan•1h ago