The one near me (St. Louis, MO) has been out of Pi 4 model B and CM4 since September. A couple CM3+ popped in stock for a few days but were gone shortly after.
Checking right now, they only have some Pi 400s and Pi 3 A+ in stock. Plus a boatload of accessories, power supplies, and cases.
At some point it might be worth figuring out a way to mash a Pi 400 into a Pi 4-size footprint.
A lot of times they get them and don't update the inventory on the website. I had the most success by just popping in once a week during a week day for a few weeks, eventually got almost what I was looking for (had to get 8gb instead of 4gb, oh well).
I was looking in the past week coincidentally. The website supposedly shows stock in-store, but says they're out at the local one. Suppose I could call them and ask directly if there's a possibility the website doesn't actually track stock closely.
I looked online the other day for an 8 GB Pi 4, and could not find any, including at Microcenter (which claims to show store availability). I also looked to see whether the Jetson Xavier AGX is available. This used to go for $700, but I didn't really need it then. Now that I could use it, it's selling for at least twice as much.
The 8gb pi4 has been OOS across the market for a few months, which leads me to believe that memory modules are the main bottleneck. The price increase of the Xavier (which come with 32 or 64gb memory onboard), seems to support this.
The Pis, and especially the compute module forms, are used for more than just clasroom toys and low power geek desktops. The CMs are a long term support item that, in recent forms, are FCC certified with wireless. Because it's a "module," with onboard wireless/antenna/etc, you don't have to perform the (quite expensive) certification tests for a wide range of products that can then have a perfectly good little computer and wireless in them.
Unfortunately, when those aren't available, it's a problem for not just those who want Raspberry Pis, but for everyone who wants to buy or sell any of those products based around a Pi. You can't just trivially redesign to anything else, not that there's anything else available...
I'm trying to build some YARH handhelds for various projects, and outside the stock of Pis I have a few of, that's just going to end up on hold, because I can't get any of the boards I figured would regularly be in supply places.
Yeah, same. I have an ag robotics application that I can prototype with stock on hand (glad I prebought a few Pi Zero W now) but I won't be able to scale up my test fleet for the foreseeable future, and that's going to be a problem.
All I really need is WiFi, Linux, relatively low power draw, and low cost, and I can fake the WiFi with an ESP8266 if I have to. Beagleboards seem to have the same supply problem as the Pi, though. Odroid is something I'd never heard of, so I'm going to look into that - thanks!
I'm sitting on 4xpi4 8 Gb and 4xpi4 4Gb, from a small cluster I built last year. In Sweden. If anyone needs a few I could probably be persuaded to part with them as they're just gathering dust right now.
Well, they were in a sense my first production environment, but I outgrew them.
The big problem is they're not chonky enough. Most of the stuff I'm working on doesn't distribute all that well. I have some smaller services, but they're so small they don't really eat much resources from my server either.
If I had machines closer to 32 Gb it might be worth adding additional nodes, but 8 Gb is too small to do anything useful with that isn't mostly just a hassle of constant maintenance and jank.
I'm presently running four RPi4-8GB units for a prototype HA VPN. Even though they have Gigabit Ethernet, they usually max out around 100Mbps. I'm assuming this is because Eben Upton and company chose to not pay extra for the ARMv8 Cryptography Extensions. I wish they would produce a slightly more expensive RPi that included them.
I'm impressed with how fast people buy them out after stock availability is announced. A few months ago, I got a notification that the Pi 0 2 was back in stock, and I have my eye on a couple units for 3D printer projects. An hour after the email was sent, all 700 had been sold. (Adafruit's emails helpfully say how many they had when the email was sent, which is how I know how quickly they burned through the stock.)
The market must be trying to tell us that they're under-priced.
People want cheap computers badly, and "cheap" might be as much as $200. I had a lot of trouble finding an x86_64 box for under $400 a couple years ago, and ended up settling for a no-name with a shitty firmware that wouldn't boot GRUB for half the distros I tried to install.
Honestly if your budget is raspberry pi levels you are better off probably buying some used dell desktop for as cheap as possible. Would be more powerful than the pi probably and a better platform for things like a home fileserver. People have built clusters out of those ultra low form factor dells.
Chromebox is my preference. Switched out all my pi's for old chromeboxes and couldn't be more pleased. Bluetooth and WiFi work great out gate, always had issues with those on the Pis. Even the oldest model CPU is on par with PI4 I think. Built in ssd too.
Or Dell thin clients. Despite some oddities with the Cherry Trail (?) boards used on the Wyse 3040 series, they are x86 and have similar processing power to the Rpi4. They come with a quad core processor, 2GB of RAM and (usually) 8GB of storage, which I assume is EMMC. Multiple USB ports, gigabit Ethernet, dual DisplayPort out.
An HP Thin Client might be nicer in some ways (x86 instead of ARM, say) but the lack of GPIO wouldn't make them a replacement for some RPi projects (and I haven't ever tried to install Debian or Ubuntu on one, not sure how unusual the hardware is).
You can use a dedicated I2C controlled GPIO expander chip at the other end. For example, [1].
This works in the tens of kHz. Indeed, for high-speed applications you need a different approach. But in that case you probably also want to run a realtime-OS ...
The HPs are usually AMD SoCs. They ship with a Debian derivative thin client OS or Windows. I have a few running Debian. They are great for home servers; fanless, can support a lot of memory and usually two M2 modules.
Previous-Gen QuadCore ARM TV boxes are available in masses for 30EUros on European Amazon. Most of them have close-to-mainline, or even mainline kernels available to boot/install a normal debian bullseye.
Somewhat reduced IO interfaces, a bit less RAM, maybe a bit less singlethread perf, but SPI, I2c, USB, HDMI and others are available. Buy 5 for the price of one RPI-SET.
The thing to do here is: Sort by rising price, note the SoC names, look them up on their respective "linux mainline kernel port progress page" (links below), and then look in the vendor sub-folders of the mainline linux Hardware compatibility list (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boo... /vendorname/) to look for the DTS of the ODM name of the board.
Then you'll need to just figure out a way to bootstrap-boot/install Debian bullseye (ideally with the 5.15 currently in backports) on that board. Just look on the Armbian site for instructions for devices with the same SoC for that.
I have several of each of these bought over the last few years running Bullseye:
It's a shame that so many are simply wasted. Lots of people bought multiple units in the past to run toy clusters for no reason. I myself have a Pico I got free with the magazine that I've yet to use. There must be thousands gathering dust that people could make use of.
Edit: In fact, if anyone does want to play with setting up a cluster (like for kubernetes or something) you can do it easily with VMs. Two great options for spinning up a virtual cluster are Vagrant and Docker Machine. The latter is specifically tailored for bringing up docker hosts. I'm not aware of any reason why you would need to use real hardware for learning.
Ironically the Pico is the one where they seem to have an abundance of silicon (they sell the actual RP2040 chip by the thousands in reels, and there's plenty of stock.
Most of that's down to how tiny the actual silicon is for the RP2040—you can print hundreds (thousands?) on a single silicon wafer.
Yep, some have credited this to the 'completely re-imagined' design of the chip. I don't know about that, but they aren't very big. Maybe it's due to the logo-shaped BGA :)
Also, there's some things you just can't get in a VM, like power management or the absolute worst kind of bugs: networking bugs!
This, it baffles me to no end that people insist on using Raspberry Pis, which are almost comically slow and not really that energy efficient, to run things like K8s scheduled containers, sometimes even buying $200 backplane boards to do so, which also defeats almost any sort of price advantage.
There has to be something about the Pi that drives this, but I can't figure out what it is. Yes, Raspbian is easy to get start with, but no easier or harder than booting a VM locally or on the cloud with an image. Yes, Pis are small, quiet, and low power, but so are NUCs. Sure they're cheap, but once you buy 4 Pis and some fancy backplane manager, you could have easily gotten a NUC or a used PC instead.
Please just buy a real computer!
Pis are exceptionally good for a lot of real use cases where the form factor, GPIO capabilities, or pre-approved module certifications are essential. Not being able to get them because of "cluster" use is annoying.
What you're missing is that it's not about compute, it's about fun. Pi's are fun, because Pi cluster's have _real_ hardware redundancy and real risk of hardware faults. Clusters of VM's are boring (what's the point of having a cluster then?), and NUCs are too expensive to buy three or five of. Clusters of real servers are even more expensive, and living room incompatible.
Energy efficiency does not matter: First, a Pi costs $5 per year in electricity. For the price of one NUC, you can buy the entire Pi cluster _and_ run it for years. Second, this is home use, not enterprise use. Don't assume the nodes are actually constantly utilized. The numbers are a lot less unfavorable for the Pi when you look at realistic workloads, by which I mean idle (~4W/Pi vs ~11W/NUC).
I object to calling it "running clusters for no reason". Hands-on experience, fun and motivation are perfectly valid reasons. And this is extremely cheap as far as specialized hardware goes. Please compare with professional training approaches (run 19" servers in lab, or rent EC2 instances), other hobbies (e.g. horseback riding), or professions (e.g. aviation).
That's fair, I am being too dismissive of people who find running clusters an amusing activity in and of itself for whatever reason. As a means to an end a Pi is a pretty bad tool, but as a means for a means, I see the appeal.
This site doesn't seem to take bundles into account. I just had a look at The PiHut and they have some Pi 4 devices available if you're happy getting them as part of a bundle (e.g. case, power supply, etc). The rpilocator website is currently showing The Pihut as being out of stock of all Pi 4 devices.
This is a trick/scam often practiced by retailers of any product where demand is higher than supply.
For example if you want to buy the new XBox right now, it's relatively easily available when bundled with a lot of pricey accessories, but essentially impossible to buy on its own.
How is this greed? The alternative is that they will be out of stock and only sold by scalpers. I've needed raspberry pis for work and if some people were not selling them at 2x their MSRP then I wouldn't have been able to find one quickly.
Right. I got a console as a bundle. Luckily only the one game included wasn’t really that interesting to me, but will be OK to check out.
I actually don’t mind bundles. They do seem to ensure, at least for RPis, that if you honestly only want one you can get one. That person would otherwise be left with nothing while others hoard or sit.
I do appreciate the effort here; however, I suspect this is going to make it even harder to find affordable units due to how fast the scalpers scoop up any readily discoverable inventory. I’ve been struggling to come up with 35 for a class I teach in the March. I would typically have my students buy their own devices, but pivoted when I saw the writing on the wall.
Until this tracker was published yesterday, the Pi Hut had consistently kept the 2GB unit in stock, allowing me to pick up a couple per month. I was a little disheartened to see how quickly that changed once this was online.
No problem. The approved resellers are sold out and sellers you've never heard of are selling them at a ridiculous markup over list price on Amazon. That's scalping.
If you are really struggling to get a job lot, the link below may be an option. Its something which could become a lunchtime/after school club/activity to get them fixed quickly but it can also help your students learn about repairing stuff because the Right to Repair is now a thing in the US, UK & EU so becoming familiar with repairing circuit boards will be a life skill, if not a hackers life skill. :-)
My biggest problem with scalpers is that they often send damaged or refurbished gear (while claiming the gear is new) and then rug pull. The graphics card market is such a god damned mess right now, and it makes me tremendously sad that the Raspberry Pi market is headed towards this hell.
Someone at work sent this into the devops channel a few mins ago, saying if more than one of our pis break we would get a shortage also. Should we buy more now? Yeah let's worsen the shortage for others that actually need them now, why not... Thankfully the manager agreed wiht me the risk is low enough. It was not us that got them from Pi Hut at least!
