The boards are of course bigger, which I guess will be a non-starter for many. They'll also require active cooling unless you downclock them considerably. They often also require more power, although many mainboards can be configured down two a few watts of power consumption, depending on what peripherals and speed you need.
Yeah, it's more work than just getting a Pi, but given the current prices, it makes sense for me.
If you use the raspberry pi for homeservers or general compute (which I did/do sometimes) then the value proposition is quite poor regardless of pre AI prices unless you have very strict power requirements (in which case it probably fits the above use case already). The comparison with NUCs or mini PCs or laptop boards feels like it's a wrong comparison.
The chips used in PIs are repurposed Broadcom SOCs that have inferior bus speeds compared to a general purpose processor from intel or amd, even few generations old. For any general purpose computing these chips will always be slower. its like comparing apples and oranges. I never really understood why people did that.
Yeah, I don't disagree, but I would argue the Raspberry was always an applorange, and that's exactly what made it popular (together with the cheap price in the beginning, which made it basically an impulse buy). It brought people into microcontroller/embedded systems territory without having to actually deal with all of the stuff that made this so daunting. As you said, it is basically a normal Linux PC, just that it runs Arm and has GPIO. People who are really into electronics/embedded systems will use a proper microcontroller nowadays anyway, these have gotten so powerful and easy to use that there's really no reason for a Pi anymore. And on the other side, people who want a little server, a pi-hole, tailscale or octoprint or whatever, can just use an old used laptop/miniPC or similar. Since the Pi has gotten so expensive, I see basically no reason to get one anymore.
By the way, I got a zero 2W a few months ago and it costed me 47€
You can make such a dongle yourself from ~any MCU dev board, but there are also productized "USB GPIO breakout" adapter boards, e.g. the Adafruit MCP2221A.
The "Pi as an SBC with GPIOs" case now only makes sense if you really, really require the Pi's compactness and/or monolithic-ness (as might be the case for e.g. ruggedized embedded systems like robots.)
For many (maybe even most) people they do the same thing. Some just want a HTPC, basic desktop, or small server, no GPIO needed. Raspberry Pis were definitely cheaper early on because you could actually buy boards at or near MSRP, but over time the price rose and mini PCs became cheaper.
or maybe the mini pcs started becoming available at all. I think these were a concept since core 2 duo and first gen i3 era. before then the chips were too much wattage for a mini pc. and the first generation mini pcs were also costly for enterprises to adopt in bulk. its only after 4th and 6th gen intel that these were adopted in large quantities in enterprises and once they dumped those in the used market they became comparable in pricing and somewhat in power to a rpi.
Used powerful PCs have always been available for dirt cheap on eBay even when the first pi was launched. just that mini pcs are a more recent thing.
As far as mini-pcs... The first Intel NUC was a Sandy bridge, i.e. Gen2, FWIW. And we did have the 'Mac Mini' as far back as 2005, buuuuut that wasn't cheap because Apple.
I think SSDs were another big part of mini-PCs though; it's easy to forget for granted the risks of having a hard drive in a poor thermal environment, as well as the general size constraints one imposes. [0]
[0] - Surrrre, you could use a 2.5 inch HDD instead, but 2.5 inch HDDs almost always were slower than a 3.5 inch HDD (excluding the VelociRaptor, but that would only be more demanding as far as thermal...)
At first it was a blessing that the Raspberry Pi gained popularity as a general purpose computer, not just for education and embedded applications. The additional demand and popularity brought more money and development attention to the ecosystem.
At some point, which I could never really put my finger on, this general purpose computer popularity grew so large that the embedded systems and educational aspects of Raspberry Pi seemed almost forgotten by the mainstream users. At a local in-person meetup group it was a running theme for people to brag about how many Raspberry Pis they owned for different purposes and to boast about using them for applications where they didn’t really fit. In person I’ve heard more about Raspberry Pi NAS systems (where people are always disappointed with the performance and the price of forcing a Pi into this role) or Raspberry Pi Kubernetes clusters (which mostly sat idle and could have been replaced by a single PC with more RAM).
This reached such a critical mass that it almost seemed like the mainstream discussion forgot the original purpose of the Pi and thought it was literally just another computer, but small. Most people who tried to use it for this purpose were left slightly frustrated by how it didn’t perform like they wanted a computer to perform.
