Our lab is looking into getting more pioreactors. Is there a best raspberry pi to use or do all of them work equally well with only cost being the determining factor for purchase?
We have some notes on our recommend Pis here. I’ll provide some more details though:
- If you’re just using wifi for connections, than I think the RPi Zero 2s are the best option: fast and pretty inexpensive. They don’t have much RAM, but the Pioreactor software doesn’t need much RAM anyways.
- If you need, or think you want to upgrade to ethernet connections, than the 3B or 4B are good options. The former is much cheaper than the latter, and the latter requires a different power connector (USB-C).
- If you want to connect a monitor + keyboard + mouse directly to the leader Pioreactor, then I would recommend a RPi 4B or 5B for that.
We recommend to buy a “better” Raspberry Pi, like a 4B, for the leader Pioreactor in a larger cluster. You should be fine with a RPi Zero 2, but the 4B’s UI will feel a lot faster and be able to communicate with the workers faster.
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