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Raspberry Pi started out being for kids, schools and hobbyists. During the chip shortage Eben Upton made the decision to focus all their manufacturing output o

Raspberry Pi started out being for kids, schools and hobbyists. During the chip shortage Eben Upton made the decision to focus all their manufacturing output on their business and industrial customers. Upton justification was that those companies income depended on Raspberry Pi so that’s where they prioritized their supply. Realistically those companies could have found other technology solutions, designed their systems around other tech. Upton could have given them notice to find other designs so Raspberry Pi could get back to kids and schools. But that never happened. So the realistic outcome is that for years now raspberry pi has been a dedicated supplier of industrial computing systems. Schools, kids and hobbyists are long forgotten. Nothing has changed and raspberry pi continues to pretend it’s about school, kids and hobbyists but it’s just and industrial computer systems company. Raspberry pi is a strange sort of ghost company. It exists, but you haven’t been able to buy their core products for many years now. The maintain a sort of phony facade continuing to market to community and schools and kids which is very strange since the community response is always “great but we can’t buy your stuff”.

morninglight 4y ago
[andrewstuart] is exactly on target with his critique. The Raspberry Pi foundation is only using the educational market as a false cover. When the pi-zero family was introduced, it looked like they were being true to their stated goals, but that didn't last long. Furthermore, Sony is the last company I would ever expect to share those goals. Sony has always targeted the high end of the market. They are profit driven, and have NEVER been interested in the low cost educational or hobbyist value of their investments.
- ngcazz 4y ago
  What do you make of the AIBO line, the Net Yaroze and the PS2 Linux kit then? (Just really curious about your assertion they have no interest in the hobbyist and education markets, since those are some admittedly outdated examples)
  - musicale 4y ago
    IIRC it was the PS3 that advertised Linux on the box (of the launch model at least) and supported the "Other OS" feature until Sony disabled it with a firmware update. ;-(
selfhoster11 4y ago
You made me realise that it's time to drop the Raspberry Pi for new projects, much like I decided to drop Android after 13 years of use in favour of an iPhone. Unless Raspberry Pi comes back with a roar in the next year or two, the best hardware platforms will be decommissioned x86 low-power SFF PCs, followed by cheap-ish special-purpose ARM devices if a specific application requires that. Raspberry Pi was the only well-supported, well-priced ARM machine that was truly general-purpose in my eyes.
- croutonwagon 4y ago
  The Pi isnt bad for certain things. And can still be had for fairly cheap. I put one in my parents house for remote support, some small postfix and NUT/UPS shutdown goodness. I usually just get a canakit on amazon for under 200 bucks and it comes with most of the utilities, cases etc needed to flesh it out. Still thinking of making a Sonos style speaker system in the house with some Pi's and some JBL charge speakers or something which can always be used as a BT speaker and even setup in tandem for stereo. Those things are solid. I use them on the boat, when playing along to songs, even when setting up a projector in the yard for the kids to watch a movie in a "special" setup.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jtode 4y ago
There's been an announcement that the supply chain has been retooled, and we can expect lots of stock by summertime. That's a short enough timeline that I say let's wait and see, first off. Second, kids and schools have not lacked for platform tools to learn about electronics and computing - we are drowning in computers, and any instructor that wants to teach kids about GPIO can get any of about a billion arduino clones for a couple bucks apiece. Your comment presumes that things will stay this way for good, and that isn't the case regardless; they're very due for a Pi 5 release, and picking a new SoC with a reliable supplier is a good way to sort both issues. Anyways, let's see what it looks like come Labor Day.
krasin 4y ago
