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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 2

22owners with an opinion
78%of verdicts positive
9/3positive/negative since 2024
12 yrslongest happy owner
3happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for noise.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 12 yearsStill going
> it will kill the card from IO cycles. It might not. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that has been running a weather station for over 12 years, and it has been on the original SD card. I have other RPi's doing dumb things around the house and I have never had an SD card failure. YMMV and all that.
Likes itOwned 10 yearsStill going
I gave up on TVs. Luckily I watch very little TV anyway so it's no big deal. I remember my friend buying a TV for thousands a few years ago and seeing just how laughably bad the interface was compared to Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 2 that I've been running close to 10 years now. Literally it's been on almost that whole time (just had to replace the power supply once). Not only does it play everything on my NAS, I can stream to it and control it from my phone etc. I never update it because it just continues to work. I use a projector instead of a screen because it's better and thankfully they are still dumb. Oh and a huge sound system. And all of that costs less than that one shitty "smart" TV...
Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going
Yes, those are the "smart" features. Just plug in a Raspberry Pi and don't touch the TV after its initial setup. I'm still using the same Raspberry Pi 2 I've been using for more than 5 years now. Beats "smart" TVs that you can buy today.
Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going
Why so? Even cloud giants are moving in that direction[1]. When next generation Mac Mini with Apple Silicon comes out, data centers using that would be running Apple Server packages on that. In fact I've been running my production applications on ARM servers for ~a year and it has resulted in greater capital efficiency. I've been using Pi 2 with USB storage as a publicly hosted git server for over 5 years used by multiple users. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
Likes it
I did something similar with a raspberry pi 2 which also by itself is way overkill, it also had a usb-wifi dongle because when I realized that it didn't have wifi natively and running Ethernet was a bit cumbersome for a temporary project. But for these simple projects there is no point in buying the latest and greatest version. When people remember the $35 pricepoint and lament the price increase of today they forget that they don't serve the same purpose anymore. Hell, the Zero 2 is cheaper than that and plenty powerful for a ton of projects.
Likes it
Yeah, I started with an obsolete PC a decade ago, and now I’m on a Raspberry Pi 2 and a couple of Orange Pis (zero, 1st gen). Weirdly, it’s enough for me now. I self-host not too many things as of now. So I guess I’d grow at least a couple of Mac minis over time too. However, I’m trying to go slowly there. Funny thing is that despite me admitting that I’m more likely to arrive there too, each time I see a superlab, I wonder ‘what do you guys do with all this?!’
Likes it
I have a RPi 2 that’s more than enough for my home server needs and I’ve tried to migrate from docker to podman, it simply failed miserably with weird errors, on my laptop everything worked fine, so maybe that’s an issue with Arch ARM or the 32-bit version of it, but really, I wish they could abstract away quadlet, service files generation and so on.
Doesn’t like it
>The GPIO was always the point. You ca get GPIO on the cheap from a Arduino, ESP8/32, or RP2040 microcontroller. RPi itself is far too wasteful for that. > People using them as cheap computers ruined it. False, industrial users using them in all commercial embedded products ruined it. Almost nobody is using RPis as cheap computers at home since they suck at that: too expensive, too underpowered and too limited in functionality to be a computer for the average joe My RPi 2 becomes an unusable stuttery mess when I open a web browser and for the price of a RPi 5 I got a used quad core Intel 8th gen laptop with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD which not only beats the RPi at any and all computer tasks, but it also comes with built in keyboard, 1080p monitor, battery, charger and I can take with me to do work on the go. The only thing I see the RPi good at at home is a headless PiHole/VPN or whatever, not as an actual desktop computer replacement.
Doesn’t like it
I put a Raspberry Pi Zero into an iconic 1971 rotary dial phone and made it play music from the country and decade dialed into it. If it weren't for this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39803313 , I wouldn't have thought of this project. So, I'm sharing it here as well. One challenge I encountered (and didn't write about) is that the Raspberry Pi occasionally misreads the dialed input. The rotary dial delivers about 20 pulses per second, which seems to be too fast for the Pi Zero 2 to handle accurately. Each pulse interrupts the Pi, which saves a timestamp. It seems the Pi occasionally lags, leading to inaccurate timestamps or missed pulses. My current idea to fix this is to use a dedicated microcontroller to read the dial instead, though I'm hoping for a simpler solution.
