5 ms·

I'm sorry but it got too expensive and hence lost its main advantage. These days I use second-hand desktop mini-pcs that cost minimally more than the full Rpi s

I'm sorry but it got too expensive and hence lost its main advantage. These days I use second-hand desktop mini-pcs that cost minimally more than the full Rpi set (charger, CD card, case, SBC) but are much more powerful. For anything involving WiFi/IoT, I use ESP32 - far less expensive and very easy to use. And for cases where WiFi is not needed, we have tons of interesting solutions and few reasons to use the Pi.

zamadatix 3y ago
These are the two high RAM models but I expect the low RAM model to retain the same $35 price. That's no microntroller cost but if you can get away with such they also have the Pico these days which is $4.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Pico has its own problems: 1. VQFN package is a pain to deal with. You can't use a soldering iron, so its reflow-only and therefore requires hotplate + reflow hot air to deal with. Due to the difficulty of rework, you likely can't use the soldering iron+solder wick technique to fix solder bridges, for example... and therefore also require a soldering stencil to work with (gotta deposit the correct amount of solder-paste and hope everything works out good). Inspection requires X-Rays as well because everything is "under" the package, so you can't even visually inspect your joints. I definitely prefer TQFP (seems to be the package with the biggest inventory in practice), and enjoy even the larger SSOP or even SOIC packages available from some competitors. All competitors offer VQFN as an option as well, in case you are truly size-constrained. But in my experience, a 9mmx9mm TQFP-32 is perfectly fine (7x7mm raw, but the leads take up another 1mm for total of 2mm added on the two sides). Your 32-traces are going to take up like half an inch of routing space anyway, so its not like the 5mmx5mm VQFN saves much space in practice IMO (IE: You'll need 6-layers or something... and/or to cut out lines to really take advantage of the space-savings from a VQFN) Note: Hobbyists _should_ be using hotplates to do the bulk of their surface-mount soldering jobs. But accessibility to soldering iron for rework / touching up problems is a huge advantage to TQFP. 2. 0kB of on-board flash. RP2040 requires external components to boot, complicating the flashing / loading / bootup process. 3. Poor sleep specs, for a microcontroller. Your typical AVR DD (modern ATMega), or STM32G0, or Ti MSP430 / MSPM0 are all in the dozens or low-hundreds of microamps sleep (with some competitors in the ~hundreds of nanoamps for deepest sleep states). RP2040 sleeps at ~0.5mA to 1mA, an order of magnitude more power. 4. Poor power specs, for a microcontroller. Your typical AVR DD, SAMD, STM32G0, Ti MSP430 / MSPM0 are maybe single-digit mA (under 10mA across the board). RP2040 is like 20mA. I kid you not: an 8-bitter like AVR DD can be going full-tilt at like 4MHz or 8MHz and still have less power-usage than RP2040 *at idle*. 5. Lack of peripherals. RP2040 has PIO and SRAM as superpowers... but its got fewer timers, ADCs, DACs, OpAmps, Comparators, than all of its competitors. --------------- RP2040's main superpower is its 264kB of SRAM. If you need gobs and gobs of SRAM, RP2040 is probably the right choice. All other situations? I'm pretty sure you'd prefer a 12-bit differential ADC with 16x gain (ex: AVR64EA48), or 12-bit differential ADC (no PGA) + 3x OpAmps (ex: AVR128DB64) and multiple comparators and 4x onboard Vref, or 2x Zero-drift OpAmps + 1x general-purpose OpAmp (ex: TI's MSPM0 line). Honestly, I'm not impressed by the Pico for general purpose use. The Pico works as a specialized compute-device (high SRAM, high MHz and dual-core), but this is simply impractical for many applications. You'd really rather have ADCs or Comparators in more typical electrical designs. Combo'd with the high-power usage (probably from all that redundant RAM the RP2040 has), and its difficult to recommend. -------- Going in the other way: Cortex-M4F cores with a floating-point unit, even at 64MHz, will be much-much-much faster than a 200MHz RP2040. Why? Because hardware float32 matter. Why do you have 264kB of SRAM when you don't even have a floating-point unit? The RP2040 can't even be a good DSP-like system with all that compute power because you gotta software-emulate floats. So if you _actually_ need compute power, you'd probably should be picking an STM32F4 (aka: Cortex-M4F) processor instead. RP2040 sits in this awkward zone where its got gobs of SRAM + MHz but is stuck on Cortex-M0+ (lacking floats, and other key instructions), so it doesn't actually have very fast compute in a very common case that matters... So yeah, RP2040 works if you're willing to rewrite to integer-fixed point... if you don't need peripherals like ADCs or ACs, if you're willing to spend more power and complexity (due to the lack of on-board Flash), and are willing to use leadless VQFN packages. Its... quite a niche IMO.