The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi

cam.ac.uk

I remember the early years the Pi was more focused on children's education and the same sort of path the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) took...

But the great thing was they could quickly scale up the manufacturing to the point where these $35 computers were available to almost anyone, and since that time a huge ecosystem has flourished, and still grows, even after wave after wave of clones has appeared.

I remember the Asus Tinkerboard being the first clone board that I thought could _really_ make a dent... but then Asus basically put it on life support. Pine64, BananaPi, Orange Pi, Radxa, et all often make some pretty decent hardware, but the fact that it's often as hard today to get my projects working on those boards as it was with all SBCs back in 2012-2014 means I still stick to Raspberry Pi-branded boards for most things.

Though I hate the closed source bits that power the Pi's Broadcom SoC, and how some of the hardware details can be locked behind restrictive NDAs, I'm happy Broadcom seems to have continued interest in feeding the project over the years.

I was worried early on about availability. They started with the goal of getting into classrooms, being cheap so kids or low-income schools can afford them, but then you also had for-profit businesses buying hundreds of these to power kiosks and digital signage. I'd almost describe it as "taking advantage" but perhaps that's too harsh. I was a little put off at first that these educational tools were being snatched up by businesses trying to save money.

I suspect that was an initial concern too, until they came to terms with the idea that e.g. Cisco's requirements in a Raspberry Pi were both achievable and also help underwrite production of more imaginative things.

> I was a little put off at first that these educational tools were being snatched up by businesses trying to save money.

I think the RPi's attraction for commercial users is less the price point and more the size of the community around it. It's by far the most approachable system to work with when you need a small linux device with cameras and gpio.

> I'd almost describe it as "taking advantage" but perhaps that's too harsh.

It is, especially when you consider economies of scale with things like computer production.

Building 50 boards is expensive. Building 500 is cheaper. Building 5 million? That's now custom equipment dedicated to the project, and costs just plummet per unit.

I also like the Pi4 model in which the "higher end" versions seem to be more profitable, subsidizing the lower cost/RAM models.

Yeah the fact is that the more demand there is for it the cheaper they can make it, so everybody wins in the end.

Well except the people living around the place where the raw materials are extracted, but that's another story.

The RPi would be viable in my work at any price lower than the cheapest Intel NUC. We’ve bought 800 since November. We’ve decimated our Windows licensing costs, power use, MTBI, and shrunk our attack surface considerably.

There is really no competitor that has even been a consideration for us. Software stack is the hardest to get right with them at scale for fleet management IMO.

Do you mean that your company has switched 800 employees from Windows machines to RPi? Are the 800 people non-engineering? Are the RPis thin clients? Everything running in the cloud?

I was thinking servers.

Before the Pi I'd bought a number of BeagleBoards over the years.

I still have a few BeagleBoard xMs and original BeagleBones sitting around. The bone specifically was super neat in that it had a ton of IO (PWM, A2D, encoder inputs, SPI, UART, etc.) that could be controlled by either the CPU or microcontrollers embedded in the SoC.

Problem is at this point I have no idea what to do with any of them. ARM CPUs got so much faster in such a short span of time that it feels like arm boards from a few years ago are kind of just junk today. There are many dirt cheap boards that are way faster than a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 (or the 700 MHz armv6 core in the OG Pi) available today.

I've never owned a Beagle. I discovered earlier this year that they were open hardware and even had real-time capabilities. It struck me that this is what the Pi should have been.

Then I saw the price. So I'll be sticking with Pis.

It would be a master-stroke if the Pi gained real-time capabilities.

The BeagleBone Black was $45 at launch (10 years ago, ouch), which was $10 more than the Pi B. At this point they certainly seem to have abandoned that price point.

The first BeagleBone (the 'White') was $85, but it had a JTAG debugger embedded in it so you could actually single step through the Linux kernel if you wanted.

I share that sentiment. I'm so sad that the Beagle project doesn't come out with a CPU refresh.

The BBAI doesn't count?

Sort of, but they tripled the price to take the CPU cores from 2010 (single A8) to 2012 (dual A15). I know the whole point of the BB is the real-time capabilities and the two DSP cores, but I do wish the application CPUs were faster. Now that there's compute support for the GPU in the Pi4, I wonder what the performance difference is (in AI stuff).

That's all fair. I love that the BB platform is so stable, I can design around it with reasonable confidence that my gizmo will still work in _another_ decade, which is a perspective only recently coming to the Pi world. But there are certainly sacrifices made in that approach.