So now every discussion about Raspberry Pi attracts comments about how nobody should buy a Pi when you can buy a NUC or laptop or some other used piece of hardware and it’s so much “better”. This is the right advice for a lot of people who wanted a powerful general computer but bought a Pi instead, but it’s also furthering the misunderstanding of what the Pi is for.
The real advice is that everyone should be shopping for the right tool for the job. There are a lot of cool applications for the Pi where a NUC or old laptop or phone doesn’t make sense because you actually need the compact size, the low-level I/O, or some other feature. However anyone who can put a NUC or laptop side by side with a Raspberry Pi and consider them both viable options for their project probably shouldn’t have been looking at a single board computer to begin with.
There is a parallel situation happening with the “just buy an ESP32” arguments. If an ESP32 solves your problem, you also probably shouldn’t have been in the market for a Raspberry Pi.
I have mixed feelings on that.
For the longest time it was safe to say "just buy a Raspberry Pi" because they were cheap enough and powerful enough. If memory serves me correctly, the base board cost roughly the same as an Arduino Uno and offered considerably more. (Of course, there were cheaper Uno clones, but those depended upon support offered by official Arduino software development tools.)
While there are some projects which would only be possible with something like the Uno, there were far more projects that would only be possible with something like the Pi. So if you wanted to give generic go-to advice to a novice, the Pi it was.
The right advice is to use the right tool for the job, but that is something that a novice (or fly-by-night forum posters) aren't prepared to handle.
Of course, things change. There are more inexpensive microcontroller development boards and the microcontrollers themselves are much more powerful. While that doesn't negate the benefits of a Linux SBC, it does raise questions now that those SBCs are considerably more expensive.
IMO, the problem with the Pi GPIO is that it's a collection of GPIO pins and low pin count buses for controlling peripherals, rather than a singular bus. The fact that it runs Linux without an RTOS monitor program or a sidecar of sorts adds to the problem.
Suddenly the Kodi and the GPIO crowd (Arduino, ESP8266, ESP32, etc.) could work with the same board.
A new era, like the IBM PC or the iPhone. Changed computing forever.
EDIT: like other commenters noted, it seems like it made the intel NUC a reality.
Fantastic for one-off projects.
Nowadays they require cooling fans and cost absurd amounts considering the performance so there seems little point.
Most of my one off projects these days are now on microcontrollers.
In a better world we'd all have one in our homes, storing all our personal data and documents. The cloud would only be used for storing encrypted backups.
Many small businesses, kindergartens etc. could also have all their digital needs served this way.
Yes they would sometimes break down, but with the right setup, the fix would be a matter of booting a replacement from the right thumbdrive.
I have a Nextcloud server running on it and the maintenance is negligible.
During the recent PHP-vulnerability I simply turned it off. The next day I booted it, and it automatically installed the new Nextcloud image with the vulnerability fixed.
Makes me wonder if I could have it check for CVEs and automatically shut down vulnerable containers until updated images are out.
May I ask, how do you think kindergartens would benefit from a home server?
[0] https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Cabinet-Equipment-RackMate-Ra...
This let me standardize on amd64 and simplified a bunch of my deploy code.
Of course, there are a wealth of hardware options out there, so it varies. I've heard as low as 4 watts.
btop says CPU takes 1W when "idle" (seeding some torrents), no idea what the rest of the board and NVMe could take.
Can you explain this a bit? What is the application/use-case where the power adapters are a problem?
Old mobile phones or laptops are riskier because of batteries. Some laptops can work without batteries as well, but do old phones?
Intel MacBook Pro from 2014 works but throttles the CPU to 800 Hz making it barely usable.
I have a ThinkPad x230 (3rd gen i7) which makes an incredible Windows XP nostalgia device. It’s basically the newest hardware that exists with full XP drivers (other than USB3 which I don’t need) so it’s massively OP, which was the point of that project. Basically, “what if I had access to insanely futuristic hardware in 2002.”
Obviously I wouldn’t sacrifice that hardware but it might be cool to try that on yet another laptop. (Hey, I don’t have a laptop collecting problem!)
they did, with modifications
I feel like The Internet has this urban myth that says keeping a charged battery plugged in all the time will eventually cause it to explode and burn your house down, guaranteed.
I get that keeping a battery at 100% charge is not great for it in terms of longevity (ability to hold a charge). And it's obvious that heating the battery up by running the laptop at full tilt inside a backpack or something will turn it into a spicy pillow.
