This is new - comments are becoming self-aware!

I've reconsidered your points carefully and decided that you're right - my £400 laptop is much more powerful and up to date than my Raspberry Pi, so I removed my Pi from my quadcopter, where I had been using it as a flight controller, and replaced it with my laptop. Can't wait to see how this thing flies!



Hang on a second... no, wait, you're still missing the point - my logic isn't predicated on something being cheap meaning it is good - it's predicated on different technologies for different applications. A Ferrari is faster than an Asda lorry, but there's no way you could fit enough food into a Ferrari to stock an entire supermarket. Likewise, you wouldn't choose the Asda lorry to enter a supercar race. Here are the things that I use my Raspberry Pi for -

1a) A living room media centre. This is probably the most popular use for the Raspberry Pi and should need no introduction, but basically it plays any kind of media, streamed from the internet and from my NAS drive. On top of that, I've got RetroPi installed so it also runs emulators, and it can also stream PC games from my desktop PC using Steam in Big Picture mode (so it's saved me having to buy one of those Steam Links). This is all controlled using a wireless Xbox 360 controller. Now, you're going to tell me that this is nothing a PC couldn't do, and that's true, but even if I could get a PC for the £12.50 I paid for my Pi (or £25 or whatever it is for a Pi 2), I would still rather have the Pi because a) it's much smaller than any PC and b) it consumes much less power - my TV has USB ports so it's just plugged into one of those (with the added advantage of making it automatically boot when I switch the TV on).

1b) A kitchen audio player. Essentially the same as above but I've got a slightly different setup on another SD card for the kitchen, where it just plays music from my NAS drive but also streams podcasts from the internet, syncing which episodes I've listened to with my PC/online account. It just plugs into a spare pair of speakers that I keep in the kitchen. I'd like to make this setup permanent, which is why I'm considering buying more Pis. I've been considering building a case for it with a small touchscreen to control it but for now I just use my phone to control it. Now you're going to say that I could just use my phone for this and you're absolutely right - and that's what I used to do. But as the whole idea of this setup is to be able to listen to music while cooking, I found that my phone kept getting covered in kitchen grease (small kitchen) and I'd much rather risk my £12.50 Pi than my £125 phone.

2) As mentioned above, a flight controller for my quadcopter. This involved hooking it up to a gyrometer and a GPS and learning how to set everything up, which was an interesting learning process. I'm looking to get a more advanced, dedicated flight controller (partly to free up my Pi for other things) but if I'd done that in the first place I wouldn't have learned as much about how they work.

3) A coffee machine controller. I've got a coffee machine with a timer, which is great for setting it to make coffee for me in the morning, but what about when you go out and you have no idea when you're going to be back but you'd still like to have a cup of coffee waiting for you? You wouldn't know what time to set the timer for. Well, with a bit of soldering you can connect a Raspberry Pi to your coffee machine, simply to switch it on/off. As the Pi can connect to the internet, you can activate it from anywhere using your phone, so just fill it with water and coffee grounds when you leave and you can switch it on when you're on your way home. I can't think of a better device to do this - not something a PC or even a mobile phone could do (no GPIO headers!) and, even if they could, it would be overkill. If I do manage to get my hands on a Pi Zero, I intend to use it to set my coffee machine up like this permanently.

4) A DSLR controller. I've got a great app on my phone which controls my Canon DSLR, but I mostly use it to do timelapses and that means having the phone connected to the camera for an extended period of time, which ties up the phone and drains the battery, often while I'm in the middle of nowhere. The Pi can do this instead, with far more options, less power consumption and can automatically backup the photos to its own SD card and even stitch the video together for me as it goes. It can also control a motor that I've installed on my slider, allowing me to make moving timelapses (hyperlapses), by moving the camera along slightly before each shot, which my phone couldn't do because, again, no GPIO headers.


So, yes, different technologies for different applications. I don't think cheap = good but you seem to think that cheap = bad. I can't argue that the Lenovo PC you linked to is more powerful than the Pi, but I wouldn't put that under the TV in my living room (although I was wondering where my Betamax player got to...) over the Pi, because the Pi is invisible compared to that and consumes much less power. Building any kind of PC, as you suggest, would be overkill for most projects that the Pi is used for.