Beaglebone AI was released: April 23, 2013.

Considering we're in early 2022, no. I wouldn't call that a refresh.

That's a typo, where did you find it? The BBAI announcement was February of 2019, and shipped in September of that year.

You are right, I was wrong. My apologies.

It looks like the date I quoted was the release date for an older variant of the beagle.

> I remember the Asus Tinkerboard being the first clone board that I thought could _really_ make a dent... but then Asus basically put it on life support.

Right -- it had potential but it also had problems they were seemingly unwilling to fix.

> Pine64, BananaPi, Orange Pi, Radxa, et all often make some pretty decent hardware, but the fact that it's often as hard today to get my projects working on those boards as it was with all SBCs back in 2012-2014 means I still stick to Raspberry Pi-branded boards for most things.

This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things.

Even when it comes down to something like pi-gen, which is obscure but enormously useful for tinkering with distribution builders. Or the Raspberry Pi Imager app for desktops.

Eben Upton credits Eric Schmidt with providing the motivation to make computers even cheaper, rather than pursuing better and better Raspberry Pi machines, and in the grand scheme of things it's hard to ignore that Raspberry Pi is better when they do focus on choosing their own constraints with stuff like the 2040 and the Pi Zero 2W.

> This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things.

Total picture is that I can't still run mainline Linux on Rapsberry Pi 2B without losing a bunch of basic features, while I can run it on almost all my Orange Pis. This makes Raspberry Pi very annoying to use. I wanted to use Rpi 2B as a networked sound card for a room. Nope. No audio support mainline after like 7 years after release.

I'm talking about the foundation's total picture, obviously.

The Pi isn't mainstream hardware, is it?

Their total picture includes OS distribution and support that eclipses all the other mini-SBC-type ARM machines.

Ubuntu has a mainstream distribution supported by the Pi Imager, and it should support sound, if you have the right boot parameters set?

(edit: not sure this supports as far back as the 2B; I might have to test that)

The Pi is a lot less "weird" than a lot of the hardware the mainline kernel does support

Wanna run Linux on a Sega Dreamcast? (game console from 1998)

Well there's a dreamcast_defconfig in the mainline kernel still

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/sh/config...

How about a Nintendo 64 from 1996? Someone sat down and hacked that out too!

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mips/20201225190503.1235321881...

Or for more recent examples. How about some ancient routers?

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....

These are bits of hardware added by hobbyists or small teams. The Raspberry Pi foundation is a company with paid developers supporting a set of devices you could count on one hand (or two if you include every variant separately)

The later ARM64 Raspberry Pi hardware is more standard, and you definitely can get most of the hardware working with a mainline Linux kernel. It looks like sound may be an outlier - but bcm2835_audio is in staging, and I2S is in the tree proper but that does require additional hardware.

Sure, but how many Orange Pi-like sbc's bother to advertise mainline kernel compatibility? That matters too if you want ease of support. The Raspberry Pi folks have a long history of working with the kernel dev community; their support is not just hacked together after-the-fact.

Weird question. Do you want an actual count?

> Weird question.

Rhetorical question, I think.

>I wanted to use Rpi 2B as a networked sound card for a room.

The analog sound output is a hack through 10bit pwm. It's better than nothing, but I wouldn't recommend building an audio related project around it.

I built a moderately successful audio project around it. We've got a few hundred Pi's as audio player appliances for our streaming platform in a hospitality niche in my country.

Yeah, Pi audio card leaves a lot to be desired, but mostly the power level of the output. The signal quality can be worked around somewhat with processing the audio beforehand (standard compression and EQ stuff, so that the signal doesn't need something that the card can't do).

However, there are sound cards you can put on top of Pi, such as https://www.hifiberry.com (which we use), without breaking the budget, and they sound great.

Edit to add: what I love about Pis is how reliable they are. We literally treat them as appliances and they end up in places that are really not optimial from either ventilation, dust or temperature aspect, and they very rarely break. Even SD cards are not as fragile as we've initially feared (we've minimized write cycles but there is some of that).

If they'd taken the same path OLPC did there would not be a Ten Years of Raspberry Pi.

Pine is in a league of its own by now, with the RK3399 and some of the other chips used in their boards having pretty fleshed out mainline support. I would personally consider them better options than a Raspberry Pi just based on software options. You can slap postmarketOS on a handful of Pine stuff now and get very up-to-date stuff.

I like PINE64's stuff, too.

Armbian is another good choice, for people who prefer Debian based OS.

