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CEO: Raspberry Pi stock to hit 1M units monthly, starting in July
- ugh123 3y agoBS. He gave a similar rosy outlook end of last year. Then apparently had their "worst quarter". Pi 4's are still nowhere to be found but apparently well stocked for "commercial customers"
- sliken 3y agoIt's never been that the supply was particularly low, just that the vast majority of them were going to large orders to be included in products. Much like the GPU vendors were selling directly to miners.
- rasz 3y agoOf course its a lie. CEOs are being paid to lie, thats their main job. Eben has ZERO influence on whether Avago will increase the manufacturing rate of some obscure outdated SoC with only one client.
- anaganisk 3y agoCan't wait to fill the dead sea with more salt from the scalpers tears.
- brink 3y agoIt'll be nice to be able to buy them again hopefully. I'm not paying scalpers $145 for a Pi 4.
- dom96 3y agoHonestly I am surprised that the demand for Raspberry Pis is this high. Where are all these Pis going?
- nekoashide 3y agoHome projects, I need a couple for home automation.
- Workaccount2 3y agoI use them for test systems at my job. Where formally we needed a whole dedicated PC or laptop, we can now just throw a $20 rpi at it with ease.
- blakesterz 3y agoProjects like this too: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/cluster https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/cluster
- topikk 3y agoThey're amazingly powerful for the money. Prior to the shortages they were great for retro game emulation, little linux boxes for fun/kids/specific uses, home automation, whole-network ad filtering, etc etc.
- jasonladuke0311 3y agoThat is incredibly niche usage. It doesn't come close to explaining why they have been basically absent from retailers for years(?).
- mejutoco 3y agoAll those niches add up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
- madspindel 3y agoHome Assistant, Adguard Home etc. Nice little device to run containers on.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago>Where are all these Pis going? Lots of commercial systems use them, for digital signage, and all kinds of automation in industrial, retail, basically they're in nearly every embedded device at this point. It's hard to find a small to medium sized hardware/IoT company that doesn't ship commercial products with PIs in them.
- jaredandrews 3y agoNot all of these are currently active but here are the distinct Pi's in my house. - PiHole - Home Automation controller - Camera / temp / humidity monitor for grow closet and at time 3d printer - A 3d printer I used to have had a raspberry pi as it's board (I think, maybe it was a clone). - I'm pretty sure my CNC machine uses a pi - As another commenter mentioned, I used to have a Pi built into a NES for emulator purposes.
- moffkalast 3y agoAlso mobile robots, various industrial controllers, home media centres I guess?
- bigdict 3y agoMy drawer.
- jkestner 3y agoImagining a drawer made out of PCBs, in which you store hobby wood. Maybe boards should all incorporate a standard slot-and-tab system to turn them into a building toy instead of ewaste.
- giantg2 3y agoI have a pi-hole, and old 1B that doesn't do anything currently but filled a bunch of projects over time, and a Pi Zero that I've played around with for a couple projects and might have a more permanent IoT project if I can get additional Pis. I have another project that sort of works on a Pi Zero, but really needs a Pi Zero 2 so it's not laggy. Right now I'm an illogical state of mind due to the shortage. I want to preserve my unused Pi Zero so I can prototype projects, yet if I can't get additional Pis then what's the point of prototyping? I've ended up looking at alternatives and had a hard time getting many things to work on them, but the lack of Pis forces me to struggle with those problems.
- lmpdev 3y agoWe installed a three phase load shedding device for a school in January It was just a Pi and relays Tens of thousands of dollars
- jerrysievert 3y agoI have hardware out in the field deployed at breweries/pubs that have died over time and needed replacements. my own stock of pi3's is now depleted, and I've been looking for replacements daily.
- jkestner 3y agoWhat do you use them for, if you don’t mind me asking?
- jerrysievert 3y agolighting and displays - the pi's work well because they have decent GPIO support and were easy and cheap to acquire when the original hardware was built. they are overpowered for what they're doing, but usually rock solid for years at a time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mattkevan 3y agoHome projects. I've got a few that I use as Airplay receivers, Calibre OPDS book server, automatic updates and builds on my static sites, Twitter bots, HomeAssistant etc. Super handy for anything that needs to run in the background without much supervision. Hoping the stock increases soon as I've got a bunch of old displays I want to turn into digital picture frames.
