RPi3 are reasonably capable for the price. For me, they make sense because:
* RPis make it easy to try non-windows OS (including Plan 9). * Provide a usable, yet inexpensive ARM platform for Plan9. * (almost) all RPI hardware components are supported in Plan 9. * There is an enthusiastic community building everything imaginable for, and with, RPI's. RPi's aren't "the" answer, but neither is Intel-inside everything. The speculative execution debacle proves that the entire industry has too much reliance on one architecture. Diversity of architectures is good for Plan 9 and the industry as a whole. In a perfect world there would be equivalent popular platforms for MIPS, Power, RISC-V and other architectures. -Skip On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 1:46 AM 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 > >