I still remember the giddy feeling of paging through coffee table magazines at various places, seeing them mention a $35, credit card sized computer. I also remember trying to explain what it was to my parents, begging them to buy me one even though it had to be shipped from the UK. The biggest memory, though, was opening that box on Christmas day and finding the Raspberry Pi 1 (Revision 2) nestled inside. The rest of my gifts didn't matter: I ripped the mouse and keyboard out of my desktop PC, plugged them into the Pi and co-opted our DirecTV HDMI cable so I could see it in action. Words can't quite describe the magic of booting into Raspbian back them, especially as a budding young computer enthusiast who thought any of this stuff qualified as sorcery.

Nowadays I've moved on to administrating bigger systems, and the Raspberry Pi's value proposition has cooled off somewhat (the Pi Zero is still neat, though). In any case, I can't help but recommend them whenever I hear someone talk about dabbling in Sysops. I get that giddy feeling again, hoping that it might spark someone else's fascination with Linux and wild hardware form factors.

Thank you for all you've done, Raspberry Pi foundation. I'm sure there's more people like me who grew up alongside one of your devices, but I can only hope that the future is even brighter for the next generation of young computer enthusiasts.

(For those of you wondering: yes, my Pi does still work a decade later)

> Nowadays I've moved on to administrating bigger systems, and the Raspberry Pi's value proposition has cooled off somewhat (the Pi Zero is still neat, though).

Has it? The Pi 4 is incredible value for money. Barely needs any compromises. Stick it in a case (Argon Neo!), stick it on top of a UASP disk caddy... a whole emergency desktop computer for really almost every normal use.

By the time you've added enough components to make it fully functional, it's up to the price range of a used machine off eBay or even some new chromebooks

I think that's a fundamental issue with a lot of these basic electronics. A significant % of the cost is on packaging/markup/distribution when the chip itself is so cheap. I frequently see old mini-PCs with i3s and it's for ~100EUR. Even a 4th gen i3 is going to be way more powerful than a Pi, the only thing going for the Pi is probably newer faster memory.

IMO the best use case for the Pi is buying 10 Pi-zeros at a discount and putting them on a moderately-heavy task that needs them to run off a battery.

That's true, although I think it is also getting to the point that it is at least as powerful as some of those cheap Chromebooks. Most of those don't even have 8 GB of RAM like the latest Pi 4.

It seems like whatever Pi comes next might pass some of these.

The 8gb Pi 4 is crazily good value for money, but one of the striking things about the Pi OS is that you barely need the 8gb ever. The 4gb machine is fine for almost everyone, as is a £5 case, £10 UASP caddy and a £20 120gb SSD.

And _then_ if you don't have stuff lying around, you go onto eBay looking for bits. Mice, keyboards, whatever.

At some point I need to upgrade my secondhand MacBook Pro. In the back of my mind I always the idea of "which is the cheapest Mac I could use for work in an emergency if I haven't been paid?"

Now the cheapest machine I can get by on is an 8gb Pi 4 and the monitor and keyboard I still have lying around. I know because I've done it.

> "which is the cheapest Mac I could use for work in an emergency if I haven't been paid?"

Mac mini (late 2012 or later), $100 to $200 on ebay atm.

Honorable mention goes to one of my favorite Macs ever, the mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro "Retina", which can also run Catalina.

The tricky part is you need a Mac that can run macOS Catalina (or later) so it gets security patches (for most of the rest of this year at least.) Sadly the poor Mac might have to turn into a Linux or ChromeOS PC if you want to keep getting security patches after its ~10 year macOS support lifespan is over. :(

I use a 2012 i7 Mac Mini I picked up for cheap as a server. Can hold 2 drives and upgrade memory to 16GB. Quite performant and silent.

Yes -- I wish my 2012 was an i7, but it's an i5. It does have the RAM upgrade and I guess it would be zippier with an SSD.

I've never been quite ready to dedicate it as a dev server but it is now beyond usefulness as a fallback developer machine; just not quick enough.

The UASP caddy it's not that easy to put to work.

Just to share my experience, I did bought a UASP caddy to plug into my Raspberry Pi 4 and unfortunately the microchip in the caddy was not recognizable by the Linux kernel running in the Raspbian system.

I would take a more careful choice when purchase a caddy again, to guarantee the chip is supported by the kernel.

[0] Jeff Geerling has a nice article talking about that: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/uasp-makes-raspberry-...

I had a bad experience with one UASP caddy, I must admit (a Sabrent) -- it's fine on my Mac and doesn't work on the Pi. (Even after the manufacturer firmware update that says it should).

I found a reliable way to test it was to try to load a 1.5gb database into mariadb.

The caddy I am using is this one, if it helps you at all:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FCLG65U

Discontinued but I think any replacement Inateck should be a good choice.

I think even the newer Sabrents should be fine but I don't know.

This Inateck caddy is excellent; it's the one I have been recommending. Though I'd like to test some M.2 stick adapters.

(I'd originally begun to devise a Pi 4 SSD appliance for one of my customers to sell with their database product, but the chip shortage has put paid to that.)

> I'm sure there's more people like me who grew up alongside one of your devices...

Hey it's me!

My first computer that I had root on and didn't need to share was a Raspberry Pi gifted by my grandfather (an old school developer, I should get him to write some about his work).

The Raspberry Pi was my introduction to Linux/non-Windows OS's, I really owe a lot to my experiences with it.

> Words can't quite describe the magic of booting into Raspbian back them, especially as a budding young computer enthusiast who thought any of this stuff qualified as sorcery.

So true! I still have massive nostalgia for the color splash and then boot sequence with the Raspberry logo up in the top!

I've posted about this a lot but I feel the need to evangelize it:

The cleverest thing the Raspberry Pi can do that almost no-one uses is network boot.

You don't need an SD card at all, you can setup your server such that you can change what OS a Pi boots into just by renaming a symlink.

I have a bunch of Pis around my house that all network boot into specific tasks and it is a joy.

Do you have a preferred tutorial on this?

This is item 1 on google (https://linuxhit.com/raspberry-pi-pxe-boot-netbooting-a-pi-4...) but happy to see whats worked for you.

I don't. But I really want to write one, because all the documentation on how to do it is quite poor.

As I've been playing around with my Raspberry Pis, I've found this too. The hardware technical documentation is good, but, well, _very_ technical. There is a lot of very good information, but it's spread around in blog posts, forum posts (a lot of those), source code and comments, etc.

But not a lot of how-tos for intermediate stuff.

Hope to write up the stuff I'm working on once I figure it out :-)

Thank you for sharing! I looked around and found this cool link:

https://blog.alexellis.io/state-of-netbooting-raspberry-pi-i...

I would be really interested in learning how to do this. In the past I've looked into PXE booting, but the tutorials all seem pretty opaque ("just make your router send a magic DHCP packet") or too specific to one configuration.

Did you try this official guide? https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/remote-a...

And it causes me endless frustration. Because after a power outage the pi will boot and look for somewhere to boot mere seconds after power is back.

But my router supplying DHCP and with info about where it should look takes guessing 3 minutes. And the NAS containing the actual files that the Pi should load is in a virtual machine that takes, guessing, 8 minutes for the hypervisor and VM to start.

So by then the Pi will have timed out and sit there, doing nothing for all eternity.

Fix? An extremely elaborate scheme of Ikea trådfri outlet controlled by the same server taking 8 minutes to boot to power-cycle the pi after it gets up (and notices that the pi doesn't answer to pings).

Has this been fixed yet? Is it even considered a bug?

Not sure about the rationale of giving up booting... Especially when this ought to be an extremely common scenario.

Could you get a small UPS for the router? I would imagine it's not sucking down a lot of watts, should take care of momentary blips and anything less than an hour fairly easily.

Or you know, just insert a $5 SD card like a normal person?

If you have a bunch of them, you cannot centrally manage them this way without a lot more work. Also, if they log to disk, it will wear down the SD card quickly. Netbooting wears down 0 SD cards.

SD cards are less than optimal in Pis for general computing usage, but you could put something like iPXE on the card. That's how I'd work around the issue originally described in this thread. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPXE

At the tech lab I managed IT for back in college we had our own implementation of the preboot environment hacked together from Python and shell scripts on top of a nearly bare linux initrd filesystem. It would poll the router until it got an assignment, then fetch the appropriate files and boot the proper OS. We had to roll our own stuff because it was actually rsync'ing Windows hard drive images and would refresh the drive to clean state before booting every time the power cycled each morning. But you wouldn't need any of that and could probably hack together a solution that does what you want with iPXE.

Even the thought of having an aging battery isn't worth it to me. And not sure if it would help either.

What I have now works for this case, but it definitely put me off using it for other projects.

How often do you have power outages?

Can't remember one in the last 10 years.

10-15 times/year where I live now (suburb of major city) when you count the brownouts. even though power here is underground, there's enough aboveground that it still goes out or blinks often enough to have a UPS.

when I lived on a mountain, quite a few more for sometimes days at a time.

when I lived downtown in the major city in a high-rise, 2-3 times/year when you counted brownouts/blips.

a slack I'm on for the area had outages throughout the city.

so, if you only get it once in the last 10 years, count yourself lucky. I'm on the west coast, not Texas, and there is quite a bit of power generation nearby.

I'm pretty sure I hadn't a single one since I'm in Munich (2009). I remember some planned outages as kid at my parents place, and occasionally we tripped the circuit breakers.

I guess Munich has a really good grid. Everything underground and safe from natural disasters.

> Everything underground and safe from natural disasters.

Well, until stuff gets digged out for construction... I was affected by the arson attack in Berg am Laim last year, took about twelve hours for power to get back.

Wind, snow, and ice affect anything above ground. Doesn’t matter if 90% is buried if 10% isn’t.

Downtown core, everything underground, fire in the vault. That was the last outage I was living there for. Since there were 2 grid operators, I had power after about 6 hours, others across the street went days without.

We get a clock resetter about every other week, and > 20 min outage maybe twice a year in New Hampshire.

What? Do you reset clocks deliberately by cycling the power, or is it a description of an outage so long it will reset clocks?

I think they mean the latter. When I lived in rural Wisconsin we'd get those at least once a month in the summer, usually from thunderstorms. The lights would go out for a second, and the clocks would start flashing 12:00. Haven't seen it happen since moving into town though.

I think what they meant was an outage so short that it will reset the clock on the microwave/stove/bedside alarm but that you don't notice it otherwise. In the northeast, these happen frequently overnight, usually due to minor weather events or grid maintenance.

Most of my clocks are internet connected and battery backed, so the only ones left in my house that are affected are on kitchen appliances.

Home, very seldom. This is in a summer cabin where the infrastructure is really bad (and under reconstruction)... Getting much better but sill one every other month and since it is a summer cabin it can take quite a while before I can do it manually.

Ok, that puts me at ease :D

Change the boot order, so that network boot is after USB / SD card, or disable it completely?

There is no SD card or USB storage attached. To my knowledge it is only booting from network.

I think there's a bit in the boot boot order hex value that you can use to tell it to keep trying indefinitely, but don't quote me on that.

the new rom is supposed to have fixed this

if it's a pi 4 you can upgrade the rom to the latest

if it's a pi 3 you will have to put the rom on an sdcard (no eeprom on the board)

Can't find anything about it, do you have more information?

I think it was this one:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/blob/master/firmwa...

I had the same problem as you, updated my eeprom and the problem was fixed

Thanks! I'll make sure to retry when I get a chance.

Can you get something that responds very quickly, even if only to tell it to reboot?

Strange that it stops trying network boot; most of the systems I have will sit there and retry PXE boot if everything else fails.

How long are your power outages typically? Is it short enough you put the router and NAS on a UPS? Maybe have a backup generator for core services?

I'm not saying this would work for you but for some people, like me, a down and dirty solution might work fine. I live in a village and short power outages (a few seconds to a couple of minutes) are relatively frequent, so a UPS covers many of my needs... for a short period of time, which is most of the time.

For out of the ordinary scenarios, such as the recent Storm Eustice, I just bought a 2.8kW petrol powered backup generator (not a particularly expensive one: equivalent of about US$500). I don't have an automatic failover yet, but that may be the next stage. Still, enough to run fridge/freezer, router, my computer, and possibly my central heating pumps (still need to investigate that).

The problem with UPSs is that they aren't necessarily quiet, and this pisses me off. I don't need loads of fan noise and beeping: I need some batteries in a box that will output a pure sine wave at 230V AC without making a big fuss about it, which is doable, but I'd also like it not to cost an arm and a leg.

"Is it short enough you put the router and NAS on a UPS? Maybe have a backup generator for core services?"

Sometimes you donts want to have tons of equipment hanging around - for example I keep all my mit in a small closet to avoid unhappy wife syndrome.

This is fair. You need to have somewhere to put it. My generator lives in a small shed outside so that wasn't too hard, and you can get some pretty small UPSs, but if you need to keep things up for longer, or have a lot of kit to hook in they get pretty bulky.

can you use this option?

https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/config_t...

If your power is sketchy, get a UPS…I have one that powers the NAS, cable modem, switch and WiFi. (And pi hole. )

Until this is "fixed" by the Pi project (indeed, most PCs will boot loop if no boot devices succeed), I'd try something like iPXE (loaded onto SD or USB.) That should be able to loop properly.

https://github.com/ipxe/pipxe

what i'm hearing is that you have insufficient pi. if the dhcp were a pi and the nas were a pi, then they'd be ready before your doing-stuff pi timed out

> But my router supplying DHCP and with info about where it should look takes guessing 3 minutes. And the NAS containing the actual files that the Pi should load is in a virtual machine that takes, guessing, 8 minutes for the hypervisor and VM to start.

And thats why people get paid to manage networked devices, if a contingency event occurs and the network doesnt come up properly, then its not setup properly.

Logical thinking is one of the things the RPi makes people engage in, not superstition.

Really nothing wrong with the setup. Everything on the network handles it fine except for the pi.

I'm curious what you think is wrong with it.

I've been netbooting Pi's since the very early days and have been running networked sound since then (replacing earlier PC-based setup). Still running on the same old Pi 2's with Wolfson/Cirrus cards. SD cards are write-locked and all they do is load the kernel; as soon as the system boots, the root FS is mounted off the server (looping on failure, e.g. server not back up yet). Zero reason for the SD cards to wear out (no writes), the Pi's always come back after power fails (and we get plenty of them).

What software are you using for networked sound? I’ve got three echo dots serving a whole house audio amp, but they’re a little clunky to use and I’ve piles of old RPis sitting around

Icecast driven by mpd on the server; 'mpd' output is also captured as raw PCM and sent over the network to anything that wants to play it back (playback software is just a hack that reads the data and dumps into the soundcard, basically it's pretty much a C program that implements 'netcat | alsa').

Thanks for sharing, didn't know that.

Similar PSA: a common Pi complaint is that SD cards wear out quickly under 24/7 use. Routing most logs to memory rather than disk vastly reduces the wear on the SD: https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

Running backblocks -n will often fix them (non-destructive read/write - it causes a rewrite of every block on the device).

Don't do it often or you'll cause extra wear, but if you find yourself getting random errors from the SD card, give it a try.

Many services log via journald, so to move those off the SD card, you can just add /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/volatile.conf with contents below and `systemctl force-reload systemd-journald.service`:

    [Journal]
    Storage=volatile

Check what your full config is with `systemd-analyze cat-config systemd/journald.conf`.

The split file approach is very handy for Pi-s. I have a set of configs I install on any new Pi I get (resolved, locale, timesync, etc.).

You can do a very similar thing with services in e.g., /etc/systemd/system/example.service.d/override.conf, which I like to do to constrain their sandbox more than the system package does (ProtectSystem=strict, SystemCallArchitecture=native, SystemCallFilter=@system-service, ~@resources @privileged, etc.)

What do all these network booted devices do? What do they do better than an SD booted device?

> you can change what OS a Pi boots into just by renaming a symlink.

Just to be clear, this is the symlink on your server right? Is there any advantage in doing this other than convenience of not having to go around your house and individually change out the SD cards of each device?

I've got a bunch of Pis around my house too, but they're just gathering dusk ;) I had all these grandiose ideas, but something, something ADHD.

In my view, the biggest advantage of the Pi (and the Arduino too) wasn't just the devices themselves, but rather the large-scale acceptance and adopting of ARM boards in specific, and microcontroller boards in general. You could be using a Teensy or a Pro Micro for a task, but DIY electronics is much easier and more accessible than many years ago. How much of this is cause and how much is effect, may be tough to say but I'm happy that electronics (and moderately complex projects) are far more easily accessible than they were some years back. Open source software/Git/GitHub too deserves credit.

The Pi and Arduino being cheap helped their acceptance for DIY projects I think more than anything. An alternate reality Raspberry Pi identical to our Pi save for a MIPS CPU instead of ARM would have been just as popular. The magic of a Pi isn't the ARM CPU but the $25 price point for a Linux computer and the ability to use memory cards, power supplies, input devices, and monitors people already own.

They're cheap enough to play with yet really flexible. Even if you never finish a "project" using a Pi it can still be a fun little emulation machine, Kodi player, or bang around system for kids. Even the Arduino isn't all that useful outside of "projects". Even when a Pi is vastly overpowered for some DIY project powering some LEDs it's still not much more than doing the same project with much more limited but project-specific hardware.

Wasn't the esp8266 similar to the arduino in that regard? It used a totally different chip design from expressif, but even so, it was still popular because of the features for the price!

I've learned a lot more about Linux playing with it.