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    Yeah, that sleep current is inexcusable for an MCU. So is the lack of onboard flash. Weird design all around.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      The "killer-app" for the RP2040 is some kind of larger display controller IMO. Displays use tons of power anyway, so 20mA power consumption of RP2040 is fine. And you need 264kB of SRAM for a good frame-buffer, and dual-core means one core can be dedicated for the display and the 2nd core can do all the other functions of your application. Graphics are likely too large to fit on a typical on-board Flash, so you'll need QSPI (or larger) amounts of Flash anyway, so the weird bootup / requirement of Flash is made redundant. --------- But general purpose use of RP2040? Uhh... no? Honestly, the RP2040 feels very much like a cut-down microprocessor in its design. I guess RP2040 has the advantages of Micropython and more than enough SRAM to run larger sets of Micropython code for beginners... which is an advantage for some folk. --------- I kind of wish that the bottom-tier of microprocessors became more commonplace for hobbyists. Full Linux 6.x kernels and 128MB with a variety of ADCs / Comparators on the SAM9x60 (ARMv5 Microprocessor with on-board DDR2 with ~50mA power usage at downclocked 200MHz) Why run microPython? Just run Python 3 and G++. Bonus points: idles at 2.1mA and sleeps at 200uA, so this Linux-capable microprocessor is comparable to the RP2040's idle/sleep specs. (I'm cheating though: DDR2 uses a substantial amount of power and I'm only counting CPU-power. But it still goes to show how absurdly high-power the RP2040 is in practice).
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      It makes sense, if the Pi Foundation is known for anything it's for giving zero thought to power management and their over-reliance on SD cards for flash memory.
  - filterfiber 3y ago
    How do you feel about the esp32's? I know there's a few variants of the 32 with different capabilities, but how do you feel about using that as a general purpose MCU including projects that might not need wifi/bt? I'm somewhat surprised they didn't go with these as they seem relatively powerful+low deep sleep, with builtin wifi/bt, etc? Their analog input I think is limited though
Octoth0rpe 3y ago
> I'm sorry but it got too expensive and hence lost its main advantage. I don't think that estimate takes into account the power savings you'd get from an ARM sbc versus a NUC or NUC-like minipic.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  They are not as high as you might think, a J4105 still idles at 4W without optimization. And at least for my use cases, idling is what the CPU does most of the time.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > I don't think that estimate takes into account the power savings (...) I don't think this is relevant. RPis cost is a critical factor in it's usefulness as a disposable toy computing platform, not web servers that need to run 24/7. Moreover, that cost is further worsened by the need to buy a custom power supply.
  - LeafItAlone 3y ago
    I have two RPi 4s that run 24/7 that I will likely replace with a 5. > Moreover, that cost is further worsened by the need to buy a custom power supply. But you don’t need to?
    - sgerenser 3y ago
      Depends on what you’re doing with it. For many things it will run fine off of a 3A 5V supply, which almost any usb-c adapter will do. But as soon as you start hanging any USB devices off of it, IIRC you need a 5A/5V supply which is unusual outside of the RPi-specific one.
      - LeafItAlone 3y ago
        Yes, and it depends on the devices. 5V/3A will limit USB power to 600mA. Could also use a powered USB hub.
    - 3y ago
wyclif 3y ago
Which ones, specifically?
- spamatica 3y ago
  For instance Lenovo Thinkcentre. Checked now on ebay and there were several under 50 Euro. I gather all the manufacturers have similar offerings that are available dirt cheap on the used market.
  - nirav72 3y ago
    yeah. Some of those ThinkCentre models have an actual 8x PCIe slot. Like the m720q. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thinkcentre-thinkstation-tiny-project-tinyminimicro-reference-thread.34925/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...
- green-salt 3y ago
  Similar to the other comment since I bet they're the same platform design are the Dell Optiplex-es that I use. Great low power ESXi hypervisors!
