this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
50 points (82.9% liked)
Memes
57271 readers
365 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
When Raspis first came out they were genuinely a massive innovation in having small computers people could learn on or build hobby projects from very cheaply.
Over the years this has changed as they have gotten expensive to the point of being out of this price range these days. There are cheaper alternatives.
I still think they are pretty cool pieces of technology for what they are but probably more niche than they used to be now.
Seems like the ESPs are filling the raspi niche anymore.
God the PiFM software was amazing. You could broadcast anything from 1-250MHZ with just a wire stuck to a GPIO pin and it was actually decent. It was essentially a software defined radio transmitter for $25 at the time. It was absolutely the most fun I've ever had with a $25 purchase
They're just better in many ways. Raspberry pi was clunky and bulky.
I got 3 raspberry pis over time when the 4 was brand new. Mainly because I didn't know what i was doing but also because that's what I knew. Everything was made for the pi, the pi had the most tutorials and community everything just made sense.
But now pis are around 200 dollars and only really good when you need an actual little computer. But working with micro controllers everything's just so much straight forward. I hated working with the pi and zero, if you ever had to debug it was like a 10 minute processes due to booting and how slow it was.
With the esp32 they just boot right away, no loading up a operating system you plug it in, see if it works and if doesn't flash it over air and do it again. It just does what it needs to and in many ways better.
Would agree with that. I have a handful of ESPs now and don't really use raspis for much these days. Well except for my home assistant box.
Do you run Linux on those ESPs?
Maybe? Idk, didn't the BeagleBone boards already exist? It definitely made an impact and got more people into it, but I can see how hobbyists might think they didnt add all that much
They existed at 4x the price.
I think raspberry pi really shone on the software side of things. ARM boards often tend to be a bit of ship-and-forget. RaspberryPi OS still supports the OG 14 years later, while most other distros have left 32 bit support in the dust.
Thats a really good point on both sides. I thought you might be overstating it on the price, but I looked it up and the XM in 2010 was at $150! BeagleBone in 2011 launched at $89 and in 2013 the BeagleBone Black came out at $45 so they were definitely playing catch up on the price. Raspberry Pi OS support has also been fantastic, with a bunch of flavors still hanging around. I used to use Arch for Pi because Debian didn't have MongoDB packaged in the version I needed 😄
EDIT: For clarity Raspberry Pi launched in 2012 at the famously cheap $35
Personally I got into hobby electronics and self hosting stuff when I got my first raspi in high school. My first server where I learned so much was a raspi!
I've learned a lot from the pi too! I think its a great little machine, but also it looks like the BeagleBoard beat it to market by about four years, so maybe it wasn't the pi itself that was so revolutionary and more the cultural movement around it