But I struggle to imagine the failure mode that reliably shows up when keeping the laptop powered on 24x7 that is never a problem for 8-16 hours of continuous use while plugged in (a very typical work day for my laptops).
I ended up repairing the Mac, replacing the battery, and installing Chrome OS on it. (chrome sucks though, someday I’ll get it back out and switch to real Linux)
I had a MacBook Pro where the laptop worked but the battery became swollen so much that it distorted the case. If I wasn't there to notice it, it would probably burst at some point and Lithium is very flammable.
It's probably rare and overblown, but it can happen.
If that had been in a closet, it would have been months or years before I realized.
for example some alienware and XPS models rely on the battery for amperage capacitance when their big onboard GPUs get busy; allows them to run cooler/less-wattage/smaller wall-warts but it also makes for a platform that'll crash when it hits a high GPU usage without a decent way to make up the amps.
'spose you could use a bigger power supply if you get bios/uefi to play nice. hard proposition sometimes with Dell products.
Batteries degrade much faster when fully cycled repeatedly, and even then just about any laptop battery can easily make it 6+ years with low-to-zero risk of failure.
Apple documented the behavior in a support note. I’m not sure if the Apple Silicon models do the throttling as well. I guess the situation doesn't come up as often since the batteries are no longer user-removable.
> Unless you're just doing it for the love of the game
Isn't that way a lot of people do the home-lab thing and related projects what would need the Pi these ideas are talking about replacing? It is why I do it [or used to be before working in tech for decades killed a lot of the enjoyment I had for playing with tech].
> or happen to have a lot of laptop boards sitting around you can sell
You are the first in this thread to bring up what any of this is worth on a larger scale, selling the results. Everyone else is talking about putting together one simple computer or jumped-up microcontroller for a task of their own, and maybe more later for other projects. Some of us find this sort of thing fun, and in the shit world we are all living in right now having a bit of fun and achieving something [sort of] practical out of it, can be priceless.
For my malware home lab, I decided to just reuse old phones and routers that nobody wanted anymore (quite literally got them from the trash bins). Now they're running an ARMv8 kernel as the host kernel and the rest is emulated or containerized, depending on the use case.
Works like a charm for most tasks I throw at it, and many old cheap Android phones have at least quad or octa cores in them, making them pretty awesome for podman/docker usage, too.
The only thing you have to look out for is to remove the battery, and that you use a separate power circuit with a step down converter to power it. But other than that, old smartphones have become amazing for selfhosting stuff now.
> The open question is supply. Finding two good used phones is easy; finding a few hundred matching ones, with healthy batteries and predictable camera behaviour, would take more work. I feel increasingly confident that it’s possible.
RaspberryPies and such are commodity hardware. You can buy one, two, ten, twenty, a hundred, and it just scales along. All of those devices will, barring perhaps a few dead-on-arrival ones covered under warranty, just work out of the box.
A used smartphone will have issues which can vary from device to device, so scaling that would take a very dedicated refurbishing setup where the quirks are ironed out (and the unsalvageable ones discarded).
I would also expect that you are starting out at the other end of the bathtub curve: with new devices you will have a few that fail soon after unboxing and using them a bit, and then they will run fine for years until you start hitting the other end of the curve and wear-related faults pop up. With old cheap phones you would start out at that side of the curve, so if you buy one hundred of those, a bunch will fail at various points soon after deploying them.
The cost of that unpredictable behaviour seems high to me. So much so that I wonder if it wouldn't be cheaper to buy a lot of unsold stock of a certain type of budget smartphone from two or three years back. Those devices could run fine as long as they aren't connected to the internet directly.
Not my experience at all. Pies are hard to find, get more expensive each week. Some are impossible to find (Pi zero).
The most fragile part of a phone is the screen. If you don't care about breaking it, then access to the battery becomes pretty easy, and therefore easy to replace.
Unfortunately thanks to the EU's new tariff regime it would cost over 30eur to ship it here, but luckily I can smuggle one back from my next trip to the UK...
That said for 4 and 5s - I've not had a problem here (Finland) in literally getting them off the shelf of a local retailer (Partco) for the going rate anywhere else.
A bird [redacted] bush.Most/all phones have one cell and therefore no balancing magic. Two connections do the job of connecting to the battery cell to the rest of the phone. These two are easily identified with a DMM.
