Been looking for RPI4 CMs for ages now and they’ve been sold out for as long as I can remember. Same with full size RPI4s and some Odroids. Is this just the new normal or are SBCs and CMs going to show up on the market again at some point?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters | More Letters ---|--- NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC | Single-Board Computer
RPi’s and RPi compatibles got co-opted by a huge number of commercial and industrial control systems companies being used for cheap full-fat embedded systems that needed more than a simple microcontroller, but where industrial PLC’s were overkill or not sourcable. Everything they produce, which is not a lot given covid supply chain whiplash, has now been going towards those customer’s contracts and fuck the little guy consumer they were meant for.
If you want to get into the SBC ecosystem leave rpi in the dust, they’re dead to the enthusiasts and won’t be coming back. There are much better options. See Linus tech tips video on them.
Finally someone mentions a product name. I am so sick of these “uh duuuh, there are better alternatives out there, hurhur” commenters who name not a single one.
I’d recommend one if I had tried any of them. The only one I’ve bought is the orange pi 5 which runs significantly higher than the basic RPi $35 and figured was outside the power envelope OP really needed.
In their defence, the pi was never intended to be a powerhouse. Their focus was on getting good software support for a low cost system. This provided a stable foundation that built that turnkey reliability.
A lot of the other board providers have a habit of just creating a powerful little board, and throwing it out there to fend for itself. This is great for competent geeks, but less good for those still learning.
Meh, I don’t know if they need defense. It’s just kind of how it is.
They got big and popular and that means momentum. Momentum is good for adoption and momentum is good for support, but it’s not great for huge jumps in technological sophistication.
I still LOVE the 2040, pico, etc, but there are just better options when you go bigger than that.
The Potato, Rock Pis.
This creator is great for when you want to SBC shop
The raspberry pi was never meant to be a power house. It’s whole goal was to make support and learning easy. A few, very well maintained models, with the same core chips. The last bit is the cause of the shortage. They can’t easily redesign without fragmenting the support base. That is completely against their ethos.
I’ve also found, once you hit a Pi’s limit, that it’s best to go to something more specialist. My go-to options are NUCs for general computing, or the Nvidia Jetson series, for portable brute power. Anything that saturates a pi will quickly saturate the smaller SBCs soon after, as well. They suffer from many of the same bottlenecks.
Have you ever checked out OrangePi? I was considering them before picking up a jetson nano. It’s crazy to think that a rpi4b is going for the same price from resellers as a jetson with cuda and tenserflow support.
Over heard of it but haven’t seen them. The other piece I was looking for was CMs for the Trying Pi that I got. It’s been sitting in a box ever since I got it because … no compute modules anywhere.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation doesn't own factories... They have to pay for manufacturing capacity and thus are limited in that capacity because their boards are built to a very strict cost that they seldom raise.
Aah, that’s what you meant. Yes that makes sense. That said in Jeff Geerling’s interview with Eben Upton, where they spoke about manufacturing and toured the SONY UK factory where the Pis are made, they called out component shortage as the culprit. Specifically the BCM2711’s availability. Of course that’s his word. I don’t know if that factory makes anything else than Pis in volume that competes with it. Maybe it does. 🤷
But even then, it goes down to the manufacturing of that chip. RPi foundation chooses it because it's built to a cost and they cannot afford outbid people for it. So again, manufacturing profits. Whether it's because RPi cannot afford to pay more for those chips to get what they need, or factories are simply de-prioritizing those chips for others that make them more money.
Those small AMD boxes are great. I set up 3 MSI ones as Kodi/LibreELEC media boxes and they work very well, stay cool and quiet while having plenty of horsepower for 4k.
Underpowered is probably the reason, they’re small and really low powered. A pi could be a 1/10th the power consumption of an x86 computer, and thus less noise and heat.
Back in 2016 or so you could get a RaspberryPi 3 for $35. Add a $5 power supply, $5 SD card and $10 case (or 3d print your own) and you’ve got a nice little piece of hardware for running a tiny project at home for ~$50. More than enough for hosting some simple web services, backup software or something like Home Assistant.
Plus it was popular (which makes it even more popular). It’s always been very easy to find guides written specifically for the hardware, despite it’s limitations.
I think the value proposition has been dropping steadily though. They cost more, are hard to find and there are now a lot more competing SBCs on the market. RaspberryPi still has name recognition though, for now.
They’re great for low strength, dedicated platforms instead of using something with more muscle like a NUC, also where a VM or container can’t be used.
Out of curiosity, what are some use cases that would fit this criteria? VMs and containers are very capable and it’s much easier to debug a failed VM than a failed piece of hardware.
I have one behind my TV that controls LED lights, although that may count as electronics. I’ve used PIs many times for when I just need a cheap computer doing computery things such as playing audio from spotify out of a speaker. They’re small enough to fit pretty much anywhere with the help of some velcro.
A software defined radio server. Lives up top of an antenna mast running off PoE with an RTL tuner connected.
ADSB receiver, similar to above, but on a fixed frequency.
The above 2 could be virtualised in theory, but there is an advantage in having the cable to the antenna short and thus the sbcs live up antenna masts in an enclosure.
MMDVM hotspot for ham radio (this might not count as it HAS TO use the gpio pins on the pi, this can’t be visualised even with a USB port passed through.
As an audio server that would bitstream 24bit/96kHz to an amp.
Last month it was hard to find these in India, but since few days RPIs are back in stock, got a couple of Pi4s (75$ each) and Zero 2 Ws (20$ each) for myself. Checked now, they are still in stock.
I have 2 pi4 4GB boards and was waiting forever to get a third to run RAFT based services across.
I gave up last year and bought 3 chinese boards at $60/ea with 2x 2.5Gb Ethernet each, emmc, and a m.2 slot - and they run at half the temp of the pi4 boards.
I never needed the wifi/bt and form-factor the pi boards offered anyway - really no reason to stay as long as you can find software that boots on other boards.
Yes. I bought a libre pi to use as a backup DNS. Besides the minor tweaks, it’s been running perfectly. Also only ~€75 for the libre+case+SD card combo.
Not to steal your post but I have had the same issue and my concern is always on OS support since some of the alternative boards I have tried in the past were stuck on custom kernels or old OS versions, has anyone had better luck these days? It has been a few years since I have tried any though.
Also, if you aren’t familiar with it this website has a bunch of real time inventory listings for the various Pi models.
Yeah I think that was another huge complain I had when I started out with an off brand SBC (Odroid C1). I think you had to do stage things to get a kernel to work and to be honest, my days of compiling kernels went out with the 90s. I remember reading years ago that the RPi had kernel integration with mainline oses like Ubuntu, so I wanted to give that a try as a dedicated key store machine and some other stuff.
I’ve got two clusters of nucs currently so they aren’t exactly foreign to me. Just wanted to find something cheaper and lighter to do some dedicated db work on. Sounds like I’ll just get another i5 NUC off eBay.
Yep that was exactly my thought process haha. For what it’s worth, raspian is pretty good and Ubuntu 22.04 works great on the PI4, I have 4 or 5 around here and they have been awesome.
Now I am curious though, what are you going to use for the key store? That is one of the things on my list to set up pretty soon here as well and I was going to put it on a pi myself. Also, if you haven’t seen this thing or this thing? They are pretty neat and I was going to get one just for the novelty haha.
According to the Raspberry Pi tracker, they are becoming available again. You may have to get them as soon as they arrive, but at least it shows they are stocked again
Raspberry Pi is based on smart phone chips, very specific chips from one manufacturer. Raspberry Pi Foundation is not the main customer for this manufacturer and chips used for Raspberry Pi are not their only product – and now, during the big 'chip shortages' and supply chain problems other customers and other chips are given priority. There are no (or not enough) new chips for Raspberry Pis so there are no new Raspberries, so availability is dropping and prices are soaring.
I guess the same is true for most other SBCs.
For my hobby projects I switched to Raspberry Pi Pico. It is not a SBC, you won't run Linux on that, but it is a very capable microcontroller board which is enough for my needs. It is way cheaper much more available. And I won't look back – it occurred to me that things are much simpler when there is no whole OS on my devices and everything the device does is in my own code.
There are no problems with Pico availability, as it is based on a simpler, custom chip, designed by Raspberry Pi Foundation and manufactured for Raspberry Pi Foundation – they are no longer dependent on a single supplier.
I was under the impression that it’s mostly Raspberry Pi stuff out of stock nowadays, and similar boards from Odroid and Orange Pi are easier to find? I see both of those in stock at Amazon right now, though I don’t know the exact models you want.
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