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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 3

33owners with an opinion
83%of verdicts positive
13/4positive/negative since 2024
9 yrslongest happy owner
2happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and ease of use; criticized for performance.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 9 yearsStill going
I did something similar in 2016 https://www.e-tinkers.com/2016/11/hosting-wordpress-on-raspb... . Instead of having Apache, I use Nginx. Instead of serving webpage from SD card, I setup a 512MB hard disk except booting still done via the SD card. The site is still running on a Raspberry Pi 3 till this day from my living room.
Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going
Around early 2019 I set up a raspberry pi 3 running Raspbian. I made the /var/log partition a ramdisk. Haven't touched it since. It goes down for power outages but probably has been out for a couple minutes total over five years (aside from power outages). Most of its job is to translate analog audio to a USB speaker system. Whole house audio for about $150. Anyway, I never touch it, it just works, all the time.
Likes itOwned 1 year
I run a RaspberryPi 3 with FreeBSD 13 booting off an SD card and a USB SSD for storage [1]. Coincidentally today (1/7/2024) is its one year anniversary. It runs a jail with my single user GoToSocial ActivityPub server [2] reasonably well with cloudflared [3] handling incoming traffic and acting as CDN to take some of the load. Originally it was only using an SD card, but there was too much IO contention so a USB-SSD adapter is used to offload the IO. I choose FreeBSD over Linux since I have other Rpis with Linux already and wanted more experience with *BSD, jails, and ZFS. Unfortunately ZFS wasn't the best choice on an Rpi since it's more cpu intensive and switched back to UFS. Overall it's been solid, multiple GTS updates and have it on my list to update to FreedBSD 14 but not really in a rush. 1. https://social.ecliptik.com/@micheal/statuses/01GP860MYM2CGH... 2. https://gotosocial.org/ 3. https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared
Likes itOwned 1 year
Only if you have bad luck. I run a NextCloud on RPi3 for over 1 year constantly and didn't have any issues so far. Yes it's just 2 users but I also shared folders with people who up- and download stuff. The web interface is responsive enough and the weak end when downloading stuff from it is my internet connection (upload sucks). I agree that it's a good idea though ;-) I've ordered a successor with some serious power and SSD for the Pi ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter-computer ) to get more users to work with it and also try the NextCloud Talk feature. Also heard good things about the beaglebones.
Likes it
Raspberry Compute Module (basically a normal raspberry without built-in I/O) is widely used in the industry at large. What they are not meant to be is the lowest cost per CPU/GPU flops so they are mostly used in high-value-add / low-volume / gen-1 products. https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia... I personally worked on a system with raspberry compute modules 3 and 4, the total system cost was in the ~million dollar range. This was definitely a commercial product with dozens of engineers doing R&D, not a hobby project. We were looking into smaller systems with lower profit margins (~20k USD) and for those we were considering moving away from raspberry CMs because of cost. The main advantage of the raspberry CM ecosystem is just how widely popular it is and how cheap and available "dev boards" are (just grab a non-CM raspberry and it is almost the same thing). Most of these types of systems don't really have the I/O that makes testing and developing a lot easier. Being popular is quite important because firmware issues are notoriously expensive to troubleshoot and fix often requiring the manufacturer help. Said manufacturer does not give a damn if you are a low-volume customer. More popular systems have more information available online and are less likely to have bugs (or at least the bugs are known). I remember one of our other systems bluetooth module had a weird edgecase bug that caused the module to shutdown after several days of it being powered…
Likes itStill going
I've used them for mostly dedicated tasks, at least the Rpi3 and older. I've used the Rpi3 as a CUPS server in a couple of sites, for a few printers. Been running for many years now 24/7 with no issues. As I could buy those SBCs for the original low price and the installation was a total no-brainer, I would never consider using any kind of mini PC for that. I have a couple of RPI4 with 8GB and 4GB RAM respectively, these I have been using as kind-of general computers (they're running off SSDs instead of SD cards). I've had no reason so far to replace them with anything Intel/AMD.
Neutral
I had Home Assistant on an RPi 3 with 1 GB RAM and a USB thumb drive until sometime maybe 7-10 days ago when I switched to an RPi 5 with 8 GB RAM and the 256 GB SSD and NVME had sold by the RPi company. The 3 was and the 5 is plugged into an energy monitoring smart outlet. Here's a graph of power for that outlet [1] for the last 30 days. HA uses long term statistics for older than 10 days, which is why the 2/3 to the left shows much less variation. The switch from the 3 to the 5 is somewhere a little way into the right 1/3, where it is using shorter term data which has a much higher sample rate. It does look like the average power goes up with the 5, but not nearly as much as I would have thought. The left 2/3 which was definitely all RPi 3, averages 2.48 W. From Jan 17 to the present, which was definitely all RPi 5, it averages 2.64 W. If those reports of 2.8 W for an idle 4 are accurate I'm curious why my HA 5 is lower. I've got an unused energy monitoring smart plug of the same kind my HA Pi is on. I'll have to put the 4 on that and see how it compares. [1] https://imgur.com/a/qa7SD2O
Doesn’t like it
I have a Pi3b in a 3D printer, and compiling the software, but also simply apt upgrade feels like it takes forever. Most day to day operations work just fine though. At work we have a display with a Pi3 (not B) connected, just showing websites in rotation. Websites even with a simple animation are laggy, startup takes a few minutes. Both of these usecases don't need more than 1 GB of ram, but I want to speed of a 4 or 5.
