Rpilocator – find in stock Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Rpilocator – find in stock Raspberry Pi

rpilocator.com

78 pointsmyth_drannon32 comments

The official raspberry pi is super user friendly, and has a great community. But I feel like most of the HN crowd that has used linux before can manage to follow the instructions to install Arch Linux ARM [0] on a very wide array of alternative devices. These other devices don't have the community support that the official pi does, but they are known devices with known configurations so they work pretty reliably. I'm mostly talking about odroid here because thats what I use. If you really like to "distro hop" on the pi, get a real pi. If you just want to run Arch, you got way more options, with added hardware options (eMMC, dual-nic, etc.)

[0] https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms

Do you know if those are all using the same upstream kernel as the rest of Arch? If so that's a pretty useful list, it's hard to find.

Even if rpi kernels aren't exactly upstream at least I can know the people paid to work on https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux are fairly responsive, and someone else will have hit an issue first.

yea, i think so - latest 5.17 - heres the package with a few patches https://archlinuxarm.org/packages/aarch64/linux-aarch64/file...

Do odroids come with the custom GPIO header pins?

Arch vs Ubuntu and other common distros:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/arch_compared_to_other_dist...

yea, my odroid n2 has the same 40 pin header as the pi.

Pi offers one huge advantage: form factor. If I get a Pi, there's a legion of cases and accessories to fit.

I've got an ODROID C1 and it's fine for what it is, but when I wanted to find a nice case with a display I was basically SOL (this was years ago). The other big issue I had with the C1 is that it used some sort of bullet connecter for power. Pis use USB whatever, and I've got a lot more USB chargers laying around.

My pi seems very particular about which USB adapter I use. If I use the canna-kit provided one, it works great. If I use any lower amperage, it down throttles and shows that power fault icon in the upper right corner of the screenbuffer. So it might as well be a custom adapter because none of my other ones work correctly. The odroid N2 came with a fantastic OEM case that acts as a giant heatsink and easy slide cover, not to mention full size hdmi (I lost my special mini hdmi plug for my pi4) and all of the ports are on the same side!

Pis are pretty picky about the charger you use. You need 5.1V with at least 2A if you don't want undervoltage warnings or worse. That basically rules out any spare USB charger you have lying around (they are 5V).

Do you know if there's a board out there with two hdmi outs? If you want to make anything with two screens, it seems like the RPi4 is the only option.

For added context, Raspberry Pi announced[1] that they're currently prioritizing industrial and commercial customers instead of retail channels for Pis like the Pi 4 model B and Compute Module 4.

It seems like they're also making fewer of the older model Pis (though I don't know if this is confirmed) since the silicon for the BCM2711 can be had in greater quantities than the older chips in the 3B+, 3+, and earlier models.

They're making 500,000 units per month, supposedly (though I don't doubt it), with a million or two orders in the backlog.

I know most people I've talked to who want to order anything less than multiple hundreds of units are unable to do so right now, and scalpers on eBay and Amazon are charging outrageous prices for the few Pis that end up in circulation :(

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain...

Thanks for the context. I did notice they were 2x more expensive than the last time I checked on Amazon. I thought it was mostly due to the chip shortage.

I've had success buying a Pi 4 recently using rpilocator's twitter. Installled twitter expressly for this purpose.

They have RSS feeds too, I believe capped at a refresh per minute. But I don't think background tasks on iOS are allowed to refresh that quickly.

From memory the RPI mission was to make cheap compute available to everyday people.

I wonder what went into the decision to prioritize industrial & commercial customers?

I fully accept there is nuance and difficulty to mass hardware production & sales that I have no knowledge about, so this isn't an accusation of anything :)

I was under the impression that the decision to prioritize industrial & commercial customers was a temporary one during the current shortages. At least, I certainly hope that is the case.

> Right now we feel the right thing to do is to prioritise commercial and industrial customers – the people who need Raspberry Pis to run their businesses – we’re acutely aware that people’s livelihoods are at stake.