If the phone works with only these two connections, then we're done; the phone will run from a bench power supply and there's nothing left to pursue.
If it does not work, then the functions of any additional connections be further explored while still never unwrapping the battery. Serial data? NTC thermistor? Something else? Fine; record that and emulate it. NTCs are cheap and so are MCU dev kits. (And if we don't have a decent-ish oscilloscope yet, then this is a good excuse to get one.)
If you don't have any real training in electronics, please refrain from giving advice like this. It can start fires, especially when lithium batteries are concerned.
Do whatever the fuck you want and suffer the consequences yourself for doing stupid things you don't understand, but don't encourage other people who also may lack understanding to follow you over a cliff.
If fucking around with lithium batteries doesn't make you pause a bit, then you're just ignorant.
Still though, could be a lot of screwing around needed to get this to work. Likely the extra wires go straight to a chip which expects to be able to monitor the voltage of the battery, and which might be alarmed by a power supply that acts unnaturally for a battery.
It makes more sense with high availability though. Their current situation seems rough.
Their board currently on sale is this. Based on Fairphone 2. Targeting commercial or industrial more than hobbyist though. I've been trying to convince them to sell the old phones as is, as well. https://shop.citronics.eu/
Thanks to Marc Lainez and his token spend we have a great Nerves system for running the Fairphone 3 by just programming Elixir. And people are flipping new (old) phones over to be put to work every week in the Nerves Discord.
We have a good UI framework in Emerge. We have media handling with Membrane. And Nerves handles the OS integration for stuff like networking. I thoroughly enjoy making up my own mobile OS for my own purposes.
You lose the GPIO/I2C/SPI/UART as easy extension points compared to the Pi. But the stuff that is there is already well integrated.
It's not the dark days of android where something like CyanogenMod takes a whole team of experienced system and embedded engineers to port and you don't have to hunt for information on XDA anymore.
Oh and cooling. That's something that the Pi has an edge on.
Early Android hackers might remember something called the Android Arduino Mega ADK. I suspect nowadays if you need real time control you can probably just have smartphone control the peripherals via the ESP32 using either USB C or Bluetooth. Developing over the wire protocols is trivial since LLMs can hammer out protobuf definitions like there's no tomorrow.
Bot farms works that way.
I also don't have a heat gun, so I had to use a Ziploc bag with warm water.
Still though, they make it really hard
I don't have experience with the ziploc method, but heat guns can melt solder so I'm wondering if temp was not high enough with the ziploc.
Could you say more about this? What kind of setups work well? Is this really straightforward or are there any subtleties?
I am by no means an expert at this, but starting of with a device on the Postmarket OS list and Claude, you can get a lot of these old devices working with mainline Linux and nearly all drivers. The newer devices are a bit harder, but if you go back nearly a decade, they're very easy to get working.
So far I have repurposed a Fairphone 3, Nexus 5, Galaxy S20, and Galaxy Tab 3.0 7". All of them (except the s20) with all drivers working compared to stock. Others have done a lot too: https://github.com/mlainez/awesome-nerves-systems
For DIY projects you can use host USB, or get one of the Adafruit FT232H type boards for GPIO pins.
So Nerves folks typically run Elixir on the Erlang VM. So you have the Phoenix web framework, Membrane media framework, Nx (nx_eigen) for basic inference, Emerge does well for embedded UI.
I've played around with clustering a bunch of these devices over Tailscale across my home. Opening cameras from one device and streaming to anothers display, willy-nilly. All experimental for me.
I've put Homex and Espex on them to have them integrate with Home Assistant. Feeding sensor data up or whatever I feel like.
Elixir already has a production embedded ecosystem through Nerves and web services have been the bread and butter for a long time. So you can do almost anything.
Because the pi has a maintained kernel and a userspace I don't have to fight.
Everything without upstream kernel support is inherently vulnerable.
This is why most phones are unfortunately not general purpose computers. They don't run the software you want, but only work on closed binary blobs hardcoded against specific kernel versions.
In the long run I also imagine this sort of thing being something someone does once per phone model and uploads it.
If you want to compare the expensive factor, at least use some kind of cost to compare like the price of a used phone etc or the cost of a basic server to see how they differ.
Perhaps not in the first world reality you live in, where you can buy a rpi 4 for a couple of bucks. But in third world countries they aren't readily available, and usually the imported prices exceed that of a decent PC.
