I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

  • socphoenix@midwest.socialEnglish
    61·
    5 months ago

    Man my home server IDLES at 76 watts per hour running x86. Now mind you I need the x86 to perform some of the functions I want. This thing works as an NAS, nextcloud, media server, kiwix, security camera (zoneminder), remote desktop (xrdp), runs home assistant, gpu AI upscaling for photos, and finally screeches along running a virtual pipe organ I built that takes 69 GB of RAM to run.

    If I could do that with raspberry pi’s I would in a heartbeat! the power savings alone would eventually pay for them. If it’s doing what you want then don’t worry about them. My pi400 works as a remote desktop client and one day I hope more of this stuff will work well on it/a future generation so I can ditch the tower, energy usage, and noise.

      • socphoenix@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        It is software (grandorgue) that pretends to be a pipe organ (the instrument). In order to run fast enough it needs to load every sound sample into memory to play, as well as usually multiple kinds of sound endings. I play professionally on a “small to mid sized” pipe organ with 1,438 pipes. The one I load for use at home has more than that!

        The instrument was from the 1960s and I rebuilt it with a pi pico that you can see here, and you can hear the before (analog sound cards) versus one of the organs I’ve loaded into it here.

        • PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocksBEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

          here

          Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

          I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

        • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          21·
          5 months ago

          That’s amazing sounding! Worth the watts, even if I did get church ptsd listening to it.

          • socphoenix@midwest.socialEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            Hahaha yeah…it’s in many ways unfortunate that if you want to play/enjoy this instrument churches are the only option most of the time :/

            Definitely worth the watts though!

            • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              2·
              5 months ago

              I’ve been recently bingeing Look Mum No Computer’s rescue/re-build/midi-fication of an organ that had been shoehorned into an organist’s home, after the church had been converted. I’m more of an engineer than musician, but it’s amazing how much goes into the layering of sounds from so many different pipes.

              My 6 yo loves learning with such a cool soundtrack too.