Feels similar to the toilet paper situation, my wife did not get them for weeks because we always keep two closed packages to avoid getting short on something like that and we did not want to be a part of the problem so we waited. Because there was no shortage on the production site, we thought stores would ramp up shipping and it would be OK. But the panic buyers just kept getting the stores empty. Then we finally were down to the last rolls and she only found two small rolls in the fourth store she tried at... annoying when you want to stay home (no vaccines yet) and not go out three days later for another ration of paper. It is stories like this that make me think if I should buy like normal and then give without profit to those who actually need them now.
For us this toilet paper shortage was only during the time when there were no vaccines, I just mentioned this fact as a reminder of context to readers that it was'nt a good idea to just go to the store every day for daily amounts of paper back then. (Alternative response: where are you that you still got a toilet paper shortage?)
I assume you're the person that took my first karma point based on this misunderstanding?
Note also that around 40% of world population hasn't gotten a single vaccination yet. It's a bit presumptuous to assume these are all personal choice, even if I weren't vaccinated (I am lucky enough to have gotten multiple, even if I wish we could offer everyone the same amount at a similar time -- it stung a little, if you will).
I'm still amazed that I managed to get a EVGA 3080 in December 2020 (Australia).
I paid around $200 more than RRP at the time, I remember I got slandered online for doing it. To think that even now in 2022 you'd have to pay approx $500 more than what I paid and still struggle to find one is just ridiculous.
It even amazes me that people can't find PS5's. I've been around for a fair share of major console releases but this is mindblowing.
With all the Pi's that are stuck in peoples' drawers, collecting dust from half-finished projects (ahem, not myself of course...) then perhaps a pi-bay might be a thing with pursuing :)
Some hackerspaces do have systems like these for extra parts (e.g. I ordered 10 buck converters for cheap but I only need 5, so I'll put them in this drawer here).
If you ever find out, let the rest of us know. It's been an open question for a long time. Manufacturers have been making more and more each year, but still no where enough to meet demand.
Or it's just a weird pile of unsold Pi 4's because that storefront only serves half the world trading under that name. (NA's storefront is different, and has them OOS)
I think Pi 400 should be fairly obtainable. I just bought one used off Offerup for a reasonable barely-used price, but before doing so, I had researched many of the standard retailers and many (1/2 to 2/3 of the US Pi retailer list from what I recall) had the Pi 400 showing in stock, eg Makerbright, Canakit, etc.
Whether they were/are actually in stock or if long delays are possible might be another question/story.
2GB is their cheapest and most popular model. At least it used to, nowadays it's probably the 1GB model which they've recently re-introduced to deal with the chip shortages.
The Raspberry Pi isn't the only board around. If you need something very specific then fine, but most software that runs on it, either has been already ported, or can be easily compiled to run on many other boards.
Just spent less than 5 minutes and found loads of boards that run Linux out of the box. Most of the NanoPi at friendlyarm.com are in stock, so are most of the Pine64 boards at pine64.org; many H3 based OrangePi boards are available from multiple vendors on Ebay, also many Olimex, Sinovoip, Beagleboard, etc. are in stock right now at tme.eu.
In the meantime, I just swapped my Rpi4 4GB with a 1st gen used Chromebox unlocked and reflashed with LibreElec; the performance gain compared to the Rpi4 is very noticeable.
I just had to purchase separately a Pulse Eight USB-HDMI-CEC interface (the Chromebox HDMI port doesn't support CEC) so that I can use the TV remote with Kodi as well.
Not to mention you can often get a refurbished mini PC on Ebay cheaper than the higher end RPi's. I've seen a lot of people have switched to them for their projects. Only use a Pi now if you really need low power, small form factor, or GPIO pins. And often the GPIO case can be tackled with an esp8266 or something similar. The niche market the RPi and other SBCs used to fill is definitely shrinking.
I used to be into cheap computing, Toshiba Chromebook 2 has 4GB of ram, 1080P screen, can buy on eBay for like $40. I've put a Linux OS on it and was able to run a VM inside it ha.
usually my local MICROCENTER has them in the locked glass cabinet, I peer in and I notice the price. "$99?!? Guess they better keep them locked up, then!" You can buy an entire used Core i7 personal computer for $99.
It depends on what you consider an alternative. If power, size and GPIO are not considerations, a refurbished Dell Optiplex 790 SFF computer with an i3 and 4GB memory can be had for around $100.
Some barebones NUCs with little/no memory also come in under $100. Lower power, smaller size, still no GPIO.
If you need the small size and/or GPIO and aren't concerned about GPL violations, a 32 bit Orange Pi with 256MB memory starts at $20 shipped.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadChecking right now, they only have some Pi 400s and Pi 3 A+ in stock. Plus a boatload of accessories, power supplies, and cases.
At some point it might be worth figuring out a way to mash a Pi 400 into a Pi 4-size footprint.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-shortages-and-...
Semiconductors shortage becomes a pain in the ….
Unfortunately, when those aren't available, it's a problem for not just those who want Raspberry Pis, but for everyone who wants to buy or sell any of those products based around a Pi. You can't just trivially redesign to anything else, not that there's anything else available...
I'm trying to build some YARH handhelds for various projects, and outside the stock of Pis I have a few of, that's just going to end up on hold, because I can't get any of the boards I figured would regularly be in supply places.
It's another breakdown of JIT.
The big problem is they're not chonky enough. Most of the stuff I'm working on doesn't distribute all that well. I have some smaller services, but they're so small they don't really eat much resources from my server either.
If I had machines closer to 32 Gb it might be worth adding additional nodes, but 8 Gb is too small to do anything useful with that isn't mostly just a hassle of constant maintenance and jank.
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100458/0200/function...
People want cheap computers badly, and "cheap" might be as much as $200. I had a lot of trouble finding an x86_64 box for under $400 a couple years ago, and ended up settling for a no-name with a shitty firmware that wouldn't boot GRUB for half the distros I tried to install.
This is verbatim what scalpers say to explain themselves.
For projects, try HP thin clients on eBay.
You can usually find them for around $35-40.
It's easy to hack a GPIO together using the USB interface or I2C interface that's inside every HDMI connector.
Also you need a microcontroller at the other end of the USB or I2C. Which means... you need a microcontroller anyway?
This works in the tens of kHz. Indeed, for high-speed applications you need a different approach. But in that case you probably also want to run a realtime-OS ...
[1] https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/PCAL9538A.pdf
Somewhat reduced IO interfaces, a bit less RAM, maybe a bit less singlethread perf, but SPI, I2c, USB, HDMI and others are available. Buy 5 for the price of one RPI-SET.
Then you'll need to just figure out a way to bootstrap-boot/install Debian bullseye (ideally with the 5.15 currently in backports) on that board. Just look on the Armbian site for instructions for devices with the same SoC for that.
I have several of each of these bought over the last few years running Bullseye:
Allwinner (sunxi): https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
Amlogic (meson): https://linux-meson.com/hardware.html#support-matrix
Rockchip: http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix
Similar pages can be found with "MySocName linux kernel mainline port progress" for other SoCs, if the board/family is worth considering.
Depending on your exact needs make sure to get a board with USB3, GE, (supported) Wifi/BT, (well(-ish)) supported GPU.
Just make sure, you get the final boot configuration right, or you'll start over ;)
Edit: In fact, if anyone does want to play with setting up a cluster (like for kubernetes or something) you can do it easily with VMs. Two great options for spinning up a virtual cluster are Vagrant and Docker Machine. The latter is specifically tailored for bringing up docker hosts. I'm not aware of any reason why you would need to use real hardware for learning.
Most of that's down to how tiny the actual silicon is for the RP2040—you can print hundreds (thousands?) on a single silicon wafer.
Also, there's some things you just can't get in a VM, like power management or the absolute worst kind of bugs: networking bugs!
https://xkcd.com/2259
There has to be something about the Pi that drives this, but I can't figure out what it is. Yes, Raspbian is easy to get start with, but no easier or harder than booting a VM locally or on the cloud with an image. Yes, Pis are small, quiet, and low power, but so are NUCs. Sure they're cheap, but once you buy 4 Pis and some fancy backplane manager, you could have easily gotten a NUC or a used PC instead.