You can find an old used phone for almost half the price that is still good enough for many daily processing tasks.
> You can just as well say why use an expensive PI when I have an old computer with a 1680ti and 12 gigs of ram.
That is a logical fallacy. A high end PC and an old used phone that you can buy in Ebay are in entirely different price ranges.
> Like yeah okay but what does that have to do with Pi? Entirely different device classes imo
Entirely different device classes, yeah, but both can execute the very same functions. The difference is one is much cheaper and you get 2x the processing power than the "more specialized" other. You can use both as local llm, serv ers, home automation... and even GPIO if you expose some wires from the phone.
2. Again, "cheaper" is a valid qualifier if you compare costs. Phones vrs pi is not what I am talking about, free vrs second hand (not free) is what I am talking about. Something cannot be cheaper than free so comparing costs is kind of weird.
Sorry for any offense this semantic may have caused.
Used phones are good for tinkering, especially for "display with sensors and battery attached" usecases, but there are still plenty of downsides. And unfortunately Linux on phones is just not ready for primetime, last I checked.
I do use termux daily to ssh into other boxes, that's incredibly useful
If you can access it from within the sandbox, you don't need to be limited to keyboards - the HID framework allows for arbitrary I/O.
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/3040/
Atom x5 Z-8350, 2GB of RAM, 8-16GB of flash, some USB, and there's a board on that page you can have done up to do a slapdash SD adapter inside the case for more flash.
I particuarly think the economics of this are interesting, if you take the one plus 11 you can get one for around £200-250. The CPU is very capable and the alternatives are a PI 5 or N100. You get 16b of ram, a screen, gps, bluetooth a camera... the list goes on.
These devices could really shine as edge computing devices and I believe they are overlooked.
I'm honestly curious to see if bypass charging is on, but it's been a while since I touched the device itself and it has been fine do far. YMMV
That's not universally true - a lot of android phones have a "bypass charging" mode where you run directly from the power supply, and indeed you can run them with the battery removed.
Not sure if those phones would work without a battery and throttle the CPU, or if they would crash.
There are exceptions, so not all phones will, but more will. I hope there'll be more time/effort put into hacking removable battery phones to accept hardwiring a PSU onto the battery terminals over the next 5 years.
1. Batteries swell over time. Replacing them is easy, but it's still harder than changing one inside a UPS hat. Most phones won't even start without a battery.
2. Software support will be awful. Maybe you'll get lucky and your device will be able to run postmarketOS.
3. There's no modularity, you're stuck with the full package. Don't feel comfortable having a camera or a microphone on a device with no security updates? Too bad, there's not much you can do about it.
Don't get me wrong, if you understand these risks, are fine with them, and Android devices cover your use cases — that's great, go for it! I just find SBCs with decent software support to be a better option for general projects.
Then you can use any 4 volt power source.
#2 and #3: You install Termux.
I once tried powering an android tablet with straight DC, turns it is EXTREMELY sensitive to slow power supplies, ie. it required a very beefy one. I had to add capacitors even to get it to work, it was really weird. But considering a battery can dish out some serious amps....
Also 4V sources are not common.
There is of course the issue that a phone uses momentarily high current when transmitting. So there needs to be beefy capacitor too.
I have done this many times, of course. Especially on Ebooks, for which you cannot find replacement superthin batteries. You use original connector and any small lithiums in parallel. Discarded e-cigarettes are good source for small lithiums.
I guess laptops are way easier: more upgradeable and repairable, don't require unlocking mostly, battery can just be thrown away and it works with its native PSU. Just need to make sure power won't go out. And it is bulkier, though maybe less susceptible to overheating.
Even with the prices increases that the PI has suffered, there no systems of vendors like Tuxedo, or System 76, at similar price point, with ARM support.
It was vastly more powerful than the old RPi 3 that i have, and significantly easier to work with given the screen, keyboard, wifi etc...
Even using a timer to charge only every odd day still leads to the same thing.
In other words if the power goes out you need to physically be there to get the device running your always on stuff.
>I’ve unlocked and rooted the Redmi
Herein lies the issue. I don't know fuck all about phones. I don't want to. They are engineered to keep me out, and that is a pain in the ass I don't want to deal with when doing hardware work. I want to own something that works the second I get it and doesn't fight me the entire way. Sure, I could let an LLM guide me through it or even do it for me, but why bother when the whole point of the hardware is for me to fuck off and use it as a subscriber to the OEM and carrier? This is tedium, removed by further spending. Not to mention documentation - what bullshit is the OEM hiding in their board or firmware thats going to ruin my day? I'm sure that some of these devices are great for reuse as a self contained server with media and modem, but is my old phone going to do this?
