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Comment by static_motion | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how much they've lost the tinkerer audience over the last few years. Unless you really need the GPIO, there are far better and cheaper alternatives for a low power computer.

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> It's amazing how much they've lost the tinkerer audience over the last few years.

They haven't lost it. Their goal was to kickstart something and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The space has moved - a usable computer now demands a lot more than the original Pi, and they realized that - this is why their tinkerer platform is the RP2040 family. The market is very healthy and the ESP32 family has a huge space.

What RPi brought was the idea that a platform with good software support would allow for a revolution in the space above the power of an Arduino.

You might've skimmed over the rest of my comment, but my focus was on another type of tinkerer - and maybe that was my bad, I guess "lite homelabber" might have been a more apt description. Raspberry Pis used to be huge among people who wanted a low power device to host useful services. I myself was one of those people once. I never used the GPIO pins, but even today a Pi is my DNS (PiHole) and Home Assistant server. It was a great device to serve as an intro to self-hosting, but with where they've taken pricing and as you said, where the market has gone, they've become all but irrelevant in that space.

But again, you're assuming that that's a bad thing. In fact if they were still doing the same thing that they were 14 years ago it would mean that they had failed their mission of helping bring low powered devices to the underprivileged. They jump started a market that has created dozens of competitors that are competing to provide the best value for the lowest price to the market with their own niche fits and geo locations and sourcing deals, etc, etc.

It’s a bit like saying the OLPC project failed. Their hardware was never ubiquitous, but they lit a fire under the seats of the industry giants that caused things like netbooks and the modern laptops built almost specifically for schools (cheap, indestructible, easy to maintain), and many schools save resources by getting students electronic versions of their books.

I use one of those myself when I don’t want to carry dead weight.

Of course, I’d love if the OLPC project lived up to their promise, but that was the stretch goal.

Even if you want the GPIO the RPI Zero or Pico are much better options. If you want fast computation on top of that simply buy any other computer and send signals to the Zero or Pico for the GPIO pins.

The RPI Zero 2 has micro-USB ports ... there are plenty of reasons given for this, which arguably made sense 5 years ago. I'm not sure about 2026 though.

People are still using Arduino boards with USB-A mini B ports. At least for micro USB you can easily find cables everywhere. Hardware world is kind of slow in that regard. You can always go for ESP32 if you want though. Cheap and USB-C.

Do tell! I know Microcenter has a house brand for Arduino now but I didn't see much in the way of "knock-off brand" for Raspberry Pi

Depends on what you want to do. ESP32-S3 devices are ridiculously cheap and come in a myriad of form factors. If you want a RP2040 form factor, they're like $5 each. They've got Bluetooth and WiFi built in, plus plenty of GPIOs.

If you need compute with a bit more horsepower, the myriad of NUCs or thin PCs exist. If you need both in a single board, then the myriad of other SBCs that aren't Raspberry Pi's...

a RPI is just a SBC with GPIO pinning (which isn't at all unique to RPI.).

The main reason it was/is the popular behemoth is not because of it's tinkerability, but because it got mainstream appeal and RaspianOS is polished enough for the average windows user to go "wow, neat."

THere is no "knock off pi", there are many many popular SBCs with the same performance at cheaper cost (O-Pi, arduino), not to mention the mini PC space (NUCS, ie intel asus.)

If you're a hobbyist, pick up some used thin clients from Ebay. I lost a couple of pis recently, and instead of replacing them, I bought a batch of Wyse 3040 thin clients for about $23 each, power supply (which is 12V) included. 2Gb RAM and a 4-core intel Atom - roughly equal to a Pi 4, but at (what is now) 1/3 the price.

if you're just trying to interface a bunch of pins to a usb port you can buy a pack of 3 USB-C ESP32s on amazon for like twenty bucks now.

Things get more expensive with specific ADC needs/etc

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