My lack of imagination lacks the imagination to address this:
> They are still prioritizing OEM customers (who have built their products around the Pi)
OEMs use RPis? What are they using it for, does anyone know, got any examples? I've always assumed RPis to be a hobbyist tool. All the blog posts, documentation, examples I encounter are around the hobbyist's mindset. I've not encountered any "business" oriented documentation or examples or blogs.
Edit: Everyone, thanks for the examples. I'm going through each one. It's like a whole new world opened to me.
Soma Shades used to have a "Soma Connect" device whose sole purpose in the world was to communicate with their shade controllers via Bluetooth and make them controllable over WiFi or ethernet. Just checking their website just now, it is now a strictly bring-your-own Pi arrangement, presumably because they can't get them, either.
Not sure if this counts, but Gardyn[1] uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W in their second-gen system. (Can't speak to the first-gen.)
They leave an SSH port open (found with nmap) and I've asked support if I can have the password, but they won't give it to me. >:(
My system is now currently powered down. I think it'd be cool if someone were to reverse engineer it and write their own FOSS firmware for the system. Shouldn't be too hard, right?
> uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W in their second-gen system
(assuming it's a standard version and you haven't already)
Couldn't you just grab the SD card out of it and inspect the file system, then try to get the password through that? You'd have to spend some time bruteforcing it most likely, but it should eventually (tbh, seeing solutions like this I'd expect quickly) give you the password.
Wow! What a great idea! I definitely would never do that because it'd violate their TOS. Don't ask me how I know that it's a Zero W in the first place because opening the thing up is a big no-no. Yup. Would never do such a thing… Never ever… No way… Nu-uh… Nope nope nope the land of ten thousand nopes…
When first reading this it sounded really strange. Buying a device and TOS don't really fit.
Checking the website it seems to be a kind of PaaS, plant as a service. Am I reading that website correctly? They are offering remotely-managed plants for rent?
It's certainly easy to use. I got it at a steep discount, so that was nice. Otherwise, I'd consider it to be rather expensive. It puts out a ton of light, which can be very nice in the right room. (We liked it.) The app sucks, and the subscription is very expensive for getting more plants than you'll be able to use. (I don't have a subscription.)
There's some CAD models for various parts; I'd rather 3D print some of the e.g. rockwool baskets and caps rather than buy from the company. If you get one, make sure you stay on top of root maintenance. You could also certainly find the plant food for cheaper.
It can produce a ton of lettuce if that's what you want to grow. We liked trying different greens. I grew some nice jalapenos as well. Can't recommend much other big fruiting plants though—they're trickier to take care of.
I could see it being folded into custom IoT / home automation setups where a relatively low-power controller is used just to coordinate signals across a network. Or how they are often used as dashboard-machines for home infra like solar panel setups.
There are also hundreds of boards that work with the CM4 to build different types of systems or integrate into automation, industrial gear, and commercial products—this is a tiny listing that doesn't even cover stuff that uses the Pi 4 or older Pi models: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm
For the market that I've seen, don't think "OEMs making products for the consumer market", rather "OEMs making solutions for the business market." RasPIs are huge in industrial automation for example. Sure, you likely won't find them at the Ford Motor Companies of the world, but at Tony's Midwest Hotel Supplying Baking Company? Absolutely, all over the place. Put together by crafty integrators at the lowest possible cost.
This is exactly it.
I work at a company that has used raspi's in hardware.
There are cheaper alternatives, but there are not better supported alternatives. The most expensive rPi is a rounding error in terms of engineering time. Why bother saving ~$30 if you have to spend $1k worth of engineering time to diagnose a compatibility issue on some less well documented board.
Yes; not needing a full time Linux kernel developer and electrical engineer debugging your hardware and drivers because the SoC you're using was abandoned by the vendor 2 years after release is a big benefit.
> The most expensive rPi is a rounding error in terms of engineering time.
* depending on volume.
For a couple hundred/thousand devices doing industrial automation yes.
For a million and up, it makes sense to pay an engineer 3 months to reduce the BOM by 10 cents.
I looked into this for an industrial monitoring project. Its possible to configure the SD card as read only but kind of a pain to not be able to change anything.
This is purely dependent on what SD card you are using. If you use a random cheap SanDisk off of amazon it will probably corrupt and fail eventually. A SLC or pSLC industrial card has better ECC, write longevity and power recovery than a commodity card.
Right. But these come with all the paperwork and compatibility required for "serious" automation. Yes, then there are also cheaper industrial controllers, but they are probably much harder to use (if nothing else because the RPI's mind share is higher in some circles). This puts the Raspberry Pi in a pretty good spot for a lot of people.
I've written software for Pi based setups that measure something and are deployed in a few factories across the world.
Wouldn't use them for something mission critical but for statistics where you don't mind missing a few minutes like in this case they're ok.
Also I'm using a Pi to do some tests for a project that will run on custom hardware (not even Broadcom) eventually. Saves time when you don't have to deal with Yocto and editing dts files just to talk to something on spi and see if it can do your job.
Yes. As an example, we use RPi in MusicBox[0], together with HifiBerry[1] sound card, as a music player appliance.
In fact, you can still buy (well, you could, if you could buy any) RPi 1's, since OEMs tend to standardize and stick to a platform. Our base platform is 1B+, for example.
Massive user base, great documentation, they're supported for 10 years, Have industrial cases and a plethora of accessories (not cheap, some of them), easy to swap compute units.
I have a MarineTraffic antenna at home, and it uses a Comar AIS receiver. The first one I got was a purpose-built device, but they later sent me an "upgraded" version from this series: https://comarsystems.com/product-tag/intelligent/
I opened it up and I can confirm it has a Rpi inside.
It's not the biggest OEM marketplace by a longshot (more of a boutique marketplace), but there are a few modules for modular synthesizers that use RPi's inside. The two I can think off off the top of my head: Sleepy Circuits Hypno and Erogenous Tones Structure, both video synthesis modules.
For astrophotography ZWO has a custom distro for pi and extra hardware for custom, wireless control of an astrophotography setup, telescope, tripod, camera and all.
It is used in a lot of products, specially legacy products that have been given a “facelift” to switch from buttons + screen to touchscreen.
I’ve been always against it when it comes to the non-CM versions.
The foundation receives donations, both private and public, and works as a non-profit with the original goal of giving every kid a computer, and now more broadly to teach through their platform. Having private companies leeching off it for me is very much scummy behavior.
A company I worked for used the 2B, 3B and 3B+ in a bunch of products. My complaints were dutifully archived in the trash.
>Having private companies leeching off it for me is very much scummy behavior.
The private companies are funding the foundation. It’s hard to call it leeching when the pi is a comparatively expensive board compared to alternatives
> The private companies are funding the foundation.
Except that if you look at their financials, it’s clear that they make very little on them. The sales of Rpis are not how they keep going, it’s all the other activities around it.
> It’s hard to call it leeching when the pi is a comparatively expensive board compared to alternatives
It’s not only about COGs, support is a big ticket in this area, and one that most manufacturers are way behind. Also, yes, there are some cheaper SBCs, but most of them are sold at “ask us for price”, and they aren’t any cheaper, especially at low volumes.
I don't get your argument, something tells me we are talking past each other..
If you are using a model from Raspberry from which they have a margin (essentially all the things on the Compute Module line), that's fine by me, it's great that the foundation can use that as an income stream.
I feel very differently when you use models that are obviously sold at a loss to pad the margins on your product.
The compute module is specially made for companies to integrate into products. Around the time they introduced the first compute module years ago they split Raspberry Pi into a formal company (with CEO etc) and a non profit charity/foundation. You've seen a lot of what the foundation has done but there's also a profit seeking company behind Raspberry Pi too.
A project I led shipped a system based on multiple RPi's used basically as web kiosks to drive large TV's monitors. We also built another Pi-based system used for monitoring equipment remotely, but I wasn't part of that effort.
I've come across a commercial HVAC system (like the big units on top of office buildings) based on the RPi Compute Module. Actually seen that from two different companies.
There was a subreddit that's now subsumed into /r/Raspberry_pi that was all about sightings of Pi's used in commercial products like airport displays, billboards, kiosks, etc.
Micro Center is hit or miss—each location gets little batches here or there. But every time I've heard there's stock at my local store, they're gone by the time I can go check on it.
