Raspberry Pi Inventory Improving, Could Reach Pre-Pandemic Levels In 2023 (arstechnica.com) 55
According to CEO Eben Upton, "hundreds of thousands" of Raspberry Pi Zero, 3A+, and 4 models should show up next year. Ars Technica reports: In a "Supply chain update" blog post ("It's good news!"), CEO Eben Upton wrote that Raspberry Pi has "set aside a little over a hundred thousand units, split across Zero W, 3A+, and the 2GB and 4GB variants of Raspberry Pi 4, for single-unit sales." During the pandemic-spurred component shortage, most of the Pis produced every month were going to businesses, leaving those in need of one or two for a project refreshing rpilocator and cursing their timing. Zeros will start showing up first, then 3A+, then different models of 4. Upton acknowledged this reality (and even linked the locator) and asked that people buy only from approved resellers and consider the Pico and Pico W lines for projects that might fit, as those lines remain strong. As of this morning, a few 3A+ and CM4 models showed an optimistic green on the rpilocator spreadsheet.
Raspberry Pi will continue to serve its commercial and industrial customers, Upton wrote, but will "make sure that inventory-building behavior which would otherwise prolong the shortage for everybody else can't take place." Meanwhile, Raspberry Pi will increase the percentage of boards designated for single-unit sales. With that change and future chip allocations, Upton expects that by the end of the third quarter of 2023, things will be back to how they were before the Great Pi Shortage, with "hundreds of thousands of units available at any given time."
Raspberry Pi will continue to serve its commercial and industrial customers, Upton wrote, but will "make sure that inventory-building behavior which would otherwise prolong the shortage for everybody else can't take place." Meanwhile, Raspberry Pi will increase the percentage of boards designated for single-unit sales. With that change and future chip allocations, Upton expects that by the end of the third quarter of 2023, things will be back to how they were before the Great Pi Shortage, with "hundreds of thousands of units available at any given time."
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The thing is, the hobbyist is the one who can the easiest switch to an alternative. If some manufacturer comes along with a product that has the features I need for my project, do I care whether the case I have to design anew for 3D printing accommodates this or that board? I'll probably rather accept spending another 2 hours redesigning the case than to wait another year for the board I need or spend 200 on a board that should cost 20 (and where the alternative costs just that). The industry can't just red
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If RPI isn't careful, someone will actually do just that and snipe their hobbyist market away from them.
Maybe, but lots have tried and all have failed. There are many alternatives which are faster, cheaper, more capable, more expandable, more advanced hardware and so on. Some of them sell moderately well. Thing is the low end Pis which are fine for so much stuff are cheap enough and capable enough that it's not worth the hassle to use something else.
It depends. If your hobby involves wrangling rando boards
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The thing RPI has going for it is that there are already a lot of projects relying on RPi boards and most people trying to recreate these things don't have the skill to rework it onto other systems. That's what keeps the competition from taking over. This, though, only lasts as long there isn't a competitor that wants this market badly enough that they throw cheap or even promo-free boards at prolific developers who likely won't care too much about this or that board, but this one costs 20 bucks and is avai
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The thing RPI has going for it is that there are already a lot of projects relying on RPi boards and most people trying to recreate these things don't have the skill to rework it onto other systems. That's what keeps the competition from taking over. This, though, only lasts as long there isn't a competitor that wants this market badly enough that they throw cheap or even promo-free boards at prolific developers who likely won't care too much about this or that board, but this one costs 20 bucks and is avai
Great news. (Score:3)
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If you need a Pi Zero you can buy a Mango Pi which uses a RISC-V chip. Same form factor and everything and they’re actually in stock!
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How is the software and hardware support?
Another option is to find an old x86 thin client on eBay. Some of them are extremely low power, rivalling the Pi. Plus you get more CPU performance, more RAM, and things like SATA to connect a real SSD.
Re:Great news. (Score:4, Insightful)
The point of RaspPi isn't to be a wimpy (till recently and I'm not sure but probably still recommended) 32-bit Linux machine but the GPIO. Therefore in general it can't be replaced with a wimpy x86 Linux box.
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And yet a lot of people were using (or wanting to use) the Pi for non GPIO tasks. For example Octoprint, Klipper, various kinds of little servers. I myself use one as a NTRIP server that passes data from serial to a network server. Many people use a Pi for Home Assistant and other IOT server stacks. There are countless uses for a small box that don't involve GPIO. From what I've seen recently on youtube and the internet in general, most uses of the Raspberry Pi do not seem to involve GPIO at all.
And for
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LOL, yes?
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But at the time Pis became popular for these tasks there was no other low-power devices on the market. Right or wrong, Pi became extremely popular in this space and still is. I mean people were promoting the Pi as a mini workstation, or a media center. You can buy a DIY laptop case based that houses a Pi. To argue that the Pi is only for embedded hardware tasks denies that whole reality.
Re: Great news. (Score:2)
Well, if it took some shortages for people to find the better (and "right") tool for the job I guess it's a win for everyone.
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And for these particular uses the small form factor x86 boxes now look pretty good. They don't use much more power, and are much more capable, and are now available at very good prices. I saw one person run two Klipper instances on a single, small x86 unit. Andreas Spiess, a prominent youtube maker, just did a video on how he's replacing his collection of Pis with second-hand Lenovo mini PCs to run his Home Assistant server, and handle various IOT tasks.
A podcast I listened to recently also mentioned how he
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Yeah the Pi works fine as a small server for IoT devices. If your requirements include a sata drive then these devices aren’t for you. There is literally no reason to use x86 devices if their primary role is to listen for a packet and toggle a gpio pin. An ESP8266 will do that just fine.
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Sure I could use an ESP8266 to do what I am doing with the Pi, but the software needed to speak the protocol is already on Linux and the Pi connects to ethernet. So it's a no-brainer. Shrug.
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If your requirements include a sata drive then these devices aren’t for you.
Funny, I use them for that purpose just fine. (Admittedly, Pi4s with USB3.0 HDDs.) I specifically chose them for their reduction in power consumption VS a traditional x86 device.
One's a NAS that runs multiple services (FTP / iSCSI / NFS / SMB), another set of them run a glusterfs storage backend for my VMs. The NAS in particular is perfectly capable of streaming HD video. The VMs are good enough. Although most of the VMs are low storage-utilization services like DNS / LDAP / etc. I do have a few that run
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Honestly no idea why someone would run a substantial HomeAssistant setup on a Pi today. I did it for a year on a small system (~10 devices), and it was kind numbingly slow with dashboards and other fairly easy operations.
I switched to NUCs with Proxmox and now have so much better performance, better firewalls, and the ability to separate non-core functions out of the Docker-mess (like Influx/Grafana), as well as a simple place to put the PiHole, NextCloud, Unifi Controller, and everything else... with exter
Re:Great news. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just wish there was a cheap way to add GPIO to PC's
Re:Great news. (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean like this? $15 https://www.adafruit.com/produ... [adafruit.com]
cheap way to add GPIO to PC (Score:1)
Raspberry Pico
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Just wish there was a cheap way to add GPIO to PC's
Depending on what you're using the GPIO for, this is pretty much the description of an entry-level Arduino. Open-source toolchain, widely available under 10USD. If you decide to start doing more computation off the PC, there are plenty of more powerful microcontrollers that you can port your Arduino code to. If you *don't" want to do any computation away from the PC, then that FTDI breakout CaptQuark has linked to looks pretty capable too... Or the Pi pico, which despite the "Pi" name, is a microcontroller
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Or, you know, use a Raspberry Pi.
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I've been eyeballing the Libre. Looks about like a Pi 3b+ with 2G ram instead of 1G. Supposedly runs Raspbian.
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Looks interesting. The problem always is that each SBC has slightly different hardware trees and incompatible booting systems, often with custom kernels maintained by each vendor, even if the user land can be Armbian. It's not ideal IMO. To say nothing of GPU support being so spotty (if you need that). At least the Pi has enough mindshare that it's well supported and has mainstream distro support.
Another thing often missing from these SBCs is software power management. The Pi had no way of shutting itse
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Supposedly there's a utility for the AML-S905X-CC that can render a card dual-bootable on both the Libre and the Raspberry Pi. Different boot sequence but the same Linux binaries. And the Libre uses the Pi's pinout and form factor so there's hardware compatibility with the hats.
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If you go in and offer love and money someone may think you're in the wrong industry.
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You seem to have been living under a rock the last few days...
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And yet I can find nothing via Google about hidden surveillance.
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I recommend you search for the following:
1. sarcasm
2. raspberry foundation hiring controversy
It will all become clear with that.
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If you have to keep pointing out to everyone that you were being sarcastic, perhaps they are not the problem
Re:Just get something else (Score:5, Informative)
They hired an EX British cop that said he used the Pi in the past to build surveillance devices for criminal investigations. One person complained on twitter, slashdot ran a story, the end. I think OP is pretty confused.
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No, you just seem to have gone full-retard on the announcement that they employed someone and translated that into them including surveillance devices.
Honestly you've said some fucking dumb shit in the past, but this is beyond the pale.
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You seem to be sarcasm challenged. I would advise you to fix that personality defect.
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You seem to be sarcasm challenged. I would advise you to fix that personality defect.
I have no defect. You've spent so much of your time saying stupid things that you don't get the benefit of sarcasm. If you want to say something sarcastic then finalise your post with: "I'm being uncharacteristically witty and sarcastic, not just my usual retarded self".
The personality defect is you presenting yourself the way you always do, and expecting people to consider you an intelligent person. That's up to you to fix.
Re: Just get something else (Score:2)
They brought in a âoemaker in residenceâ who used rpi hardware to make surveillance devices. Not sure this will translate into shipping products.
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/r... [dexerto.com]
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Obviously not. I was being sarcastic. It is really surprising that so many people do not seem to get that.
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The RPi's hardware is indeed... meh. But where it excels is in software support. Pretty much every other SBC out there has weird and spotty software support, with tons of forum questions from people running into issues.
Raspberry Pi OS on a Pi just works. No mucking about needed.
pre pandemic levels? (Score:2)
they were almost impossible to get in the before times, unless you bought some shitty makers kit with a power supply that was so bad the pi complained about it
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I don't recall having any trouble laying my hands on a Pi 4 shortly after they first came out. Before that I bought bare Pis at Micro Center a number of times with no difficulty.
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Pi4s, yes. Zero W2s? You could as well want to buy a pink invisible unicorn.
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Zero W2's are caught up in the current supply chain problems. They came out well after the 4 developed supply chain problems.
Zero W's... well, I bought about 10 of them at $5 each when they first came out. No problems.
Re:pre pandemic levels? (Score:4, Insightful)
The raspberry pi is INCERDIBLY picky about it's power supply and will complain about voltages that are in spec but on the low end for USB. Usb is 5v +/- 5%, so 4.75 to 5.25. The raspberry pi complains about anything below 5.
Even if you have a perfect USB power supply with 5V right on the money, no ripple, no droop, your PI will probably complain because you'll get a slight drop down the cable and it'll see under 5V.
This is probably my main annoyance with the pi, though I've never actually had it cause problems.
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I have. Even with the Pi power supply. Granted the unit is over two years old and trying to drive a 4K tv, but I had similar issues with 70% of the units I bought. I don't think any of the 15-20 SBCs I have bought over the last 5-10 years has been measurably better though, and the Beagles were significantly worse (and more expensive).
Lucky me (Score:1)
I'm so glad I bought a bunch of RPi 4s and ZeroWs before the shortage hit. I have three on my desk right now and a couple in boxes on the floor.
Woohoo... I think I'll turn them into cryptomining systems.
Oh wait... yeah... that's not a thing any more :-D
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Yo boss, forget that banking job this weekend. I think I just found some guy online who has 3 Pis on his desk and some more on the floor. Yeah Pi 4s and Zeros the ones with Wifi. You know the good shit. Should we get the twins to look into it?
Where are they going in business? (Score:2)
Took a YEAR to get one (Score:2)
I caught CanaKit when they had a preorder of PI 4 8G available in Dec 2021
FINALLY got it a couple weeks ago - so a full year
At the original price point and easy availability, it was a no-brainer to set up for a specific use - but knowing if my pi hardware ever died I might have to struggle a bit to find a replacement.... well, it made me nervous - In theory one of the other ARM based SBCs would likely have worked but I just didn't have the spoons, and I found other shinies to chase and forgot till I got a "