Raspberry Pi RPi

Works is a bit of an understatement, with a package library that's close to surpassing that of ppc64[0], thus becoming the third largest. I've used mine as a desktop for a while, but now it's been repurposed as home server. It runs Debian trixie (still not frozen, just sid + small delay), with a generic kernel (not vendor crap) and root on ZFS, a 1TB M.2 SSD, with an external 22TB disk, also ZFS, on UASP USB3 enclosure. Compared to the rpi4 it replaces, it is somehow actually faster. Sustains 70MB/s aes decrypt (luks), where the rpi4 gave me https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-week-big.png

And they are promptly out of stock, I assume. I've owned every Raspberry Pi since the first one but I think the 4 was my last one. They are fun to tinker with with but not great for long-term use in my experience. I felt like I had to babysit it way too often, it absolutely wasn't a "setup an forgot" device, again in my experience. It'd be rock solid for 2-3 months then randomly stop working, rinse and repeat. A little bit back I bought a cheap (~$250) mini pc to run Home Assistant on and I haven't looked back. The Raspberry Pi 4 did decent at that job but was a little flakey for my liking and I even had a special case with an m.2 adapter so I didn't have to use the SD card. And before "$XX < $200" (whatever these are going for now), I spent over $100 for my RPi 4 (top ram, I think 4? or was it 8?) especially since you need a case, power supply, etc. Also I had to buy a m.2 ssd and that special adapter.

I have used the NUCs to integrate controllers into small robotic platforms and custom lab equipment. They are a good 'it just works' platform that you can scale performance v cost over time as needs vary (need image processing? drop in a core i7. just motion control? save money and go with an i3 or atom). Also they are more reliable and performant than RPi, and relative to the cost of the motion control systems, the NUC is a rounding error. Notably the NUC has a standardized base plate mount that requires only two screws, and it has nice rubberized stand offs that isolate vibration. So, mechanical integration is super easy, and swapping out a NUC in the field is also very fast. In some cases it is easier to do a firmware upgrade by switching out the whole NUC than trying to walk a lab tech through punching a hole in the corporate firewall, or running an ethernet cord through the production floor, etc etc.

I did this same sort of thing. My impetus was that I have tons of shows and movies to watch but I 1) don't necessarily want to binge every episode back to back and 2) my wide selection leads to choice paralysis. I mostly want some background noise rather than something I'm super engaged in. I wrote a script to catalog all my shows/movies then another that reads a schedule and generates a daily playlist. My schedule has daily episodes of some shows and then weekly showings of others. I even put some network block bumpers between some shows and "upcoming schedule" clips. The output of the scheduling script is just an m3u playlist. A cron job loads the day's playlist at midnight and it plays continuously during the day. There's no controls to pause or anything, if I miss something I miss it (by design). All the video content is stored on a 5TB drive plugged into the machine. To complete the old school analog nature of the project I picked up a low power Hlly VHF video transmitter. I've got a small CRT TV in my office that I use during the day and I can pick up the signal on the TV in the living room. The project started on an RPi with VLC but it struggled on some videos I'd ripped from Bluray so I replaced it with a little fanless AMD box with an HDMI-RCA adapter. It sits in the garage and I can pick up the signal anywhere in the house. The best part is apart from the setup it's proven to be pretty reliable. My next step is to make a schedule output like what you linked and mayb…