Raspberry Pi Shortages Could Last Another Year | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi Shortages Could Last Another Year

tomshardware.com

Anyone find other SBCs as an alternative? Curious if anyone has been using the Khadas line up of SBCs instead...

I'm in the process of porting printnanny.ai to Rock Pi. I wrote an imager app akin to Raspberry Pi Imager to provide the same UX.

I stumbled across a project called DietPi -- https://dietpi.com. Scroll halfway down the main page and you'll see many SBCs that it works on and might be good alternatives. Khadas are not on the list, though; I've never heard of them before now.

I am excited for VisionFive 2, "the world’s first high-performance RISC-V single board computer (SBC) with an integrated GPU."

https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/boards

But my problem with all these SBCs (including VisionFive) is they max out at 8 GB of RAM. This is a problem for me because I want to run an Ethereum validator, and the software stack needs 16+ GB RAM. Is anyone aware of an SBC supporting 16 GB?

A bit confused about your requirements.

Aren't those boards like $200? Can't you get a "normal" computer at that range?

A normal computer has features I want to avoid, such as size, heat, fans, large power supplies, etc. A single-board ARM or RISC computer has all the compute power and peripheral connectors I need. The only missing piece is sufficient RAM.

Khadas Edge2 Pro has 16GB of RAM, $340 tho, available now, even from amazon. Radxa ROCK 5B also has 16GB of RAM, $220, available via ameridroid. Jetson Orin NX 16GB has 16GB of RAM, $600, available in Dec, would probably also require a carrier board of unspecified price.

Thanks, this is great! I didn’t know about any of these.

The closest alternative is ultra small form factor PCs, which is quite sad for a number of reasons.

Why is this the case? Personally, I feel like getting a RPi has been harder than getting a 3090, PS5, or Xbox Series X—it's a fundamentally cheaper, underpowered product, that should theoretically be able to produced in serious droves.

I get the current economic and supply chain uncertainty, but I figure the shortages that have been going on for this long don't merely chalk up to that. Is there more to it?

IIUC, it's basically their demand skyrocketed (not that their supply went down) and still is. They just can't produce enough of them [1] despite efforts to do so.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/you-cant-buy-raspberr...

They've also prioritized supplying companies that committed to building systems based on their boards over hobbyists. I think there's a solid argument that's healthier for the ecosystem long term.

In case you want to try your luck snipping one. I made a telegram bot that will notify you as soon as one is available using the rpilocator website.

https://github.com/sschueller/rpilocatorbot

That's pretty rad, but could you please make one for Matrix users as well?

My concern is that a large portion of the population who has traditionally used RPi for projects will have pivoted away to another platform by the time they are available again.

I'd like one so I can use it for Mathematica. Running it on my RPi B (the original) is pretty underwhelming these days.

Eben has no say in it. Broadcom/Avago decided not to order chips, so no chips are being manufactured. Eben can decide directly about RP2040, and unsurprisingly those are being manufactured and available.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com