Covid Killed the Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Covid Killed the Raspberry Pi

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15 pointsrmason19 comments

Man, I ordered an 8GB pi over a year ago from CanaKit. I wasn’t in a big hurry to get it, but I was thinking a year was a long time, so I eventually emailed them inquiring about my order—no response, but then a PayPal invoice appeared—I configured my shipping address and paid the invoice. The next day, UPS emailed me with a tracking number. Hurray! Then I noticed the address was completely wrong (wrong city, wrong state). I emailed CanaKit and got no response for a few days (I also tried changing the destination via UPS, but only senders can do that), by which time the Pi had been delivered. I submitted “package delivered to incorrect address” through UPS, and a few hours later I got a paypal email notifying me that I had been refunded.

Not a bad outcome, but I hope I don’t have to wait a year and change for my next Pi order! (:

I also discovered that CanaKit’s advertised “contact us” phone numbers had been disconnected. I’m guessing they were pretty ravaged by the supply chain disruption and laid off support staff. :(

Hope the industry can get back on its feet!

I miss RPi a great deal.

I recall that a core piece of RPi's strategy was to use excess capacity to create an awesomely capable and super inexpensive product family. That core piece of thinking was instrumental to RPi's success.

Semiconductor production capacity was already getting tighter before Covid, but Covid fully shifted the space from capacity excess to capacity drought.

The same leverage that super charged RPi's growth is what is now snuffing it out.

I really want to see RPi come back. It seems that will only happen if...

1) Some dramatic shift in global dynamics returns the semi conductor industry to the capacity excess state.

2) RPi manages to extract itself from the business/leverage model it used to power its growth and find a new way to do its thing.

Both seem pretty unlikely in the foreseeable future.

BTW, the Beaglebone has a completely different mission, purpose, and philosophy. It's a pretty excellent piece of hardware as well, and seems much more likely to stick around in the current environment.

It's notable that compute modules have had pretty ok availability for a bit. The primary chip seems to be reasonably available.

I feel like there's a pretty untold story here, that while yes chips are hard to get & there is limited capacity to a degree, there's also been an enormous amount of buy-outs across the industry & a lot less competition. Not a lot of folk are signing up to try & compete with an rpi like product or main chip, and I think the market's disinterest in serving the low end, in striving to keep going upmarket, is a macro trend that can't last forever.

I was lucky to get one of the Raspberry Pi 4 8GB boards before covid. That really is a great little computer. I wanted to build a product to sell using those but had to shelf it.

As I recall back then they said it would be at least 3 years before they'd be releasing another upgrade to that and we're pretty close to that now. If the supply chain ever does get back up to speed we may see that soon after.

This video from Linus Tech Tips presents some alternatives to Raspberry Pi 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJvCVw1yONQ

There. Are. Other. SoCs.

Which one(s) would you suggest for little DIY things like home automation, print servers, etc?

If you want a true SoC because it's tiny and cute? Try a TI Sitara (BeagleBone, etc). The new BeaglePlay is really nice for $98.

If you need a home automation/print server? Get a $40 used Xeon workstation on eBay.

I don't know much about RPI alternatives, but those seem to either cost a lot more (BeaglePlay) or they seem to be much larger and with worse power consumption (used Xeon workstation)?

Then you're stuck. If you want to wait for the cheap subsidized part then it might be a while. Maybe forever in the case of the original Broadcom SoC. Beaglebone Black is ~$50 if price is really the problem. What's your objective here?

ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1 v1.1 is excellent. It's got multipurpose GPIO pins that can be used for input, output, ADC, touchscreen, etc., and it's got wi-fi and BLE. Easily programmed with the Arduino IDE. It's an MCU, not a single board computer. If you really need a Linux environment then Orange Pi has a lot of SBC models available. For those I use Armbian, which is optimized for SBC use.

How many of them run mainline Linux?

FSL/NXP is on 6.1.4 and TI is on 6.3-rc2. ST seems harder to find, they look like they're merging 6.3. Is that close enough?

I think so, thanks.

Last time a looked (which was a long time ago), most other SoC's led you down hyper-version-specific patchy nonsense to Linux to run on them. Good to see the field is improving :)

Getting mainline on their Yocto recipes is tough, those tend to lag way behind. But anything is possible if you bang your head against those recipes hard enough.

There are other SoCs, but none has anything like the vast, vast, vast ecosystem of tutorials, videos, packages, and accessories that Pi has developed over the past decade.

...everything except real technical documentation on the part, which Broadcom won't give you.

Oh yeah, and you can't actually buy the part alone. So you're stuck buying their board to stick in your project.

At the end of day, it's embedded Linux. All those wonderful tutorials and source repos can and will work on many other parts. There's nothing magical about the RPi core, and seriously really nothing magical about the hardware. Once you boot off of eMMC you'll never want to go back.

I believe most of people would be just fine with NUC.

My uninformed impression is that while Raspberry Pi's have all but disappeared from the marketplace, Orange Pi has grown with more models and availability.

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