Neutral
I have build something similar as an entry for the Hackaday prize in 2016: https://hackaday.io/project/12384-autofan-automated-control-... I used Viola-Jones for face detection on a Raspberry Pi 2 and built a fan with servo-actuated lamellae from plywood using my CNC-Router. It almost landed me a job at a local engineering company but chose to stay in academia back then. I still have the hardware somewhere in a drawer in my workshop. It definitely was a fun project.
Likes itStill going
I've bought/set up at least ten of these cheap mini PCs (~$200) over the years and at least half of them had their built-in WiFi just stop working after some time. Something to be aware of if you're not going to be using it wired. Can always swap over to USB WiFi if it stops working anyway. I've never this problem with a Raspberry Pi (have a RPi 2 running on WiFi since it came out!) but haven't bought as many of them.
Doesn’t like it
The Pi 2's I had were hit or miss and had hardware issues, and ended up repurposing an old laptop to fill in for it. Worked fine, and had decent luck buying older laptops off of kijiji / craigslist / fb marketplace and using those in lieu of Pi's. Outside of GPIO that's on the Pi's, the laptops are fine, and though a little more expensive they can also run more powerful VMs, have cooling, and can do x86 stuff.
Likes it
What are you using to read/post to HN? That would likely be enough to run Cuis on. I've run Cuis on a Pi 2 and that was fast enough to provide a reasonable interactive development environment with a useful amount of memory. Running without a GUI is generally not likely to lead you in an interesting direction. The thing to understand is that the Squeak VM expects to encapsulate 'high level' hardware including a bitmapped display, keyboard, mouse and a sound device. Anything less than that and you're putting yourself more in the role of VM developer instead of Smalltalk developer. (Honestly, if one were starting from scratch today there are more interesting places to start than the Squeak VM as its lack of SMT support is becoming a crippling limitation. This is a design limitation of the language/environment and can only be overcome fundamentally rethinking a couple of core concepts.)
Likes it
things micro pcs cannot do: - rpi has GPIO pins - many rpi boards' max power consumption is around the idling power consumption of a pc, rpi zero 2 can run off a standard usb A port of a laptop - rpi zero 1/2, rpi 3A and rpi 4 has usb gadget mode which means it can be plugged to a notebook and two machines will connect over usb ethernet. That is especially helpful for debugging headless machines when in a hotel room (no wifi under your control, no ethernet cable). - yes microsd is slow, but it's also cheap and easy to swap. That means you can: 1. if a board is broken then take out the card and insert it into another board. It will take you 2 minutes max and then everything will be exactly the same. 2. clone your entire microsd card as backup 3. you can swap different OS by swapping microsd. No need to partition your harddisk. I do my development works on my iPad connecting to a remote VPS. And I always has a rpi zero 2 as my backup when I have no internet connection. You just connect ipad to zero2 using a usb-c to usb-c cable with a usb-c to micro usb adapter, then you can mosh from ipad to zero2 and keep programming. How wonderful! [edited for formatting]
Neutral
I've got a zero 2 sat next to me that's got uncomfortably warm because I've been pushing too much at it. What I've been trying to do is get it to chew through whisper.cpp at anything like a reasonable rate. It can so nearly do it with the right sized model, the latency isn't good enough yet, but the reason I'm doing this on a pi zero 2 is because of the USB-OTG port. I can take the whisper.cpp output, and have the pi pretend to be a USB keyboard, typing what it hears into a second machine over USB. This gives you dictation capabilities in environments where upgrading the PC it's plugged into isn't an option. Like I say, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but it's close enough that I think the problem is just a matter of software (and arguably model) optimisation.
Likes it
but, but, but ... the RPi is meant for tinkering, isn't it? I got an RPi2 connected to a GPSDO acting as time server. Another RPi2 controls test&measurement gear via GPIB (there are GPIB hats, but I happen to have already an USB adapter from Agilent) and TTL PPS input and trigger output for synchronization. A RPi2 is plenty of computational power for those applications.
Likes it
In the book, The Hunt for Red October, the acoustic signature of the Caterpillar Drive is modeled on a Cray-2 (pretty sure). There's a nice plot segment where the protagonist and the Cray operator make a wager on how long it will take to complete. In comparison to that model of Cray I'd be curious how the Raspberry's fair. I actually learned linux on a bunch of 486/586 boxen given to me by my neighbor, so powering a Pi2 from my laptop's USB port and getting a full linux distro really impressed me.
