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I've heard it said that there's a rule, called the "Law of Engineering" or similar. It states that if a thing is possible, the price of that thing will eventually drop to effectively free. This article is my experience with that law.
In high school my best friend and I worked together to build a pair of computers, one for him, one for me. These were genuine hacker boxes, big ugly beige towers, wonky hex screws, the works. The price per machine was around $1400 in 199X dollars. We had both saved from our jobs for a WHILE to build them.
Of course I don't remember the exact specs, but they were something like:
486 DX2/66 CPU (aka 66Mhz processor speed)
Some RAM (probably 16MB)
500 MB Hard Drive
3.5" floppy drive
5.25" floppy drive (backwards compatibility!)
4X CD-ROM (not DVD, and not RW)
SoundBlaster Audio card
56K modem
Video Card? What's that???
We both already had VGA monitors.
And we were pretty happy with the machines we built!
I currently have 4 or 5 Raspberrys Pi running in my house doing various things. A Raspberry Pi Zero W costs about $10, and is a better computer in every way than the machine I built in high school (other than the disk drives).
1Ghz CPU
512MB RAM
8/16/32 GB SD card (depending on what I have laying around when I start the project)
built-in audio that is good enough for what I do with these machines, or a HAT that does _excellent_ audio
Wi-fi
Video card? Kinda? but HDMI out that pushes far more pixels than my 640x480 monitor in high school.
I realize this is mostly just me sounding old, sometimes it feels wasteful to use ALL THAT POWER to run a small 12 key keyboard, or an ad blocker, or a Gemini capsule that gets a few visitors a day. Shouldn't I be using all those wasted cycles? Shouldn't I use less powerful hardware to free up those cycles for some other purpose?
But honestly, an Arduino style board is usually MORE than $5, and is less flexible. It's often the right tool for the job, but a Raspberry Pi Zero is just so useful. I'm good at Linux admin, I can handle setting up a headless machine over ssh and keeping it safe and secure while it does whatever task I give it.
> Note: Cross-posted to my gemlog on my personal capsule. I might stop doing that at some point. Or not. Not sure. 😃
It seems like the *coolest* way of running the smallest tasks would be to use refurbished/repurposed hardware somehow, but that's awful effort-intensive.
I use RPi 3b+ for monitoring the voltage, current and wattages for my solar power setup at home.
Great to see you brightblue! I've always wanted to try a Raspberry Pi but somehow never got to buy one... yet. I might invest in my new toy now. :)
It's impressive to see how fast tech has changed. I remember how in awe I was as a kid to look at computers. I could spend days in a computer store looking at all the CDs, cables and machines.
I wonder if kids are still as fascinated by computers as we could have been. I'd imagine so. It's just that it's so common now.
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