That's pretty accurate. And still, Raspberry Pi remains the best option for getting started with computers.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  The second hand and refurbished market remains the best option, regardless of the form factor. You can get a more powerful, multicore, perfectly functionnal laptop, desktop or minipc with 4GB of memory or more for 100usd/€ while the pi price do not drop as much. In most case battery will be dead on the laptops but many people stick with old laptops with dead batteries for years and just use them as portable plugged desktop because they don't want to spend the money on a new computer. Raspberry pi are really only interesting if you want to stick to the small form factor and the usually come without screens and keyboards. EDIT: raised price from 50 to 100€ as a quick search only showed netbooks and laptop with 1 or 2GB of ram for 50€ in a 10km radius. In 2 minutes I found a Thinkpad T420 with crappy screen resolution 1366x768.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    And I have experienced enough times that actual durable storage medium would be a good thing. I think there should be better options if you just want small cheap box to run linux. Though the cheap is slight challenge.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Yeah the pros of having access to a common architecture cannot be understated. You'd think ARM would be widely supported by now given that nearly every phone runs it, but every time one tries to do something vaguely nonstandard you run into walls that simply aren't there on x64 (especially with an AMD/Nvidia/Intel GPU and common net card instead of <insert SoC manufacturer's barely supported custom homebrew card>). There's a reason one cannot simply update Android phones to the latest OS without explicit vendor support and the reason why is not pretty. Goes doubly so for the Pi specifically, since they stayed on 32 bit armhf OSes for the longest time which have even less package support and just straight up cannot run a wide range of software. And the new arm64 builds are laughably bad, having an almost 10-50% performance overhead on certain processes. And the Pi 4 is already painfully slow even compared to cheap android phones. It is in most aspects an absolutely terrible way to get started with computers.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
It's why I much prefer the Arduino platform. It doesn't depend on using a very specific chip that can suffer a shortage or be monopolized by the manufacturer. It's an ecosystem that can use several families of chips, from 8 bit AVRs to 32 bit ARMs. The Arduino code you find online will most likely work on either one, as the most used low level functionality (timers, GPIO, etc.) are abstracted by a high level API that will work on any microcontroller supported by the Arduino IDE. The RaspbeeryPi ecosystem is too tightly coupled to that very specific Broadcom chip family, which gives them and the RaspberryPI foundation, a powerful monopoly.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Arduino is good, but it can be better ;) The ESP32 is really a major upgrade in almost all areas. SPIFFs webpages as control apps via a wifi hotspot are just so damn convenient.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Well the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are two different kinds of computers. When you need a full Linux system Raspberry Pi is great. For embedded applications Arduino is handy. But there is now the RP2040, a processor from Raspberry Pi that works well in most Arduino-like applications. It has a lot of very powerful features! And what’s interesting is that last time I checked this, it was the most in stock processor at Digikey (to pick one vendor as an example). The stock numbers for the RP2040 are very high, and I suspect it will never experience a shortage. The RP2040 and its dev board the Raspberry Pi Pico don’t depend on Broadcom and they’re wonderful chips. If you do a lot of Arduino I highly recommend checking it out!
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >When you need a full Linux system Raspberry Pi is great. Then you're much better off getting one of the endlessly available low-power X86 small form factor platforms either new or off the second hand market, available with Intel or AMD chips. And unlike the Broadcom based R-PI, you'll have a much better time as you won't get locked into any specific chip vendor so you can easily migrate to whatever chip offers you the best price or performance or energy efficiency at the time of purchase. The standardization of the X86 platforms is unbeatable by the current crop of ARM SBCs with their proprietary firmware blobs and weird boot methods. Locking yourself into a very specific chip platform of a single manufacturer, just for running linux and a web server, is a huge mistake and we're now seeing the consequences of not having a competitor/dual source.
wolpoli 4y ago
It is sad and I doubt they will return to their root any time soon now that they are half a unicorn.
melx 4y ago
Kids in the UK (and elsewhere?) can access the Micro:bit computer[0], while not the same and powerful/extendable as R Pi - it is cheap, good and plenty available. It includes a LED display and motion sensor. Kids can program it using "block coding", or write Python code that runs with the help of MicroPython[1]. [0] https://microbit.org/ https://microbit.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPython https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPython
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pico https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pico is the pi version of that. I'm still not sure why the BBC went down the route of making its own platform when adapting the arduino world would have been simpler and more effective. Still its good to see that the BBC is doing computing again.
- JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
  Feel like MicroBit v2 is a drastically underutilised tool. There's the potential to make completely self contained gadgets that anyone could use by copying a file into a directory. Falls into an awkward position where the people who could utilise it can do much more for much cheaper with an esp8266 Some pretty neat UI design limitation challenges involved too with the 5x5 display. e.g. I made a pomodoro timer with it; iirc I used used left-to-right top-to-bottom for normal time, reversed for breaks, a number for how far into the cycle it was and flashing figures for when setting inputs and it beeped when a break started/ended with a longer beep for the big break
pdpi 4y ago
> So the realistic outcome is that for years now raspberry pi has been a dedicated supplier of industrial computing systems. Schools, kids and hobbyists are long forgotten. When I backed the Turing Pi 2 project, I hoped that I'd be able to source some CM4s by the time they were done with the project. Well, the boards arrived last week and I still haven't been able to get my hands on some CM4s, so those boards are just sitting on my shelf waiting.
nsteel 4y ago
> Realistically those companies could have found other technology solutions, designed their systems around other tech. There is nothing realistic about this statement. What useful notice period and what alternate designs (that were magically not impacted) would those companies have been able to use? We had, and are still suffering from, a GLOBAL semiconductor shortage. The GLOBAL supply chain fell over. I would expect the charity arm continues it's work with kids and schools. The focus of this article is Raspberry Pi Ltd, a for-profit computer company. It is sad they split the company up and the roots are gone but it makes sense if they are to grow and continue producing their own chips/boards/peripherals, hopefully without Broadcom. > you haven’t been able to buy their core products for many years now. Things are getting better. I bought a Pi 4 at the end of Jan. https://rpilocator.com/ https://rpilocator.com/
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  Well, if the alternative is going out of business, you'll redesign the product around whatever you can buy right now! That's exactly what an untold number of companies have had to do, some multiple times in one year.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  Many companies have redesigned their hardware to use the chips that are available. https://www.wired.com/story/chip-shortage-hacks/ https://www.wired.com/story/chip-shortage-hacks/
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    Did they manage to keep it in the same price envelope? changing CPU/memory to something double the price is going to have caused a whole lot of squealing.
    - nsteel 4y ago
      No, they didn't. > Manufacturers and brokers are, of course, able to charge a premium, and companies have little choice but to pay. But the article is irrelevant anyway. It's talking about peripheral 50-cent chips, not the Raspberry Pi processor which is likely the heart of your device.
KaiserPro 4y ago
The pi-zero is in stock in most places > So the realistic outcome is that for years now raspberry pi has been a dedicated supplier of industrial computing systems. Schools, kids and hobbyists are long forgotten. The rp2040 is cheaper and probably better for teaching embedded electronics. (and super easy to get access too). It's documentation shits all over the ESP* tool chain, and its a nice, smooth coherently documented ecosystem. I understand that you want the pi-4, as do I. But. The money from pi sales goes to education, you can see it in the company accounts. The documentation, and family of hardware is unparalleled anywhere (outside maybe adafruit) The world is complex, and sometimes doesn't do what you want. Don't shit on something because you're upset that they aren't doing exactly what you want.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  I don't see the Zero (2 or 2W) in stock often, but they do come and go. The model 3 A+ has been in stock regularly now (as predicted in Raspberry Pi's December 2022 blog post), and supposedly we'll get back to regular stock by the end of the 3rd quarter this year for Pi 4 products. Not sure about Compute Module 4... but I hope that too, because it's arguably way more useful. The RP2040 and Pico have been widely available almost since launch, and in some ways are even more intriguing for educational purposes, especially since they cost $1 and $5, respectively. And the Pico W has been an excellent alternative to ESP devices for ESPHome and other automation needs. The built-in PIO has been a pretty interesting feature, enabling some use cases I didn't initially see. In the end, I think this year's stock availability will make or break the SBC side of things for the maker / hobbyist community. There are way faster and more feature-rich boards with chips like the RK3588 at this point, but the software support and available libraries are still leaps and bounds better on the Pi, which is why the nearly 5-year-old hardware is selling at a premium :(
