What has happened to Raspberry Pi?

[Dr_Jeff]

The pricing has gone way up and available models has gone down.

And there are other Pi's as well with fruit names, Banana Pi, and some other that I have seen.

Are they compatible, software wise?

Oh, and you can buy these Mini PCs that are tiny for what a Pi used to go for.

 

[day_trippr]

Jeebus H Christmas you ain't kidding!
I'm flush with plenty of RPi's, even have spares, so pricing and availability has been off my radar the last year+.

I have no idea what's up. Maybe the foundation isn't important enough to component vendors and they're being starved for parts...

 

[passedpawn]

Likely the Broadcom processor on there has become rare.

 

[day_trippr]

All of them?

 

[passedpawn]

All of them?

Whu?

 

[day_trippr]

The price gouging is literally across the board involving both single core (ie: Zeros of all stripes), dual core (2Bs) and quad core (3B/3B+ and now Zero-2W) and advanced quad core (4B) product lines...

Cheers!

 

[passedpawn]

Meh, just design your own. I did that once when a client came to me with a Netduino and wanted his own board (think Arduino with networking capability). Open source hardware, code, api's that plug into Visual Studio. I wonder if the Pi is fully open-source.

 

[Dr_Jeff]

I just bought one of the mini pc's for my tap board and it can be used for other things and it come with Windows already installed. I guess that it has to be a licensed version seeing that I'm buying it off of Amazon. $134 with 4GB ram, Intel Celeron, 64GB Rom and a space for a SSD that I already have.

 

[garzlok]

Blame it all on dreaded Global Supply Chain issues!

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

Blame it all on dreaded Global Supply Chain issues!

I'm not sure if that's meant to be flippant or not... But it's a thing.

I highly doubt that Raspberry Pi makers are high on the list for IC vendors to make sure they keep supplied with components. I'm assuming most of them are on the very long tail of the supply chain. So they are probably having MAJOR issues trying to source what they need to build boards...

 

[passedpawn]

It's definitely a thing. Good time to be an a contract electronic designer - MANY companies scrambling to redesign boards to get around unavailable parts... or stop selling and shutter the place til 2023.

 

[Beerstein]

Zeroes have been typically hard to get before the semiconductor shortage.

I read recently they are doing some redesigns to use more common parts.

Edit to add they they sell enough units, I'm sure they get preferred vendor support.

 

[day_trippr]

fwiw, none of the RPi designs are considered open source. They're all property of the Org.
As for using someone else's SOC: I don't know about you, but one hour of my time could buy a half dozen RPi4Bs at their classic price. Recoding to an incompatible target usually entails someone taking a loss...

Cheers!

 

[garzlok]

I'm not sure if that's meant to be flippant or not...

No, just matter of fact with a supporting link.

 

[matt_m]

I want one for home automation and my jaw hit the floor when I looked a couple weeks back. Couldn’t even find one yesterday.

 

[bracconiere]

never looked at them before... $30 seems reasonable?

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

$30 seems reasonable?

$30 is generally just the board. One also needs a power supply, case, SD card, and probably a fan.

The pricing has gone way up and available models has gone down.

It looks like premium kit prices have gone up. But I'm also seeing 128 GB SD cards and two HDMI cables in those kits.

 

[bracconiere]

$30 is generally just the board. One also needs a power supply, case, SD card, and probably a fan.

ahh...

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

available models has gone down

Apparently Adafruit (online site / store for hobbiest exploring electronics) added 2FA to their order process to slow down bots. Additional discussion (link) over an YC's "Hacker New" site .

 

[bruce_the_loon]

Haven't seen a rPi of any size or model available in South Africa for over eight months now.

 

[day_trippr]

Did someone come up with a way to use them for BTC mining??

 

[bruce_the_loon]

Did someone come up with a way to use them for BTC mining??

I'm starting to think the chip fabs shifted their lines to build their own mining operations and caused the chip shortage.

 

[Thorrak]

All I know is that suddenly my hoarding can be justified as me just "buying low"!

In all seriousness, with close proximity to Micro Center, getting Pis has never felt terribly difficult, even if they aren't always available the day I think I want one. I went through and upgraded my cluster to Pi 4s late last year, with all the upgrades funded by selling the Pi 3s on eBay. Pure insanity.

 

[passedpawn]

I've got at least 20 raspberry 3's somewhere in my attic, srsly. I think they are still in the boxes.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

CPICOM -- a CP/M 2.2 emulator for the Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is a tiny, low-cost ARM-based controller, with 2Mb of flash ROM and 256kB of RAM. When running a CP/M emulator on the Pico, the overall performance is about the same as that of a real Z80-based microcomputer of 1980s vintage [...]

"duckduckgo" on "CPICOM" (quoted) to find the article and the github repo.

 

[matt_m]

I just ordered an Celeron-based micro PC for my Home Assistant home automation project for about the same price as the PI 4, case, fan, and power supply I intended to use. I don't need the GPIO pins since would use ESP32 devices remotely where I want that capability.

 

[BurrowK]

I believe in part is because the general increment on semi-conductors..... cryptos huh?

 

[matt_m]

This is the mini PC I bought. From what I've seen so far its pretty good as a PI replacement where one doesn't need the IO pins. I made a live boot Ubuntu USB stick and booted from that, installed Etcher and flashed the built in storage with Home Assistant no problem. I'm considering buying another or two for other purposes.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09373HTN7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

If one doesn't need the GPIO pins, $150 mini-PCs (or old laptops/desktops) can be a solid alternative. Articles can be found where people extend 4 unit Pi clusters using 10 year old laptops / desktops.

 

[Dr_Jeff]

now they are over $200 with the 8GB model $269, this is nuts