i bought one (well, my employer bought me one) as a desktop machine. i don’t know where i could buy a headless pc or a used laptop for £30.
i also have drivers for the hardware and an install process that takes 10 mins (copy the image to an sd card). they are not perfect, but a good comprise for me. -Steve > On 4 Feb 2018, at 09:45, Ethan Grammatikidis <eeke...@fastmail.fm> wrote: > >> On Sat, Feb 3, 2018, at 11:46 PM, Bakul Shah wrote: >> >> Not to mention The RasPis are poor at >> reliability. Even a xenon flash or near a RasPi could power a >> RasPi2 down! And since they do no onboard power regulation, >> people had lots of problems early on -- add one more USB >> device and the thing can become unreliable. > > This is probably an impossible question, but I've got to ask: Why do people > even buy RasPis? Like, for anything? Even when the first RPi was new, a > second hand laptop could offer far more processing power and reliability for > the same price, sometimes excepting the disk of course. Add a base station > with the old printer port and there's some GPIO; not as much as a RPi, it's > true, but there are ways around that. One alternative for GPIO is the > actually cheap boards from Ti or whoever which exist to interface Ethernet, > WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB on one side (depending on the board) to GPIO and > serial on the other. I think they're programmed in Forth, but I wouldn't be > surprised if you can just download programs for them to do anything you'd > want with remote control. > > -- > The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer
