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Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?
In the consumer and the small business markets, we are having computing power being more and more shifted from desktops or laptops to tablets and smartphones, we are even seeing full computing watches these days. In your opinion, what about DIY, IoT, small robotics, etc. and the generalist barebone computers they use, like Arduino, Raspberry, etc.? Will they become more and more powerful for a new race to bigger, maybe embedded systems or will they stay small, open, very cheap and marginally energy-hungry?
- davelnewton 8y agoI'm not sure I understand the question. Of course they'll become more powerful--that's what happens. They'll stay focused on what they're good at.
- trumped 8y agoHopefully USB3 will come to the RPi... It would make it more useful as a file server.
- xd1936 8y agoAnd get the USB and Ethernet onto separate buses
- Rjevski 8y agoMaybe just add USB-C with PCI-Express lanes in there. This would allow Ethernet or anything else to be plugged into that should it be needed.
- franciscop 8y agoI wanted this as well; from what I read from the forums, the chip does not support it so it'd need to either switch the chip or add another one, going way beyond the price point. Hopefully the integration for new chips becomes better and there's more demand so that it becomes a reality.
- finbarr-s 8y agoThis is the one feature I'm hoping to appear.
- chopin 8y agoI use a BananaPi for this (comes with a SATA bus).
- black_puppydog 8y agoFrom the interviews I've heard with the founder, rPi set a price point first, then developed the best hackable computer they could to match it. If they keep up with that (as they have so far) then expect something more powerful and possibly smaller at the same price. Although I think the rPi zero is probably at the lower end of how small you can go without making tinkering cumbersome with all those gpio pins and such. although, people also like ATTiny, so who knows :)
- VectorLock 8y agoThe PiZeroW is hits such an amazing triple point of price/functionality/size that although I love the Tinker Pro for coming close in size/price and the ease of Arduino programming for simple things the PiZeroW just gives you SO MUCH functionality.
- chrisshroba 8y agoSlightly off topic - The one-per-customer policy on the PiZero and PiZeroW seems very limiting to me for someone who would like to develop more than one pi-based hobbyist project (or multi-pi projects like a cheap kubernetes cluster to play around with that stack). Does anyone know if there are plans to drop this restriction anytime soon, or do hobbyists just need to accept that to do multiple projects they need to buy the more expensive models? (Not that I can complain that $25-$35 is expensive!)
- paraplegic 8y agoIf the availability of the pi zero W is any indication I expect trouble ahead. Trying to buy the zero W in bulk through channels is practically impossible, and the vendors sell them only in kit bundles at many times MSRP at 10$.
- elfchief 8y agoInstead of the pi zero, check out the CHIP Pro (https://getchip.com/pages/chippro https://getchip.com/pages/chippro) ... a little more expensive, but available in quantity and designed to be pick & placed (or hand-soldered!), runs linux, and does most of the things a pi can do (sans video)
- Tepix 8y agoStay away from CHIP, they appear to be bankrupt and/or fraudulent, they took my money and never delivered.
- mbu 8y agoFwiw I don't think it's even possible to order anything from them at the moment. I can't figure out how to (but also have heard other stories of late or non-delivery). Seems like a cool product until you realise it doesn't exist.
- b5 8y agoThey withdrew sales of the original C.H.I.P. months and months ago, without really explaining why. It's quite puzzling, because I ordered four in November 2015 and got them as promised about six months later. I guess maybe they made an initial batch, fulfilled that, then just ran out of steam and haven't made any more? It's disappointing to hear other people haven't received theirs.
- elfchief 8y agoHuh, weird. I ordered some CHIP Pros and dev boards in February last year, and got them in ~2 weeks. I haven't ordered from them since, so maybe they went defunct or something. I dunno. That's too bad. :(
- 8bitben 8y agoI would bet we'll see a version with an integrated SIM card, hopping on the IoT-anywhere train. Twilio was a big first mover with their Twilio mobile service, and I can see people deploying rPi's and the like to more out-of-home applications.
- tomjuggler 8y agoOrange Pi have one, the Orange Pi 2G-IOT. It's really cheap, might be worth checking out. Supposedly runs Android or Linux.