musha68k 3y ago
What about power / TDP though? I personally lean heavily towards ARM/MIPS and hopefully soon RISC-V for that above all? Depends on the use case of course…
- wutwutwat 3y ago
  For tinkerers and experimentation TDP or power consumption is rarely a factor (for me anyway). I just need cheap access to compute that's available, right now. The device never runs long enough for power consumption to factor into total cost of ownership for me. Waiting forever for low consumption, and often more expensive devices, is for me personally, more expensive than whatever additional power a device I can use right now, when I need it, will draw. The cost of me losing inspiration/motivation due to waiting for a device, or not being able to afford a device, is an order of magnitude more costly than the few cents I'll spend from inefficient power draw. Focusing on TDP is a premature optimization imo, the same as when we hyper focus on loop efficiency in an app with zero users or scaling issues, you don't need to worry about it while in the validation phase, and probably not for a long time after that as well. And let's be honest here, unless you're optimizing every piece of software on the device (whether you wrote it or not), there is all kinds of needless power draw happening even on the lower TDP devices due to inefficiencies in the code. For long term deployments, I think recycling what would become e-waste by reusing older enterprise units is better overall for the environment than letting it go to a dump and buying a lower power consumption unit. TL;DR: TDP is not a factor for me, quick and lowish cost access to devices right away is way more important at the start
turtlebits 3y ago
The main advantage of the Pi is the ecosystem and availability/consistency, not the price. The hardware is known and well documented has the best OS support. If I have issues, I can just move the SD card to another one, or just reflash another SD with 0 downtime or fuss.
- apetresc 3y ago
  Sure, but the reason it generated that ecosystem was because of the price. I remember when the first Pi's were being marketed, and "the $30 computer" was absolutely the main selling point being pushed.
  - LeafItAlone 3y ago
    I think both are true. The low price point got me into them over a decade ago. The ecosystem is why I prefer them even at their top spec lines. Even at their current prices, the 8GB versions are inexpensive enough to grab instead of a 4GB one, even if there is no initial need. And I don’t have to deal with the process of buying second hand, maybe will work, maybe won’t, items.
- mike_d 3y ago
  > The main advantage of the Pi is the ecosystem and availability Availability is a big oof. We learned over the past few years that you shouldn't build anything of any importance on top of RPi because when manufacturing crunches hit "hobbyist" products are first to be sidelined.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    I don't think that's a very helpful takeaway from the situation. Early in my career as an EE, I learned that your world could suddenly be upset and swaths of components could suddenly become unavailable to the small manufacturer because an auto company or some other massive customer got preference, so the majority of parts went "on allocation." Meaning that the production runs were allocated to certain customers and if you were lucky then you got the leftovers. You could suddenly not be able to built product for a year because critical parts just couldn't be found on the market. I remember one vendor selling a part that normally cost around $16 for over $400. It's not specific to the Pi: this happens everywhere.
nope96 3y ago
The first Pi (2012 release) was $35, this release is, when inflation adjusted to 2012 dollars, $44. So in the same ballpark-ish
Mumps 3y ago
I've been feeling this way for a while: that Raspberry Pi lost its way, in pursuit of specs over cheap. I've been very surprised to not see other people discussing it.
atoav 3y ago
One thing here: The rpi3b is still around. You can also get the rpi zero, rpi zero 2 W, rpi pico, etc. Get the right one for the job. If you need an M.2 SSD or actual 4k video playback, go for the rpi 5, if not, for sth. else.
- benterix 3y ago
  > The rpi3b is still around Yeah, and it costs over $50 for just the SBC: https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-MS-004-00000024-Model-Board/dp/B01LPLPBS8 https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-MS-004-00000024-Model-Bo...
  - atoav 3y ago
    The first place I checked was 38 €. This, coincidentally is 30 € plus the inflation since 2018. I hardly can blame them for inflation.

