RPi3 are reasonably capable for the price. For me, they make sense because:
* RPis make it easy to try non-windows OS (including Plan 9).
* Provide a usable, yet inexpensive ARM platform for Plan9.
* (almost) all RPI hardware components are supported in Plan 9.
* There is an enthusiastic community building everything imaginable for, and with, RPI's.
RPi's aren't "the" answer, but neither is Intel-inside everything. The speculative execution debacle proves that the entire industry has too much reliance on one architecture. Diversity of architectures is good for Plan 9 and the industry as a whole.
In a perfect world there would be equivalent popular platforms for MIPS, Power, RISC-V and other architectures.
-Skip
On Sat, Feb 3, 2018, at 11:46 PM, Bakul Shah wrote:
>
> Not to mention The RasPis are poor at
> reliability. Even a xenon flash or near a RasPi could power a
> RasPi2 down! And since they do no onboard power regulation,
> people had lots of problems early on -- add one more USB
> device and the thing can become unreliable.
This is probably an impossible question, but I've got to ask: Why do people even buy RasPis? Like, for anything? Even when the first RPi was new, a second hand laptop could offer far more processing power and reliability for the same price, sometimes excepting the disk of course. Add a base station with the old printer port and there's some GPIO; not as much as a RPi, it's true, but there are ways around that. One alternative for GPIO is the actually cheap boards from Ti or whoever which exist to interface Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB on one side (depending on the board) to GPIO and serial on the other. I think they're programmed in Forth, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can just download programs for them to do anything you'd want with remote control.
--
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer