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Comment by pseudosavant | Hacker News Reader

Not a completely invalid or uncommon take, but also not completely correct. People lament that it isn't the $25 like it used to be with the Pi 2/3, but ignore that you can get a Pi Zero 2 W (quad A53 cores like 3B, 512MB RAM) for <$20. I've used them for a bunch of projects: moonlight game streaming client, on-stage video player controlled by a foot pedal, Bluetooth controlled recorder for USB audio interfaces, Tailscale exit node, etc. They are tiny and great!

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/

I wish a Pi 5 (and RAM in general) was cheaper, but Raspberry Pi can't control that.

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Some people seem to think raspberry pi is a consumer tech company and whenever a new model is released, the old one will be discontinued. They will complain about the product being changed and the company robbing them of a cheap SBC.

I can only assume they don't actually work with the pi because if you spend just a minute looking at any reseller's inventory or even just the official website you will see they still make and sell and support boards from a decade ago.

Agree. It's clear since COVID that Pi it's barely a company for makers or DIYers anymore, but it's a supply company for small to medium industries to integrate cheap PCs in their manufacturing process and they are good at that role.

Huh. I had a work project a decade ago where we were evaluating SBCs as drivers for kiosks. At that time, the prevailing wisdom was that the Pi was specifically not for industry, as its main advantage was the strong community to provide support for DIYers. Competitors like PINE64 and Orange Pi were the same/better specs at half the price.

When people talk about whether something like a Pi is aimed at industrial customers, that is largely not a statement about the cost vs specs, nor about the level of engagement with the DIY community. It's usually about having a suitable supply chain and long-term support and stable BOM and a mature software platform for customers to start building on.

Our logic at the time was that the relatively fixed cost of figuring out the hardware and developing device-specific software was less than the variable cost-per-board delta of like $20.

The Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms weren't meant to power commercial-grade products, nor be cost effective at scale compared to raw/custom ARM and AVR devices. However, they've become ubiquitous in education, which I imagine has impacted industry. Similar to how software companies give out free student licenses so that upcoming engineers become familiar with their software for when they start working, an entire generation of embedded systems engineers were taught on official (or compatible) Arduino and Raspberry Pi devices. While these platforms aren't meant for commercial products, I imagine engineers in industry might use these platforms to prototype or work with subcomponents, before they integrate it with a raw/custom AVR or ARM platform. After all, when prototyping, it's easier and faster to get up and running when you have a massive collection of libraries and tutorials online to use, which RPi and Arduino offer, versus doing it all yourself with raw AVR and ARM.

As an example, I believe the tear-down of one of the now-defunct electric scooter rental company’s units revealed it contained a RPi. IIRC, the commentary lambasted them for using it, because it’s not really rated for that kind of job. But a significant portion of the peanut gallery understood and rationalized the decision. I expect fewer folks would question this choice these days.

Raspberry Compute Module (basically a normal raspberry without built-in I/O) is widely used in the industry at large. What they are not meant to be is the lowest cost per CPU/GPU flops so they are mostly used in high-value-add / low-volume / gen-1 products.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...

I personally worked on a system with raspberry compute modules 3 and 4, the total system cost was in the ~million dollar range. This was definitely a commercial product with dozens of engineers doing R&D, not a hobby project.

We were looking into smaller systems with lower profit margins (~20k USD) and for those we were considering moving away from raspberry CMs because of cost.

The main advantage of the raspberry CM ecosystem is just how widely popular it is and how cheap and available "dev boards" are (just grab a non-CM raspberry and it is almost the same thing). Most of these types of systems don't really have the I/O that makes testing and developing a lot easier.

Being popular is quite important because firmware issues are notoriously expensive to troubleshoot and fix often requiring the manufacturer help. Said manufacturer does not give a damn if you are a low-volume customer. More popular systems have more information available online and are less likely to have bugs (or at least the bugs are known).

I remember one of our other systems bluetooth module had a weird edgecase bug that caused the module to shutdown after several days of it being powered on. It took multiple engineers >1month of work to basically go "yep nothing we can do about this and manufacturer is not helping"

I know they are being used in Ukranian drones and some police-car systems in some cities (although this was hearsay from a coworker and I don't remember the city). But those are just the examples I heard of.

I've seen this sentiment a bit and while I don't dispute that you can get a better SBC for cheaper, there are still a lot of issues and it tends to be around software support primarily that allows it to occupy a very sweet spot. It's a significant factor in deciding to use them. There are a lot of embedded use cases that can be solved by hooking up to an ESP32 but there are a bunch that need a little bit more than that. If you want to run a web server for example, you do have options on the ESP32 but also writing C/C++ for a web backend is both a little fraught and kinda miserable compared to Python or Go or something. I mean it's certainly doable, but it certainly isn't the first language I'd reach for. If you want to work a little bit with streaming video, same deal

So this is the embedded Linux usecase. And... the embedded Linux ecosystem seems kinda... hacked together? You a lot of the times get Yocto Linux which is its own can of worms because you tend to invariably get meta-vendor packages that patch everything from U-Boot to the kernel to random userspace utilities. There are better cases and it depends on how much the vendor works upstream. Sometimes the vendor doesn't even bother with maintaining the meta layer and it ends up getting into a "maintained mostly by one guy in Nebraska" scenario

Some other vendors seem to take U-Boot and a copy of the Ubuntu LTS sources from 10 years ago and hacked it until it was possible to get a root shell without the thing going into a kernel panic then put the resulting image on a Google Drive or FTP server somewhere but didn't go much further than that

What ends up being is that there is like a U-Boot and Linux kernel variant for either each different SBC (or sometimes vendor thereof) duck taped together. Support, even for the peripherals included, can be spotty at best, and there are many times where you have to patch the kernel or userspace to get it to work right. I've seen boards which run the weirdest stuff, ones whose kernel patches run into the megabytes with poor (if any) documentation, boards which apparently don't want to run anything but Android, etc. There are certainly vendors that work well and upstream and make everything nice and easy but they tend to be rarer and/or more expensive

Compared that with the Pis and the difference is night and day enough that the raw specs matter less. Yes RasPi has their own kernel fork, but iirc they do work a bit upstream and the versions maintained are like 6.12 and not like 5 (which I've seen). They are also relatively easy to procure where more specialized vendors tend to be... less so. Flashing them is pretty simple and if you want to create your own image you can do that as well easily without Yocto or whatever. The HAT ecosystem is a nice way to add extensibility, the headers basically allow you to do a lot of ESPy type things as well (since Linux has native specific userspace support for GPIO, I2C, SPI, PWM, LED, hwmon, etc). And so on and so forth. And it all just kinda works

This in of itself, makes it a pretty decent option for industry, especially if it's like either n <= 1000 units or a relatively small part of the BOM itself. It often is very much the economically sensible option to stick a Pi in it rather than put many man hours into fixing problems that really shouldn't require me to open up menuconfig or apply a kernel patch again.

People like Geerling tend to come at it from the hobbyist or maker side of things but it does apply to the industrial side too. Yes in many cases knowing part XYZ will still be manufactured in 30 years is more important than the dev experience or some other factor is at play (power draw being another) but in a lot of cases its not (e.g. more portable code, stuff not requiring recertification) and the Pis also do have a relatively reasonable time guarantee too. It shouldn't be a bad experience to develop on these boards! But regardless, there are a lot of times that it is, and that's why I think the RasPi continues to do as well as it does.

This is also why I think, despite the price, it continues to do well in the hobbyist community. I can hook it up using the headers to anything SPI, I2C, etc, and start making it do things with very little software trouble and regardless if I want to do it in C or if I want to do it in Python

While you can still buy a pi 3, you'd be kicking yourself for not using something faster.

Why would you? It's completely fine for it's intended educational context

It's not just intended exclusively or limited to education. Many products ship with compute modules inside.

We have a lot of old pi3 stock at $work. We keep using them. The pi3 was the newest model when we imagined and built the applications we're using them for. It was perfectly capable back then. Why would that have changed? The application hasn't changed and it's still perfectly capable now.

I don't know, I've got a ~10 year old 1B+ sitting there running Pihole just fine. My ass remains un-kicked.

I don't understand why it's so difficult for people to understand.

If you're using the Pi as a microcontroller that you can run Python on, then just get the cheapest Pi that meets your needs.

If you're using the Pi for computationally expensive tasks then pay more money and get the fast one.

Personally I have a Pi 5 and it's perfect for me because I want small size but high performance. People say "just buy a real computer" but that would be higher energy and larger footprint.

The whole point of these things is that you use them for whatever you can imagine. Since different people have different imaginations it only makes sense that there's a range of different devices to suit everyone.

N100-class minipcs are better at everything the pi 5 is doing except perhaps a bit of idle power and gpio.

Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface? Can it be used to build a portable battery powered smartphone like PC (Compute Module 5)?

Raspberry Pi’s biggest strength is its form factor and low power draw.

> Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface?

Yes. Generally only requiring a $10 PoE splitter like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134500605396

Some N100 class machines draw more power, but many don't, and there are more capable PoE splitters for a few dollars extra.

Use a USB touchscreen.

I might also point out that with Pi/mini PC pricing being the way it is, a used iPad mini mounted to the wall is also in the same price range. As a bonus you could remove it from the wall and walk around with it, and you’ve got way less DIY work to deal with.

