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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

More like the $15.22 computer with shipping. And said shipping cost is hidden at the third stage of ordering, well after you've given your email (hello dark pattern).

At least the $6.22 shipping cost to my European country is reasonable and the same for two CHIPs (3: $7, 4: $9, 5: $11). I recall it was much higher during the kickstarter (and they worked to reduce it, as it seems on the campaign page).

Edit: PockeCHIP shipping is $11

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You can get Orange Pi One for ~$14 with delivery - which looks more powerful

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-Pi-One-ubuntu-linux-an...

Orange Pi is Cortex-A7, while this one is Cortex-A8.

Orange Pi is based on a much newer generation of SoC - A7 is newer than A8, and the Orange Pi is also quad core rather than single core and built on a more modern process node. They're not really direct competitors though since they have such different peripheral sets and intended uses - the C.H.I.P can be battery powered and has WiFi, whereas the Orange Pi is more suited to fixed/media applications thanks to its higher power usage, Ethernet, HDMI out, and better video decode hardware.

I think Cortex A7 is faster than A8. Or at least more modern.

That's really cheap, but it's worth noticing that it doesn't comes with a WiFi NIC and on-board storage.

You can always go with nodemcu with wifi and storage on board. ~$2.5 on aliexpress with shipping

That isn't comparable in any way

Why not? Most people don't use rpi as a home desktop. These GPIOs are there for a reason and I think that's what people mostly care about unless they are making some magic mirror or other form of a display.

There is a lot more software for Linux boxes than there is for the NodeMCU, for example.

Furthermore, their processing power is orders of magnitude apart, as is RAM and storage. NodeMCU targets embedded, and there are plenty of cases where a rpi is used but a NodeMCU would be more than sufficient. But that doesn't mean that they're equivalent, there are also plenty of use cases where a NodeMCU is horribly underpowered.

I think the ESP8266 supports operating in SDIO mode, it's the descendant of a chip used to add wifi to low-end tablets. So it could be used as a literal replacement for an on-board WiFi module, if SDIO pins are available on the Orange Pi board.

i keep seeing people say that, but i can't find (reputable) seller with price <$3. do you have some links for sellers with that price that you've done business with?

Here's $2.85 with lots of feedback: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/new-Wireless-module-CH340-Nod...

Personally I've bought from this one: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/NodeMcu-Lua-WIFI-development-...

So far tested 3 units and they work without any problem, packaging was also very good.

I don't see any cheaper than those currently, but once you have everything tested, if you want to cut the cost you can always just use esp8266 directly which goes for $1.8

The same store has the Orange Pi Lite, which is essentially the same as the One but with wifi instead of ethernet (plus a microphone, ir receiver, and a 2nd usb port). It costs $2.01 more.

They also have the Orange Pi PC Plus, which has both ethernet and wifi, 1GB of RAM instead of 512MB, and an 8GB eMMC. But that's getting up in price to ~$25 shipped.

I bought an Orange PI PC a few weeks back. It died after two days and the sellers are being extremely difficult at giving me a refund. I advise against buying from them.

That is the game you play when you buy from China.

I disagree. That's the game you play "buy cheap from China."

Spend a bit more (say, $30) and the quality will greatly surpass expectations.

I bought 50 of them and found only one that was faulty. Didn't bother asking for refund as the whole process probably could cost more than the product itself.

Did you resell them or do a cool project? I love seeing writeups of folks who make arrays of inexpensive ARM boards.

Then I would recommend hackster.io - they have a section for just Raspberry Pi projects.

I'm going to be posting my own soon using the new Pi Zero w/ camera connector - made my own text message powered camera doorbell.

I resold some and kept about 10 of them. Waiting for mainline kernel to be finally working to have some fun setting up Kubernetes cluster. I also created Cassandra cluster just to see if that could be possible. It worked, but performance was terrible.

Generally they know of this and will refund you or send you another replacement without you shipping back anything.

Sellers on aliexpress are more cooperative if you open a dispute rather than just messaging them, because it carries a consequence if mediation doesn't go in their favor. You can open disputes for a while (two weeks ish?) after confirming now too

They say the 5V ⎓ 3A power supply needs to be connected through the Orange Pi One’s DC socket. However, they don’t mention the size of barrel connector¹ (outer diameter & inner diameter) that will actually fit inside the DC socket.

