Of Rain and a Pi 5 4GB

Rain was forecast today. If rain had not been forecast then I would have driven to Ins, near the Lake of Murten near Neuchatel to go around the lake at a slow up. I didn’t go, not because rain was forecast, but because rain was expected although not quantified. I like to drive and do things, sometimes, but if I drive so far, especially to do something in relative solitude I would prefer to do it when the weather is good, rather than rainy. By driving so far in the rain I am contributing to global warming for very little

That’s why I’m going to write about my current experiment. I saw, a few days ago, that the Raspberry Pi 5 4GB model was being sold at a reduced price so I decided to get one and experiment. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu on one SD card, but I also swapped the SD card from the 8gb pie to the four GB pi. So far I find that the 4gb pi copes well with Facebook, watching facebook reels, YouTube videos of 18 minutes or more and other simple browser based tasks.

It is easy for us to fall into the trap of looking at expensive laptops and thinking “I want the latest mac book pro” or “I want the latest framework laptop” and so on.

The truth is that for web browsing a Pi is good enough, especially the Pi 5.

Heat and Pi Crashes

As I was browsing, looking for more inspiration for this post I got the Pi to crash, simply scrolling down a Facebook page. In my experience Pi crash when they become too hot. It’s not that they have stopped working, but rather that they overheat and slow down, to the point to appear as if they have crashed. If you get a fan and blow air on them they usually revive.

That’s why it’s worth getting a fan to go with the Pi, to help with cooling.

I use the Raspberry Pi default case with the Raspberry Pi integrated heatsink and fan and it works reliably. I was using the Pi 5 default case with the default fan when it overheated and slowed to the point of appearing as if it had crashed.

One Pi5 works as a server that is always on. The second works as a laptop replacement, and the third is for experimentation, so that I stop breaking my main laptop replacement. I was recently experimenting with other desktop environments and was unable to recover. The third Pi was bought because it was cheaper than usual, so that I could experiment and learn more skills. It takes very little time to reconfigure a Pi as I want it but if I use it with Immich then that does take time to recover.

And Finally

If the weather was good I would be hiking and writing about the experience but since it’s rainy and overcast I am experimenting with a Pi5 4gb, crashing it, and then reverting to the Pi5 8GB to conclude the post. The official fan/heat sink costs 14.40 so it’s not that expensive but once it’s on the board it is hard to remove.

Next Sunday I should be doing something more interesting.