Well, nobody's arguing about RPi prices here. I'm just advocating for using the right tool for the job. Lots of people claim that Raspberry Pis have been rendered obsolete by cheap N100 mini PCs but they simply lack the understanding of what RPi actually is and what are its optimal use cases. Hosting a home server on a 16GB Raspberry Pi is mental illness territory and that's where an x86 mini PC is going to make way more sense. Same with retro gaming (unless you really need Composite out). RPis shine when you need compact size, low power and heat with great selection of hardware accessories like cameras and other sensors but also want to run full Linux or need that extra performance that a micro controller just doesn't have.

Edit: Putting a device with permanently attached battery inside of a wall or even on a mount, always plugged in gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Basically, my point is that for the use case of “touch screen on a wall,” you can grab something modest like a 4GB Raspbery Pi 5 for over $110 with no screen, power supply, enclosure, etc.

Or you look at a mini PC and you really can’t buy one at all for much less than $200 these days. Again, no screen.

But Apple will sell you a refurbished iPad mini for $379 and you’ve got nothing to setup.

I share your concern about running it with the battery all the time, but I think it’s pretty common. I probably wouldn’t put it in my wall but I know of a place of business I frequent often that has one plugged in 24/7 and nothing has happened.

Apple power manages devices that are plugged in all the time, they’ll likely just park the battery at 80%. They are also about as good as you can get as far as hardware quality: Apple sells a bazillion devices and has definitely thought of fire risk.

The other benefit of the iPad is that the accessory ecosystem is vast.

But that's way bigger and hotter than a RPi4 with an official Touch Display 2. It's technically possible but sounds silly and impractical.

To drive a touchscreen and serve as a Home Assistant interface you need neither a Pi nor an N100-class mini PC. That's the job of an ESP32. 20 bucks... for a pack of 5.

(plus the screen. And ethernet / PoE variants are rare, and not as cheap, so if that's a hard requirement, maybe not for your specific use case)

True but that Raspberry Pi can be both the server and the interface if desired. It's also the easiest way to do all of this with RPis great software support and official plug and play accessories like RPi Touch Display 2. RPi is also going to be way more responsive rendering a complex Home Assistant dashboard.

Or! a "handheld gaming" device that runs mainline Linux.

Setting aside what they're for, Linux handheld gaming devices are kind of a perfect fit for a minor "house computer". Made cheap by commodification. Flexible. Sadly no GPIO in these I think but tack on an RP2350 and we're golden.

Strip or modify the chassis and embed them hidden or with the screen facing out. Kachinng.

Watermelons are better at everything the apples are doing except perhaps a bit of weight and for making apple pies.

If I tried to put a mini PC where my Pi currently sits - a very narrow shelf - it would fall off and probably hurt itself. You can put a Pi just about anywhere.

For the microcontroller use case with Python, the alternative might be to use actual microcontroller that runs CircuitPython/MicroPython. Personally I find it a bit better due to no need to manage/update the Linux distro.

Everything on their website has a date they promise to manufacture them until.

They really want to assure people that they can get a near identical replacement for years to come if they want to build a product or deploy one somewhere.

Try getting your hands on a Pi Zero 2 W. Here in Germany you cannot get them at all any more and the quoted price has gone up 3x.

It's $37 new incl shipping on US eBay. Initial retail price was $23 incl shipping, see launch thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025579

So a 61% price hike over 5 years, of which 24% was just inflation. If the total price really went up 200% in your country, that's exceptional and probably caused by policies unique to your country.

btw you can't compare prices without shipping because there was never an option to buy 100 at $15 each and amortize shipping. Retailers treated it as a loss leader with a limit of one per purchase, often forcing you to buy some extra junk to meet the order minimum.

Weird. I can get one at the local Microcenter - with headers, the only one they're selling right now - for $18. They have a bunch in stock.

Yeah, for those with a Micro Center, the Pi pricing is in line with MSRPs. A lot of people buy from vendors on Amazon or eBay, which do not have to stick to MSRPs, and they use those prices as "gospel". Sadly, for some people, those prices are the best they can find for a shipped product in their location, so I don't blame them.

Can you buy out their inventory, sell them for $36 online, and help everyone save a dollar, or is this the same old "Retailers treated it as a loss leader"?

Amazon/eBay prices are indeed gospel. You can ship something like this across the country for <$5 so location doesn't matter unless you're talking tariffs

I'm sure Microcenter is not selling Pi Zeroes at a loss. They're an authorized retailer selling at the part's MSRP. They do sometimes make these available only in store, not online, once they sell out online and I don't think it's a mystery why a retail business would do that.

Why are you so confident? Raspberry Pi's prospectus says "unit gross profit margin of 20 per cent. for us and 10 per cent. for our ARs" and they give an example: "sell it to our ARs for $90, which in turn would sell it to the end user for $100". AR=Approved Resellers and delivery costs are paid by the reseller.

Is 10%/$1.50 enough to pay for the retailer's freight, ~3% fee to accept credit cards, inventory carrying, rent, payroll, shrinkage, support/RMA, and fraud?

https://data.fca.org.uk/artefacts/NSM/Portal/NI-000098822/NI...

Those are both extraordinarily low profit margins. Good on them!

Meh, the real profit margin is in scalping. RPi's retail price requirements ensure that scalpers make a profit while it stays out of stock in official channels

Yeah, more stock arriving on 1st of October, so I'm told.

> you can get a Pi Zero 2 W (quad A53 cores like 3B, 512MB RAM) for <$20

Except... You can't. They're sold out almost entirely and none of the distributors can tell when the new batch gets in. At least in EU.

The Pi Zero 2W is great, but data I/O (WiFi, USB, and micro SD) do limit use cases slightly. For most use cases, I doubt this is an issue, but it is something to keep in mind if you want to run bandwidth-constrained services on it. For $15, I don't think that's an issue, but it is unfortunate.

Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering?

What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?

I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.

An old thin client machine, like a Thinkcentre M73, would do the job, and would cost less than an RPi. Look at EBay.

He's talking about a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It's a $15 part.

In my experience, yes to hardware-accelerated video from CLI--running in EGL mode, with no window manager, that RPi model works very well. (A C++ app that uses video as a texture can be surprisingly performant, too.) But no to playing video in a full desktop environment and browser, not smoothly--it's just too much overhead.

I've easily played 1080p video, but not using a full Linux GUI. The more effective way is to use a command-line video player like mpv that can leverage the hardware decoder and render to the frame buffer.

I made a project for a band to use on-stage where it would switch between videos by tapping a bluetooth foot pedal. The stompbox-style foot pedal buttons were just wired into an ESP32 acting like a bluetooth keyboard sending 1, 2, or 3. The key bindings for mpv were setup to instantly switch to specific videos for each number. It worked perfectly.

I have also used it to real-time 1080p stream my gaming PC from another room using Moonlight so that I could play in more than one location in my home. That was also running directly from the command-line.

But trying to use something like X/Wayland and proper GUI apps usually performs poorly. 512MB of RAM and the 1GHz CPU clock struggle with that.

> Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering?

Yes, I think so. With strong caveats.

I used a Pi 3b as the primary video player for local media in my living room for a few years, starting a decade or so ago when that was the new hotness. The Pi Zero 2W is the same thing except with less IO and a somewhat-slower clock speed (but it can be overclocked to match the 3b).

I just put an appropriate build of Kodi on an SD card, booted it up like an appliance, pointed it at my network share, and used it.

The performance was proper for the time doing this in lets-sit-down-and-watch-a-movie mode. It was generally flawless with 1080p h.264 and lesser formats. It was not so good with h.265/HEVC, but that wasn't as common back then as it is today.

I was very pleased when I picked up a Pi 4 for this role once that came 'round. It does a very fine job with all of my 1080p media on my old dumb TV, including h.265 (which it has a hardware decoder for).

> What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?

No, not in my experience. There may be an incantation that I don't know, but I have not had very good success with these devices with browser-based streaming media. They have, for me, been resolutely disappointing in this role. I blame gaps in the video driver/X11/browser stack, but I haven't ever wanted to go very deep into this particular rabbit hole.

> I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.

If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.

> If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.

These are horrible from a privacy standpoint, and should be avoided. They are cheap for a reason.

Yeah, probably. So is the Android phone that I bought for $64 that I take with me everywhere.

My war is already lost. Reaping the spoils of assimilation is only natural.

No, I don't think it will be beefy enough, since you need to be running a desktop environment essentially to do that. (Check out Plasma Bigscreen BTW.)

I used thin client seems much better for this.

Zeros are just sold out everywhere through, no?

I can't find a Pi Zero 2 W for sale anywhere that will deliver to me

except you can't. They have been out of stock for weeks

I just checked my closest Microcenters (in Illinois.) 12 in Westmont and 25+ in Chicago (for $18) Zero W were 13 and 25+ respectively at $15.

Long gone are the days when they would sell a Pi Zero for $3.14 on Pi day.

Pi Zero 2 W is what people are saying is out of stock. MC doesn’t have any of them either.

There's more than one Pi Zero 2 W -- one with headers, and one without. Are you looking at both?

Headerless version is out-of-stock for my nearest Microcenter (Columbus, Ohio): https://www.microcenter.com/product/643085/raspberry-pi-zero...

But they say they have 25+ of the version that comes with headers: https://www.microcenter.com/product/683270/raspberry-pi-rasp...

Second link says sold out.

Still 25+ available for me, in Columbus, Ohio. In-store only, limit 1 per household.

I'd pick one up when I'm in the area this weekend...but I'm not into the scalping/arbitrage game, and I've already got a few Pi Zero Ws kicking around without a purpose that are still overkill for lots of things. (I may have bought too many of those back when Microcenter was selling them for half of MSRP at $5.)

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