Hacker News Reader

Comment by dom96 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I am surprised that the demand for Raspberry Pis is this high. Where are all these Pis going?

>Where are all these Pis going?

Lots of commercial systems use them, for digital signage, and all kinds of automation in industrial, retail, basically they're in nearly every embedded device at this point.

It's hard to find a small to medium sized hardware/IoT company that doesn't ship commercial products with PIs in them.

Home projects. I've got a few that I use as Airplay receivers, Calibre OPDS book server, automatic updates and builds on my static sites, Twitter bots, HomeAssistant etc.

Super handy for anything that needs to run in the background without much supervision.

Hoping the stock increases soon as I've got a bunch of old displays I want to turn into digital picture frames.

I have one pretending to be a grandfather clock (it used drive a servo that rang a physical chime via a little motor driver controlled by GPIO, but the servos would burn out every year or so, now instead cron just plays some .ogg files of a clock striking). But for straight-up servers, wouldn't a bunch of docker containers (or even some shell scripts and cron) cover many of those other uses? I tend to think of the Pi as a sort of 'physical container' that gets me a full OS (with networking, package mgmt etc.) which can be great if you only need one thing in one place, but I also have a little fanless NUC-alike running a bunch of containers.

What kind of case do you put these in? Or do people run naked boards?

I use them for test systems at my job. Where formally we needed a whole dedicated PC or laptop, we can now just throw a $20 rpi at it with ease.

My understanding is that the vast majority of them end up in products. Embedded in all kinds of systems. IoT, assembly lines, signs, lobby displays, interfacing with all kinds of dumb systems to get them an internet interface. $5 for a Pi-0/pi-0w is hard to beat on anything that ships less then many 10,000s of units.

Only a very small percentage are sent to hobbiest/makers. Much like how the GPU manufactures (or their distributors) sold directly to crypto miners.

I have a pi-hole, and old 1B that doesn't do anything currently but filled a bunch of projects over time, and a Pi Zero that I've played around with for a couple projects and might have a more permanent IoT project if I can get additional Pis. I have another project that sort of works on a Pi Zero, but really needs a Pi Zero 2 so it's not laggy.

Right now I'm an illogical state of mind due to the shortage. I want to preserve my unused Pi Zero so I can prototype projects, yet if I can't get additional Pis then what's the point of prototyping? I've ended up looking at alternatives and had a hard time getting many things to work on them, but the lack of Pis forces me to struggle with those problems.

Not all of these are currently active but here are the distinct Pi's in my house.

- PiHole

- Home Automation controller

- Camera / temp / humidity monitor for grow closet and at time 3d printer

- A 3d printer I used to have had a raspberry pi as it's board (I think, maybe it was a clone).

- I'm pretty sure my CNC machine uses a pi

- As another commenter mentioned, I used to have a Pi built into a NES for emulator purposes.

Also mobile robots, various industrial controllers, home media centres I guess?

We installed a three phase load shedding device for a school in January

It was just a Pi and relays

Tens of thousands of dollars

They're amazingly powerful for the money. Prior to the shortages they were great for retro game emulation, little linux boxes for fun/kids/specific uses, home automation, whole-network ad filtering, etc etc.

That is incredibly niche usage. It doesn't come close to explaining why they have been basically absent from retailers for years(?).

All those niches add up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

I have hardware out in the field deployed at breweries/pubs that have died over time and needed replacements. my own stock of pi3's is now depleted, and I've been looking for replacements daily.

What do you use them for, if you don’t mind me asking?

lighting and displays - the pi's work well because they have decent GPIO support and were easy and cheap to acquire when the original hardware was built.

they are overpowered for what they're doing, but usually rock solid for years at a time.

SBitx ham radio transceiver. https://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v2/

Home Assistant, Adguard Home etc. Nice little device to run containers on.

Home projects, I need a couple for home automation.

Projects like this too: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/cluster

My drawer.

Imagining a drawer made out of PCBs, in which you store hobby wood.

Maybe boards should all incorporate a standard slot-and-tab system to turn them into a building toy instead of ewaste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com