News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
Raspberry Pi Holdings is a embedded systems manufacturer for pity's sake; we don't need more from them, we need less. [EDIT] A faster Raspberry Pi 6 is encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150 and its successors and mainstream Linux distributions and that is a battle they would lose in terms of price and performance.
Give us a Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.
Many years ago, I measured performance per watt of the original Raspberry Pi when they were still relatively new. The performance per watt lagged behind even a beefy Intel box since the original Raspi was so slow that it destroyed any gain it got from using so little power.
EDIT: One set of benchmarks I found as an example: https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Performance-Per-Watt
They've never been particularly cheap, in a performance-per-dollar sort of way. Used machines from eBay, yard sales, and old broken laptops (that still compute!) have always been better. (They usually come out OK when new is compared to new, though, which is IMHO the only valid comparison.)
Those comparisons were never very favorable.
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The parts where it shines are: Small; they come in two sizes, and those sizes are small and smaller. That was new, but it's been cloned all over the place.
Built-in GPIO that's meant for people to actually-use and tinker with. That was new, too, but it's also been cloned. (Also: These days, anyone can plug a cheap Pi Pico into any PC with USB and get a fairly intense amount of GPIO to goof with.)
Standardization, and the appliance-like behavior this can enable. Lots of folks, including kids of all ages, just download pre-built images and swap SD cards like they would cartridges in a Nintendo. That's not for me, but it's pretty neat.
Community. They've still got a lot of momentum by being first at these roles. That's good. It helps newbs (who at this point may have never had anything resembling a "real computer" to play with ever before in their lives) to get started.
Low-power enough: It's not ideal when chasing tiny Watts for battery or small solar power, but you probably won't notice it on an electric bill (and despite the bizarro-world cooling rigs people put together, a passive heatsink really is good enough to keep it running in-spec).
but there is very little reason to use a rpi over other sbcs if you have a remote idea what you’re doing beyond hobby use
If you don’t specifically have a project where you need the GPIO pins built in, I struggle to understand the use case proposition of a raspberry pi compared to a typical x86 mini PC or even just grabbing a think client desktop like a ThinkCentre.
Almost everything that is unique to a Pi compared to an x86 mini PC seems like it makes more sense with an ESP device.
When the Raspberry Pi was $35 and it ran a desktop OS and the cheapest alternative that did that was 5x the price that use case made sense.
The ones I find on Lenovo's website don't seem to get any cheaper than $649.
Or do a search for “mini PC” on aliexpress.
The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers.
The company didn't sell its first microcontroller until years later in 2021 with the Pico, by which point we already had Pi 4. I do though think its a real shame prices for the SBCs have risen as they have.
Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.
Mate you know full well it was multiple things... Marketed to education as an actual computer, to the maker demographic as a microcontroller, as a way to learn coding but also robotics etc
>Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores blah blah blah
Same applies to thinking of them as SBCs
Pre-Beagleboard-and-Pi, if you wanted an programmable thing to work with GPIO, you used an Arduino or a BASIC Stamp, or just a plain old PIC. But they wouldn't run a real OS.
Pre-Beagleboard-and-Pi, if you wanted an embedded Linux box, you used a WRT54G or a Soekris or an old laptop. But getting GPIO out of them was a PITA. (And often involved lashing an Arduino to the side.)
The Beagleboard (released in 2008), could finally do both. It had gobs of I/O and first-class support for it under Linux. It was pretty affordable. Then the Raspberry Pi came out in 2012, with a similar amount of GPIO, but demolished the price point to where it made sense to use it in place of a microcontroller.
That's really the magic of the Pi. You can keep one cheap gizmo around, and use it to solve (a large fraction of) two classes of problems. It doesn't fully replace everything a PIC or a PC can do, but it replaces an awful, awful lot of them.
In this amazing world full of such inexpensive choices, it seems so bizarre to me to demonize any of them. They're all excellent in some way, and it's OK that there's more than one.