Likes it
I have a 4 with a huge ass passive heatsink on at home. It's my minecraft server when I feel like it. The heatsink is uncomfortable to touch (it's not in a case). Pretty sure it would downclock if i removed it. So it works without a fan, but not without a heatsink (I bet the keyboards have a heatsink for the Pis built in.). A 3 would have worked fine without any heatsink at all. At least at normal room temperature.
Neutral
Interesting that they prefer syncing. I went the other way and stream everything, but locally. Music acquisition is 95% bandcamp (5% is Amazon or Qobuz or physical CDs I rip), the FLACs gets transferred to the N100 server in my living room, where it gets picked up by Navidrome[0]. Navidrome then streams it to the kitchen (via Music Assistant to a pi3 with USB-connected speaker), to my phone (via Symfonium), and to my browser (via the web app). The server has tailscale for remote access as well. [0] Until recently I used Jellyfin, but the performance of Navidrome is far superior.
Neutral
I have used OpenBSD on first a Raspberry Pi 3 and then 4. I liked it, until one day the system stopped responding on either SSH and the serial port, so I had to cut the power to reboot. That's fine, these things happen, but I lost several system files in the process and I couldn't figure out which ones. I only noticed because some things no longer worked and there were some files in /usr's lost+found. OpenBSD's file system does not have journalling. Their closest equivalent, soft updates, was removed some versions ago, so that they can add journalling later. Until that happens, I will install OpenBSD anywhere again. That's a shame because apart from that, it really is a good operating system. The documentation is excellent and there are some great services in base. I much prefer OpenSMTPD over Postfix, for example, because it's just a lot simpler and I don't feel unsure if I've missed some option that I really needed to change for the system to be secure.
Likes it
That’s not the whole picture. I have a “mini Mac” I built that runs BasiliskII directly on a Raspberry Pi 3’s framebuffer (using SDL on a directly attached LCD) and the thing is _much_ faster and snappier than the SE/30 it sort of looks like. Were it not for the size (it’s 1/3 scale, so the screen is tiny), it would be pretty “usable” with Word and Excel.
Likes it
You're a bit pessimistic, but beyond that I feel like you're missing the point a bit. The purpose of a RTOS on big hardware is to provide bounded latency guarantees to many things with complex interactions , while keeping high system throughput (but not as good as a non-RTOS). A small microcontroller can typically only service one interrupt in a guaranteed fast fashion. If you don't use interrupt priorities, it's a mess; and if you do, you start adding up latencies so that the lowest priority interrupt can end up waiting indefinitely. So, we tend to move to bigger microcontrollers (or small microprocessors) and run RTOS on them for timing critical stuff. You can get latencies of several microseconds with hundreds of nanoseconds of jitter fairly easily. But bigger RTOS are kind of annoying; you don't have the option to run all the world's software out there as lower priority tasks and their POSIX layers tend to be kind of sharp and inconvenient. With preempt-rt, you can have all the normal linux userland around, and if you don't have any bad performing drivers, you can do nearly as well as a "real" RTOS. So, e.g., I've run a 1.6KHz flight control loop for a large hexrotor on a Raspberry Pi 3 plus a machine vision stack based on python+opencv. Note that wherever we are, we can still choose to do stuff in high priority interrupt handlers, with the knowledge that it makes latency worse for everything else . Sometimes this is worth it. On modern x86 it's about 300-600 c…
Doesn’t like it
100% this, my rpi3 kept running out of ram running all the services I wanted on home assistant so I moved it to proxmox and use the roi+touchscreen as a dedicated web client for the interface now Be careful with the beelinks though, I have one with a nice ryzen API that's basically useless because the USB gave out and it's a chicken and the egg problem trying to get Bluetooth on it. Haven't gotten around to attempt manually configuring Bluetooth on the SSD yet (from another computer) or otherwise fixing those ports
Doesn’t like it
Just a note to anyone interested in trying out Home Assistant: It's amazing _but_ do NOT use a raspberry pi to run it. Save yourself a ton of headaches and buy a mini pc (there was a list of used mini pcs posted here yesterday from ebay). Also I recommend using HAOS (or whatever the "we install and run the whole OS" option is called) so that you can use things like plugins without messing around with docker. I love docker but trust me, life is easier on HAOS. I liked HA but felt like it wasn't really "stable". I used a Pi 3 for a while, then a Pi 4 decked out (highest ram, NVME storage, super nice case, etc) and still felt like it was unstable. I chalked this up to HA but then rolled the dice on a Beelink mini pc and it has been rock solid ever since. Also don't be misled by the lower price of the Pi, I paid more for my Pi 4 setup than the Beelink (or about the same). I blamed everything from the Zigbee/Z-wave dongles, to HAOS, to HA itself, etc but in the end it was RPi. The 4 was the last Pi I'll ever buy. EDIT: I was in a hurry and didn't add my normal disclaimer when I talk about the RPi's: Yes I know some of you have a Pi 1 that been running you entire life since it first came out and you think I'm full of crap. I've owned every Pi 1-4 and never been truly happy with them. I bought them "raw" and sourced all the parts myself, I bought high-end (at least in price) kits with everything included, I bought all official accessories (like power), they always were just that lit…
Likes it
I see VLC as the swiss army knife that can play anything you throw at it, no matter how weird. I see mpv as a more streamlined, less abstract implementation that supports many fewer options, but can contain special-case code paths for hardware acceleration, for example. Hardware-accelerated playback on my Raspberry Pi 3 works out of the box with mpv but requires some special trick or doesn't work at all in vlc. I assume mpv's design allows it to contain a special-case code path when you happen to be playing something compatible with a Raspberry Pi's GPU on a Raspberry Pi.
