Raspberry Pi 2B

I've got a Raspberry Pi 2b I've been using for probably close to a decade, with two SDRs hanging off it, pulling aircraft ADS-B locations and VHF radio transmissions out of the sky. It's a great application for this platform. ADS-B scanner averages about 25% CPU and the VHF airband receiver averages about 17% (uses hardware FFT).

Maybe today.. But my TV has been sitting on my stand for years, and it doesn't need upgrades. My Raspberry Pi pi-hole is a Pi 2b that has been running for over 5 years and it's totally fine. It has automatic security upgrades turned on but nothing else, and it doesn't need any time or attention. It just does its job. I have a Homelab that's a mini-PC that's quiet and does not suck lots of power and is tucked away neatly in a closet. I think it would be completely possible to provide an appliance-like machine that would not have the problems you're outlining. Impossible is absolutely the wrong qualifier.

I actually did something just like this with the second raspberry pi and an offline copy of Wikipedia. Although I don't know this devices specs I recall being able to reliably power the pi 2b + a 3.5 inch touchscreen with a random 15,000mah solar power Bank from amazon

Why does it need continuous, perpetual support? Most devices like this get built, software installed, and never updated again. When is the last time you updated the ECU software in your car? I built a small arcade cabinet using an old raspberry pi 2b. Once I built it I've never needed to upgrade anything on it. It works fine and plays all the old games. I have backups of the SD card in case anything craps out.

> "It can do but is overkill". "Overkill" tends to disappear when you consider the cost of your time. You are not penalized for not using all, or even most, of a platform's capability. Silicon is cheap, programmers are expensive. The pi shines at doing complex tasks that involve physical I/O when the device is manufactured in low unit volumes. e.g., a few years ago, I built a machine to do a proof of concept for a physician. It was based on a Pi 2B solely because he wanted a touchscreen. The entire thing could have been built with an Arduino, but the hardware cost to do it on a Pi was only about $40 more than on an Arduino. That difference was more than an order of magnitude less than I would have had to charge to do the touchscreen software on an arduino. When I was working for an engineering services company, there many applications that we could have put a Pi or a Pi Compute Module into, even at larger volumes but for one reason or the other the company would suggest a ground-up CPU board design to the customer...

Been down this self-hosted route many times … from the ground up … as a local neighborhood IT dude. Don’t you hate being that guy? Not me, I get tons of free stuff from my neighbors. For a simple default-deny-firewall IPv6 NAT gateway (zero HTTP3 support), I used Gentoo, no initramfs, all static (no kernel modules, eBPF JIT disabled, no strace/perfmon2) on 2013 Dell Optiplex 790 SFF. This is the extreme tinkerer mode a la Slackware/Linux 1.98 ramp up expert learning mode. Has Libvirt running Docker/LXD/QEMU. Virtual DNS/NTP/nextCloud/WireGuard/no-SSH. Stable, consistent, rock solid. Initial cost: $65.00 USD. Electric cost: $8.33/month. Also a beast called Dell Precision T710 24U rack with a RAID5 having 12 hard drives at 2 TB each running Proxmox/Debian, half of RAID is encryptedFS, and NFSv4 (planned on CephFS upgrade next) for all my photo and important docs. Also an NVS (for storing video streams from doorbell and patio cameras). Also a Git repo (Gitea). And Backups too. Initial cost $100 + hard drives. Electric cost: $12.81/month. Raspberry Pi 2B is UPS-backed Devuan (systemd-free Debian) (systemd has an open network socket for PID 1, my big no-no as a security analyst) for DNS PiHole serving, Home Assistance serving and cron jobs. Self-hosted home alarm system with Zig devices . Has a cellular GPIO adapter in which to call my phone of any home event. Maximum availability, maximum reliability, maximum uptime. Electric cost: unmeasured. Cellular cost: pay-as-you-go cell…

I do, I use an old (note to self: probably need to upgrade to a new) Raspberry pi 2B with headless Ubuntu server. For storage I use also an old 2.5 HDD. This system was one of the first I built for playing around with RPi. When updated & upgraded, it is a cheap and very easy solution. Even after so many years I still store stuff on it and use it on daily basis.

Personally speaking .. with a perceived growing trend towards using low(er) power hardware - planning for dystopian power shortages etc - I know that I can host a reasonable server on a Raspberry Pi and still have it working effectively. I had mine running on a Pi2B for quite a while, but with the introduction of the Pi Zero 2 and the addition of an ethernet HAT, that's also a viable device. The size of the gopher files library will be determined by the USB stick you can afford.

In my experience, i have only had 1 corrupted SD card yet - after running about 5 Pis any given time for a few years now, starting with a 2b iirc... Running HA, Pi-Hole, OpenVPN, solaranzeige.de, piVCCU, piCorePlayer, BirdNET-Pi, OctoPi/Klipper (2x), Pi1541 etc... No. single. failure. yet. The corrupted SD card had me baffled for a while as randomly some binaries would get corrupted (like php, which would throw random errors, files of a Grafana install would end up in lost+found) - the cause? Me, using a spare Apple iPhone charger (1A) to power the Pi - haven't had an adequate power supply around at that time.. As a rule, i use 5V PS with at least 2.5A with the Pis and (almost) never had issues like the Raspys complaining with that rainbow colored box (or "vcgencmd get_throttled")... So, yes, getting a good power supply (well, one that can supply 2.5A++ - if these are really good (as in "noise free") is another matter, which i've discovered with my BirdNET-Pi now) is key for the longevity of your SD card!