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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi 4

9owners with an opinion
83%of verdicts positive
5/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

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

What owners wrote

Neutral
Yep, with video games, we started with SNES and have been slowly moving higher fidelity. We've got a VOIP landline for the kids, as well as a CD player. It's been working pretty well. For computing, they have a desktop Raspberry Pi 400 running Raspbian, terminal-centric setup.
Likes it
> 16 GB RAM – LPDDR5-6400 – soldered [crying cat emoji] No need to cry: 1. Per ark[1], "Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type) 16 GB" - you wouldn't be doing much with modular RAM, anyway 2. Swapping BGA package RAM actually isn't THAT hard. If you invest a few hundred monetary units now in a hot air station, some flux, a few relevant stencils, some solder paste and/or appropriately sized balls, fine tweezers, and (for extra credit) a €£$60 AliExpress LCD microscope, you never have to cry again when the laptop you prefer has soldered RAM, a soldered M.2 1216 SMT Wi-Fi module, a flaky USB-C charge port (ThinkPad plague), etc. Guess how many Raspberries Pi 4 I've upgraded to 8GB RAM! [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/...
Likes it
> Pretty sure it would downclock if i removed it. So it works without a fan, but not without a heatsink The Raspberry Pi 4 will throttle performance at 80C (if I recall correctly) but it can work without a heatsink. I have a R.Pi 4 working without a passive cooler in an enclosure and it reports 55C-62C most of the time. > I bet the keyboards have a heatsink for the Pis built in You are right, both models use a heatsink. The PCB is also different, although the respective CPUs are standard Pi 4 or Pi 5. Incidentally, the CPU in the R.Pi 400 has a higher clock rate than the standard R.Pi 4, so it performs better.
Neutral
No. None of this. > Are trivially easy to set up Done it. Been doing it for 25+ years. ZFS is easier. MUCH easier, and much quicker too. > expand As easy with ZFS. > or replace drives; Easier with XFS. > require no upkeep; False. Ext4 requires the occasional check. This must be done offline. ZFS doesn't and can be scrubbed while online and actively in use. > and no setup when placed into entirely different systems. Same as ZFS. > Anybody using ZFS or ZFS-like to do some trivial standard RAID setup (unless they are used to and comfortable with ZFS, which is an entirely different story) is just begging to lose data. False. > MDADM is fine. I am not saying it isn't. I am saying ZFS is better. I think you haven't tried it, because your claims betray serious ignorance of what it can do. I built my main NAS box's ZRAID with the drives in USB-3 caddies on a Raspberry Pi 4. I moved it to the built in SATA controllers of an HP Microserver running TrueNAS Core. Imported and just worked. No reconfig, no rebuild, nothing. It moves seamlessly between Arm and x86, Linux and FreeBSD, no problem at all. Round trip if you want.
Recommends it
older accelerators still work and are great compatibility-wise of course, there's also terrible fire which is great. I'd put Vampire the last actually, in-part due to compatibility and as you've said it.. you can pretty much do the thing with RPI and heck, you can even have rpi as an accelerator within an amiga - PiStorm. I have three A1200s, two A600s, and an A500+. In each A1200 I have in order of least to most powerful: Blizzard 1230 with 030+FPU, Blizzard 1260 with 060, and TF1260 with 060. If I'm after most compatibility and games, it's 1230 that gets out. B1230 is just plug and play, you put it into Amiga and it's faster. That's it. With 1260 both Blizzard and TF you have to install stuff, play with it etc. It's good for demos and demo coding where target always is anyways Blizzard 1260. In A600 I have one stock and one with Furia with 030. A500+ is stock (actually A500 reworked to be A500+). Technically that's the full circle of it. There's no new stuff made for it or advantage of more power than this. Demos are made for 060 anyways. I also have PCMCIA cards with WiFi on them so that I can move stuff to amigas over the air, or even remote execute code. Aside from ALL OF THAT (including a bunch of 1084s monitors), I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. I boot it up, it's an amiga, has all the crap on it and most of it works immediately. What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amig…
Neutral
Dokku Maintainer here: Piku is awesome! I've always thought the PaaS space is wide enough for many players in specific niches, and I love the approach of running processes outside of containers. About the only thing I would change is to utilize systemd (or similar) for spawning processes, but otherwise it's super neat. I've used it myself on a raspberry pi zero :)
Likes it
I run Ceph on some Raspberry Pi 4s. It's super reliable, and with cephadm it's very easy[1] to install and maintain. My household is already 100% on Linux, so having a native network filesystem that I can just mount from any laptop is very handy. Works great over Tailscale too, so I don't even have to be at home. [1] I run a large install of Ceph at work, so "easy" might be a bit relative.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
A MacBook Neo is 699 GBP. An 8GB Raspberry Pi w/ 32GB SD card, cable, housing, fan and power supply from Kiwi Electronics is 188 EUR (160 GBP). A monitor, kb/mouse, and SD card from Newegg is 70 USD (45 GBP). Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
It's not intended for a normal person to use. If you're a normal person making something as a hobby project, you'll get a much nicer development experience by using a microcontroller that costs a few dollars rather than a few cents. For hobby purposes, I recommend either the Raspberry Pi Pico or the STM32 blue pill. A part like this is intended for inexpensive, high-volume consumer electronics that need some sort of simple control functionality. For example, let's say you're making an electric toothbrush. All it needs to do is turn the motor on, wait for 2 minutes, then pulse the motor to let the user know they're done brushing their teeth. This can do that. Or let's say you're making a promotional keychain, and you want it to blink a few LEDs in a specific pattern when the user presses a button. This can do that. If you take apart basically any piece of cheap (< $5) electronics that's been designed in the past 10-15 years, you'll usually see a tiny unmarked 8-pin microcontroller doing the control work. This part competes in that market.
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
I'm a fan of the RP2040 chip. It's a good trade-off between being simple and capable. There are more powerful chips like the STM32's, but frankly there are too many variants and their data-sheets are nightmarish. And there are simpler chips like the Atmel AVRs, but the tooling sucks. ESP chips are also good, but I haven't kept up with them so can't give much advice. You'll want a dev board, which has the chip plus some supporting components on it. The Raspberry Pi Pico is a good choice because it's so widely used and well documented. If you care about Rust, you'll also want to get the Debug Probe. Worth the money. If you don't care about Rust, any Adafruit dev board should run CircuitPython, have good documentation, and likely some projects you can start with. The reason I don't recommend these for Rust is because many of their dev boards do not "break out"/make available the connections for a debug probe.