Modern, more powerful, more compact, equivalent:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
By the way, people say it's a great learning tool for kids but when I search for "kid using pi400" on youtube there are zero results.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
By the way, people say it's a great learning tool for kids but when I search for "kid using pi400" on youtube there are zero results.
So Why not this one which is roughly the same thing but is available for purchase in hundreds?
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontro...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyRGnLPBe8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS7qhKF8wGE
I know the Raspberry Pi has that huge community behind, but alternatives like this one can spark the interest of kids who need incentives to grow, and this one offers well above the minimum necessary without serving them the whole dinner ready to eat. When I cut my teeth with M68k asm in the early 90s all I had was a terrible book poorly translated in Italian whose code examples were written half in German and half in English, a local BBS and no Internet; they can do a lot more with today's tools without any need of a huge community.
My problem is the ARM chip and how likely I am going to have problems running a non-blessed OS on the thing. A year from now, will it be able to install a new kernel?
I also have to face reality in that I have zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty. I think almost everyone would be better served by a NUC ($400+) or refurbished SFF PC ($100-200 can be very competitive hardware).
ARM shouldn't be a problem for a long time; there's a huge number of boards out there using that architecture and most of them are well supported by Linux. Here are some Armbian images: https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/opi800/ The user is reliable and a regular Armbian contributor/maintainer.
> zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty
I think the main selling point of these devices is for kids to carry them in their backpack when they study with their friends, so that they have all their stuff in a single device that is more usable and safe than a cellphone and needs only a video connection, without messing with the family computer. A relatively low cost independent device with exposed gpio ports could also have some uses in a lab to drive external hardware, microcontrollers programming, etc. If I had one I would probably use it for such tasks, including audio measurement by adding an external sound card.
You picked a bad time to complain about this, because a whole bunch of Pi 400s have been popping up in stock over the past few days.
rpilocator doesn't track the 400, but they do tweet when they see them in stock: https://twitter.com/rpilocator
As for "why not" the alternatives, it's because they get no ongoing support, and don't run mainline Linux, so you're stuck with what they ship with, and can never update them.
[0] Industrial boards aside (PC104 et al.) which predate those boards by a decade at least, for people who were playing with stuff like the Foxboard LX832 [1] as soon as it was released (2006), the Raspberry Pi became later the alternative, not the other way around. Granted, the Etrax 100lx was slow as a dead sloth compared to the RPi1 BCM, RAM and storage were constrained, and no WiFi, but hey, it ran Linux! I sold them on Ebay long ago, but kept their super cool Tux shaped plastic case [2].
But I don't think it's such a great thing for kids per se. It depends on the experimentation environment they get. The hardware is almost irrelevant. Something as direct as a Commodore 64 looks more appealing to me than VSCode on a Raspberry.
The Pi shines when you’re interfacing with relays and sensors and stuff, for software alone a PC or laptop will be fine.
[0] https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/01/07/iphone-12-bill-of-m...