Choosing a Raspberry Pi for your tinkering projects was once an easy choice. Before the cost of RAM went through the roof, the Pi was a genuinely low-cost option that was still powerful enough to handle many tasks. The pricing is no longer so competitive, but there are plenty of reasons why I will still use a Pi. 3.14 reasons, to be precise.
GPIO pins let you interact with physical devices
You can make more with a Pi
A lot of the things that I used to use a Raspberry Pi for are now handled by my mini PC. For example, I ran Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for several years, firstly running it from the microSD card and miraculously never experiencing a card failure, and then from an external SSD. It ran well enough that I didn’t feel the need to upgrade for some time.
Eventually, I wanted to run more intensive features that the Raspberry Pi was struggling to handle, and I moved Home Assistant to Proxmox on a mini PC, alongside several other self-hosted services that I would have perhaps run on a Pi in the past, such as Pi-hole. There are plenty of things that the Raspberry Pi can do that the mini PC can’t, however.
One of the most useful advantages is that you can hook up a Raspberry Pi to other hardware via the GPIO pins. This allows you to use a Raspberry Pi to build all manner of things. For example, I made a celebrity-based productivity Tamagotchi by attaching a small OLED display to the pins of a Raspberry Pi. I also hooked a Raspberry Pi up to the display ripped out of an old iPad to build a security camera monitor and information display.
It’s this ability to build things with a Raspberry Pi rather than just use it to run software that makes it so versatile. The small form factor also means you can create portable devices or hide the Pi away in the body of whatever you’re building.
- Brand
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Raspberry Pi
- Storage
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8GB
It’s only recommended for tech-savvy users, but the Raspberry Pi 5 is a tinkerer’s dream. Cheap, highly customizable, and with great onboard specs, it’s a solid base for your next mini PC.
Low power consumption
Ideal for running things 24/7
There are plenty of services that ideally need to run all day, every day. Home Assistant, for example, has been running continuously in my home (barring power outages) for several years. You can run Home Assistant on almost anything, including a desktop computer, but leaving your computer running 24/7 can consume a lot of power.
The Raspberry Pi was designed to be a low-power device. Even when compared with a low-power mini PC, the Raspberry Pi can often consume significantly less power. If you’re running a device all the time, that can really add up over time.
The comparison against a standard desktop computer is even greater. A Raspberry Pi may only draw a few watts when idle, while a typical desktop computer can draw many times more. Under load, the difference can become even more significant.
There are plenty of situations where using a desktop computer or even a mini PC is overkill. A Raspberry Pi can handle lightweight tasks that need to run non-stop, while keeping your power usage low.
5 ways to use a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant (aside from running your server)
It’s time to repurpose your old Home Assistant server.
A huge and thriving community
Someone has probably already done what you want to do
When you buy a Raspberry Pi, you’re not just buying hardware, you’re buying into one of the largest maker ecosystems out there. People have been using Raspberry Pis for all manner of hobbyist projects for well over a decade, pushing it to the limits of its capabilities.
The best part is that many of these projects have been documented online or discussed in forums. No matter how bizarre or niche your Raspberry Pi project idea is, there’s a high chance that someone else has already built a similar project, hit the same bumps in the road, and posted their solutions online.
This means that successfully completing the Raspberry Pi project you’re working on is far easier, since you don’t have to figure out everything from scratch. Whether you need to know which pins to connect to or the best software to run, you can usually find the answers in the thousands of subreddits, forum posts, and YouTube videos created by the community.
Instead of wasting days of your life trying to figure out a cryptic Linux error, you can often find pre-configured software images or community scripts that get you up and running in next to no time. If anything does go wrong, if you ask for help, you will usually find it.
The final 0.14
An irrational argument
I’d never really understood the phrase “writing yourself into a corner” until now, but when I came up with the idea for this article, the “3.14” reasons part seemed like a good idea. Now I’ve got here, it doesn’t seem quite so clever, but here goes.
Perhaps that’s the biggest reason why I still use a Raspberry Pi?
A Raspberry Pi can still do a job
As long as you assume that the final reason was going to be about seven times longer than it actually was, I think that just about gets us to 3.14 reasons. Weak jokes aside, the Raspberry Pi may no longer be the dirt-cheap option it used to be, but it still has a lot going for it. The cost of a high-spec Raspberry Pi is prohibitive for many, but you can still get models such as a Pi Zero 2 W for a reasonable price and do a lot with them. Sometimes, a Pi is still the right hardware for the job.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