Please just buy a real computer!
Pis are exceptionally good for a lot of real use cases where the form factor, GPIO capabilities, or pre-approved module certifications are essential. Not being able to get them because of "cluster" use is annoying.
Energy efficiency does not matter: First, a Pi costs $5 per year in electricity. For the price of one NUC, you can buy the entire Pi cluster _and_ run it for years. Second, this is home use, not enterprise use. Don't assume the nodes are actually constantly utilized. The numbers are a lot less unfavorable for the Pi when you look at realistic workloads, by which I mean idle (~4W/Pi vs ~11W/NUC).
I object to calling it "running clusters for no reason". Hands-on experience, fun and motivation are perfectly valid reasons. And this is extremely cheap as far as specialized hardware goes. Please compare with professional training approaches (run 19" servers in lab, or rent EC2 instances), other hobbies (e.g. horseback riding), or professions (e.g. aviation).
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=1967965
For example if you want to buy the new XBox right now, it's relatively easily available when bundled with a lot of pricey accessories, but essentially impossible to buy on its own.
Do not reward the greed of retailers who do this.
I actually don’t mind bundles. They do seem to ensure, at least for RPis, that if you honestly only want one you can get one. That person would otherwise be left with nothing while others hoard or sit.
Edit-it’s the scalpers that are doing harm here.
Until this tracker was published yesterday, the Pi Hut had consistently kept the 2GB unit in stock, allowing me to pick up a couple per month. I was a little disheartened to see how quickly that changed once this was online.
So I opted for one of the alt boards...just deciding which one (so this thread is perfect timing for me)
Edit: the Amazon link
https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Computer-Suitable-Workst...
And that wasn't even an 8GB model.
https://blog.jmdawson.co.uk/i-bought-200-raspberry-pi-model-...
Feels similar to the toilet paper situation, my wife did not get them for weeks because we always keep two closed packages to avoid getting short on something like that and we did not want to be a part of the problem so we waited. Because there was no shortage on the production site, we thought stores would ramp up shipping and it would be OK. But the panic buyers just kept getting the stores empty. Then we finally were down to the last rolls and she only found two small rolls in the fourth store she tried at... annoying when you want to stay home (no vaccines yet) and not go out three days later for another ration of paper. It is stories like this that make me think if I should buy like normal and then give without profit to those who actually need them now.
I assume you're the person that took my first karma point based on this misunderstanding?
Note also that around 40% of world population hasn't gotten a single vaccination yet. It's a bit presumptuous to assume these are all personal choice, even if I weren't vaccinated (I am lucky enough to have gotten multiple, even if I wish we could offer everyone the same amount at a similar time -- it stung a little, if you will).
I paid around $200 more than RRP at the time, I remember I got slandered online for doing it. To think that even now in 2022 you'd have to pay approx $500 more than what I paid and still struggle to find one is just ridiculous.
It even amazes me that people can't find PS5's. I've been around for a fair share of major console releases but this is mindblowing.
Sorry, off topic a bit.
I'm assuming it's just horribly out of date, or some terrible caching failure. Or just lies.
https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/raspberry-pi/1822098
Or it's just a weird pile of unsold Pi 4's because that storefront only serves half the world trading under that name. (NA's storefront is different, and has them OOS)
Whether they were/are actually in stock or if long delays are possible might be another question/story.
Much of online chatter recommends buying 4 or 8
Some barebones NUCs with little/no memory also come in under $100. Lower power, smaller size, still no GPIO.
If you need the small size and/or GPIO and aren't concerned about GPL violations, a 32 bit Orange Pi with 256MB memory starts at $20 shipped.
Follow https://www.cnx-software.com/ for a while and you'll see them come out regularly. Or just click a few pages back into history.
I've used Beaglebone's in industry grade projects. To my knowledge they are still in use after several years of operation with no hickups.