You can't buy a Raspberry Pi right now
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
The official blog is just marketing fluff for the most part, almost never mentioning the fact you haven't been able to easily obtain one for over six months.
If what Eben told Jeff is the case, why not tell everyone on the blog, or some other public channel? "Ringing up Eben" is not an option for most of us.
I also think with prioritizing commercial customers, we should drop the ruse that this thing is an educational board. I honestly don't think education has been a majority of users for a long time, but perhaps i'm grossly mistaken here.
If the Raspberri Pi foundation doesn't want to sell you their product, there's no way you can force them to sell you one. That there are no blog posts probably just means that some exec from Broadcom told Eben not to post anything.
rPi stopped feeling like educational material when they moved on from whatever low price they were at the beginning.
You are not going to convince me that a computer selling for $150~300 each or whatever it is nowadays is "for education". An educational computer is something like an Arduino board, which apparently sells for $25~50 currently from some quick checking.
If I'm dropping two or three Franklins on a computer, I'd rather just get an older Intel NUC or something so I can take advantage of the much larger and capable Windows and Linux ecosystems.
yes, it sucks, but the performers (and the Pi makers) did the best they could to offer them to folks at a cheap price.
There is, actually. They can raise their price until supply equals demand
Instead, if they raise prices the difference will end on the foundation pockets, and they could use that money to ramp up production.
What they are doing right now reeks of either corruption or stupidity.
If he stopped supplying OEMs, nobody would lose their jobs. The opposite, in fact. More engineering staff and contractors and consultants would get work because these companies would have to re-develop their products to use an in-house SBC or any of the hundreds of industrial SBCs out there.
Everyone else can't do that. Your average hobbyist can't just call up an industrial SBC company and buy. That was the whole point behind the Pi (well, the whole point was using up shitty SoCs that Broadcom hadn't been able to sell, but that's beside the point.)
What's really going on is that Ebon is prioritizing large OEMs who use Pis because they don't want to be bothered spending R&D to develop their own embedded system.
Meanwhile he's fucking over every small guy. All the retailers who have lost all that revenue and associated accessory sales? Fucked. What about their livelihoods? What about the logistics people they employed? They apparently can all get fucked.
All the non-profits (like libraries, hackerspaces, schools, etc) who may have secured budget and grant money for Pi-based programs that now cannot be spent? Fucked. rarely can money secured for purpose A be diverted to purpose B, and more often than not, you simply lose the funding entirely and you lose that amount of money from next year's budget, too.
How about the thousands of cottage industry small entrepreneurs making a living off Pi-based products they've developed? Fucked.
How about all the researchers, using Pis for data collection and controlling experiments? Fucked.
How about all the people who had home or business automation who need to replace a damaged or fried Pi? Fucked.
But thank god we're saving jobs at those large corporations who went with Pis because it was a cost-saving measure.
The Pi Foundation isn't even particularly competent. Every single Pi model has had problems, and the Pi 4 had basic, obvious-within-minutes-to-anyone-who-tried-to-use-it problems with power because the Pi foundation fucked up their USB-PD implementation.
Ebon says they're making 6M Pi's a year but it's months between any US supplier getting Pis, which means he's doing way more than "prioritizing OEMs."
I doubt anyone foresaw that RasPi would be forced to ship less than 400k units across all their models monthly. The chip shortage is catching everyone by surprise, and we’re probably lucky RasPi is considered important enough to get a regular allocation of their BoM at all, given the low margins they’re operating on.
As I understand it, there are quite a few OEMs who have staff allocated to improving the Pi ecosystem as well, so it’s not like the educational and hobbyist markets gain nothing from their OEM engagements. RasPi has become the de-facto standard for the, “I need a cheap card that can run Linux in under 10 watts,” market in large part because of its robust support.
Basically if this is survival mode during the chip shortage, I hope they can do everything possible to make it through this in good shape.
Also I have enough pi's for my needs already, I'd love to build a cluster but IMO cluster projects should be of the lowest priority customers.
I do agree, though, that cluster projects should have a low priority!