- douglaswlance 8y agoRaspberry Pi is for hacking. It's not really a commercial platform. You can technically use it as such, but it's more cost-effective to design your own boards at that point.
- alanfranzoni 8y agoIf you've got enough users. I argue that, for a (possibly initial) batch of less than 1000/2000 boards, a rpi (either the zerow, or the 3) are simply great.
- fhood 8y agoMeh. That is true if you are selling thousands or more of an item, but for small companies, custom boards can be a nightmare. I worked for a company once that put literally two full weeks of debugging into a problem caused by a flaky diode batch.
- nottorp 8y agoI'll raise you two full weeks of debugging and then the project got canceled because redesigning the board was needed and it was too expensive ;) I'm doing quite a few of low volume (mostly bussiness/industrial helpers) arm linux projects on Pis now. Some of them stay on Pis, if rebooting the board every 2 hours is feasible, some move to custom boards after the prototyping is done. Still, it's very nice to have an off the shelf documented board to start stuff on.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y agoWhat issues have you seen that require a 2-hour reboot? Stability was one of my concerns with my last Pi project, so during development I basically never powered it off or rebooted (except to test power-up behavior) so I could see if I encountered any problems. No problems came up, but others' experiences are always good to learn from.
- nottorp 8y ago
- l1k 8y agoTheir competitor, Libre Computer, has mused that given their investment in the graphics stack, they might be headed in the GPGPU / AI direction. Think Raspberry Pis that you can cluster together for deep learning, or individual boards that kids can tinker with to learn about AI. The blog post also predicted the 3B+ fairly exactly: https://libre.computer/2017/12/06/raspberry-pi-3x-raspberry-pi-4-broadcom-and-qualcomm/ https://libre.computer/2017/12/06/raspberry-pi-3x-raspberry-... Money quote: > We expect the Raspberry Pi 4 to be based on a new Broadcom SoC based on Cortex-A55 built on < 28nm fabrication process. We can call this BCM2839 and it will feature the much alluded to VC5 GPU and a new form factor. Since that hardware is more than two years away, it is difficult to predict the direction of the industry and thus the exact specifications. We expect such a Raspberry Pi 4 board to utilize dual 32-bit LPDDR3 or LPDDR4 to cope with the bandwidth requirements of OpenCL and neural network acceleration. The exact release date for such a specimen can vary dramatically depending on Broadcom’s tapeout schedule. It should be relatively soon if the Raspberry Pi Foundation expects to release hardware in 2019.
- majewsky 8y agoPlease avoid code snippets for blockquotes. It's very annoying to read this with the `overflow-x: scroll` that HN's CSS adds (particularly on mobile). Just put a ">" in front of the paragraph, like so: > We expect the Raspberry Pi 4 to be based on a new Broadcom SoC based on Cortex-A55 built on < 28nm fabrication process. We can call this BCM2839 and it will feature the much alluded to VC5 GPU and a new form factor. Since that hardware is more than two years away, it is difficult to predict the direction of the industry and thus the exact specifications. We expect such a Raspberry Pi 4 board to utilize dual 32-bit LPDDR3 or LPDDR4 to cope with the bandwidth requirements of OpenCL and neural network acceleration. The exact release date for such a specimen can vary dramatically depending on Broadcom’s tapeout schedule. It should be relatively soon if the Raspberry Pi Foundation expects to release hardware in 2019.
- adrianN 8y agoHopefully it will become more open and less reliant on binary blobs.
- bjt2n3904 8y agoI'm more of a Beagle Bone person, so I hope you don't mind me answering the question from that standpoint. The sadness I have about the bone is that it is a means to an end. Purchase bone, insert into host board. Voila, IoT. It gets you to an MVP really fast, but limits your design to that form factor. Migrating away is difficult. The Arduino, at least, served as training wheels. The end goal was to design an atmega328 into your circuit board, not glue another pcb on top. (Just remembering, there is some progress here with the pocket beagle... Though it does raise supply chain concerns.) Also unlike the bone, the Arduino opened up a pathway for many other architectures and families of microprocessor, lowering the barrier to entry for 32 bit processors and ARM, keeping the platform relevant. The bone CPU is getting a little long in the tooth, and there doesn't seem to be a path forward to the next generation of processors in the same SWaP C space. There are others, but the cost or power consumption tripples. The bone is at a real sweet point for price and capabilities. I'd love to see a lower power generation with some fixes to annoying problems (like the RTC). In their defense, there are two or three orders of magnitude more complexity to an ARM SoC than an 8bit micro. The bone community really is on point with making a stable platform with regular releases, especially given the complexity of supporting a SoC+peripherals with the kernel, device tree, U-Boot, Debian, etc.