- FeistySkink 4y ago
  Did you mean Pico? I have a notification for a Zero 2 W set on the official supplier and it hasn't been in stock for a year now.
  - shirleyquirk 4y ago
bootloop 4y ago
Overall I agree. But these companies would have scalped any free supply on the market anyway so I don't think there was any way to avoid the outcome.
olabyne 4y ago
I think the the main issue is software support. ARM chips manufacturers are providing bad software. Kernel is outdated, hardware acceleration is undocumented, etc. And when there is good software support, it is oriented towards smartphones and never lasts more than 3 years (hello Qualcomm). So lots of industries are willing to compromise the performances (Raspi are not top-of-the-line SBC) over a very stable software
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >ARM chips manufacturers are providing bad software. Kernel is outdated, hardware acceleration is undocumented, etc. And when there is good software support, it is oriented towards smartphones and never lasts more than 3 years (hello Qualcomm). It's why I'm sticking with X86 for my Linuxy projects. Migrating your entire SW stack from one ARM SBC to another is virtually impossible, while on X86 you never even think about it.
  - olabyne 4y ago
    x86 is pretty limited when it comes to power consumption. That's where the raspberry pi has almost a monopoly.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Not anymore. Intel sells Celeron quad-core chips with 5W-10W TDP with integrated graphics. AMD also. R-Pi was leading 8 years ago when it was readily available, dirt cheap and x86 was only gas guzzlers. Now the market has shifted against it. People should really look into recent developments instead of defaulting to R-Pi out of habit. I can buy a Intel N5095 based NUC for 170 Euros on Amazon with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD[1]. Sure it's more expensive than a PI, but that thing is readily available, will sip power and blow any R-Pi out of the water performance wise, plus it comes with 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 3 display outputs. It can be a great home server, it can be a great PC replacement, it can be anything you want. R-Pi is still far to weak in comparison. If that's too expensive and overkill for you, and you just want some low-end ARM SBC to blink some LEDs from the internet, there's still the Beagle Bone Black with a single core Cortex A8 and 512MB of RAM, for around 60-70 Euros. [1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Ethernet-Windows11-3-Screen-Display-Consumption/dp/B0BLY1DR42/ https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Ethernet-Windows11-3-Screen-Displ...
lynguist 4y ago
It’s not possible. My job depends solely on the Raspberry Pi and the software stack is built on top of Linux on Raspberry Pi 3 or newer. When the supply of Raspberry Pis was drying up, we started recycling returns to make them work again, but even that would not be sustainable. There is no real alternative, nothing with a functioning Linux kernel and hardware that doesn’t die because of low/high temperatures or humidity or the like. The Raspberry Pi is engineered to a higher standard. Only since December 2022, a next-generation Rockchip ARM board is shipping that’s based on Cortex A-76 and has 8K video out, but it is expected to get mainline Linux support only in 6.3. Raspberry Pi works, the rest is just tinkering. Raspberry Pi supports some important niche economies, whose dependents would also break apart, if they didn’t get them. Medical sector, laboratory analysis, etc, etc. — What I want to add is that the Raspberry Pi 400 always stayed in stock, and I’ve bought one for my child. So you’re also wrong on that aspect as well.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  try the nvidia jetson nano (for industrial application), we switched to that and its worked pretty well for us. A little faster for some workloads too
  - justin66 4y ago
    I see that Nvidia are selling these again, but are they providing anything newer than Ubuntu 18.04 (now unsupported) to go with them? Are industrial customers just rolling their own distributions?
- nsteel 4y ago
  > What I want to add is that the Raspberry Pi 400 always stayed in stock, and I’ve bought one for my child. So you’re also wrong on that aspect as well. It's out of stock everywhere in the UK right now and it has been that way for as long as I can remember. Out of interest, was it possible to apply for access to the OEM pi stock? I don't know how the whole thing worked but wasn't their strategy explicitly designed to help people in positions like yours? https://www.itpro.com/hardware/370314/raspberry-pi-ceo-eben-upton-surviving-the-semiconductor-crisis https://www.itpro.com/hardware/370314/raspberry-pi-ceo-eben-...
bogantech 4y ago
> Raspberry Pi started out being for kids, schools and hobbyists. Just for the free PR I'm sure