Doesn’t like it
When the first Raspberry Pis came out I was in love. It was incredible, a full (headless) computer that was small and cheap. I played with it for a while but never had a great long-term use case for it. I bought pretty much every Pi up to the 4, always trying to find a place it could occupy in my life but never really managed to find a good use. I ran Home Assistant on a 3 then later on 4 (with a super nice case, NVME hat+stick, etc) but HA was not super stable. I, wrongly, blamed it on the HA software for a long time then I bought a Beelink mini computer and moved HA to it and I have literally not thought about HA since, it's worked flawlessly. Maybe I had bad luck, maybe I happened to get 6 (I had multiple of certain Pis) defective boards but they always felt "unstable" to me. They might run fine for months then randomly need to be rebooted. I'm sure some of you will say "I've had a Raspberry Pi 1 running constantly since I bought it and it's rock solid", good for you, that was not my experience. During COVID (maybe before as well) it came out that the company was prioritizing bulk sales over sales to individuals (or rather sales to companies that resold to individuals) which soured me. This news just further confirms my belief that the company and product I loved is dead and probably has been for some time. It was nice while it lasted.
Neutral
I recently bough Onyx Boox tablet. After degoogling device I'm really enjoy possibilities of android system more then closed one like Kindle or Kobo or Pocketbook. Main purpose is reading a lot of sheet music documents, making annotations and share with choir/orchestra. I discovered that Calibre is excellent tool for organisation of large database of sheet music documents. What surprised me most is how responsive drawing/writing by stylus is. Weird part is that apps need optimalisaton for fast responsivness which some apps have and some don't. Which mean eink technology capabilities are limited by SW quite significantly.
Neutral
I am running a hypervisor ( https://blogs.vmware.com/arm/2023/12/15/esxi-arm-fling-1-15-... ) on my Raspberry Pi 4. Rock solid. Currently running virtual machines: * Home Assistant ( https://home-assistant.io/ ) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave * Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit) * Pihole All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS. I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.
Likes it
LibreELEC is indeed slick: Their motto is, IIRC, "Just enough Linux to run Kodi." It is absolutely ideal if what one wants to have is a dedicated media player appliance and -- like any other cromulent video playing appliance -- it Just Works. But there's a ton of other ways to get Kodi running on Raspberry Pi hardware. For instance: There was a time when I was running Kodi under RetroPie, so I could combine antique console emulation and video playing on one [at the time] Pi 3.
Doesn’t like it
FT8 would be pointless. FT8 uses SSB which this can't do. Doing FT8 on FM is a waste of bandwidth and low-signal. FT8 is usually done on HF since that has long-distance propagation and it is important to pick out tiny signals. People do FT8 on VHF but they use radios with SSB. The radio probably doesn't have the processing power for FT8. A Raspberry Pi 3 was struggling for me. Also, a big part of FT8 is choosing what to send and who to respond to, need a good display for that.
Likes it
My laptop is nearly 10 years old (MacBook Pro Mid-2014). My phone is nearly 7 years old (iPhone8). A Raspberry Pi3 has replaced my home server. Honestly, part of my motivation has been power consumption. Running a fat multi-core PC with heaps of memory and a beefy GPU pulls a lot of watts, and ... I don't need it. The very few times I could use the extra grunt, I can also really just wait an extra minute or two ...
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
It is not! That is super misleading. For normal program code it is closer to a Pi 4 than to a Pi 3, similar to the all the very popular A55s board that have come out more recently than the Pi 4. The only way it is slower than a Pi 3 is if the Pi 3 program is using SIMD (Neon), which the VisionFive 2 lacks. The worst part of this Pi 3 comparison is that the Pi 3 has only 512MB or 1GB of RAM, which is extremely limiting in the modern world. This RISC-V board comes with a *minimum* of 2GB and is available with 8GB for $37. The RAM difference alone makes many things possible that are impossible on a Pi 3, and many other things much faster, regardless of the raw CPU speed. And then you have the M.2 NVMe SSD, something that neither the Pi 3 nor Pi 4 support, which again makes a whole raft of things much faster, even if the single lane means it can "only" do something near 400 MB/s (vs SD cards at 40 or 80 MB/s)