- bduhan 8y agoYou mentioned Pocket Beagle, but did you know the OSD335x[1] is readily available on Mouser and DigiKey? I certainly would have specified one instead of a BBB if it was available during our product development cycle. [1] https://octavosystems.com/ https://octavosystems.com/
- mikece 8y agoI think the future is only going to get brighter for Raspberry Pi because its niche is as a hacker's machine. It's so inexpensive and versatile for putting together proofs of concept and I think that's where it's real value lies. If you can show a solid working prototype of something on a Pi then the assumption is that a dedicated hardware solution will run even faster... assuming you don't just make a custom case and mounting set for your ad hoc solution and call it good. What I think would kill Raspberry Pi is trying to make it more advanced and powerful than it needs to be, trying to make it a full powered computer rather than a hacker's delight.
- nimbius 8y agoThese things are a god-send for the auto industry in my opinion...specifically professional drivers. as a lead automotive mechanic for a semi truck shop, I bought about 5 pi's for our techs. We use them for reading OBD diagnostics and doing resets or long-term vehicle observation for certain problems. Theyre cheaper than most of the commercial rent-seeking computer tools we use and if a tech accidentally crushes one, its cheaper than dirt to replace. We even have a customer who keeps long term backups of log books and GPS data on a pi running off her cigar lighter, as well as her favorite audio books. Trucking companies dont care if you whine the most about your miles, but send them a ZIP file of 6 years of logs and the CEO himself will write you a pay raise. best of all, she tucks the pi in her shirt when she switches trucks. Try doing that with a qualcomm or a laptop!
- bnycum 8y agoJust curious what software are you using for the ODB diagnostics? I'm currently using a cheap ELM327 reader hooked up to an Android tablet with Torque. I have wanted to switch to using a Pi with software I could modify myself, but I guess my previous search was a little short. It's a dream, but I would love to see some open-source software that would be equivalent to the diagnostic tablets from some of the tool trucks.
- IloveHN84 8y agoWhat kind of software are you using for reading OBD?
- makerofspoons 8y agoNot OP, but I found this Python library for reading data from a car's OBD port that people seem to be having success with, including on the Pi: https://python-obd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://python-obd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- teh_klev 8y agoThis looks like the kinda setup: https://www.cowfishstudios.com/blog/obd-pi-raspberry-pi-displaying-car-diagnostics-obd-ii-data-on-an-aftermarket-head-unit https://www.cowfishstudios.com/blog/obd-pi-raspberry-pi-disp... Also a search for "reading OBD diagnostics with raspberry pi" brings back some promising results.
- noonespecial 8y ago"MAX PER CUSTOMER: 1" It really doesn't matter where else they "go" until they fix that right there. (Why? Because on my workbench right now is the pi, instead of a pi; and that makes all the difference.)
- alanfranzoni 8y agoOnly for bare pizerow. Buy it along with official case, you can order as many as you like. Price raises to 18 usd per unit.
- fhood 8y agoDo they still enforce that? When I was working with Pi's a few years back I never had any trouble getting 5 or 6 at a time.
- nottorp 8y agoI had trouble getting more than one zero at a time when it was new. Maybe it's still the same in some places.
- dolessdrugs 8y agoI think I've only ever bought Pi's by the handful...
- feocco 8y agoI've got 3 pi's in my desk drawer not in use. There's multiple outlet's that sell more than 1 per customer.
- noonespecial 8y agoIf you could tell me where I can get z-dubs 10 at a time for the advertised $10 price with combined shipping, I'd be eternally grateful.
