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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I think that's a bit harsh. The bulk of the Raspberry Pi audience has no idea of the Broadcom connection. They're kids (like mine) who are looking for a cheap computer to do their hardware hacks with. And a Raspberry Pi Pico is very hard to beat for the money, they're ~5 bucks here single quantity, and far more powerful than Arduinos (and cheaper!).

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The competition for "very hard to beat for the money" hasn't been Arduinos for decades; it's cheap ARM Cortex boards, e.g. STM32 Nucleo - or ESP32.

I think ESP32 is really the one to beat.

Arduino have been lazily cashing in on their brand name for many years.

Is there a good comparison site anywhere for boards nowadays?

I still usually gravitate to the Pi or Arduino, but mostly due to a combination of lack of familiarity with other brands, and being a repeat customer for stuff that just works

I don't think so. Mbed used to have a nice one for all the boards that support Mbed, but that's dead now.

Looks like Zephyr has an extremely comprehensive list: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/index.html

Doesn't include prices though, and it's really too comprehensive - it seems to include lots of boards you can't actually buy. So maybe not very useful for finding good boards.

What’s a “good” RiscV board to start using for small projects?

Looking for a successor to the RPi - good documentation, easy to write bare metal for (no SDK), no surprises.

ESP32-C6, and associated dev boards.

>The bulk of the Raspberry Pi audience has no idea of the Broadcom connection

That doesn't make it less true. The GPU/VPU on the OG RPI was always undocumented and closed source that the community had to reverse engineer drivers for. Big L from my side for that.

It's why the OG RPI felt to me like a sneaky way Broadcom could move the stocks of unsold inventory of those set-top-box chips by marketing them as "Linux computers" that pretend to be open source but are actually not. Big brain move on their end to be fair.

> The GPU/VPU on the OG RPI was always undocumented and closed source that the community had to reverse engineer drivers for. Big L from my side for that.

So, like pretty much every other consumer level GPU?

Consumer GPUs aren't marketed as open source learning and tinkering boards.

That's fair. At the same time: the foundation and Broadcom really are two separate entities and I think even Broadcom is surprised by how successful the whole thing is. They may have thought to just humor their employee but it has become something much larger than that now. And I do agree they should open it up, just that that is not in Broadcom's commercial interest as far as I can determine.

looking for a cheap computer to do their hardware hacks with

A free standard PC, of which a depressingly large number are thrown out every day, easily beats the price and performance of an RPi, in addition to being far more open.

…while being hundreds of times bigger and also not offering the scope to implement hardware hacks (e.g. interfacing through GPIO/I2C/SPI/Serial without additions that cost more than the entire Pi).

Yes - obviously you can use an old PC for many different PoCs and prototypes. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of those you can’t.

> not offering (...) GPIO/I2C/SPI/Serial

Nearly every "old PC" does offer built-in easily accessible I2C - as "DDC channel" of a monitor plug - VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort - all have it. Linux exposes those as regular /dev/i2c-*, so any I2C software that works on a RPi or other Linux SBC, will run with those too:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120903090802/http://www.painty...

Also there are usb devices that can run gpio/spi/i2c/uart for a few bucks.

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