morninglight 4y ago

[andrewstuart] is exactly on target with his critique. The Raspberry Pi foundation is only using the educational market as a false cover. When the pi-zero family was introduced, it looked like they were being true to their stated goals, but that didn't last long. Furthermore, Sony is the last company I would ever expect to share those goals. Sony has always targeted the high end of the market. They are profit driven, and have NEVER been interested in the low cost educational or hobbyist value of their investments.

ngcazz 4y ago
What do you make of the AIBO line, the Net Yaroze and the PS2 Linux kit then? (Just really curious about your assertion they have no interest in the hobbyist and education markets, since those are some admittedly outdated examples)
- musicale 4y ago
  IIRC it was the PS3 that advertised Linux on the box (of the launch model at least) and supported the "Other OS" feature until Sony disabled it with a firmware update. ;-(

selfhoster11 4y ago

You made me realise that it's time to drop the Raspberry Pi for new projects, much like I decided to drop Android after 13 years of use in favour of an iPhone. Unless Raspberry Pi comes back with a roar in the next year or two, the best hardware platforms will be decommissioned x86 low-power SFF PCs, followed by cheap-ish special-purpose ARM devices if a specific application requires that. Raspberry Pi was the only well-supported, well-priced ARM machine that was truly general-purpose in my eyes.

croutonwagon 4y ago
The Pi isnt bad for certain things. And can still be had for fairly cheap. I put one in my parents house for remote support, some small postfix and NUT/UPS shutdown goodness. I usually just get a canakit on amazon for under 200 bucks and it comes with most of the utilities, cases etc needed to flesh it out. Still thinking of making a Sonos style speaker system in the house with some Pi's and some JBL charge speakers or something which can always be used as a BT speaker and even setup in tandem for stereo. Those things are solid. I use them on the boat, when playing along to songs, even when setting up a projector in the yard for the kids to watch a movie in a "special" setup.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jtode 4y ago

There's been an announcement that the supply chain has been retooled, and we can expect lots of stock by summertime. That's a short enough timeline that I say let's wait and see, first off. Second, kids and schools have not lacked for platform tools to learn about electronics and computing - we are drowning in computers, and any instructor that wants to teach kids about GPIO can get any of about a billion arduino clones for a couple bucks apiece. Your comment presumes that things will stay this way for good, and that isn't the case regardless; they're very due for a Pi 5 release, and picking a new SoC with a reliable supplier is a good way to sort both issues. Anyways, let's see what it looks like come Labor Day.

krasin 4y ago

That's pretty accurate. And still, Raspberry Pi remains the best option for getting started with computers.

prmoustache 4y ago
The second hand and refurbished market remains the best option, regardless of the form factor. You can get a more powerful, multicore, perfectly functionnal laptop, desktop or minipc with 4GB of memory or more for 100usd/€ while the pi price do not drop as much. In most case battery will be dead on the laptops but many people stick with old laptops with dead batteries for years and just use them as portable plugged desktop because they don't want to spend the money on a new computer. Raspberry pi are really only interesting if you want to stick to the small form factor and the usually come without screens and keyboards. EDIT: raised price from 50 to 100€ as a quick search only showed netbooks and laptop with 1 or 2GB of ram for 50€ in a 10km radius. In 2 minutes I found a Thinkpad T420 with crappy screen resolution 1366x768.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And I have experienced enough times that actual durable storage medium would be a good thing. I think there should be better options if you just want small cheap box to run linux. Though the cheap is slight challenge.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Yeah the pros of having access to a common architecture cannot be understated. You'd think ARM would be widely supported by now given that nearly every phone runs it, but every time one tries to do something vaguely nonstandard you run into walls that simply aren't there on x64 (especially with an AMD/Nvidia/Intel GPU and common net card instead of <insert SoC manufacturer's barely supported custom homebrew card>). There's a reason one cannot simply update Android phones to the latest OS without explicit vendor support and the reason why is not pretty. Goes doubly so for the Pi specifically, since they stayed on 32 bit armhf OSes for the longest time which have even less package support and just straight up cannot run a wide range of software. And the new arm64 builds are laughably bad, having an almost 10-50% performance overhead on certain processes. And the Pi 4 is already painfully slow even compared to cheap android phones. It is in most aspects an absolutely terrible way to get started with computers.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