Does anyone here know?

――――――

¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_power_connector

I don't have it at hand to measure but it's not something typical. I suggest getting an offer on aliexpress where they include dc barrel to usb cable.

edit: outer diameter 4mm

Thanks for the firsthand confirmation; I appreciate it!

4.0mm/1.7mm barrel plug, centre positive according to http://linux-sunxi.org/Xunlong_Orange_Pi_Plus - I think it's the same on all of the Orange Pi boards.

Oh, nice, thanks for that link and info! As you mentioned, the page even lists the output plug polarity¹ it requires (centre positive)!

EDIT: Just realized that’s the same size barrel connector used for Sony’s PlayStation Portable², PlayStation TV³, etc., and the power supply⁴ those devices come with is 5V ⎓ 2A and have a centre positive polarity, so it seems like they’ll be perfect for use on the Orange Pi One.

――――――

¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_symbols

² — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable

³ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_TV

⁴ — http://f.cl.ly/items/3I3N1m0U1E3o3I1q0v19/sony_ps_tv_ac_adap...

Don't DC power jacks come keyed for at least voltage/polarity?

If not -- why‽

They come in various shapes, varying on inner diameter, outer diameter, and length. Smaller connectors may tend to be lower voltage, but that's certainly always true.

There are several standards, and at least some of them specify voltage ranges for particular sizes, but there's no universal standard.

List of plug sizes and their common uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_power_connector#Listin...

Could always solder on a mini/micro usb header for power. Just pick up 10 from aliexpress while getting your Orange Pi.

You know, this is about half the power of a linux machine (not counting HDD) you can get on azure for $13 a month. However, it's a one time purchase... I can see myself buying 10 of these, hooking them up to my MQ, and running a bunch of celery workers with less critical tasks.

I think you're better off buying some old server for the $140. You can get an 8-core Xeon plus 16GB of RAM and a compatible motherboard for about that amount.

I'm very interested, would you have a link?

Ebay has Dell R5400 rack mount servers for under $100.

2.66 ghz quad core xeon, 16 gb ram.

Not exactly the original poster's specs, but pretty close.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epIlB49SNTI

I don't know if this specific one is a good buy, it's just the first thing that came up when I searched "HP Proliant", but here's an example [0]. Search for the names of servers from the past few years on eBay, and you can find some powerful hardware for cheap. Keep in mind they're typically very loud.

[0] http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Proliant-DL380-G6-8-Core-Server-1...

Furthermore, get a motherboard with a common socket maybe a generation or two behind. Some larger companies have been decommissioning old hardware, so you can get CPUs for a magnitude or two less money than before.

Thanks for that! I've been looking at picking up some old PowerEdge units, and never thought of that!

If you are in a decent metro (or near to one) check out Craigslist. I've seen quad-core Xeon boxen (HP Proliant and Dell Poweredge) for <200USD in my area. If I drive about 2 hours away, the prices are about 30% lower and about twice as many available.

Might also google office or company liquidators in your area. You can often snag IT equipment and servers for fairly cheap from them as well.

Check out http://www.savemyserver.com/ and look at something like the PowerEdge 2950 III.

I have some "cloud" servers at home DELL C6100 .. Xeon, lots of RAM. I used them as a lab at one point but am now confused what to do with 'em. These days, I am playing with deep learning. Is it reasonable to pick up some cheap GPU to go into these? Any other ideas?

Does your GPU fit that chassis? That is my major concern with that. Beyond that, the major weakness of those chassis is that they eat a bunch of power compared to modern processors. That's why they're being sold off.

Other than that, the default GPGPU picks are either the OG GTX Titan or the 780 Ti since either has the same processor as the Tesla compute cards.

The power consumption will eat into your savings if you use that 24/7 however. One of the nice thing about these tiny SBCs is that they run on just a few watts.

You just described why I bought the i5 skywell nuc. Yes it's a little pricey for what you get, but power consumption is low. It's a perfectly adequate lab machine.

Why I only found out about this by accident? I just bought a Rpi3 for 40 usd...

It was no accident. You are on HN. Then things like this happen. Learn to deal with it! ;-)

I mean, I visit /r/arduino, /r/diy almost daily. I hate missing stuff like this for months.

