What are people using all these Raspberry Pis for? Is it really so needed that the price is becoming unaffordable? There are other components in stock, so I’m curious what’s demanding an RP4.
I have plethora of this SBCs. A Raspberry Pi 4 is acting as a HiFiBerry system at my parents' home, replacing a component Hi-Fi. With high end 2x35W amplifier and quite a nice software stack, my parents can listen whatever they wish to do with their old high quality speakers in a very practical manner. Sound quality is superb, too. HiFiBerry amplifiers are no slouch.
I ran an OrangePi Zero/512MB with BitTorrent, DNS, FTP, Syncthing, WebFS http server. It served as the perfect home server.
I'm currently setting up an OrangePi 5B with 8GB RAM to replace my old desktop computer's duties. Cloud backups, video encoding, local DNS, etc. Also, it'll take over the previous Zero's roles too, and with almost no cables, it'll replace and even supersede my old Desktop computer, and make my life much easier.
These things are immensely useful.
I have a RPi2 that is running a weather website since 2014. Same SD card, insane uptime, and virtually zero maintenance.
My other RPi's serve has my Homebridge, Wireguard endpoint, Tailscale exit node, DNS server, Plex, git repos....
Crazy how useful they are.
I prefer to merge them to a one powerful server, because I already have more than enough servers at the office, and want to keep a minimalist home as much as possible.
If the MIMO Wi-Fi chipset works as promised, I'll only attach a single disk and power to this thing, and tuck it away somewhere. What's nice is, Rockchip systems have "heartbeat" LEDs on them, so I'll be able to see whether it's running or not with a single glance.
PiShop in Canada, for example, still lists the Pi 4 4GB for $76.95, but rpi locator says last time it was in stock was June 2022. Some item’s have an empty field for last seen and I've been assuming that means the tool has never seen them in stock.
So I would have needed to find another way to get it, and scalpers/Amazon never waste a good crisis.
If you need tutorials, a community, and some sort of support, you have to buy a Pi.
Maybe it is different now, but other SBCs just haven’t had those in the past. Raspberry Pis are unique in that sense.
You would think this would be the moment to disrupt the market, but I haven't seen much going on. I like my Orange Pi 5 though.
- one runs a copy of the (now offline) old Shapeoko wiki/forums for reference purposes (much easier than using the Wayback Machine)
- the second is in a tablet case and controls a CNC machine
I'd like a 3rd to use with a Wacom One tablet screen --- perhaps Einstein will run on that?
I used to have a few more, but I put them on eBay last year. I figured I was doing my part to lessen the shortage, and I'll replace them whenever they come back into regular supply.
I really hope it’s not ignorance instead of indifference. Building a computer, even a tiny one, is not hard.
I want to build a digital picture frame with an e-ink frame that pulls photos from a server. The right way would be a low powered processor, but then I have to figure out writing the image, sleep states and wake up, setting up networking etc. in whatever programming language my embedded board supports.
Or I can just plug in a pi, and live with the always on power consumption.
It's not that I'm ignorant, but I have a limited amount of time and may prioritize project completion over doing it completely right.
It's a special kind of weird to worry about whether the people who are interested in a SBC you're not interested in are "ignorant."
> If the price is going up
It's not, so you can stop worrying about that.