For a major vendor (someone linked some korg devices below) to loot this market is no better than the auto vendors who are buying washing machines simply to pull out microcontrollers, or cryptominers destroying the GPU market.
Major vendors can hire fabs to push out their own designs. The RPi is a licensed implementation of ARM, it isn't an industrial platform, from a supply chain point of view, clearly.
Everyone who is shipping a product based on RPi is doing so because they were able to get cheap individual samples to build on. Now that's not possible for new folks.
RPi was designed as an affordable learning computer, now there is not an affordable learning computer available to anyone who can't buy 10,000 parts or whatever.
If you view the current supply shortage is a temporary issue (as much as it doesn't feel very temporary right now), then not being able to provide stock to "us" is also a temporary issue. But failing their OEMs is a long-term issue - if not a permanent one. If Sharp's commercial display business takes a hit because they bought into the rpi ecosystem, and it bit them in the ass - they will not be back (See also: Apple vs nvidia). You seem to take the view that the OEMs deserve it for taking "our boards" - but rpi still take the hit when partners leave them. (and OEMs are a snowball effect: being able to point to examples like Sharp helps them win the next OEM - and I'm pretty sure that if they start publicly losing partners, the loss would only encourage the next loss).
For the rest of us - there's not many great contenders. I'm surprised at this - traditionally pi-alternatives have struggled from the lack of community. If someone else has a way around the supply shortages, this would seem like the best time to get in there and steal that community. But so far they haven't, so there's the best chance we're just going to sit here and wait for the return of the pi.
It's not ideal, it's not fair, life's a bitch. I am annoyed that it impacts me, but I can't begrudge rpi for taking the most sensible option.
1: https://www.hackster.io/news/mango-pi-launches-allwinner-h616-based-mq-quad-single-board-computer-mcore-h616-som-87343b7936afDamned, I like their boards/schematics/wiki. Single-page wiki entries with /most/ of the info I want (connector=FOO, voltage=BAR, power converter=BAZ (oh, so it's claimed 12V, but commenfary says 9-14V is definitely in the range and the chip manufacturer for the power regulator (like on my NanoPC-T4) says I'll be safe with 5.5-28V).
Cool.
Their boards do have some problems (none that have bothered me for long - look at the schematics and realize that that port is easy to over-tax so swap the cables and life is good), the different software distro's (Ubuntu this, Ubuntu that, Buildroot, Android Xx an Yy) are nice as examples when I'm replacing it with my own.
I think of the magazine, MagPi. An OEM customer? Indirectly. How can you sustain a hobbyist magazine on the Raspberry Pi when the hobbyist cannot get a Pi for less than $100?
I have a feeling Broadcom is the main problem here, they probably prioritize other customers. Which is surprising in some ways because a lot of raspberry pi foundation members are ex-broadcom or still even work there.
However I guess the other companies are willing to offer more whereas if the pi became more expensive there would be a lot of uproar (and rightly so because it defeats the purpose)
It's possible they see this as some sort of marketing, but I don't think they are using it to drive a sales funnel of low-volume customers.
The original goal (remember that?) was to make it a cheap educational Linux system. And it was a nice idea. The cheap sticker price got it noticed compared to the other more expensive (but better supported) ARM single-board computers. And here we are.
I sure as heck don't know what Broadcom's endgame is here either, because like you say they don't even answer your call if you're <100K EAU. So unlike other EVKs that can be used to rip apart and spin into real projects, you're stuck with RPi as a standalone unit.
The chip shortage is hurting everyone, but at least with other SoCs you can find them from multiple sources eventually. Or use a broker if you're desparate.
I was a big Beaglebone Black supporter, but figured the winds were blowing towards the Raspberry Pi, so just started using that instead. Now I'm here with the need for several mini Linux boxes and instead I have nothing. Beaglebone Black feels outdated. Raspberry Pi is unobtainium. Unfortunate where the random walk leads.