zamadatix 3y ago

These are the two high RAM models but I expect the low RAM model to retain the same $35 price. That's no microntroller cost but if you can get away with such they also have the Pico these days which is $4.

dragontamer 3y ago
Pico has its own problems: 1. VQFN package is a pain to deal with. You can't use a soldering iron, so its reflow-only and therefore requires hotplate + reflow hot air to deal with. Due to the difficulty of rework, you likely can't use the soldering iron+solder wick technique to fix solder bridges, for example... and therefore also require a soldering stencil to work with (gotta deposit the correct amount of solder-paste and hope everything works out good). Inspection requires X-Rays as well because everything is "under" the package, so you can't even visually inspect your joints. I definitely prefer TQFP (seems to be the package with the biggest inventory in practice), and enjoy even the larger SSOP or even SOIC packages available from some competitors. All competitors offer VQFN as an option as well, in case you are truly size-constrained. But in my experience, a 9mmx9mm TQFP-32 is perfectly fine (7x7mm raw, but the leads take up another 1mm for total of 2mm added on the two sides). Your 32-traces are going to take up like half an inch of routing space anyway, so its not like the 5mmx5mm VQFN saves much space in practice IMO (IE: You'll need 6-layers or something... and/or to cut out lines to really take advantage of the space-savings from a VQFN) Note: Hobbyists _should_ be using hotplates to do the bulk of their surface-mount soldering jobs. But accessibility to soldering iron for rework / touching up problems is a huge advantage to TQFP. 2. 0kB of on-board flash. RP2040 requires external components to boot, complicating the flashing / loading / bootup process. 3. Poor sleep specs, for a microcontroller. Your typical AVR DD (modern ATMega), or STM32G0, or Ti MSP430 / MSPM0 are all in the dozens or low-hundreds of microamps sleep (with some competitors in the ~hundreds of nanoamps for deepest sleep states). RP2040 sleeps at ~0.5mA to 1mA, an order of magnitude more power. 4. Poor power specs, for a microcontroller. Your typical AVR DD, SAMD, STM32G0, Ti MSP430 / MSPM0 are maybe single-digit mA (under 10mA across the board). RP2040 is like 20mA. I kid you not: an 8-bitter like AVR DD can be going full-tilt at like 4MHz or 8MHz and still have less power-usage than RP2040 *at idle*. 5. Lack of peripherals. RP2040 has PIO and SRAM as superpowers... but its got fewer timers, ADCs, DACs, OpAmps, Comparators, than all of its competitors. --------------- RP2040's main superpower is its 264kB of SRAM. If you need gobs and gobs of SRAM, RP2040 is probably the right choice. All other situations? I'm pretty sure you'd prefer a 12-bit differential ADC with 16x gain (ex: AVR64EA48), or 12-bit differential ADC (no PGA) + 3x OpAmps (ex: AVR128DB64) and multiple comparators and 4x onboard Vref, or 2x Zero-drift OpAmps + 1x general-purpose OpAmp (ex: TI's MSPM0 line). Honestly, I'm not impressed by the Pico for general purpose use. The Pico works as a specialized compute-device (high SRAM, high MHz and dual-core), but this is simply impractical for many applications. You'd really rather have ADCs or Comparators in more typical electrical designs. Combo'd with the high-power usage (probably from all that redundant RAM the RP2040 has), and its difficult to recommend. -------- Going in the other way: Cortex-M4F cores with a floating-point unit, even at 64MHz, will be much-much-much faster than a 200MHz RP2040. Why? Because hardware float32 matter. Why do you have 264kB of SRAM when you don't even have a floating-point unit? The RP2040 can't even be a good DSP-like system with all that compute power because you gotta software-emulate floats. So if you _actually_ need compute power, you'd probably should be picking an STM32F4 (aka: Cortex-M4F) processor instead. RP2040 sits in this awkward zone where its got gobs of SRAM + MHz but is stuck on Cortex-M0+ (lacking floats, and other key instructions), so it doesn't actually have very fast compute in a very common case that matters... So yeah, RP2040 works if you're willing to rewrite to integer-fixed point... if you don't need peripherals like ADCs or ACs, if you're willing to spend more power and complexity (due to the lack of on-board Flash), and are willing to use leadless VQFN packages. Its... quite a niche IMO.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  Yeah, that sleep current is inexcusable for an MCU. So is the lack of onboard flash. Weird design all around.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    The "killer-app" for the RP2040 is some kind of larger display controller IMO. Displays use tons of power anyway, so 20mA power consumption of RP2040 is fine. And you need 264kB of SRAM for a good frame-buffer, and dual-core means one core can be dedicated for the display and the 2nd core can do all the other functions of your application. Graphics are likely too large to fit on a typical on-board Flash, so you'll need QSPI (or larger) amounts of Flash anyway, so the weird bootup / requirement of Flash is made redundant. --------- But general purpose use of RP2040? Uhh... no? Honestly, the RP2040 feels very much like a cut-down microprocessor in its design. I guess RP2040 has the advantages of Micropython and more than enough SRAM to run larger sets of Micropython code for beginners... which is an advantage for some folk. --------- I kind of wish that the bottom-tier of microprocessors became more commonplace for hobbyists. Full Linux 6.x kernels and 128MB with a variety of ADCs / Comparators on the SAM9x60 (ARMv5 Microprocessor with on-board DDR2 with ~50mA power usage at downclocked 200MHz) Why run microPython? Just run Python 3 and G++. Bonus points: idles at 2.1mA and sleeps at 200uA, so this Linux-capable microprocessor is comparable to the RP2040's idle/sleep specs. (I'm cheating though: DDR2 uses a substantial amount of power and I'm only counting CPU-power. But it still goes to show how absurdly high-power the RP2040 is in practice).
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    It makes sense, if the Pi Foundation is known for anything it's for giving zero thought to power management and their over-reliance on SD cards for flash memory.
- filterfiber 3y ago
  How do you feel about the esp32's? I know there's a few variants of the 32 with different capabilities, but how do you feel about using that as a general purpose MCU including projects that might not need wifi/bt? I'm somewhat surprised they didn't go with these as they seem relatively powerful+low deep sleep, with builtin wifi/bt, etc? Their analog input I think is limited though