This isn't football, handball, American politics, or Highlander: There can be more than one. It's OK.
There have also been times when Pi's were cheap enough and x86 idled so power-inefficiently that you'd save money over a reasonable time horizon if you couldn't run your old laptops at full throttle.
Absurdly extreme example, but at one point I decided to replace a couple (maybe 3) RPi's with a single old Dell rack server off Ebay plus replaced my router with one running pfsense. I knew it would be mostly idle, that thing had 2 Xeon processors to replace 3 cheap ARM processors.
Between the 2 rack servers, my power bill went up by enough to buy a new Pi or two every month. It was like $80/month extra in power bills.
I suspect Espressif has mostly taken over that market now
Maybe you could do this with a ESP32 but it's easy on linux where you can use all the normal tooling and filesystem drivers.
ESP32 hardware is much better than they used to be.
Not everything needs to be under Linux monoculture, thankfully.
As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)
> the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions
FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.
If you're trying to get maximum performance out of it all the time, you will want a heatsink and fan. If you want to run some Python scripts in a Linux environment or even if you're doing heavy work and waiting longer is not a problem, you don't need extra cooling.
> and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port)
This hasn't been true in 10 years.
Powering something off of any old USB port means it would have to fit within the 5V 500mA basic specification, which the Raspberry Pi 3 exceeded long ago.
> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python
It was never a microcontroller by any definition of the word.
Raspberry Pi foundation has released microcontrollers that run MicroPython in a very user-friendly format https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/m...
What's the point of doing so though? If you're doing this, you're obviously using the wrong device. If all you need is to run some python scripts in a Linux environment, you should use a Pi 3 or Pi 0w2.
Agree with your other points.
Most light workloads are very bursty. When you type a command or click on something you want latency to be low. Having the overhead to get it done quickly at the full clockspeed is good if you are latency sensitive.
Throttling has become a bad word. Some feel compelled to avoid it at all costs, doing things like buying big coolers and running synthetic benchmarks to avoid it. Unless you're doing sustained workloads where you need all of the performance, allowing a little throttling is fine.
I'm going to replace it before then.
Do heat cycles mean that the device only lasts half as long as it might if it were kept at some constant ideal temperature? A third as long?
If so, then...so what? The tinkerers using these things aren't broadly concerned about these things. We're all out here running our real-live desktop, laptop, and pocket computers with bursty loads, dynamic clocks, and dynamic heat anyway, and these things are generally doing just fine. We aren't driving space ships with this stuff; it'll be alright.
I insist that there is no merit to holding a lowly Raspberry Pi board to a higher standard than we hold everything else.
Furthermore: If perfection is necessary for some kind of application, then maybe starting with a <$100 hobby SBC isn't the best move. It might be time to look within for a better pathway.
(Disclaimer, I work for raspberry pi ltd, not views of employer etc.)
> It was never a microcontroller by any definition of the word.
I think the poster means people treat the R-Pi like an MCU that runs Python. The Arduino was popular at the time the Pi came out but limited. Once the Pi landed, it quickly filled the gap and the Arduino's popularity diminished to the point where it's now a corporate Pi clone.
I and many other people very much used it like a microcontroller.
Theoretically, devices like the iPhone have lower power consumption than that and loads of performance features like recording 4k 120fps video.
Of course, an iPhone costs much more than a RPi, and has much better economies of scale, so they’re not truly comparable.
iPhones use cutting edge (expensive) manufacturing processes for their chips.
They also have batteries inside to cover the power demands while doing intense work like recording 4K 120fps video.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. The Raspberry Pi is not in the same class of device as an iPhone.
In practice most USB wall warts will happily provide 2 amps or even more with no overcurrent protection at all. The 500 mA limitation, at least outside of ports on computers (where you'll maybe get a prompt on Windows and macOS), is theoretical.
They need to stick within limits to avoid liability (and avoid arseholes blaming them on forums).
Someone would get a problem with their computer or TV, and then blame Raspberry Pi (or create a problem).
