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Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

Marvellous, but why raspberry pi? I suppose this project was started before 2021. Today there is little sense to be using them for anything new (unless you're doing it just for yourself and you already have few lying around). Basic functionality such as gpio, networking etc is well documented on rockchip based alternatives (made by pine, radxa, orange etc) I haven't played with allwinner boards, but I hear they are similar. The only thing I woukd choose rpi for today is perhaps for its hdmi/composite video out and camera interface(that too can be had on alternative boards today).

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A lot of those alternatives have adopted the pi's form-factor as a loose standard, so there's a reasonable chance this is going to work on many of those alternatives.

We're almost starting to reach a point where Pi is being decoupled from Raspberry, in much the same way PC was decoupled from IBM. We don't need to lose the Pi ecosystem just because the RPF won't sell us theirs.

I have several other "RaspberryPi-like" SBCs. Rockchip, Pine, Orange, you name it. While all of them still work fine and some are indeed more powerful than the RPi (or have more features), my biggest complaint with them is Linux support by the manufacturer. Many of them run a custom 4.x kernel that requires vendor patches that were never upstreamed, and sometimes the Websites / Downloads for these special kernels don't even work anymore.

Yes, these are older boards (4+ years), so maybe this has changed recently, I don't know

So for something that is facing the Internet I would be very reluctant to use them. For something internal, they're probably fine though

While availability of new pi4 is complicated, you can easily find them on the second hand market as well as myriads of 2, 3B, 3B+ and zero variants.

Also, as said by previous answer, many alternatives have the same gpio.

Yes, we have also tested the HAT and software on Odroid C1 and Banana Pi. The problem is that you need to have one of each SBC to compile the software and test it - some of the GPIO pins do not match the Pi scheme, so have to be remapped.

We managed to secure a bulk supply of Pi 3B+, so that suits our market.

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