I'm not gonna spend $50 on ewaste to try to do something unless I want to use that ewaste (old keyboards, old toys? :3). Old phones are a non-sequitur because, again, they're engineered to keep me out.
I mean, you do know we're on a forum called hacker news, right?
In most cases it's not some magic voodoo process that you need an LLM for, it's the first result on Google and one command to run or in some cases you just hold two buttons together when booting up and click the unlock button.
Like, I completely understand your perspective and desire to have things which "just work"(I'm in the same boat a lot of the time lately) but like, let's be realistic - rooting an old phone and running some software on it is really not a big deal, I'd hope especially for people on here.
It is the drawback of locked proprietary hardware builds no one makes anymore.
An recent laptop with a broken LCD is cheap e-waste, and works just fine to setup on an external monitor. Mini PC are also cheaper than most pi5 now, so if you don't need the gpio... save the money for a real SSD. =3
Nowadays I dumpster dive for old computers and parts to Frankenstein together what I can with Debian as headless servers.
One man's trash is another man's treasure, repurposed to sail the high seas.
Arrrr!
Not to mention not all phones are hackable, they might not have the gpio or software you want or ecosystem (I’m quite fond of the Poe hats for example) and frankly if you’re buying a pi you’re obviously not the person who has the perfect hackable phone lying around or otherwise can easily source one
https://nimitbhardwaj.github.io/posts/hermes-agent-rooted-an...
Raspberry PI's don't give me near the struggle and I never dumbly signed a contract that I didn't really own the device I was purchasing (that I am completely aware of)
You can also "just" take the battery out, it might still function without it or with something that pretends to be a battery but isn't
Some are bought with US carrier locks - never activated or unlocked. Any chance they can be unlocked with today's tools and not dumped into ewaste.
There are a few simple projects for home automation i have in mind but the rooting felt like a daunting task.
But a new pi is just a bad deal for anything right now.
The pi has pihole and unbound installed. You aren't supposed to use these programs with DHCP but I'm a cowboy.
All clients connected to this AP have less ads.
Built it for some seniors who got sick of ads. Works great for them.
My blog article about this: https://louwrentius.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a...
Sure, CPU wise an old phone can do the same job, but not the GPIO.
But hey, thanks AI delusion , even a fucking raspberry pi is now a purchase I gotta think 3 times about before pulling the trigger.
You can get a cheap Tracfone for like $20, never pay for the subscription, and run termux on it.
Need to fuck about pretty much per phone model,rather than install Debian, unattended-upgrades and forget about device for 2 years
* Lithium batteries are a problem
* No ethernet
* No prebuilt images like say Talos
* Can't readily attach an SSD
The point of a rasperri PI is to allow general, easy, and intentional bespoke availability of a fully programmable platform, where it also allows you access to low level, but practical means of acheiving home automation via GPIO etc.
I have 5 old phones in my cupboard, the most recent 3 of them have locked bootloaders and could potentially be rooted simply because of them not being region locked, while not gauranteeing me any real and complete support such as a PI would.
Nevermind even thinking as far ahead as GPIO pins etc etc.
At best, 1 out of the 5 phones might be able to eventually, and with effort/time and possible additional cost for extras give me parity to a PI, even exceeed the PI in compute.
But that is not the point. You know it. I know it.
Your post is not in search of an answer. You know the answer, you are the minority, and you know this.
You would not get an expensive PI if you had what you need from your old phone and skillz.
So why ask us where you already knew the answer...
It's because you are not asking anything, you are trying to show off and be dishonest by posing it as a question while assuming generousity by 'helping' people not 'waste money'
You are transparent buddy.
Yep, the typos are understood and left as is. Does nothing to take away my meaning.
No one cares if you have overpriced white earbuds or not for Pi tasks.
I think in practice the timing jitter and the low cost difference to something like an Arduino Nano or Pi Pico means people use one of those even if they could technically use a GPIO adapter.
A lot of phones these days are offering longer update periods. For instance that 13C only offered 3 years from release, but the 15C is offering 6 years. The Pixel phones are getting 7 years.