It depends on when big companies throws out their pcs, like when they are 5 years old, or so it feels.
I did a quick search on ebay, it probably depends on where you live but I stumbled upon a 55€ one here
The problem with tinkcentres (tiny here) is that they are really easy to open and service, usually has place for a 2’5 drive plus a nvme and had two sodim slots, plus some funky stuff like small cards and CD player and so on so eventually it might cost more than 50€…
I always thought about the raspberries strength as small mobile devices. If I want IO on my PC I could buy an adapter/card. Or use my raspberry because I have one or two ofc. It sure is easy with them.
Just curioys, why wouldn’t you buy say a 50€ thinkcentre instead or a raspberry?
hmmm I’m not sure now 😅
I’m using the RPi for other projects but this one was for a server and I might not have put much thought for the hardware
But I’ve never seen a mini PC that cheap though?
It depends on when big companies throws out their pcs, like when they are 5 years old, or so it feels.
I did a quick search on ebay, it probably depends on where you live but I stumbled upon a 55€ one here
The problem with tinkcentres (tiny here) is that they are really easy to open and service, usually has place for a 2’5 drive plus a nvme and had two sodim slots, plus some funky stuff like small cards and CD player and so on so eventually it might cost more than 50€…
Same reason as any other mini PC.
GPIO.
Honestly there is no other reason to use pi. Just the simple ability ti connect and build your own connection stuff.
Pi is by far the easiest system with a well suppirted os and api for learning\experimentation.
When to comes to using as a desktop etc. There are loads of better options if gpio is not wanted.
Fair.
I always thought about the raspberries strength as small mobile devices. If I want IO on my PC I could buy an adapter/card. Or use my raspberry because I have one or two ofc. It sure is easy with them.
But even with GPIO, there’s other cheaper boards out there with better specs to boot
I tried the orange pi, and that was a hassle, I had to fix and compile some obscure library in C to make python control I/O work.