I don't see how people buying them and not using them is relevant - that's what people do with things, especially if they're cheap. I got my first Raspberry Pi for £12.50 and thought 'That's so cheap it doesn't matter if I don't use it', but as it turned out I found several uses for it and I'm always having to move it between setups to the point where I'm considering buying another 2-3 of them. Meanwhile, I've got a Windows tablet that I bought a year ago (the Linx 7" when those first came out and were on offer) and it's just sat gathering dust, despite being less 'archaic' device with full input/output, simply because it doesn't fulfil a need for me (it's not as powerful as my laptop and not as portable as my phone). I've also got a pair of running shoes that I don't use but that's another story...

Also, about inputs, you either have a spare keyboard and mouse lying around or you don't. If you don't, you can just factor the cost into buying a Pi (plenty of starter kits out there that include a wireless keyboard & mouse - I bought a wireless Logitech keyboard with trackpad for all of £10). But the fact is that a lot of Pi projects don't need a keyboard and mouse to run - you'd just need them for installing the operating system and setting it up to do whatever you need it for. Then you can take the input devices out of the equation as the Pi will just run whatever on its own.

As for your point about the SD cards - yes, I've checked the forums (as you might have gathered from the projects above, I've read quite a bit of them) and honestly I don't see that it's as prevalent as you seem to think - it hasn't happened to me anyway, and even if it's happened to you, don't just assume it will happen again. You don't have to be a genius to know you should back your work up, and I don't see what valuable and important data you would have on your Pi (and only your Pi). A lot is done by installing packages and copying and pasting code, so nothing is lost but the time it takes to setup again (which is always quicker the second time), unless you're writing your own code, in which case I imagine you would be precious about backing it up anyway. But I've never had my Pi lose anything or corrupt any of the 4-5 SD cards I regularly use in it.

You keep saying that a PC can do 'more', but 'more powerful' does not mean 'more things'. My Pi can't play Fallout 4 so I use my PC for that. My PC can't control my quadcopter or coffee machine, I don't want it in the living room and I can't take it out on photography shoots, so I use my Pi for those things.

​What an idiotic reply to a thread directed mainly at the pi zero. Come back when you can find a £4 phone that can do what the zero can!

You don't really get what it's for, do you? That's like saying saying my car doesn't have wings so it can't fly so it's useless. It doesn't do less, it does different things - you seem to be thinking that everything needs to have the latest and greatest tech to be able to do its job, but no, we have different things for different uses.

I mean, I couldn't play Fallout 4 on a Raspberry Pi, but then I wouldn't build a £1,000 desktop PC just to watch videos - and I physically couldn't use a desktop or even a laptop PC as the brain for a remote control car or a quadcopter. Likewise, I wouldn't buy a £100 smartphone just to stream podcasts or control my coffee machine - not when a £4 Pi could do the same job.

As for the price - the fact that it has a 'many-generations-obsolete CPU' is exactly the point - that makes it cheap, which makes it accessible, which means everyone can afford one, schools can fill their classrooms with them and everyone can use them to learn to program and build electronic projects out of them. Yes, you only get the board for £4, but did you realise that £4 is only £4? Chances are you already have a USB power supply, keyboard, mouse, monitor and spare SD card lying around, and if not, they could be bought pretty cheaply, bringing the total cost up to not much. But they're not even all essential - once you've put software on the SD card you can control it via SSH from a PC or even a phone, so you don't need anything else. And that's intentional - so that you only add what you need to it, depending on the project.

And on the subject of your 286, as it's about 1/166th the speed of the Pi Zero I'd be happy to offer you a proportionate price for it. That would be 2.4p but I'll round it down to 2p as it's second hand.

you'll need a USB PSU (or battery) a micro USB adaptor and a micro HDMI adaptor normally to use it and a USB hub. a 4GB micro SD card to. though if you've a card setup you can scrap that, apart from the USB bit to get a WiFi or Ethernet connection an SSH in. should be a great little thing to transfer a full setup to one you don't need all the other bit. like a more compact A+

cold for?

Posted earlier today!

Can't make pi without...HEAT added!

I see your point - but I have just managed to pick up a copy on my way home - so they are out there , but I appreciate that it might be difficult to some.

If someone can show me how to upload a pic into the comment I can upload a pic of magazine and a receipt.

Where did you buy it from? Is it in wh smiths?

It was a WH Smiths - and they had many copies - but it is in an area where the demographics don't lean towards buying educational magazines. I understand not everyone will get hold of this as easily as I did. [I live in a largely Indian heritage area of West London]

I can't work out where to buy it - there's no WH Smith in Dundee apart from the hospital...