The problem with the Pi5 is that they use weird profile, 5A/5V, that requires special charger. Most 5V chargers are 100W and beefy. If they hadn't cheaped out on power circuits, they could have used normal 30W charger. They should come out with new version that fixes that.
5A/5V what are they smoking?
Is that a good idea? Well, not really.
Maybe a tick-tock release cycle (one with new features and some speed, the next with the ~same features and more speed) is where they're headed, and maybe that makes sense. They wouldn't be the first.
I'd love to see even-lower-RAM versions, though. Most of what I use Raspberry Pis for at home for is not RAM-hungry at all.
My Pi4 network router has 2GB because that was the smallest/cheapest version at release when I got it, but the system itself consistently only uses about 64MB of RAM. It'd do perfectly well and have a ton of breathing room with just 128MB of RAM (which will never happen, but if it did happen...).
I suspect the Pi4 that I use as a set-top box with Kodi would be fine with 512MB.
I've used Zero Ws for all kinds of things over the years and never felt RAM-starved with their little 512MB of RAM.
So I'm learning towards 512MB.
But sure: 1GB options would also be fine even if it does double the price. Our comments serve to demonstrate that there's room in the marketplace for different SKUs with different memory capacities. :)
How do you cope with high resolution videos?
Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.
They may not have intended to be in direct competition, but in the current crisis conditions they are priced about the same as equivalent RAM/storage N150s, have even worse supply issues than the N150s, and have worse performance/watt than the N150s.
Its mighty hard to recommend them for new projects at the moment (nor any of the Pi clones, which are also rocketing in cost and dwindling in availability)
Among people who want GPIOs and network connectivity, a low price and an open, microcontroller like experience, not caring much about USB speeds and lots of cores and running Linux and suchlike, it’s in competition with the esp8266 & esp32. And the previous generations of RPi.
I have a bunch of old intel atom boards laying around. The Intel Compute Stick (TM) burnt out its flash root drive in a few months. The C2000 board I had burnt out the clock pin to drive the bios. I have a Clover Trail with a PowerVR GPU (I thought I was getting an intel GPU because it was branded Intel Graphics or similar, but nope!) that lost Windows support very quickly after launch, and has no GPU drivers for any other OS.
Instead of being fooled 4 times in a row, I looked into using an N150 for a NAS, but this time I held off a bit until after launch so I could research it first.
Lo-and-behold, they all have crazy PCIe / memory subsystem data corruption issues. I guess there are some chicken bits for the OS developers to set if the kernel can stay up long enough after boot without a panic.
Why would anyone buy this for a NAS / embedded use case?
Source? I've never had a single problem with PCIE on N100/N150/N200.
I have had a ton of issues with drive corruption on the pi, both via USB3 and PCIE.
I am pretty certain that the Linux kernel must also contain specific code for various quirks of all Arm CPUs that have been used in the various Raspberry Pi models.
Intel had indeed several bugs that were more ugly than usual in their recent CPU models, like also MONITOR not working correctly in Lunar Lake, but even so, Intel still has better documentation for their CPU bugs than most vendors of Arm-based CPUs.
In any case, the bug that you linked was solved in the kernel years ago and it affects a privileged instruction that cannot be used in user programs. It does not have any direct relationship with memory and PCIe corruption. Memory corruption can occur inside the operating kernel only in certain circumstances, when the kernel changes the mapping of global memory pages and then writes the new pages, but the writes go to the old pages. However, this could happen only until 3 years ago, before the bug was known.
During covid I wanted a small low power always on server. I thought about Raspi, but at the time it was expensive and I went with an intel nuc, for a similar price.
Now if I wanted to do hobby electronics, I heard I should look into esp32 or stm32..
It depends massively on what kind of DX you want. If you want to work with a 'regular' operating system, you're looking more in the RPi direction.
If you want to write straight-up C firmware, then yeah, the esp and stms are both great.
Each Pi release is more powerful, but uses more energy. I found the Pi 4B to be the sweet spot for me, because it is the earliest model to support USB booting, gigabit Ethernet, and offer > 1GB RAM.
Perhaps a used one would fit your purposes and budget?
I currently use it to run PiHole, serve media via SMB, host Postgres & Redis, and run some custom written Dockerized apps. Home Assistant to possibly follow, too. The current load seems reasonable in htop, but I haven’t looked into burst scenarios.
> encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150.
It’s nerdier to say you built your homelab on a Raspi, and that’s what keeps the foundation afloat.
But that's not as good for PR as "bigger, faster, better" even if that comes with the problems you mentioned.
Yes, that would be kind of a dream device, perhaps also if it could suspend the os when asleep so it doesn't have to boot every time but I guess that might the standard way of doing it.
What would be really nice is Zero 3 with 2 USB-C ports and video output. Then have something cheap for projects that was flexible.
Finally, they should replace the header with new extension mechanism. Something that does PCIe, USB, and power. That would allow new extension boards including one that goes GPIO breakout.
M5Stack and other esp32 based ecosystems rule the world for MCU so the Zero just need to be linux SOC with all the fancy bells and whistles with good driver support
Reasons: - full sized HDMI connector - headphone connector - good bang for the buck
If I had one wish for any new product in the Raspberry line it would be: Do the Raspberry Pi 3++ or something. Same thing. Faster, but with USB-C power connector, 4K Video resolution, 2× USB-C I/O, 2× USB-A peripherals and maybe M.2 support.
I seriously cannot fathom being someone doing development who wouldn't pay $0.50 extra to purge the last micro USB from their desktop.
$0.12 for microUSB female connector (rated 1A) $0.26 for a USB-C female (rated 3A). Needs 2 x resistors (< $0.01), 20% larger board area
I think the power capabilities are the biggest item. If you want to pull higher current from a laptop for development or supply from a wall, you have to switch to USB-C.
I don't think either of these prices are that aggressive - pretty sure the cost comes down at volume.
But it seems like it would be useful nowadays, since some laptop have mostly USB-C connectors, and USB-C to USB-C is pretty common. I’ve never seen a C to Micro. Do they even exist?
I have a Pico in front of me, and there's plenty of room there for a USB-C footprint and the two 5.1k resistors. Given that, I cannot reasonably agree that the "design" stage is significant.
In other words, it's a change that I would make to my own board in 2-5 minutes because the stakes are low. My ballpark guess is that such a change at RPi would have to go through a proposal stage, a PCB change review, and then there would be dozens of places to update documentation.
Since backwards compatibility is non-optional, this would result in a separate SKU, which means that the whole distribution chain needs to be updated with a new product.
So, I acknowledge that when you're working at their scale any change like this is the definition of non-trivial. What I don't agree with is the conclusion that it's not still clearly the right thing to do.
They do, in spades: https://www.amazon.com/3FT-Micro-Data-Charge-Cable/dp/B0DDWH...
I look forward to the day when they're no longer necessary.
There is no more use case for RPi if I can have ESP32 C6 for $10 - maybe I have to do some soldering on my own.
Then if I need a minicomputer I'd rather go with MinisForum PC that is in price range of RPi and if I need I2C or GPIO I can pair it with ESP32 like as many as I want ESP32 instead of single one like RPi. Then communicate over wireless as much as I want with BLE or WiFi.
Remind me how many PIO channels does the C6 have?
Also, could you confirm that the RP2350 consumes 2-3x less power when idling?
If you have the contact details for any certification labs that don't charge extra for radio modules even if you're not using them in your product, that'd be super helpful as well.
I am just hyped about ESP I have. I also have bunch of old RPi’s.
I guess power consumption can be lower on C6 if I turn off BLE and WiFi.
When you frame two MCUs intended for different purposes as competition, you're completely missing why there are so many different useful MCU families in the first place.
If you need a programmable IO state machine (or twelve) then you need the RP2350, period. It's a feature that enables entire domains of functionality that wouldn't otherwise be possible. For example, I'm using it to perform a real-time 12 output MIDI THRU that doesn't tax the CPU cores. Nothing like that exists on the ESP32 family.
I'm on a phone that makes it a pain in the ass to switch languages. Do it yourself.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/en-us/collections/rp2350
https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-pro-micro-rp2350.html
What I am saying is that we're well into 2026 and there's no good reason for RPi not to offer a USB-C version of the reference board for this MCU.
I don't need a Pico or any other 3rd party board. I drop SC-1511/12s packages on my PCBs as needed.
What I am saying is that the reference board for an RP2350 should have a USB-C port in 2026. It's not aesthetics or even convenience (and it's definitely not price) so much as establishing best practices for how a part should be used.
A big part of that is to acknowledge the context in which a part exists, and in this case, it's both a fact and a very good thing that the world has embraced USB-C. It's even being regulated in many cases.
I'm not saying that you can't smoke, just that maybe you shouldn't do it when you're volunteering as a Big Brother.
I do think that you're missing my point, which is that we're significantly past the point in this wretched timeline where they should offer a USB-C version of the reference board for this MCU.
This way, I can have my laptop running codex control over a target laptop, by pretending to be a keyboard.
Edit: one thing I can think of where micro USB connectors are better: if you broke off the connector, it's much easier to solder it back on.
Sure when you're at home, if you have a stable home. It's one more cable to bring if you don't, or if you ever travel and stay in a hotel.
USB-C is the opposite of all those cons: much more durable, not directionally opinionated, you can use one cable for everything, you can do USB host and USB-PD.
It's also clearly the future everything is standardizing on. There's value in embracing that, since it is a Reference Board.
The economics don't add up either, because an adapter cable costs money too.
however, while in one hand we are happy to (albeit temporarily) raise prices based on ram situation, in terms of design, there is simply not enough money for the port. especially when now they are adding ecosystem items that do cost money to develop and maintain.
this explanation made sense pre-ipo but no longer imho.
I just don't get it. Anyone who wants to save a few pennies just buys the chip directly. Their Pico board is primarily for prototyping and one off products, where quality of life is everything and 16 cents is nothing. The adapter cable probably costs more than the amount they saved. That's a dick move.
[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/673711/raspberry-pi-5
[2] https://www.microcenter.com/product/691058/nvidia-jetson-ori...
Edit: looks like they at least have a better headless option now.
Also, supposedly on the second half of 2026 they were going to be moving even more stuff out of their Jetson-specific drivers as they already do for their slightly newer chips (so you could use the standard drivers, and standard CUDA builds). Let’s see how that turns out.
I was always disappointed by the Nano as it was a pretty capable device, but it seemed like not many people picked it up as a platform for cool things which I always attributed to the software.
rephrase please?
Who would’ve thought that NVIDIA started upstreaming stuff once they realized how much money Linux is making them?
I thought it was "out of three" or something
human parser error :/
And at their price point, you could just get a mini PC and have better performance, or if you want to use it as a microcontroller, you can just use an arduino, esp32, or an actual microcontroller for a fraction of the price and power consumption.
So, what do people actually do with these pies?
But you're right. It's pretty overpriced for its performance. If I'm after the GPIO I'd just use a microcontroller. If I'm setting up a headless server I'd just use pretty much any other SBCs or mini PC. I'm personally not a big fan of Raspberry Pi.
The cheap Raspberry Pi's still available as Raspberry Pi Zero tho, if that's what you're after.
I keep hearing voices invalidate each other, is the bottleneck the raw silicon substrate, or fab capacity?
What purity levels are required for say Pi Zero 2W?
The volume of monocrystalline silicon used in solar panels is orders of magnitude greater than the volume used in IC's / RAM production.
Is the actual bottleneck 11N + grade silicon wafers while 6N to 9N grade used in solar panels remains unaffected?
Everything they do from a compute perspective is just better with a mini pc or old laptop with a mobile spec chip.