The hobbyist market has weirdly strong network effects: we saw this with Arduino, too, which was a lot more expensive than its competitors! I assume there is a measure of influencer marketing here that old-guard tech companies didn't grasp.
10 years ago, the beagleboard was a game changer, though. They are still making beaglebones and beagleboards, both of which are cool, but they are last-generation computers with lots of useful embedded SoC features, while the Pi is a computer first.
In my many argumen^H^H^Hdiscussions with RPi users here and elsewhere, the counter-argument for Pi has always been the community support is excellent. And, yes, it is. When you aren't large enough to get a TI or NXP FAE to answer your email then having a robust community is great. But it was built ground-up from all the RPi fans having the object in their hands and little else to do with it.
When TI dropped OMAP I left for Freescale, now NXP. I've been developing on i.MX for well over a decade now and have really enjoyed it. Their foothold in automotive has allowed them to keep growing the line and branching it out in different ways, more so than TI or Broadcom will.
The idea of "community support" is kind of interesting - it clearly had an effect here, but I'm not so sure how they got it. I guess the foundation just made it very easy for people to talk to each other about RPi projects, while TI put you on some forum in a dark corner of their website.
And I believe you're right about the community support. The RPi groups have been run by actual owners and enthusiasts, whereas the factory support forums in my experience have been minimally maintained with almost no interaction from anyone at the actual companies.
I didn't like the way TI exited the Android world; I'm glad the beagleboard lost. However, my ideal is for both TI and Broadcom to lose.
Which is why i soooo excited they bought VMWare.
Relying on Raspberry Pi as a business means relying on the goodwill of Broadcom - which is a severely broken company.
You need a laptop/expensive graphics card, you needed it back them when you started on a "waitlist" (official or your own), and after them becoming available, you buy one laptop/card, and you're done.
With raspberrypis, everyone doing anything with them outside of purely first time hobbyists, will order 5, 10, 50, however much they can get, because the waiting is killing the business. When rpi zero w 2 came out, it was hard to get, but the moment I could get one, I bought 3 pieces, even though i needed only one at the moment, but I knew, if I needed more, I wouldn't be able to get them for months again.
Well, Nvidia and AMD GPUs have only shown improvement because the writing was on the wall that Ethereum was going PoS and the downturn in worldwide economies made the rest of the shitcoins unprofitable.
> They are still prioritizing OEM customers (who have built their products around the Pi)
OEMs use RPis? What are they using it for, does anyone know, got any examples? I've always assumed RPis to be a hobbyist tool. All the blog posts, documentation, examples I encounter are around the hobbyist's mindset. I've not encountered any "business" oriented documentation or examples or blogs.
Edit: Everyone, thanks for the examples. I'm going through each one. It's like a whole new world opened to me.
I believe most of them don't advertise the fact they use Raspberry Pis as it might cheapen their offering in the eyes of customers
They leave an SSH port open (found with nmap) and I've asked support if I can have the password, but they won't give it to me. >:(
My system is now currently powered down. I think it'd be cool if someone were to reverse engineer it and write their own FOSS firmware for the system. Shouldn't be too hard, right?
(assuming it's a standard version and you haven't already)
Couldn't you just grab the SD card out of it and inspect the file system, then try to get the password through that? You'd have to spend some time bruteforcing it most likely, but it should eventually (tbh, seeing solutions like this I'd expect quickly) give you the password.
Checking the website it seems to be a kind of PaaS, plant as a service. Am I reading that website correctly? They are offering remotely-managed plants for rent?
There's some CAD models for various parts; I'd rather 3D print some of the e.g. rockwool baskets and caps rather than buy from the company. If you get one, make sure you stay on top of root maintenance. You could also certainly find the plant food for cheaper.
It can produce a ton of lettuce if that's what you want to grow. We liked trying different greens. I grew some nice jalapenos as well. Can't recommend much other big fruiting plants though—they're trickier to take care of.
