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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

I went to do this sort of thing the other day.

First thing I did was try and find a Pi Zero 2 W. Discovered most models of Raspberry Pi are completely unavailable. And so, another side project was canned.

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That has been the situation ever since the worldwide chip shortage hit. Raspberry Pi (the company) decided to prioritize companies that use Raspberry Pi's in their products over consumers. So it became almost impossible to get a Raspberry Pi, unless you were willing to pay a huge markup to a scalper.

The situation should improve this year though.

> As a result, we can say with confidence that, after a lean first quarter, we expect supply to recover to pre-pandemic levels in the second quarter of 2023, and to be unlimited in the second half of the year.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-goo...

It's not entirely their fault. The Raspberry Pi foundation has very close ties to Broadcom, who make all of their CPU SoC's. The original Pi was made with super cheap chips Broadcom was struggling to sell to anyone else. Either a batch of SoC's that didn't sell as well as expected, and later fabrication capacity reserved at a foundry that it later turned out wasn't needed.

The Pi foundation basically sucks up overproduction of chips from Broadcom, in return for low prices. But when there is a chip shortage and no overproduction, they don't get any.

Our trailer has a 'cloud gateway' that allows you to see/control it from the internet. The box that does that is a raspberry pi with a dedicated hat to power it, in a custom box. They want $450 for a new one when the Pi's SD card poops out.

It’s been the situation for years, I drove 30 miles for a zero like 6 months after they were released. I bought an A because the B was sold out in 2014.

As it's not mentioned yet: https://rpilocator.com/ might help getting a Pi at its intended price.

Wow, you're not kidding! I checked ebay and saw one bid to $50 and another buy-it-now for $93. For a Pi Zero!

Yep. I got all excited to set up a PiHole at one point during the pandemic and then realized how impossible it was to actually buy a raspberryPi and gave up. Hopefully one day

Linus Tech Tips recently listed like 10 raspi alternatives.

Yeah, but take all of those with huge grains of salt. Some of them will only run the vendor’s custom kernel, others have library/driver incompatibility issues, the non-Pi SBC ecosystem is a bit of a crapshoot. And I say that as someone whose primary non-Pi experience is with the fairly well-supported Jetson Nano. You quickly realize why Raspberry Pi is so beloved.

Don't bother with that video, he completely ignores the software aspects of the boards.

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