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.
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
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.
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
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