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Comment by amigoingtodie | Hacker News Reader

Which of these are readily available for around the price listed?

Also, can anybody vouch for the Espressobin? 3 gigabit ports, usb3, and SATA. Nice.

The hardware is nice. The mini PCIe appears to be temperamental depending on which board you've used and there's little to no support from the vendor - they seem to have released everything, then disappeared.

All of them AFAIK. Even the Zero W can (finally) be had with relative ease, I just ordered one from SparkFun and Adafruit also has 'em in stock. Been wanting to make one into a security camera but they have been hard to get until just recently.

I think it depends on what is meant by "readily available". It's hard to do something like buy more than a couple Zero-W's at $10 apiece, unless things have changed very recently. In the past, I've seen people wanting to use a few dozen in a project having trouble finding that many for uninflated prices.

Yeah I abandoned a kickstarter roll out because I discovered I couldn't buy 1000 ... My guess is that they're losing a little on each one

I can't see why they would though. I don't think the RPF has the resources to sell so many units at a loss. I suspect it's probably just barely breaking even on both. The Wifi chipset the Zero W uses costs exactly $5 in quantity according to Digikey; the board layout is slightly different but otherwise the bill of materials is the same so that's the main cost difference. They're probably making some profits off of the accessories like the case or the camera (especially the camera, which is pretty expensive and I expect fairly popular).

Microcenter will sell you a single W for $5.

If you buy more than one, it is over $10 each and increases based on quantity.

Of course, I am lured in every time I am near and have a few Ws, and definitely spend more than $5.

Very true. It's definitely hard to get more than a couple still. But they aren't perpetually sold out anymore, at least. That is definitely an improvement in the availability that has occurred in the past couple months, so maybe their supply is finally settling down.

$49USD ESPRESSOBin board with 1GB DDR3

$79USD ESPRESSObin board with 2GB DDR3

https://www.amazon.com/ESPRESSObin-SBUD102-Single-Computer-N...

see more:

* http://wiki.espressobin.net/tiki-index.php

* http://wiki.espressobin.net/tiki-index.php?page=Package+Pric...

* SATA I or SATA II or SATA III ?

Probably "SATA 3.0"

based on this: https://www.marvell.com/docs/embedded-processors/assets/marv...

"The Marvell® ARMADA® 3700 SoC family incorporates rich high-speed I/Os including USB 3.0, SATA 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet (1 GbE) and 2.5 GbE (NBASE-T) off ering two confi gurations: 88F3720 for dual-core and 88F3710 for single-core, both confi gurations have industrial temperature grade support. In addition, these devices feature a wide set of security and data acceleration engines suitable for innovative networking, storage, and computing applications. The ARMADA 3700 supports advanced power management technologies for switching the CPU cores, as well as per-core dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. This solution off ers a signifi cant reduction in power consumption under diff erent workloads and delivers an optimal Performance-per-Watt in the embedded markets."

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