Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Of course they'll become more powerful--that's what happens. They'll stay focused on what they're good at.

Hopefully USB3 will come to the RPi... It would make it more useful as a file server.

From the interviews I've heard with the founder, rPi set a price point first, then developed the best hackable computer they could to match it. If they keep up with that (as they have so far) then expect something more powerful and possibly smaller at the same price. Although I think the rPi zero is probably at the lower end of how small you can go without making tinkering cumbersome with all those gpio pins and such. although, people also like ATTiny, so who knows :)

If the availability of the pi zero W is any indication I expect trouble ahead. Trying to buy the zero W in bulk through channels is practically impossible, and the vendors sell them only in kit bundles at many times MSRP at 10$.

I would bet we'll see a version with an integrated SIM card, hopping on the IoT-anywhere train. Twilio was a big first mover with their Twilio mobile service, and I can see people deploying rPi's and the like to more out-of-home applications.

Raspberry Pi is for hacking. It's not really a commercial platform. You can technically use it as such, but it's more cost-effective to design your own boards at that point.

Their competitor, Libre Computer, has mused that given their investment in the graphics stack, they might be headed in the GPGPU / AI direction. Think Raspberry Pis that you can cluster together for deep learning, or individual boards that kids can tinker with to learn about AI. The blog post also predicted the 3B+ fairly exactly:

https://libre.computer/2017/12/06/raspberry-pi-3x-raspberry-...

Money quote:

> We expect the Raspberry Pi 4 to be based on a new Broadcom SoC based on Cortex-A55 built on < 28nm fabrication process. We can call this BCM2839 and it will feature the much alluded to VC5 GPU and a new form factor. Since that hardware is more than two years away, it is difficult to predict the direction of the industry and thus the exact specifications. We expect such a Raspberry Pi 4 board to utilize dual 32-bit LPDDR3 or LPDDR4 to cope with the bandwidth requirements of OpenCL and neural network acceleration. The exact release date for such a specimen can vary dramatically depending on Broadcom’s tapeout schedule. It should be relatively soon if the Raspberry Pi Foundation expects to release hardware in 2019.

Hopefully it will become more open and less reliant on binary blobs.

I'm more of a Beagle Bone person, so I hope you don't mind me answering the question from that standpoint.

The sadness I have about the bone is that it is a means to an end. Purchase bone, insert into host board. Voila, IoT. It gets you to an MVP really fast, but limits your design to that form factor. Migrating away is difficult.

The Arduino, at least, served as training wheels. The end goal was to design an atmega328 into your circuit board, not glue another pcb on top. (Just remembering, there is some progress here with the pocket beagle... Though it does raise supply chain concerns.)

Also unlike the bone, the Arduino opened up a pathway for many other architectures and families of microprocessor, lowering the barrier to entry for 32 bit processors and ARM, keeping the platform relevant.

The bone CPU is getting a little long in the tooth, and there doesn't seem to be a path forward to the next generation of processors in the same SWaP C space. There are others, but the cost or power consumption tripples. The bone is at a real sweet point for price and capabilities. I'd love to see a lower power generation with some fixes to annoying problems (like the RTC).

In their defense, there are two or three orders of magnitude more complexity to an ARM SoC than an 8bit micro. The bone community really is on point with making a stable platform with regular releases, especially given the complexity of supporting a SoC+peripherals with the kernel, device tree, U-Boot, Debian, etc.

I think the future is only going to get brighter for Raspberry Pi because its niche is as a hacker's machine. It's so inexpensive and versatile for putting together proofs of concept and I think that's where it's real value lies. If you can show a solid working prototype of something on a Pi then the assumption is that a dedicated hardware solution will run even faster... assuming you don't just make a custom case and mounting set for your ad hoc solution and call it good. What I think would kill Raspberry Pi is trying to make it more advanced and powerful than it needs to be, trying to make it a full powered computer rather than a hacker's delight.

These things are a god-send for the auto industry in my opinion...specifically professional drivers.

as a lead automotive mechanic for a semi truck shop, I bought about 5 pi's for our techs. We use them for reading OBD diagnostics and doing resets or long-term vehicle observation for certain problems. Theyre cheaper than most of the commercial rent-seeking computer tools we use and if a tech accidentally crushes one, its cheaper than dirt to replace.

We even have a customer who keeps long term backups of log books and GPS data on a pi running off her cigar lighter, as well as her favorite audio books. Trucking companies dont care if you whine the most about your miles, but send them a ZIP file of 6 years of logs and the CEO himself will write you a pay raise. best of all, she tucks the pi in her shirt when she switches trucks. Try doing that with a qualcomm or a laptop!

"MAX PER CUSTOMER: 1"

It really doesn't matter where else they "go" until they fix that right there.

(Why? Because on my workbench right now is the pi, instead of a pi; and that makes all the difference.)

Most of the comments so far seem to have missed the point of the RPi specifically, which is that it was always intended more as an educational tool than commercial solution. The idea of the RPi foundation is to promote experimenting and hacking by selling a board cheap enough that you don't care too much if you ruin it.

This was explicitly a response to the rise of smartphones(/smart-whatevers) which turned computing into magic by sealing off all the components and preventing any hands-on work - students were enrolling in to computer science degrees with nearly no understanding of how a computer is fundamentally put together.

There is no reason for RPi to change from their very successful mission - they will keep putting out the best hardware they can squeeze into their fixed price point.

The difference between Arduino and Raspberry Pi is already one where the Arduino (at least the basic, most popular(?) model) is just a board supporting a small, highly energy efficient microcontroller that you program in C, while the Raspberry Pi (even the Zero) comparatively uses a ton of power and runs a full Linux distro. That difference is huge, and seems to already be in the two different directions you're postulating.

That said, Arduino (the company) has released more boards with faster, more powerful processors over the years, and I wonder if they'll ever give up the flagship Uno model. I sure hope not, since as bjt2n3904 mentioned, it's a great stepping stone for small, cheap, efficient microcontrollers. It's kind of like learning a programming language and realizing how that knowledge applies to most/all other programming languages, whereas so much of the RPi is abstracted behind Linux.

I wish I could make use of those small computers better, but so far my main use case is for xbmc for my dumb TV, and I'm loving it.

The rPI mostly failed in its original mission as an educational tool. In practice, it proved too complex and fragile to use as a microcontroller but not powerful enough to substitute for a desktop PC. A lot of important lessons were learned and put into practice in the BBC Micro:Bit project. For teaching basic programming and electronics, a dinky little Cortex M0+ with a few LEDs and IO pins makes far more sense than a repurposed mobile phone chipset.

http://microbit.org/

rPI has spawned a whole ecosystem of hacker-friendly hardware. Like Arduino, it generated demand for a particular form-factor - a lot of people bought rPIs simply because they were cool and cheap, then figured out how they could be useful.

The rPI has clearly moved towards being more powerful and power-hungry, with the latest model drawing about twice the power under load than the original. Documentation and kernel support remain a sticking point, especially for the off-brand PIalikes with Chinese chipsets.

The development of these boards is really dictated by the rest of the market. Nobody is spinning silicon specifically for dev boards, so they'll continue to use whatever cheap chips are on the market. A lot will depend on how well the foundries cope with <14nm process nodes.

They are very powerful right now, how much powerful do you wish for them? What I like about them is CHEAP, lower energy use. So long as they maintain that, then it's all good. I bought 6 pi zeros with wifi, $5 each.

The specs are always going to get better. For me it's all about physical size for the Pi. Given say 10 years... what would you imagine the smallest form factor you can get the Pi functionality into for the same cost.