It's why I much prefer the Arduino platform. It doesn't depend on using a very specific chip that can suffer a shortage or be monopolized by the manufacturer. It's an ecosystem that can use several families of chips, from 8 bit AVRs to 32 bit ARMs. The Arduino code you find online will most likely work on either one, as the most used low level functionality (timers, GPIO, etc.) are abstracted by a high level API that will work on any microcontroller supported by the Arduino IDE. The RaspbeeryPi ecosystem is too tightly coupled to that very specific Broadcom chip family, which gives them and the RaspberryPI foundation, a powerful monopoly.

moffkalast 4y ago
Arduino is good, but it can be better ;) The ESP32 is really a major upgrade in almost all areas. SPIFFs webpages as control apps via a wifi hotspot are just so damn convenient.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Well the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are two different kinds of computers. When you need a full Linux system Raspberry Pi is great. For embedded applications Arduino is handy. But there is now the RP2040, a processor from Raspberry Pi that works well in most Arduino-like applications. It has a lot of very powerful features! And what’s interesting is that last time I checked this, it was the most in stock processor at Digikey (to pick one vendor as an example). The stock numbers for the RP2040 are very high, and I suspect it will never experience a shortage. The RP2040 and its dev board the Raspberry Pi Pico don’t depend on Broadcom and they’re wonderful chips. If you do a lot of Arduino I highly recommend checking it out!
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >When you need a full Linux system Raspberry Pi is great. Then you're much better off getting one of the endlessly available low-power X86 small form factor platforms either new or off the second hand market, available with Intel or AMD chips. And unlike the Broadcom based R-PI, you'll have a much better time as you won't get locked into any specific chip vendor so you can easily migrate to whatever chip offers you the best price or performance or energy efficiency at the time of purchase. The standardization of the X86 platforms is unbeatable by the current crop of ARM SBCs with their proprietary firmware blobs and weird boot methods. Locking yourself into a very specific chip platform of a single manufacturer, just for running linux and a web server, is a huge mistake and we're now seeing the consequences of not having a competitor/dual source.

wolpoli 4y ago

It is sad and I doubt they will return to their root any time soon now that they are half a unicorn.

melx 4y ago

Kids in the UK (and elsewhere?) can access the Micro:bit computer[0], while not the same and powerful/extendable as R Pi - it is cheap, good and plenty available. It includes a LED display and motion sensor. Kids can program it using "block coding", or write Python code that runs with the help of MicroPython[1]. [0] https://microbit.org/ https://microbit.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPython https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPython

KaiserPro 4y ago
https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pico https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pico is the pi version of that. I'm still not sure why the BBC went down the route of making its own platform when adapting the arduino world would have been simpler and more effective. Still its good to see that the BBC is doing computing again.
JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
Feel like MicroBit v2 is a drastically underutilised tool. There's the potential to make completely self contained gadgets that anyone could use by copying a file into a directory. Falls into an awkward position where the people who could utilise it can do much more for much cheaper with an esp8266 Some pretty neat UI design limitation challenges involved too with the 5x5 display. e.g. I made a pomodoro timer with it; iirc I used used left-to-right top-to-bottom for normal time, reversed for breaks, a number for how far into the cycle it was and flashing figures for when setting inputs and it beeped when a break started/ended with a longer beep for the big break

pdpi 4y ago

> So the realistic outcome is that for years now raspberry pi has been a dedicated supplier of industrial computing systems. Schools, kids and hobbyists are long forgotten. When I backed the Turing Pi 2 project, I hoped that I'd be able to source some CM4s by the time they were done with the project. Well, the boards arrived last week and I still haven't been able to get my hands on some CM4s, so those boards are just sitting on my shelf waiting.

