Raspberry Pi availability is visibly improving after years of shortages | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi availability is visibly improving after years of shortages

arstechnica.com

53 pointsWithinReason19 comments

And/or maybe demand has decreased as people have settled on alternative boards...

I started with Raspberry Pi years ago but now prefer FriendlyELEC NanoPi and OrangePi, both running Armbian. Armbian has some performance tweaks that RPi doesn't have, especially the use of zram to minimize system writes to SD cards, which extends their life.

Things like that are easy enough to set up on Raspbian with a script. You also need a bunch of tmpfs mounts, including some in crazy places(Regular Pi has a log file under ~/.cache that can fill disks and crash servers, and if you don't fix it Chromium writes seemingly useless crap constantly. There's auto updates on some systems, which is terrible if you're on a private WiFi, not doing internet stuff.

I'm not using zram at the moment, just getting rid of swap, but my current script to get a Pi ready for embedded projects is here: https://github.com/EternityForest/KaithemAutomation/blob/mas...

Armbian is such a great project, it's really nice to see it get more wide use and recognition.

This doesn’t seem to have happened at a scale that would trouble the Raspberry Pi Trading Company.

What has happened, I think, is that applications that only ever needed a few hundred lines of python and a few GPIO pins have happily moved to the Pico/Pico W.

But I suspect the poor OS support and terrible documentation of most competing boards means that the clone SMBs will only have made a small dent in their business.

Not that a little market diversification is a bad thing. Any competitor that can match the broad software support and documentation of the Pi boards is obviously going to be welcome.

Mind you there must have been a cost to the zeitgeist/mindshare aspect of SBCs generally; the Raspberry Pi products weren’t the only ones to become hard to find at truly low prices. The Foundation did a great job with the Pico which I would argue meets their educational goals better than say the Pi 4B, but maybe the role of the SBCs in education is forever diminished.

Clicked through all the vendor links from Raspberry Pi. No $35/$45 1/2GB v4 in stock, but available as much more expensive kits.

2GB Pi 4Bs at thepihut.com, 2gb and 4gb machines at pimoroni.com.

Zero W is seemingly unconstrained, Zero 2W is turning up in the kits and will hopefully soon be unconstrained.

The picture looks a whole lot better.

If you look at rpilocator.com’s “Last Stock” date, you can see that lots of retailers have has the 3, 4, and even Zero 2 in stock in the last few days. That was so rare earlier this year.

Maybe not the 1/2GB models you are looking for, but still an improvement.

FYI: You can use https://rpilocator.com to get a list of all Pis currently in stock at authorized resellers.

I finally was able to upgrade my 5-node P4/4GB cluster to an 8GB cluster these past few weeks. Took a mish-mash of vendors, but I'll finally be able to run more complicated Spark jobs.

Note: The Sun has come out of a decade long period of relative inactivity that coincided with the post-dot-com-crash era where Intel had removed ECC functionality from its consumer processors to protect the sales of its business processors thereby resulting in AN ENTIRE GENERATION of people who go on the Internet speculating that ECC is not necessary for mission critical applications (such as NAS controllers).

https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/deadly-solar-storm...

Still waiting to get my hands on a CM4 after all these years…

The tip I've seen for CM4s is digi-key will accept backorders. I got mine after six months, but that was also a few months ago, so I don't know how it is now.

Thanks for the tip!

Up to 1 million / month = 667 YEARS to supply each citizen of this planet with one (1) RPi.

Read: some more world domination left to do :-)

I bet 1/1,000th of people actually want one though.

Where is the $80 6GB Apple Pi and Apple CM (that boots Asshat Linux with a Swift compiler and runs a special edition of Swift Playgrounds for Wayland, but is otherwise blacklisted by Apple's own operating systems --except as a BLE target for iPad)?

Looking forward to a little counter in the Apple Stores filled with robocars, flashing LEDs and 16x20" pictures of 10 year old kids holding 25W soldering irons and a placemat filled with SMD components. :)

autocorrect rofl

Great question. Those AppleTV devices could be repurposed. Has anyone just targeted them for use?

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