Like a lot of computery hardwary people, I have been buying and setting up Raspberry PI 4’s for various tasks around the house.
For instance I replaced an aging Mac Mini house file server with a Raspberry PI 4 and a 2 disk software Raid1. And one of my 3D printers is controlled by a Raspberry PI 4 with OctoPi installed on it.
But also last summer I set up a Pi 4 system, on a battery and solar panel, out in the garden to do weather satellite image receving over an SDR radio.
Before the pandemic, PI 4’s were relatively cheap, and they run Raspberry PI OS (a linux veriant) or even Ubuntu. So you get a PI board, a case, heat sinks, fan and power supply and you have a low cost computer that runs a real operating system.
Except when the chip shortage came, PI 4’s were very expensive just for the board, and are only now coming down in price, probably mostly because they introduced the PI 5. Well lets look at the economics of it… A PI5 board alone is selling for about $100 on Amazon. To use it as a general purpose computer, you need to add a case, a power supply and active cooling (PI 4 got by with just a fan, the 5 seems to need more elaborate cooling) .. so the power supply costs about $20, and the case plus cooling costs about $25… You have to add a micro SD card to this, pick a size, so we’re looking at about $150ish for a PI computer, and that’s without a monitor, keyboard and mouse — in some applications I run headless anyways.
I was about to put in an order for one, because lately I’ve been designing and building my own microcontroller boards, and frankly, I risk, due to my inexperience, blowing out a USB port on my expensive laptop if I plug it in and have something wrong in the wiring. So I figured, hey, buy a cheap Raspberry PI system and you only risk blowing out a port on a $100 computer board.
Well If all I want to do is run the PI as a terminal emulator to my boards, that’s fine, and probably I could get PlatformIO running on it and I can do Arduino sketch development right on the PI… but as I have advanced in things, I see I’m leaving Arduino land and I want to run more serious IDEs from chip makers themselves. For instance Microchip’s MPLAB X, which will run on linux, but not on a PI.
That got me looking for what very cheap PC could I buy instead of a PI, and I found, on Amazon, a $155 Intel N95 based computer. It’s about as long as a PI enclosure width wise, and depth is about twice a PI enclosure. so still a tiny single board computer, that has all the IO and video ports a PI has, plus USB-C, and like a real computer, it comes in a case, with a power supply and whatever cooling it needs, there are notable advantages over a PI 5. First it is an x86-64 machine, comes with Windows 11 installed and of course will run Linux if you want. Second, it has a real 512 gig SSD, as opposed to running off a micro sd card like a PI, and has 16 gigs of ram installed (upgradable), wheras the PI 5 seems to max out at 8 Gigs.
So price wise, there’s no reason now to buy a Raspberry PI system, and performance wise, well I’ve set mine up, installed the IDE I will be using, and found for sure it blows away a PI 4 performance wise, (I don’t know about vs a PI 5, I don’t have one).
The only reason I thought a PI could still have an advantage is that you can run a PI off a battery… But this N95 machine has a DC input jack on it, and the wall wart that comes with it is only 12v 3a. So hey… no problem running that off a 12 volt battery.
Stefanos's Blog 