There are also hundreds of boards that work with the CM4 to build different types of systems or integrate into automation, industrial gear, and commercial products—this is a tiny listing that doesn't even cover stuff that uses the Pi 4 or older Pi models: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm
(edit for clarity)
There are cheaper alternatives, but there are not better supported alternatives. The most expensive rPi is a rounding error in terms of engineering time. Why bother saving ~$30 if you have to spend $1k worth of engineering time to diagnose a compatibility issue on some less well documented board.
* depending on volume.
For a couple hundred/thousand devices doing industrial automation yes. For a million and up, it makes sense to pay an engineer 3 months to reduce the BOM by 10 cents.
Our volume would be well below 1 million at market saturation. More important for us to be able to iterate and customize.
You can also reduce your write wear with putting stuff like temporal logs in ram etc.
Wouldn't use them for something mission critical but for statistics where you don't mind missing a few minutes like in this case they're ok.
Also I'm using a Pi to do some tests for a project that will run on custom hardware (not even Broadcom) eventually. Saves time when you don't have to deal with Yocto and editing dts files just to talk to something on spi and see if it can do your job.
Korg released a few new digital synthesizers in the past couple of years: Opsix, Wavestate, and Modwave. They are all running Raspberry Pis inside.
Texas Instruments has a big catalog of cheap and DSP-capable chips.
Yes. As an example, we use RPi in MusicBox[0], together with HifiBerry[1] sound card, as a music player appliance.
In fact, you can still buy (well, you could, if you could buy any) RPi 1's, since OEMs tend to standardize and stick to a platform. Our base platform is 1B+, for example.
[0] https://musicbox.com.hr/ (Croatian only, sorry, it's for the local market)
I opened it up and I can confirm it has a Rpi inside.
https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/wavestate/
https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/opsix/
Although that's with the CM3
Stratodesk makes them now:
https://www.stratodesk.com/solutions/raspberry-pi-thin-clien...
How Good is the new Raspberry Pi 4 as a Thin Client? (2019)
https://www.stratodesk.com/how-good-is-the-new-raspberry-pi-...
https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-cm4-ser...
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/tv-thats-not-necs-pi-...
https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/control/range_cn/index...
It is used in a lot of products, specially legacy products that have been given a “facelift” to switch from buttons + screen to touchscreen.
I’ve been always against it when it comes to the non-CM versions.
The foundation receives donations, both private and public, and works as a non-profit with the original goal of giving every kid a computer, and now more broadly to teach through their platform. Having private companies leeching off it for me is very much scummy behavior.
A company I worked for used the 2B, 3B and 3B+ in a bunch of products. My complaints were dutifully archived in the trash.
The private companies are funding the foundation. It’s hard to call it leeching when the pi is a comparatively expensive board compared to alternatives
Except that if you look at their financials, it’s clear that they make very little on them. The sales of Rpis are not how they keep going, it’s all the other activities around it.
> It’s hard to call it leeching when the pi is a comparatively expensive board compared to alternatives
It’s not only about COGs, support is a big ticket in this area, and one that most manufacturers are way behind. Also, yes, there are some cheaper SBCs, but most of them are sold at “ask us for price”, and they aren’t any cheaper, especially at low volumes.
As opposed to losing money, which is what happens with consumer sales with at least one model, hence limiting to one per customer
If you are using a model from Raspberry from which they have a margin (essentially all the things on the Compute Module line), that's fine by me, it's great that the foundation can use that as an income stream.
I feel very differently when you use models that are obviously sold at a loss to pad the margins on your product.
I've come across a commercial HVAC system (like the big units on top of office buildings) based on the RPi Compute Module. Actually seen that from two different companies.
There was a subreddit that's now subsumed into /r/Raspberry_pi that was all about sightings of Pi's used in commercial products like airport displays, billboards, kiosks, etc.
The Orange Pi other users suggested is a good choice, as would be the very similar NanoPi, and many others. However, although the scarcity hits more the popular boards such as the Raspberries, others also became somewhat harder to find, so I would suggest for example to take note of which board is supported by a well known distribution, then look for vendors offering it. A good start would be the Armbian and DietPI download sections in which you can easily find dozens of boards and devices with their support status.