The longest stock lasted was about 24 hours a couple months ago. I think people have scrapers even for their local Micro Center website so they can find when they're in stock and go snag one immediately.
The Micro Center near me usually has a large bag full of Pico and Pico W, though, as well as practically every HAT and official Pi accessory.
This was NYC Flushing and they limit to one per in-store customer. Believe it or not there were a little over 50 of them and the stock lasted about 5 or 6 days. I waited two days before going and there were still like 30 of them. Picos are all over.
Hmm I was wondering what happened to them.
I'm debating getting a rockpi or orangepi, but just like the article suggests
I like raspberry pi for their support.
Really needs to be a resale market imho. Loads in my drawer that are doing nothing and I'm not too fussed about putting them on eBay for what it's worth, but maybe if there looked like proper forum (however how long until those got bought for resale for a markup, I dunno)
In the UK, I've seen a lot of vendors (when they do get stock in) only sell them as part of a bundle, with power adapter, case, SD card, usb and hdmi cables etc, which adds £20-£30 onto the price of the Pi.
Probably partly as it's extra profit, but also to discourage multi-buys I guess. I dunno if it discourages the scalpers.
I was looking at those recently. They're all small, sub $200, and usually have a Celeron N5105. Do you have to worry about Linux support when you're looking at something like that, or will it work pretty much out of the box?
I was about to comment - there's absolutely no issue buying an RPi4 in the UK currently, if you don't mind buying a bundle. Pimoroni has few different ones in stock currently.
And yes it discourages the scalpers - while the stuff you get in the bundle is usually worth the price being asked for it, to a scalper it's worth 0 and it makes it difficult to make profit flipping the boards themselves. Same principle is successfully used to fight PS5 scalpers.
I started a little hardware project about a month ago. Was going to use one of my pre-existing Raspberry Pi's but the shield didn't get along with my existing cases and I didn't want to bother disassembling them.
Rather than remove one from their case, I decided to run to Microcenter to just grab a new one.
Nope. Not a single Raspberry Pi in stock. I was honestly shocked. I was completely unaware of the shortage.
The convenience of having RPis in brick-and-mortar locations near me has been one of my favorite things about the Pi. It was like being able to stop at a local Radio Shack or Frys and pick up ICs back in the day.
Haven't seen that, I'll have to check it out! I've got an orange pi zero and zero2. The zero fits great in an Altoids tin, with a bit of extra space for the power cord.
One of the unfortunate side effects of the ongoing RPi shortage is the shrinkage of the accessories market. A lot of the coolest stuff still isn't available for the Model 4, like the SNES enclosure with working buttons and USB ports in the controller ports.
Jeff is always a raspberry foundation supporter. I do feel a bit more pushback is needed. The other companies he mentions like Apple and Nvidia have shown considerable improvement in recent months. The raspberry is only ever harder to get.
I have a feeling Broadcom is the main problem here, they probably prioritize other customers. Which is surprising in some ways because a lot of raspberry pi foundation members are ex-broadcom or still even work there.
However I guess the other companies are willing to offer more whereas if the pi became more expensive there would be a lot of uproar (and rightly so because it defeats the purpose)
I wonder what Broadcom's endgame is. They appear to be selling the SoC very cheap to the foundation. I thought maybe this is to encourage other customers to buy that same SoC at a higher price but it appears they don't sell it. If there's no path for Broadcom to make reasonable margins then of course they have no incentive to increase production.
The pi foundation was started by a group of Broadcom engineers. If not for that connection, Broadcom would likely have never given them the time of day - they are notoriously bad to deal with if you are a small company.
It's possible they see this as some sort of marketing, but I don't think they are using it to drive a sales funnel of low-volume customers.
if broadcom were supplying at below cost as a marketing expenditure it would explain a bunch of things such as why raspberry pi doesn't allow bulk sales but would give them away with magazines
It doesn't, but the foundation does make a loss on the zero as far as I remember (remember reading somewhere..) which is why they never lifted the "one per order" restriction. It's very annoying because I give trainings sometimes and it would be nice to give each participant one.
The first Pi was based off a failed set-top streaming box SoC that Broadcom didn't know what to do with.