nsteel 4y ago

> Realistically those companies could have found other technology solutions, designed their systems around other tech. There is nothing realistic about this statement. What useful notice period and what alternate designs (that were magically not impacted) would those companies have been able to use? We had, and are still suffering from, a GLOBAL semiconductor shortage. The GLOBAL supply chain fell over. I would expect the charity arm continues it's work with kids and schools. The focus of this article is Raspberry Pi Ltd, a for-profit computer company. It is sad they split the company up and the roots are gone but it makes sense if they are to grow and continue producing their own chips/boards/peripherals, hopefully without Broadcom. > you haven’t been able to buy their core products for many years now. Things are getting better. I bought a Pi 4 at the end of Jan. https://rpilocator.com/ https://rpilocator.com/

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
Well, if the alternative is going out of business, you'll redesign the product around whatever you can buy right now! That's exactly what an untold number of companies have had to do, some multiple times in one year.
andrewstuart 4y ago
Many companies have redesigned their hardware to use the chips that are available. https://www.wired.com/story/chip-shortage-hacks/ https://www.wired.com/story/chip-shortage-hacks/
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  Did they manage to keep it in the same price envelope? changing CPU/memory to something double the price is going to have caused a whole lot of squealing.
  - nsteel 4y ago
    No, they didn't. > Manufacturers and brokers are, of course, able to charge a premium, and companies have little choice but to pay. But the article is irrelevant anyway. It's talking about peripheral 50-cent chips, not the Raspberry Pi processor which is likely the heart of your device.

KaiserPro 4y ago

The pi-zero is in stock in most places > So the realistic outcome is that for years now raspberry pi has been a dedicated supplier of industrial computing systems. Schools, kids and hobbyists are long forgotten. The rp2040 is cheaper and probably better for teaching embedded electronics. (and super easy to get access too). It's documentation shits all over the ESP* tool chain, and its a nice, smooth coherently documented ecosystem. I understand that you want the pi-4, as do I. But. The money from pi sales goes to education, you can see it in the company accounts. The documentation, and family of hardware is unparalleled anywhere (outside maybe adafruit) The world is complex, and sometimes doesn't do what you want. Don't shit on something because you're upset that they aren't doing exactly what you want.

geerlingguy 4y ago
I don't see the Zero (2 or 2W) in stock often, but they do come and go. The model 3 A+ has been in stock regularly now (as predicted in Raspberry Pi's December 2022 blog post), and supposedly we'll get back to regular stock by the end of the 3rd quarter this year for Pi 4 products. Not sure about Compute Module 4... but I hope that too, because it's arguably way more useful. The RP2040 and Pico have been widely available almost since launch, and in some ways are even more intriguing for educational purposes, especially since they cost $1 and $5, respectively. And the Pico W has been an excellent alternative to ESP devices for ESPHome and other automation needs. The built-in PIO has been a pretty interesting feature, enabling some use cases I didn't initially see. In the end, I think this year's stock availability will make or break the SBC side of things for the maker / hobbyist community. There are way faster and more feature-rich boards with chips like the RK3588 at this point, but the software support and available libraries are still leaps and bounds better on the Pi, which is why the nearly 5-year-old hardware is selling at a premium :(
FeistySkink 4y ago
Did you mean Pico? I have a notification for a Zero 2 W set on the official supplier and it hasn't been in stock for a year now.
- shirleyquirk 4y ago

bootloop 4y ago

Overall I agree. But these companies would have scalped any free supply on the market anyway so I don't think there was any way to avoid the outcome.