I keep buying then all :) got 2 CHIPs (although I think I only ordered one) one of then was faulty... the other I'm a bit unsatisfied. although I did not managed to have the time to play much with it, I get some noise/static sound coming out of the audio jack as processes are run (I'm typing or running commands in the bash ). Video quality is deplorable... the PIs are still very sturdy and cool machines... worth the pennies.

Same could be said about literally any product you buy online, actually the same could be said about buying things in B&M stores seen as you can't just teleport there for free you either have to add the two public transport journeys or the gas to drive there…

Nope, since many stores include shipping in the price, or offer free shipping after a minimum order amount.

BTW, I'm criticizing the fact that the shipping cost are not easy to find upfront, not that there are any. I'm even acknowledging that they worked to reduce them.

Well, I just bought the elusive pi zero, as a kit...because that's the only way I can get it, from adafruit a few days ago...around $36 with shipping. The actual shipping was $8.50 and I am just 5 miles from their office.

Do they actually ship from their office though? Or from a warehouse somewhere further away?

I think their warehouse and office is in the same place.

The Adafruit offices are in NYC, right? There are three or four Microcenter stores in the area, and they claim to have "10+" available.

Interesting. I went to Microcenter once and got a tablet for $20 bucks. Nothing fancy though...had Jellybean installed. I will definitely check them out for the pi zero...hope I am not too late to the party.

On their website, you can choose specific stores and get inventory counts for that store. Of course, I'm making the assumption that the numbers are correct-ish. Every one of their stores that I've checked always claims "10+" Pi Zeros in stock.

If the shipping for a computer dominates the cost I wonder if it makes sense to distribute them a different way. Conferences, club meetings, schools, etc? I suppose there's opportunity there for someone.

Perhaps even... brick and mortar.

Unfortunately, that adds another pocket to be paid, thus making slim margined goods unaccessible at traditional brick and mortar.

Yeah, that was a no-go for me (might reconsider since you posted the prices here). It really sucks that many shops still do this. It makes sense sometimes (when you have large inventory with different sizes and thus shipping costs) to not have a shipping section, but not this time. And you can still at least show the shipping right there where I fill out my address.

So you want to know something more than a country (perhaps postal/zip code) before showing me the shipping price? I simply don't bother going further and look for another vendor (would not work here, I know).

Yeah this is exactly what demotivated me from using my CHIP. This is probably my single biggest pet peeve of online shopping, when people hide huge costs in shipping. I am very harsh with negative feedback when this happens. CHIP is definitely guilty of it.

That's my issue with the Raspberry Pi.

It's often advertised as a 35 dollar computer, etc., however when I decided to get one all the recommended partners and distributers were easily selling it for 40-45 minimum, excluding tax and shipping costs.

Are you based in the UK?

It's termed the $35 computer becuase components are purchased in dollars, and so it's the base price without having to take into consideration the daily fluctuations in currencies.

It's manufactured in the UK however (Wales specifically), and so there will be inevitable shipping costs to destinations outside of the UK. This is simply unavoidable, and will depend on factors such as the price of oil.

No, I'm in the US. Shipping costs are definitely understandable.

I just mean that there have been times I've looked for one only to find marked up prices before shipping/other costs.

"before shipping" is "after shipping" if your shopping in US shops though.

I found it to be the case for both US and EU distributors.

It'd just be nice if the costs were described rather than just silently raising the price without explanation.

I just went to element14.com (their official distributer in the US), and the current RPi is showing for $35. Where are you seeing the higher price at?

It wasn't recently, but in the past. Last time I looked was probably in April or so.

Ah, that makes sense -- around that time I noticed that the primary distributors such as Element14 were out of stock, but you could pick one up from a place like Adafruit for $5 - $10 more.

I've bought mine at a brick-and-mortar Microcenter, and I ended up paying less than $35 for it ($35 with a $5-off coupon plus tax). So for RPi at least, the cost is not disguised as shipping.

most people assume you have to pay for shipping, at least with most online retailers. yes, it may cost $15.22 but it is still a $9 computer, the same way that an iPhone might be $599 with $5 shipping they don't call it a $604 iPhone.

this most likely also includes handling costs which in this business is most likely going to be one of the biggest expenses once you've conquered production.

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