- StavrosK 8y agoThat's exactly my problem as well. I wanted to hack a Pi Zero W into a presentation machine (for giving talks) and I didn't want to ruin my only Pi Zero W on account of how expensive it would be to replace (with shipping etc, it comes out to 30 euros or so).
- mangecoeur 8y agoMost of the comments so far seem to have missed the point of the RPi specifically, which is that it was always intended more as an educational tool than commercial solution. The idea of the RPi foundation is to promote experimenting and hacking by selling a board cheap enough that you don't care too much if you ruin it. This was explicitly a response to the rise of smartphones(/smart-whatevers) which turned computing into magic by sealing off all the components and preventing any hands-on work - students were enrolling in to computer science degrees with nearly no understanding of how a computer is fundamentally put together. There is no reason for RPi to change from their very successful mission - they will keep putting out the best hardware they can squeeze into their fixed price point.
- dbuder 8y agoThey have recently warmed up to the RPi being used in commercial products. No one else in the space gets the volume/goodwill discounts the RPi foundation does and the Chinese SBC producers are yet to provide decent software support and might have to raise their prices if they did.
- aurailious 8y agoBut just because its primary purpose is education doesn't mean it will/would/should always be that. Its sort of like curb cuts, something that starts out trying to fix one problem but then its quickly seen how many other problems it helps fix or other capabilities to enable.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y agoThe original point of the RPi is meaningless if the majority of the use cases are something completely different. For me, doing embedded consulting, the Pi is a cheap, simple way to get a touchscreen and/or network capability without jumping through the hoops of Arduino add-ons.
- kingosticks 8y agoI don't think that's true when the Rpi is entirely under the control of a non-profit. They don't care how many you buy, you are only further funding their goal and so far that goal has trumped everything/anyone else. Which I think is great.
- joemi 8y agoThe difference between Arduino and Raspberry Pi is already one where the Arduino (at least the basic, most popular(?) model) is just a board supporting a small, highly energy efficient microcontroller that you program in C, while the Raspberry Pi (even the Zero) comparatively uses a ton of power and runs a full Linux distro. That difference is huge, and seems to already be in the two different directions you're postulating. That said, Arduino (the company) has released more boards with faster, more powerful processors over the years, and I wonder if they'll ever give up the flagship Uno model. I sure hope not, since as bjt2n3904 mentioned, it's a great stepping stone for small, cheap, efficient microcontrollers. It's kind of like learning a programming language and realizing how that knowledge applies to most/all other programming languages, whereas so much of the RPi is abstracted behind Linux.
- wiradikusuma 8y agoI wish I could make use of those small computers better, but so far my main use case is for xbmc for my dumb TV, and I'm loving it.
- jdietrich 8y agoThe rPI mostly failed in its original mission as an educational tool. In practice, it proved too complex and fragile to use as a microcontroller but not powerful enough to substitute for a desktop PC. A lot of important lessons were learned and put into practice in the BBC Micro:Bit project. For teaching basic programming and electronics, a dinky little Cortex M0+ with a few LEDs and IO pins makes far more sense than a repurposed mobile phone chipset. http://microbit.org/ http://microbit.org/ rPI has spawned a whole ecosystem of hacker-friendly hardware. Like Arduino, it generated demand for a particular form-factor - a lot of people bought rPIs simply because they were cool and cheap, then figured out how they could be useful. The rPI has clearly moved towards being more powerful and power-hungry, with the latest model drawing about twice the power under load than the original. Documentation and kernel support remain a sticking point, especially for the off-brand PIalikes with Chinese chipsets. The development of these boards is really dictated by the rest of the market. Nobody is spinning silicon specifically for dev boards, so they'll continue to use whatever cheap chips are on the market. A lot will depend on how well the foundries cope with <14nm process nodes.
- segmondy 8y agoThey are very powerful right now, how much powerful do you wish for them? What I like about them is CHEAP, lower energy use. So long as they maintain that, then it's all good. I bought 6 pi zeros with wifi, $5 each.
- adruinooob 8y agoThe specs are always going to get better. For me it's all about physical size for the Pi. Given say 10 years... what would you imagine the smallest form factor you can get the Pi functionality into for the same cost.