Octoth0rpe 3y ago

> I'm sorry but it got too expensive and hence lost its main advantage. I don't think that estimate takes into account the power savings you'd get from an ARM sbc versus a NUC or NUC-like minipic.

Semaphor 3y ago
They are not as high as you might think, a J4105 still idles at 4W without optimization. And at least for my use cases, idling is what the CPU does most of the time.
rewmie 3y ago
> I don't think that estimate takes into account the power savings (...) I don't think this is relevant. RPis cost is a critical factor in it's usefulness as a disposable toy computing platform, not web servers that need to run 24/7. Moreover, that cost is further worsened by the need to buy a custom power supply.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  I have two RPi 4s that run 24/7 that I will likely replace with a 5. > Moreover, that cost is further worsened by the need to buy a custom power supply. But you don’t need to?
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    Depends on what you’re doing with it. For many things it will run fine off of a 3A 5V supply, which almost any usb-c adapter will do. But as soon as you start hanging any USB devices off of it, IIRC you need a 5A/5V supply which is unusual outside of the RPi-specific one.
    - LeafItAlone 3y ago
      Yes, and it depends on the devices. 5V/3A will limit USB power to 600mA. Could also use a powered USB hub.
  - 3y ago

wyclif 3y ago

Which ones, specifically?

spamatica 3y ago
For instance Lenovo Thinkcentre. Checked now on ebay and there were several under 50 Euro. I gather all the manufacturers have similar offerings that are available dirt cheap on the used market.
- nirav72 3y ago
  yeah. Some of those ThinkCentre models have an actual 8x PCIe slot. Like the m720q. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thinkcentre-thinkstation-tiny-project-tinyminimicro-reference-thread.34925/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...
green-salt 3y ago
Similar to the other comment since I bet they're the same platform design are the Dell Optiplex-es that I use. Great low power ESXi hypervisors!

musha68k 3y ago

What about power / TDP though? I personally lean heavily towards ARM/MIPS and hopefully soon RISC-V for that above all? Depends on the use case of course…

wutwutwat 3y ago
For tinkerers and experimentation TDP or power consumption is rarely a factor (for me anyway). I just need cheap access to compute that's available, right now. The device never runs long enough for power consumption to factor into total cost of ownership for me. Waiting forever for low consumption, and often more expensive devices, is for me personally, more expensive than whatever additional power a device I can use right now, when I need it, will draw. The cost of me losing inspiration/motivation due to waiting for a device, or not being able to afford a device, is an order of magnitude more costly than the few cents I'll spend from inefficient power draw. Focusing on TDP is a premature optimization imo, the same as when we hyper focus on loop efficiency in an app with zero users or scaling issues, you don't need to worry about it while in the validation phase, and probably not for a long time after that as well. And let's be honest here, unless you're optimizing every piece of software on the device (whether you wrote it or not), there is all kinds of needless power draw happening even on the lower TDP devices due to inefficiencies in the code. For long term deployments, I think recycling what would become e-waste by reusing older enterprise units is better overall for the environment than letting it go to a dump and buying a lower power consumption unit. TL;DR: TDP is not a factor for me, quick and lowish cost access to devices right away is way more important at the start

turtlebits 3y ago

The main advantage of the Pi is the ecosystem and availability/consistency, not the price. The hardware is known and well documented has the best OS support. If I have issues, I can just move the SD card to another one, or just reflash another SD with 0 downtime or fuss.

apetresc 3y ago
Sure, but the reason it generated that ecosystem was because of the price. I remember when the first Pi's were being marketed, and "the $30 computer" was absolutely the main selling point being pushed.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  I think both are true. The low price point got me into them over a decade ago. The ecosystem is why I prefer them even at their top spec lines. Even at their current prices, the 8GB versions are inexpensive enough to grab instead of a 4GB one, even if there is no initial need. And I don’t have to deal with the process of buying second hand, maybe will work, maybe won’t, items.
mike_d 3y ago
> The main advantage of the Pi is the ecosystem and availability Availability is a big oof. We learned over the past few years that you shouldn't build anything of any importance on top of RPi because when manufacturing crunches hit "hobbyist" products are first to be sidelined.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  I don't think that's a very helpful takeaway from the situation. Early in my career as an EE, I learned that your world could suddenly be upset and swaths of components could suddenly become unavailable to the small manufacturer because an auto company or some other massive customer got preference, so the majority of parts went "on allocation." Meaning that the production runs were allocated to certain customers and if you were lucky then you got the leftovers. You could suddenly not be able to built product for a year because critical parts just couldn't be found on the market. I remember one vendor selling a part that normally cost around $16 for over $400. It's not specific to the Pi: this happens everywhere.

nope96 3y ago

The first Pi (2012 release) was $35, this release is, when inflation adjusted to 2012 dollars, $44. So in the same ballpark-ish

Mumps 3y ago

I've been feeling this way for a while: that Raspberry Pi lost its way, in pursuit of specs over cheap. I've been very surprised to not see other people discussing it.

atoav 3y ago

One thing here: The rpi3b is still around. You can also get the rpi zero, rpi zero 2 W, rpi pico, etc. Get the right one for the job. If you need an M.2 SSD or actual 4k video playback, go for the rpi 5, if not, for sth. else.

benterix 3y ago
> The rpi3b is still around Yeah, and it costs over $50 for just the SBC: https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-MS-004-00000024-Model-Board/dp/B01LPLPBS8 https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-MS-004-00000024-Model-Bo...
- atoav 3y ago
  The first place I checked was 38 €. This, coincidentally is 30 € plus the inflation since 2018. I hardly can blame them for inflation.