- jkestner 3y agoWhat kind of case do you put these in? Or do people run naked boards?
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoI have one pretending to be a grandfather clock (it used drive a servo that rang a physical chime via a little motor driver controlled by GPIO, but the servos would burn out every year or so, now instead cron just plays some .ogg files of a clock striking). But for straight-up servers, wouldn't a bunch of docker containers (or even some shell scripts and cron) cover many of those other uses? I tend to think of the Pi as a sort of 'physical container' that gets me a full OS (with networking, package mgmt etc.) which can be great if you only need one thing in one place, but I also have a little fanless NUC-alike running a bunch of containers.
- pwinwood 3y agoSBitx ham radio transceiver. https://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v2/ https://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v2/
- sliken 3y agoMy understanding is that the vast majority of them end up in products. Embedded in all kinds of systems. IoT, assembly lines, signs, lobby displays, interfacing with all kinds of dumb systems to get them an internet interface. $5 for a Pi-0/pi-0w is hard to beat on anything that ships less then many 10,000s of units. Only a very small percentage are sent to hobbiest/makers. Much like how the GPU manufactures (or their distributors) sold directly to crypto miners.
- throwaway2990 3y agoIn 2023 they are just so slow now when there’s better arm products on the market :/
- kentm 3y agoWhich ones at the $50-$75 price point? Edit: Thanks for all the responses, got some good options!
- throwaway2990 3y agoI can’t even get a pi4 at that price point…
- margalabargala 3y agoThis, for example: https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=69&product_id=287 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product... Honestly the major sticking point of Pis for me is that their microSD cards are wholly unsuitable for anything that may lose power or requires long term reliability. Most equivalent manufacturers such as the one above ship with eMMC, which won't get corrupted by sudden power cycles.
- sidewndr46 3y agoAt that price point why not just buy an Intel based single board computer?
- cuu508 3y agoWhich one?
- Denvercoder9 3y agoDo you have an example of an x86 SBC with similar or better price, processing power and power consumption? I tried to find one a while back, but couldn't really find anything suitable, they mostly seem to be in the $100-$150 range.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoI switched to Intel NUCs. Some of the older models can be really cheap
- mypastself 3y agoAny downsides to these compared to a Pi? Heating, noise, power consumption?
- ianai 3y agoIt’s going to be all of those but especially power consumption and form factor. I’d be interested to see someone log how much power they use on idle/serving simple k8s tasks, etc. Plus, they’re just not well built if you have to open them up for any reason. Do-able, but not confidence instilling. Plus, at the scale enterprise probably uses NUCs they should sell second hand at 50-100$. But of course nowadays that gets 2xed by some middle man. At that point, it’s not such a compelling case to buy something they probably kept booted 24/7 for 5 years. Or buy one of these RPis, accept the salt of that deal, but at least it’s actually new.
- mypastself 3y agoThat's basically my impression. The Pi has been notoriously pricey these past few years, but computing-power-per-dollar is far from the only consideration when picking an alternative.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lbwtaylor 3y agoI think it really mostly comes down to power consumption - you can get a brand new mini PC with something like a N5095 celeron for not much more than $100. And it's also the pi ecosystem vs the x86 ecosystem.
- ianai 3y ago
- nerdjon 3y agoI really hope this is true, I have a display in my home I have been wanting to setup for close to a year (the monitor is even already mounted) but I just did not want to support scalpers. If within a couple months I can buy a new PI for retail that would be great.
- megous 3y agoYes please. Flood the market, so that other better SBCs also have to compete on price again. :)
- Raed667 3y agoA million unit for me to run twice and then collect dust in that universal drawer
- moffkalast 3y agoIf you're serious, there's plenty of people that would buy them off you at higher than retail price.
- nazgulsenpai 3y ago"But you can't sell it because you might need it again and not be able to find one!" ~ my brain re: the RPi 4 in my utility closet
- dpacmittal 3y agoSetup pi-hole and have an ad free network for all devices in your home. It's easy enough to setup and doesn't require any maintenance at all.
- kyriakos 3y agoHad bad experience blocking some sites from working completely. Especially social media. It was years ago how are things now?
