There was maybe a short period of time when RPi offered a decent compute for money if ever. But all of that time it's about the ecosystem and simply being the most popular platform. Any hardware library, you take it and you know somebody tested it on this exact hardware with the same operating system. When doing hardware stuff it can be really painful to debug. You don't want to also be wondering if maybe some pin is handled differently on your box than RPi etc.
Yeah; honestly if you're going to integrate I2C/UART/SPI, cellular, serial bus stuff, PoE, or anything like that into a project, the Pi (4/5) makes that simple, and almost always painless.
Having well-supported GPIO and documented interfaces is nice, when you want to do anything outside normal 'compute' use cases.
The Pi 4 is still a great option for throwing into random spots for $35 and burning 1-2W of power. The Pi 5 less so, in that common homelab use case.
I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.
> I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.
It's not a Raspberry Pi, but this Radxa board is more powerful than a Pi Zero 2 and has the form factor you're looking for. Price isn't that bad either (around $25 for the cheapest model).
There’s Orange Pi Zero, they are pretty good. I have the very first version from circa 2016, and I like it. The only thing I’d change is to move from 32 bit to 64. But IIRC their very next version is 64 bit. And as of today there are three or four versions. All of which are pretty cheap.
The ecosystem (and in the early days, price) is about the only thing they’ve ever had going for them.
They’ve otherwise always been mediocre boards in pretty much every respect. Slow, relatively power hungry, and powered by a set top box SOC that is NDAed out the wazoo.
