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What gets in the way of your Raspberry Pi project?

cstanton

For those following along, it's become a bit of a daisy chain...

It's been about 10 years since the Raspberry Pi was released to the world, and I remember everyone being excited. It was a mixture of miscommunication, promises and new technology. An affordable embedded computer that was the size of a credit card. A lot of heated debate about open source and availability, and plenty of marketing. It hit off very well, and everyone clamored to get one, and somewhat still do, and support it. With open source libraries, packages and Linux, quite the contrast to similar boards released around the same time - I think it says a lot when someone has a project and decides 'no, this is how you do it' and leads with a direction and decision and doesn't leave it open for the herd of cats.

Still, a lot of people I know have a collection of Raspberry Pi, and the meme goes 'Yes I have one, it's sat in my drawer collecting dust, I don't know what to do with it' or 'I use it for my media server... and that's about it'. While using a Raspberry Pi as a media server is not a bad thing, it's rather justified (and frankly has spun off a lot of similar products since) it's not the only thing to use a Raspberry Pi for.

Now there's a lot of accessories available, a lot of example code (like other microcontroller boards) but there still must be something about it that trips you up when creating that project. Is it limitations with the hardware? (it is mostly 3v3 after all) or is it the physical size of it? (the compute module, pico and zero start addressing this) well right now it's obviously the availability (or lack) of it, but we can't address that right now, so let's focus on what we do with it when we have one.

We're looking at expanding our content and what we ask from Raspberry Pi (Foundation/Trading) to govern our campaigns and content on the Community, and I'm interested in what you need help with, so reply and let us know, regardless of knowledge level or what you've been doing.

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  • Definitely time has been my biggest speed bump.

    I tend to use the smallest, cheapest, simplest controller possible for the task, and for my projects (which I often plan based on limited time budgets), the Raspberry pi sbc is overkill. It also requires more general setup time before the real project can begin, and in the project it needs more startup time compared to the few milliseconds an Arduino needs.

    The price of the RPi sbc is still too high to simply use for everything. The $5 pi zero and $10 pi zero w are becoming interesting though - where the price point means we don’t worry about all the wasted resources. I haven’t yet picked up either zero so I can’t fully comment yet.

    I’m not 100% sure, but I understand the GPIO pins have some limitations compared to Arduino boards. That’s also been holding me back from using them for the hardware based projects.

    I’ve been using the standard sized Pi’s for bigger projects though, like my sprinkler system that has some big complex software, and my sensors  server - also involving multiple complex software packages.

    The Raspberry Pi SBC seems to be best suited for software-heavy projects, and I don’t really do many of those, as I try to keep my hobby projects simpler than that.

    Future plans involve image recognition, which is another one of those resource-hungry software-heavy projects the Pi seems to excel at.

  • in reply to ntewinkel
    ntewinkel said:
    It also requires more general setup time before the real project can begin, and in the project it needs more startup time compared to the few milliseconds an Arduino needs.

    This just requires a few iterations, before you're able to set up a Pi very quick. On the SBC front, they are the ones that mastered this cycle.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps
    Jan Cumps said:
    This just requires a few iterations

    That's true - once it's set up, simply duplicating an SD card is pretty much all that's needed (and setting computer name, I suppose).

    And you made a good point about boot time - in most applications that happens once and then it just keeps running. My server hasn't been rebooted in months.

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