I do wish it had video out as that would simplify setup & diagnostics for me, but the serial console is fine.
https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
They aren't going to be quite as small or efficient as a Raspberry Pi or equivalent, but instead you get full x86-64 cores, and they are still pretty small and efficient.
A future development I want to explore is using one external eSATA box so I can add more drives. I'm not sure however about any incompatibilities between BSD (or Linux) or the PCI-E controller and external SATA port multipliers.
Will almost certainly cost a lot less than buying a new mini-itx motherboard and compatible case, power supply, ram, etc.
randomly chosen example in 20 seconds of searching, figure that the shipping cost is actually $25 of the price here, built into the final buy it now price.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/204098861051?hash=item2f853d77fb:g:...
1: https://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-TeraStation-Network-Attached-...
Not ITX, but since you're responding an RPi thread, you may possibly be interested in Hardkernel's products, which have always been very competitive with RPis - in my opinion, simply better than them, although less popular.
Currently, they offer the C4 (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4), and the blazing fast N2+ (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram-2).
The N2+ not only ships the A73 (the successory to the RPi's A72), but it also runs it at high frequency.
I am actually a big fan of the H2(+), but sadly, went out of production (it's an x86, whose form factor I absolutely recommend).
EDIT: There actually are x86 SBCs. Two random picks:
- https://www.axiomtek.com/Default.aspx?MenuId=Products&Functi...
- https://www.seeedstudio.com/ODYSSEY-X86J4125800-p-4915.html
I have an older asrock j1900 celeron board running my 9front CPU/Disk/Auth server at home 24/7. No issues and it has been solid. At the current electric rate it costs about $2/month.
I think I'll never be back to Raspberry after all this drama. Fool me once, etc.
PC Engines' APU 2 line is also great, assuming it meets your needs.
* Gigabyte Brix - size, performance, features, expandability, longevity
* Chromebox (Asus) - size, performance, expandability, longevity
* R.Pi - size, support for Debian, longevity (I confess a particular fondness for the Pi 400)
* Odroid - size, performance
[1] https://www.tech-america.com/item/intel-nuc-11-essential-nuc...
Probably partly as it's extra profit, but also to discourage multi-buys I guess. I dunno if it discourages the scalpers.
These bundles never appear on rpilocater.
And yes it discourages the scalpers - while the stuff you get in the bundle is usually worth the price being asked for it, to a scalper it's worth 0 and it makes it difficult to make profit flipping the boards themselves. Same principle is successfully used to fight PS5 scalpers.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/raspberry-pi?product_t...
I wasn't able to actually find any website other than eBay at 100+ quid that have them in stock, even as kits.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-essentials...
Rather than remove one from their case, I decided to run to Microcenter to just grab a new one.
Nope. Not a single Raspberry Pi in stock. I was honestly shocked. I was completely unaware of the shortage.
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)
body {
color: #eee;
background-color: #000;
}There are dozens of us - dozens! - and Jeff's page looks uniquely bad. Something about the font weight, perhaps? The strokes are so thin as to disappear. Zooming to 150% makes it much more readable.
https://i.imgur.com/xdMq8SJ.png
and here's a screenshot at 150%:
https://i.imgur.com/hKcCBo7.png
I do see something funny going on with the ligature for 'ff' in "different vendors" and "official retailers, " especially at 100%.
Running `fc-match serif` says that the fault being picked up is DejaVu Serif [0]
What's so bad about white-on-black? Light-gray-on-a-bit-darker-gray and similar are the evil choices.
The text should look great across most browsers/sites, and I make sure the layout flows well if you increase or decrease font size... but if you can send a screenshot of what you're seeing and your device/screen configuration, I can take a look at what might be going on.
That's exactly the problem. Too much contrast is a thing with text and can make a website uncomfortable to look at (for me at least). It's hard to find a source for that, but most people seem to agree (see ~95% of other sites).
That's not a problem on commodity LCDs (maybe the one you're using) because "black" is fairly bright, but on OLED especially that's almost infinite contrast.