Likes itStill going
> Especially since the setup requires a Raspberry Pi to run permanently. Which they'll gladly do no? If (poor quality) SD card corruption is a concern, you can have the RPi mount the SD card read-only or just keep a full backup of the SD card. I've had a RPi 1 power 4 VoIP Cisco phones for years. Zero issue. I've got another one constantly establishing a remote SSH-tunnel so that I can easily troubleshoot my brother, who lives in another country, 's LAN. The uptime is more than a year. One is routing (well, doing SNAT really) and firewalling between two non routable LANs. I set up the thing once and it's so reliable there's neither a screen nor a monitor hooked to it: just the power adapter and two ethernet cables (including one in a USB-to-ethernet adapter). Another one is running unbound . Same: no monitor, no keyboard, no nothing. The power adapter and one ethernet cable. Simple. Not much can go wrong. No moving parts. It's happily null routing hundreds of thousands of crappy domain names 24/7. I've got another one in a vintage arcade cab with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. In years it never failed to boot once. As we the others, just in case, I still have a "dd" of the entire SD card. Should something happen I'd just dd the image to a new SD card. The shortage of RPi is apparently due to companies snapping them all for industrial uses. I haven't heard of many people complaining "my RPi died overnight" (unlike, say, the Apple M1 laptop's screens). They're incredibly rel…
Doesn’t like it
I've had about half a dozen Raspberry Pi in total (only 1 through 3), and many dozens of SBCs, and I found Raspis generally unreliable except for the Raspberry Pi 1 (model B), which is extremely slow for anything nowadays. The longest I've had running was a The Things Network gateway on a Raspberry Pi 3: OK for 2 years, then it killed the sd card (not corruption, it just wouldn't work anywhere anymore). I set it up again and it killed the new card within a week. Again, and within a month. I gave up and it sucks because the LoRa shield is Raspberry-specific. A Raspberry Pi 2 died just because while decoding ADS-B. SD was fine. For the rest of the experiences, I always found some data corruption at some point. Often hanging and needing monthly reboots. The only worse SBC (and it wasn't really an SBC) I've experienced was the Cubox i4-Pro. I eventually lost it, and I'm almost glad, weekly data corruptions and crashes, underwhelming performance and very fickle behavior overall. Other Pis have turd-tier hardware support but whatever you manage to get running tends to be reliable. Pine64 (the oldest model) is so far the only SBC I haven't seen crash, trash an SD card yet, or have FS corruptions yet.
Neutral
On the inference accelerator? IIUC, the RAM is just to hold the model and whatever state it needs during a particular inference operation. I'm not an expert on ML but AFAIK 16 GiB is plenty. I suppose it'd also need to hold onto reference frames for the video decoding, but at 1080p with e.g. YUV420 (12 bits per pixel), you can hold a lot of those in 16 GiB. edit: e.g., 4 references for each of the 96 streams would take ~1 GiB. Even on the host, 16 GiB is fine for say an NVR. They don't need to keep a lot of state in RAM (or for that matter to do a lot of on-CPU computation either). I can run an 8-stream NVR on a Raspberry Pi 2 without on-NVR analytics. That's about its limit because the network and disk are on the same USB2 bus, but there's spare CPU and RAM.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us. They came out in 2008, were sold until 2010, had literally less performance than a 2000 Pentium III CPU, were lauded from pundits left and right, and probably the school/hand-me-down laptops of that age (like today's e-waste class Chromebooks). Especially when Acer and whatever had proper laptops with proper Intel SU-class CPUs and 3-4 GB RAM for the same price. I disliked these "netbooks" back then and still do, and all that followed its footsteps, including the "laptop"-lookalikes with 32 GB e-MMC storage some mobile carriers would give out with their plans. It's a disrespectful destitute class of computing. I know that the Raspberry Pis came out later, but a Raspberry Pi 2 is a hundred times better engineered and well-rounded product, that will also run a desktop better than these netbooks (or at all). On a related note, I also have colleagues at work who will run only sub-200 dollar smartphones and enjoy living the proper Nigeria/Bangladesh experience from 1-2 years ago . I also know that they don't use heating at home, and do everything in the name of efficiency.
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
It seems to be a really hard problem. Deep sleep even with Raspberry Pi Zero and Pico product lines has been problematic. I hoped they would make Pico 2 deep sleep better, but it still needs external deep sleep RTC like DS3231 to make it truly useful.