Learned Python playing with it.

Learned more about package managers using it.

Used to to play with e-ink displays and other interesting peripherals.

I enjoy the Pi and have happily watched as it has become more and more user-friendly.

I have a tendency to think about the textbook picture of a bunch of kids in a classroom lab when I hear about the Pi being for educational purposes. However, it's easy to forget about individuals like yourself and how they've tinkered with one to learn all kinds of things about OSes, programming languages and computerized peripherals.

Funnily enough, as of 2022 I've been finding it impossible to get Raspberry Pis. I suppose it's due to shortages.. I'm in Canada and everywhere is sold out, when checking the US it's sold out, the UK too, etc. Couple resellers price-gouging at 4-5x prices do exist though.

Here's to 10 more years of Pis, preferably with availability too!

Check stock at https://rpilocator.com - they have a Twitter you can follow for alerts.

Every board is OOS in the US.... :-(

Yeah but they do come in stock occasionally, subscribe to the Twitter and turn on alerts.

If you want to pay four times the price for them yes. Or just wait for Q4 when they'll probably ramp up production to meet demand.

It's nuts; they're 3-4x MSRP on the secondary market ($70 for Zero2's, $200+ for 4b's). I just broke down and ordered some competitor SBCs (OrangePi's via AliExpress).

There are many Armbian supported devices[0] which make great alternatives.

[0] https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported

I read an interesting counterpoint in the IpFire forum. Among other points

>Now, everybody is looking for a cheap ARM board with performance and loads of features. The Raspberry Foundation is a charity that pays probably no tax at all, but somehow is selling lots and lots of boards at an absolutely “amazing” price.

>Amazing because nobody else in Europe can compete with them. Paying no taxes helps. The second step is that they have almost completely outsourced their software development. They call it Open Source-ed, but that is not the same.

>Over many years, there has never been a release of that piece of hardware that was supported by a mainline kernel. Neither Linux nor any other of the *BSDs. They simply do not care what software runs on it.

https://community.ipfire.org/t/arm-sbc-support-discussion/26... Post number 4

I thought the organization was split in two, a Raspberry Pi foundation/non-profit that was tasked with the original mission (cheap computing for all people of the world), and a Raspberry Pi company with CEO (Eben Upton), board, etc. driven to be a successful company that produces the Pi.

Here's the foundation: https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/

Here's the company: https://www.raspberrypi.com/about/

Thanks for the heads up. There seems to have been a past thread on a similar topic, when the Ltd announced its IPO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392649

Its a structure like Mozillla, meaning the company is fully owned by the foundation

first time I've seen someone complain about being outcompeted by a charity...

what's next? Glaxo complaining about the Wellcome Trust?

He is making a solid cause and effect description though. About something i hadnt thought about from this perspective before. Namely that by its size it heavily influences the market and its trajectory. The effect is not so different from big companies being able to sell a products at a loss. At the end of the day the existence of the Pi likely played a role in why we dont have a good open source equivalent yet, because it hampers the business models that could finance the necessary development through an institutional advantage.

And i dont have to look further then what i use my Pis for and how much that fits the description of a charitycase. I use it because its cheap and do it despite the sad state of the code base. I dont want to talk you out of your righteous indignation but i think its something interesting to think about. The upsides dont mean there are no negative effects. At the end of the day the complexity and workload for new open source projects is limited. You have only so much spare time. At a certain point you need a business model to get you to a level that allows adaptation which might move it further. There was a interesting thread about it earlier about how many giant projects started as a few week solo project. Think Unix or Git. The more complex hardware gets, the more difficult that gets for anything outside of the monoliths due to enormous entry hurdles. And at the end of the day the Pi doesnt run a mainline kernel and its boot process needs a blob. Its in competition with any open source platforms, be it in sales or developer time, that dont have the same advantage. The fact that they do amazing work doesnt change that.

edit: Not a summary but what i took away from it.

These days it's impossible to find Pis in any of the online stores at their original prices. Vendors who do have any stock are charging 5X.

I've been looking for a Zero WH (Zero W with headers), and for the life of me can't find any in stock anywhere.

/shakes fist at the sky

https://rpilocator.com

Edit: not sure they track the WH variant though

Get it w/o headers, and solder them; A half an hour job for a trembling hand.

Since you seem to only need one board, I don't see how this is an issue.

Or I guarantee someone near you is capable to do the soldering for you. Indeed, if I was designing a soldering practice exercise for someone’s 5th minute ever holding an iron, putting headers on a Pi would be a good one.