Also bear in mind that most* educational needs can be met by the Pi 400, which generally hasn't suffered a shortage to the same degree. So they can often be satisfied by the 400 whereas the industrial/commercial uses are typically more constrained (esp. if it's a design based on the compute module)

* - but perhaps not all, in case there are some pedants

From https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain... :

>> "...supply constraints have prevented us from flexing up to meet this demand..."

Wish they would have elaborated more on what kind of supply constraints they are facing. Is there a limit to how many microchips that they can order that they can't manufacture themselves? Seems to me regardless of the supply constraints, if they raise the price by $20 to $50 and pass that money on to the suppliers that would positively motivate them to increase the supply.

>> Where units do appear, bots often attempt to scalp stock which is then resold at higher prices elsewhere. Many Approved Resellers have implemented single-unit limits to combat this, with Adafruit and others going further and enforcing two-factor authentication – we’re encouraging other Approved Resellers to consider this route.

For as long as the price is artificially constrained, what is there to prevent secret mafia deals between reseller insiders and the bot farm operators, or what is there to prevent the bot farm operators from infiltrating the resellers, and quickly gobbling up the supply as soon as it is available, to sell at market prices for the easy profit??

I recently bought an rPi 4. After trying in vain to find any in stock at a reasonable price, I figured out you can buy units that are preconfigured for another purpose and re-flash them (eg https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-w-optisigns-pre-c... - in stock right now).

I’m not sure others have caught onto this yet given these are still in stock.

Seems that’s about $20 markup? Not bad if you’ve been looking for awhile. Comes with a case, sd card and psu.

official PSU is $15-20, SD card is $5-10, and a case can be 3d printed or bought for $5-$20 depending.

I didn't look at the link so i could be missing that if you add all that up, there's still a $20 markup above and beyond that.

The associated Twitter account is more useful, especially if you turn on alerts: https://twitter.com/rpilocator

It really feels hopeless right now trying to get a 4GB model. It actually came back in stock for me at adafruit and I even had one in my cart! But alas they required me to enable 2-factor which holds back tear required me to log out and log back in and it was gone.

I notice even old models are hard to get, like the zero W.

the last time there was a shortage of pi hardware (before the 4) - target in the US had these "learn hardware!" boxes on clearance for a few bucks, with a Pi Zero (not sure which one, wifi only) and a cardboard case and a daughter board. I still have a couple of unopened boxes in a cabinet.

Unfortunately, i've lost about 2 pis a year to hardware failure since 2018, usually the SD card overheats and practically melts. I'm not sure why, humidity maybe, or bad SD cards.

I've had this happen to me when the SD card would snap in 2 inside the SD card holder on the PI. Happened twice with the CanaKit PIs, once for PI3 and another time for PI4, with the SD cards that came in the CanaKit. I just put Raspbian on some fresh SD cards that I bought separately, plugged them in, and everything was back to normal. I think the overheating was from the short circuits inside the snapped SD cards.

I’ve been checking this every week or so and the scene seems to be pretty dismal. Does Raspberry Pi have any plans to address the huge supply/demand gap?

74 weeks lead time....

Good luck finding anything at all. This is not a problem exclusive to Raspberry Pis and there is not a huge amount they can do about it.

This reminds me so much of my search for parts for my projects. Searching Digikey for very common parts in very common packages results in a barren wasteland of inventory, excluding the “marketplace” which is undoubtedly of dubious state.

Last month I got a survey from DigiKey's Manager of Production Control about my satisfaction with their shipping carriers. The only feedback I could come up with was that their third-party marketplace continuously encouraged me to look elsewhere.

How's the secondary market? I should fish some of mine out of drawers and ebay them.

Are there specific components they’re short of?

Stop complaining that you can't get an RP4 you stingy mofos! Under $200 is still very reasonable -- https://www.ebay.com/itm/313962570333?epid=18047669553&hash=... (I'm not associated with the seller)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com