Therefore, instead of having your browser enforce a lowered contrast for yourself, you prefer that the majority of the rest of us, with commodity LCDs, suffer too little contrast by asking for the colors to be changed on the website.
Design websites for correct display devices, and calibrate your display devices to correct for imperfections.
Asking for users with good displays to intentionally reduce the displays' quality to simulate a bad display is just ridiculous. That's what color profiles, LUTs, and tone mapping are for.
Rather than wait around for stock to become available, I've decided to expand to Rock Pi and Orange Pi. I had to roll my own Linux distro and build tools to match the experience provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation (e.g. SD card imaging tool). ... but where there's a will, there's a way. https://twitter.com/grepLeigh/status/1572683931769778176
Maybe my board was just ram starved, but my impression is you want to go bare metal with the ESP.
I have an old Pi Zero W and I love it. I watch Adafruit for the new version constantly but no luck.
That's not a super unusual setup for a microcontroller system, though those types of systems were often larger industrial systems running WindRiver VxWorks, etc. not cheap chips for your IoT lightbulbs. Even when using an RTOS my perception is the most common setup is that the RTOS is just compiled and linked into your firmware image like any other library.
It was a bit of a culture shock when I started using ESP32s because I can't buy STM32s anymore. I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to embedded systems and I didn't like the idea of having someone else's code control so much of the chip, but it's the pragmatic choice.
Finally managed to get 3 PiStorm boards (for a more decent price than the scams off ebay), but I have only one Pi 3B, and the 3A+ or Zero 2 are nowhere to be found
Only option is to buy 3B/B+ which are a little more common, at 3x+ the price, and unsolder the usb connector.
Sure feels like back in the amiga days when I was waiting for the Emplant to emulate a PC and whatnot... or waiting for Gateway, Escom, etc... to do something useful...
Come to think of it, it's a perfect retro experience WITH post-1994 frustrations of waiting with constant hopes and failures as a bonus :)
Also backordered a 4GB version on Digikey and it came through only a week later. (Good timing on my part I guess!)
It took a few months to get to this point so patience is the name of the game for sure until the market cools off a bit.
Eventually Sony stepped in and offered production capacity at a place in Wales UK which I think improved availability a lot.
I got mine last July before the spike: https://i.imgur.com/2jzmhhA.png
With the current situation, I am not certain that I will have enough supply for my next class.
Get a thread going on HN requesting old PIs... shoot ive given so many away... but in return, share your coursework/connect your students with other students...
I actually bought it for saving money on retiring servers using expensive electricity, but it was already a sketchy proposition and would take months to earn back. At even more expensive it would not have been worth it.
That is 4.8 million a year. So it's not like they're not trying. Where are they all going? OEMS, sure. But what do they end up being used as? What consumer tech? What tech? What field(s)?
Pre-post edit: This thread has a ton of answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33072316
By the time I logged in to order it was all gone :)
I did find another at a slightly inflated price and ordered that one. It was a kit with a decent power brick and a useless case. Guess 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
4 Gb model was $60 ish, kit was $110. Romania prices so 19% VAT, possible import taxes yadda yadda.
This leaves many hobbyists, students and tinkers, the original group the Pi was created for, wanting.
I have very mixed feelings about this.
The longest stock lasted was about 24 hours a couple months ago. I think people have scrapers even for their local Micro Center website so they can find when they're in stock and go snag one immediately.
The Micro Center near me usually has a large bag full of Pico and Pico W, though, as well as practically every HAT and official Pi accessory.
Wow, I had no idea. I wonder what all those OEMs are doing with all those Pis?
Out of stock now, but I see they have refurb 4gb in stock.
https://www.okdo.com/p/refurbished-raspberry-pi-4-model-b-4g...
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-w?varia...
See "Buy now" on https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/ for your country
There's some stock in the US usually on Wednesday mornings if you are quick...
I just sold a used Pi for 3 times what I paid for it
while the foundation became too successful to the point they are dependent upon by other companies, the enthusiast part of the consumer market is not helping either.