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Comment by keewee7 | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of "over-demand" for RPis because many companies and universities mistakenly think it's the only way to do embedded Linux. The truth is that there are many cheaper alternatives out there that are more appropriate for embedded projects (ADC, PWM etc.)

Edit:

Forgot to add a link to this article that goes through some of the alternatives:

https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/

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The last time I tried some pi derivative, many softwares doesn't work on them. If there is a fix, it usually involve self compiling the broken software, along with some of their dependencies. Of course they're all using different build system that you have to learn. The labor cost of that is probably greater than the cost per unit of the hardware. Especially since pi-based products are necessarily low volume.

And there’s still a global supply chain shortage on some dependent components.

What are better options? At lot of that also means better documentation. Better hardware doesn’t mean much if they docs aren’t there

Most "how do I do X on the Raspberry Pi" questions are just "how do I do X on Linux" questions. Maybe there is some device specific stuff in the device tree, but if you're messing with that you're already in an advanced use case.

A lot of Raspberry Pi projects could just as easily be using BeagleBone Blacks. There's a pretty robust community around those products too.

I don't know that the Raspberry Pi Linux boards are particularly notably well documented compared to competitors. Maybe I'm just unaware, because it generally runs Linux well and causes few problems.

I will say that I think their support for the Pico microcontroller is pretty exceptionally high quality.

Better than arduino?

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