Not even worth it anymore. You can buy old used corperate PC or mini PC for around $100.
Granted this is a gaming sub so that view makes sense, however for specialized applications where you need the GPIO pins or space/power is a large factor they’re still needed and this is gonna suck.
Yeah it sucks. I know there are alternatives like the orange pi that are cheaper but the software support just isnt as good.
End of an era.
If space isn’t the biggest factor, you can get the micro-pc and connect a microcontroller like a raspberry pi pico via USB or serial and write a driver to interface between the two systems (or use something like micro-ros). It’s not the best in extremely space constrained situations or areas where the connectors could come apart though
PCIe card with GPIO?
Except a PCIe GPIO card is bigger the the entirety of a Pi, let alone the entire computer and still suffers from power draw issues. On the software side I don’t know how well that would work as there already are a lot of GPIO SDKs a libraries specifically targeted at the Pi.
I’m normally really bad at timing the market but I really did get lucky for buying a Pi 5 8GB in September 2025.
There’s already a price jump of $20 USD between the RPi 4B 1GB ($35) and 2GB ($55) versions in Micro Center. It’s hard to do much with a GUI with that little memory nowadays.
I hope some solution can come about, they’re still very useful little things
