I love reading about all of these exotic Raspberry Pi projects and people pushing the Raspberry Pi into applications far beyond what you'd expect.
But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize that these things are really not great solutions in general. This contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W during a benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers.
The Pi is a lot of fun and the Raspberry Pi foundation has done an excellent job of bringing us powerful ARM processors at low price points, but the gap between Quad Cortex-A72 and even a cheap, low-power x86 board is still massive.
But on the other hand if you're doing this for learning and for fun, these things are awesome.
But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize that these things are really not great solutions in general. This contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W during a benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers.
The Pi is a lot of fun and the Raspberry Pi foundation has done an excellent job of bringing us powerful ARM processors at low price points, but the gap between Quad Cortex-A72 and even a cheap, low-power x86 board is still massive.
But on the other hand if you're doing this for learning and for fun, these things are awesome.