Everything they do from a programmability perspective is just better with a microcontroller specific to the task.
I just don't see the actual market position for these things. They were supposed to be a cheap board, but you can't actually buy them cheaply because the vendors upcharge so much.
If you're trying to build a couple of units of some embedded thing where you need to toggle some GPIOs or serial devices in response to requests over the network, but don't have the expertise or resources to do it with a microcontroller, a Pi is a great option - you know you'll have software support, and you know that the vendor will be making the exact thing you bought for 5-10y.
For hobbyist stuff at home, I agree, though. A mini PC is probably better for homelab stuff, and an RP2350 or ESP32 is probably better for anything embedded or battery powered that you want to do.
* Replacement controller for my UFO Catcher - It has WiFi, easy to update, and I can operate the machine remotely with it. It's bolted to the back of small touchscreen that lets me change the machine settings as well.
* Remote printer access - I can monitor from the USB cameras and gather statistics about the prints.(I suspect a lot of 3D printing enthusiasts use them for this purpose.)
Having a small low power computer has been useful for me in those instances.
It's amazing how well these fit into the category of products that people feel compelled to buy, play around with, and then forget about.
Flipper Zero is another product that landed in the same space.
What's sad is that Raspberry Pi does have a lot of legitimate use cases and people who want to use them, but the supply has always been swamped by all of the demand.
Isn't it mainly for learning and hobby-ism?
Rapid prototyping: I created a PoC to take a webcam snapshot every half hour and upload it to a server in an afternoon. Freelance project. Could it have been done with a microcontroller? Yes, but not in 4 hours.
Local digital displays in a gym: we built a system with a number of overhead 60" TVs, each with a pi on a VESA mount to show scheduling and workout information in a gym for a client.
HVAC controller: bid on a project where the customer's original concept was a Pi managing a rooftop HVAC system for large buildings. They outgrew the pi and wanted a new solution.
Data aggregator: collecting sensor information via BLE (bluetooth) and uploading to an internet server over Ethernet.
Remember that "cheap" to a consumer doesn't have the same definition for a business. To most profitable businesses, a $100 computer that fits on the back of a TV and consumes a fraction of its power is cheap. In fact, one of the reasons that Pi's were so hard to find for a while is that the Raspberry Pi foundation was prioritizing industrial/commercial customers over hobbyists.
I've tired of buying S1 compatible sonos speakers on ebay, so I'd like to build a speaker enclosure with a WiFi device that has a high-quality DAC and the ability to use pipewire or similar to do real-time DSP and multi-room audio sync.
A RPI + third party hat should work well for this, or so I am told.
https://sonocotta.com/esp-products/
Now I have a wifi radio running in homeassistant. Running my own (music only) radios with azuracast. Loud enough for high quality 30+ year old 10kg 100/140 Watt speakers. Next step is making a remote for it, cheap ikea one with two buttons or a tap dial with more.
For a company, they're also nice for "I want to make an IoT device that's heavier weight than an ESP32 and/or I only want to hire Linux Application People and not Firmware People; what's the cheapest Linux module I can get that's widely supported, backed by a real company, and has regulatory approvals" - Pi Zero W. My understanding is this exact pattern is why it's harder to get them as a hobbyist.
I use them widely in automotive reverse engineering; ESP32 can and does work just as well or better for an end product, but for experiments it's really nice to have a self-contained appliance to SSH into and use SocketCAN on rather than some bespoke firmware project to manage and iterate on.
Given the price and availability issues I suspect the market is "correcting" a bit and companies are hiring Firmware People and switching to true MCUs in places they'd previously have avoided doing so, but it was definitely a thing for a long time.
They also make OK Kodi/Libreelec boxes due to better documented video decode silicon (Intel still better at that).
The moment you want to use a dynamically linked library, you're out of luck.
The vast MCUs don't have enough RAM or flash storage. You'll have to trim everything down so it fits.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Raspberry-Pi-discusses-Zero-3-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCs/comments/1tmuy3a/radxa_rock_pi...