Soldering thru hole components is charged by the pin by the fabs. Header might be adding almost $1 to the BOM.

There are many interesting alternatives available:

https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported

I'd worked with "serious" embedded systems when the Pi first came out so I was skeptical. Fast forward to today and I have multiple Pis doing various things for lab experiment automation and so do many others around me. I think the main contribution, similar to what Arduino has done, is giving us a mass market standard that seriously drove down prices.

Such page design make me dizzy. Left, right, left, right, scrolling a whole page to get barely a paragraph. Awkward. Blah.

I'd love to purchase a few Pis for the following purposes:

- Build a 3 or 4 Pi cluster to practice DevOps stuffs

- Use a Pico to learn ARM assembly (However I have a TIVA board for that purpose, although I prefer something simpler)

Nowadays they are all off from the online shops!

If you ever manage to find any for purchase, I wrote up some brief documentation on how I got a k3s cluster set up: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12TT49VgyPRSH7F4b_oC5rOv1...

Thanks! I'll take a look.

Apologies if am misreading the last paragraph, assuming it meant that it's hard to find the Pico, that was the case for a while but the situation is now much better, e.g. Adafruit has 56 in stock: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4883

Admittedly, this is $1 more expensive than the $4 baseline board since it also comes with headers.

Just checked and DigiKey has about 17K in stock ($4 Raspberry Pi Pico): https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC09....

And that's leaving aside the slightly fancier boards that have the RP2040 and cost around $10, e.g. Adafruit Feather RP2040 etc.

The chip itself is not in any shortage, e.g. DigiKey and Mouser have tens of thousands/thousands in stock, etc.

Oh I forgot to mention that Picos are quite available :D It's the Pi4s that are rare. I actually found some in local but they are in kits. I prefer just boards.

It got me (back) into electronics. Hooking stuff up to the pins was great, but I soon worked out that an AVR chip could do more or less the same for under £1. So the pi got neglected :(

I know a number of people who bought a Pi, figured out how easy it was to hook up software to some GPIO pins, then got into microcontrollers and basic electronics afterwards.

It's also funny to see how many Pis out there in the world are doing a task using 1-2W of power continuously for years, where a little microcontroller and a sleep could do the same task using a few mW :D

Sure, but if dev time for the microcontroller was significantly higher it could still lose out overall.

It would depend on what you are trying to do, if you are familiar with C etc. In some ways it is simpler, because your program is all there is.

> It got me (back) into electronics. Hooking stuff up to the pins was great, but I soon worked out that an AVR chip could do more or less the same for under £1. So the pi got neglected :(

I'd argue that the pi was a complete success. It got you back into electronics, which aligns with their goals - get people to learn stuff.

I completely agree.

I was there the day their site went down when they started selling them. Pretty sure I still have that board around somewhere here.

In case someone doesn’t know, the title refers to the movie, Life of PI

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_Pi_(film)

PI is a tiger that has a journey with a boy.

I remember buying a code on eBay for a few $ with which I could then purchase the original Raspberry Pi from RS Components, because of the limited supply.

It was a total waste of money, because I canceled the order and got it faster fron an another online seller.

Thank you for all who worked on making the Pi. I learned so much while having fun. I think it shaped my career too.

My only suggestion is that they should produce more of them. I placed an order early January for the new pi zero2w, still in backorder.

I'm form EU and I can't find the latest Raspberry Pi for 35$... Even many of the older models are still above 35$, is this an EU problem or is there something obvious that I'm missing?

The price of the basic model was increased to $45 due to the chip shortage. They say it will return to $35 when the chip supply improves.

Who knows when that will be.

A Raspberry Pi might very well be the reason I work as a SRE today, I think it was the first machine I SSH'd into and that got me that "anything is possible" feeling.

I haven't used any of the latest generation, but are they still using that custom PMIC that gets fried by the most basic of mistakes but that they completely refuse to sell you for repair? I remember trying to fix some Pis that died for unknown reasons and seeing nothing but anti-repair nonsense from the staff on the official forums. No schematics to be found and even the people who go through the trouble of diagnosing an issue and try to buy a replacement component (because it's custom for some reason) get the standard response: "the Pi is only sold as a unit and is not intended to be user-serviceable".

It's sad that even the cheapest knockoffs from china (like Orange Pi) are more open than the RPi (you can get schematics and all the components are available from the usual places) - I really hope that's improved in the last few years...

Any news on the 64bits RISC-V raspberry pi?

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