- quaintdev 3y agoThey should refurbish old, unused Pis for resale. It benefits the community by offering affordable options and promotes sustainability. The organization can generate revenue and attract new enthusiasts. Let's give those forgotten Pis a new life
- j0hnyl 3y agoI just use my old android phones now.
- lmpdev 3y agoI use Optiplexes and ThinkCentres
- moffkalast 3y agoIf you're not using the GPIO it's a dreadfully slow and power inefficient phone anyway.
- cramjabsyn 3y agoI'd be nice to see a Raspberry Pi 5 upgrade sometime soon too
- marpstar 3y agoI recently hacked together a "parental control" filter (e.g. "block Roblox after 9PM) by way of PiHole and some shell scripts. As the name implies, these usually run on a RaspberryPi, which have been impossible to find. I picked up an ODROID C4 from Ameridroid and have been really happy with it. It lacks WiFi, but it wasn't necessary for my purposes. I'd love to be able to get Pi Zero W, but not enough to scour every third-party dealer's site hoping they're in stock.
- cylinder714 3y agoCheck rpilocator.com--the Zero W has been available in the U.S. for a week as I write this.
- hedora 3y agoPiHole will run in a VM these days, and doesn't use many resources. For example, I have a copy running on a Pc Engines OpenBSD router. The real time clock is busted inside the VM, but it's using an early version of their hypervisor; that might be fixed now. Other than that, it works fine.
- mrandish 3y agoThe Rockchip 3588-based Orange Pi 5, 5b and 5+ are readily available. The MSRP is a little higher than RPi4 but they have significantly more CPU/GPU power and I/O. The new 5+ looks to be a viable desktop replacement with m.2 NVME, dual 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, dual HDMI 2.1 and USB 3.1.
- sliken 3y agoSignificantly more = 6-8 times the compiling performance. I was quite impressed as how fast the RK3588 is.
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoBut are they running mainstream kernel or some weird patched one which means at one point they will stop providing updates? nvm I just saw it supports debian
- megous 3y agoNot mainline yet.
- elabajaba 3y agoIt's running a weird unsupported kernel, though iirc mainline 6.3 mostly works now (just don't expect hardware video encode or decode to work anytime soon, if ever on a rockchip soc running Linux)
- megous 3y agoWhy not? Video decode acceleration works fine in mainline Linux on other Rockchip SoCs. This one will likely not be very different. And there's already AV1 decoder driver posted for inclusion mainline (so the work is happening): https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/ab2b13e31e1af52ae52b0678b0abd5dd9d616e8a.camel@collabora.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/ab2b13e31e1af52ae52b0678b0abd5d...
- magicalhippo 3y ago> The MSRP is a little higher than RPi4 If by a little you mean about twice. I'm sure the Orange Pi 5 is a lot more powerful, but it's reflected in the price.
- caeril 3y agoWhat's the point, anymore? There are incredibly inexpensive Celeron-based SBCs on the market that vastly outperform the pi4 in any metric you can think of. Unless there's a pi5 on the horizon with higher clock speeds, better memory bandwidth, better I/O, more bus lanes, etc, who the hell would want a pi anymore?
- justin66 3y agoWhat would you recommend as an obvious "you'd have to be a fool to prefer a Pi 4 to this" Celeron-based SBC choice, and how much does it cost?
- caeril 3y agoBeelink N5095 with 8GB RAM and a 256GB M.2 drive goes for $130 on Amazon. If you want just the board, the case is easy to strip off. The only reason not to do this is if you want GPIO pins, but USB->FTDI->Cheap Arduino board is an easy workaround to that. The pi is dead.
- justin66 3y agoFor some people lack of GPIO, increased power usage with the need for active cooling, and a 40% price bump will be offset by the advantages of faster CPU, x86, and the storage. It feels more like something that will live adjacent to the Pi 4 rather than killing it, to be honest. > If you want just the board, the case is easy to strip off. On the contrary, I think I'd be worried running it without the case and cooling.
- Shish2k 3y agoI’ve been trying to buy a CM4 to run Home Assistant, while in parallel, trying to buy a house. Buying a house was easier, and only slightly more expensive than rPi scalper prices :D
- neurostimulant 3y agoIf the goal is to run Home Assistant, a secondhand thin client like HP T620 is more than enough and can be bought for like $30.