olabyne 4y ago

I think the the main issue is software support. ARM chips manufacturers are providing bad software. Kernel is outdated, hardware acceleration is undocumented, etc. And when there is good software support, it is oriented towards smartphones and never lasts more than 3 years (hello Qualcomm). So lots of industries are willing to compromise the performances (Raspi are not top-of-the-line SBC) over a very stable software

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>ARM chips manufacturers are providing bad software. Kernel is outdated, hardware acceleration is undocumented, etc. And when there is good software support, it is oriented towards smartphones and never lasts more than 3 years (hello Qualcomm). It's why I'm sticking with X86 for my Linuxy projects. Migrating your entire SW stack from one ARM SBC to another is virtually impossible, while on X86 you never even think about it.
- olabyne 4y ago
  x86 is pretty limited when it comes to power consumption. That's where the raspberry pi has almost a monopoly.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Not anymore. Intel sells Celeron quad-core chips with 5W-10W TDP with integrated graphics. AMD also. R-Pi was leading 8 years ago when it was readily available, dirt cheap and x86 was only gas guzzlers. Now the market has shifted against it. People should really look into recent developments instead of defaulting to R-Pi out of habit. I can buy a Intel N5095 based NUC for 170 Euros on Amazon with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD[1]. Sure it's more expensive than a PI, but that thing is readily available, will sip power and blow any R-Pi out of the water performance wise, plus it comes with 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 3 display outputs. It can be a great home server, it can be a great PC replacement, it can be anything you want. R-Pi is still far to weak in comparison. If that's too expensive and overkill for you, and you just want some low-end ARM SBC to blink some LEDs from the internet, there's still the Beagle Bone Black with a single core Cortex A8 and 512MB of RAM, for around 60-70 Euros. [1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Ethernet-Windows11-3-Screen-Display-Consumption/dp/B0BLY1DR42/ https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Ethernet-Windows11-3-Screen-Displ...

lynguist 4y ago

It’s not possible. My job depends solely on the Raspberry Pi and the software stack is built on top of Linux on Raspberry Pi 3 or newer. When the supply of Raspberry Pis was drying up, we started recycling returns to make them work again, but even that would not be sustainable. There is no real alternative, nothing with a functioning Linux kernel and hardware that doesn’t die because of low/high temperatures or humidity or the like. The Raspberry Pi is engineered to a higher standard. Only since December 2022, a next-generation Rockchip ARM board is shipping that’s based on Cortex A-76 and has 8K video out, but it is expected to get mainline Linux support only in 6.3. Raspberry Pi works, the rest is just tinkering. Raspberry Pi supports some important niche economies, whose dependents would also break apart, if they didn’t get them. Medical sector, laboratory analysis, etc, etc. — What I want to add is that the Raspberry Pi 400 always stayed in stock, and I’ve bought one for my child. So you’re also wrong on that aspect as well.

RugnirViking 4y ago
try the nvidia jetson nano (for industrial application), we switched to that and its worked pretty well for us. A little faster for some workloads too
- justin66 4y ago
  I see that Nvidia are selling these again, but are they providing anything newer than Ubuntu 18.04 (now unsupported) to go with them? Are industrial customers just rolling their own distributions?
nsteel 4y ago
> What I want to add is that the Raspberry Pi 400 always stayed in stock, and I’ve bought one for my child. So you’re also wrong on that aspect as well. It's out of stock everywhere in the UK right now and it has been that way for as long as I can remember. Out of interest, was it possible to apply for access to the OEM pi stock? I don't know how the whole thing worked but wasn't their strategy explicitly designed to help people in positions like yours? https://www.itpro.com/hardware/370314/raspberry-pi-ceo-eben-upton-surviving-the-semiconductor-crisis https://www.itpro.com/hardware/370314/raspberry-pi-ceo-eben-...

bogantech 4y ago

> Raspberry Pi started out being for kids, schools and hobbyists. Just for the free PR I'm sure