The vast majority of NPUs are a poorly documented mess. The only one with good documentation is the one from AMD.
Glad I'm not alone in caring about this. All I want from them is a Pico with a USB-C port. When using them for keyboards and arcade controllers you either need to wire up a separate port (and USB-C is awful to solder) or use someone else's variant with one on there. I have had issues in both cases. The Open-Frame1 leverless controller needed me to either pay for assembly or fail at soldering on the extra port myself (did the former for batch 1, got cocky when ordering batch 2 and didn't pay assembly, never got any of the new boards working). Flatbox rev 5 used an RP2040-Zero from Waveshare, which initially seemed fine but later turned out to have major bouncing issues. Typing on a virtual keyboard with it was nearly impossible, all the extra inputs being detected. The amount of debounce needed to be added in GP2040-CE settings to completely solve it resulted in it being much higher latency. I heard a theory that it was due to a lack of filtering on the MCU. Meanwhile Haute42 started pumping out incredibly cheap leverless controllers in all sorts of designs within a year of me building 10 Flatboxes. They're so cheap you can't really DIY one cheaper anymore unless you need them in bulk, and they have no bouncing/input issues. They even have extension ports to help deal with console auth. Their non-3d-printed buttoncaps also don't break as much, though I did eventually have one break after living in my backpack a while.
I'd like to take another crack at building a solid leverless someday. A new Pico with a USB-C port would probably be enough motivation.
Also I should note that part of why USB-C is such a big deal on a game controller is because they all use it now, and I've got lots of long USB-C to A cables connected to consoles and my PC, I can easily switch controllers at the user-facing end without having to re-run a cable. I can go from my Open-Frame1 playing Rivals of Aether to my Steam Controller playing Crab Champions to my Haute42 M16 playing Melty Blood all with the same cable routed under my desk, often without leaving my chair.
The price increases were the end of the Pi being a viable option for most application in my eyes.
The existing secure boot mechanisms aren't bad, but allowing for more than one public key hash in OTP would be nice, too.
These kinds of things are expected to be on modern embedded SOCs and SOMs now.
I've spent far too much time messing around trying to get TPMs working over SPI or I2C to meet security requirements with 4Bs and 5s over the years.
I've been curious for a while about the overall taxonomy of security, especially for embedded platforms. It seems like the only hope is defense in depth, given the power glitching attacks and the like that you can find demonstrated.
Specific to the Raspberry Pi, I believe I even saw a thread at some point where one of their firmware engineers was making the case that secure boot on the Pi 5 was equivalent to a TPM in almost any reasonable threat model, since, in either case, you were out of luck if an attacker had physical access and was willing to put in enough effort.
The TPM is used for measured boot, the post process to understand what actually was booted and if the right set of things were booted then to allow unlocking of specific items like keys.
Both are important but they are not the same thing.
And if you're not worried about CPU you can get a pile of Pi Picos or ESP32s.
Actually, considering that the original zero had a better CPU than 2014 Pis, I'm surprised you didn't get a 10 pack of those when they were extra cheap.
Then I actually couldn't set the thing up because of the mini HDMI connection - I have a mini to HDMI cable, but to use my portable screen with it I need mini HDMI to MINI HDMI. Don't get me started on micro HDMI - almost everyone of of those connectors I've bought slips off or breaks in the device. Every time I go to set up an RPi5 I end up having to order another one of those tiny connectors.
Full HDMI for all new devices please. Even if the second display can't be connected.
These days a 175 GBP N95 from a no-name Chinese OEM on Amazon, with 16 GB of RAM and a 500GB SATA SSD is way better value and performance - and importantly - zero fuss - standard setup.
"These days" seems to be over for now. The prices went up there, and now the only affordable option is an old laptop's motherboards with DDR3 sticks. But passively cooled PCs are rare, so the Raspberry Pi still makes sense. As a bonus, it is easier to power and find a small UPS that will keep it running for hours.