The original goal (remember that?) was to make it a cheap educational Linux system. And it was a nice idea. The cheap sticker price got it noticed compared to the other more expensive (but better supported) ARM single-board computers. And here we are.
I sure as heck don't know what Broadcom's endgame is here either, because like you say they don't even answer your call if you're <100K EAU. So unlike other EVKs that can be used to rip apart and spin into real projects, you're stuck with RPi as a standalone unit.
The chip shortage is hurting everyone, but at least with other SoCs you can find them from multiple sources eventually. Or use a broker if you're desparate.
Yup, Raspberry Pi kind of sucked the oxygen out of the Beaglebone ecosystem. Speedier and cheaper. The Beaglebone has a lot of features that hardcore embedded engineers want (real-time support, eMMC, tons of IO, good platform documentation), but the Raspberry Pi really appealed to the maker crowd. I guess the $25 price difference made a big difference? I never really understood it.
I was a big Beaglebone Black supporter, but figured the winds were blowing towards the Raspberry Pi, so just started using that instead. Now I'm here with the need for several mini Linux boxes and instead I have nothing. Beaglebone Black feels outdated. Raspberry Pi is unobtainium. Unfortunate where the random walk leads.
In a world where TI had been able to get a foothold with hobbyists on the beaglebone, the world might be very different. TI doesn't hate small-volume sales like Broadcom.
The hobbyist market has weirdly strong network effects: we saw this with Arduino, too, which was a lot more expensive than its competitors! I assume there is a measure of influencer marketing here that old-guard tech companies didn't grasp.
10 years ago, the beagleboard was a game changer, though. They are still making beaglebones and beagleboards, both of which are cool, but they are last-generation computers with lots of useful embedded SoC features, while the Pi is a computer first.
Yeah, TI always seemed nice to hobbyists. I think the RPi foundation was just better organized. Beaglebone always felt very scrappy. RPi feels like they have full time employees around to do all the running-the-org stuff. Well run org + OK project > OK org + great project, I suppose.
From my POV the companies were happy to see people experiment with their designs and SoCs but they just didn't have the resources to put the necessary amount of customer support forward.
In my many argumen^H^H^Hdiscussions with RPi users here and elsewhere, the counter-argument for Pi has always been the community support is excellent. And, yes, it is. When you aren't large enough to get a TI or NXP FAE to answer your email then having a robust community is great. But it was built ground-up from all the RPi fans having the object in their hands and little else to do with it.
When TI dropped OMAP I left for Freescale, now NXP. I've been developing on i.MX for well over a decade now and have really enjoyed it. Their foothold in automotive has allowed them to keep growing the line and branching it out in different ways, more so than TI or Broadcom will.
NXP does seem to be the next good vendor of ARM SoCs (i.MX and QorIQ are both pretty impressive lines).
The idea of "community support" is kind of interesting - it clearly had an effect here, but I'm not so sure how they got it. I guess the foundation just made it very easy for people to talk to each other about RPi projects, while TI put you on some forum in a dark corner of their website.
NXP has been doing solid work with ARM for almost 20 years now. Their LPC line, which they had before the Moto/Freescale acquisition, is a solid workhorse set of SoCs. I've done many projects with the LPC17xx (Cortex-M3) family and they all come out pretty great.
And I believe you're right about the community support. The RPi groups have been run by actual owners and enthusiasts, whereas the factory support forums in my experience have been minimally maintained with almost no interaction from anyone at the actual companies.
You need a laptop/expensive graphics card, you needed it back them when you started on a "waitlist" (official or your own), and after them becoming available, you buy one laptop/card, and you're done.
With raspberrypis, everyone doing anything with them outside of purely first time hobbyists, will order 5, 10, 50, however much they can get, because the waiting is killing the business. When rpi zero w 2 came out, it was hard to get, but the moment I could get one, I bought 3 pieces, even though i needed only one at the moment, but I knew, if I needed more, I wouldn't be able to get them for months again.
> The other companies he mentions like Apple and Nvidia have shown considerable improvement in recent months.
Well, Nvidia and AMD GPUs have only shown improvement because the writing was on the wall that Ethereum was going PoS and the downturn in worldwide economies made the rest of the shitcoins unprofitable.
When I ordered a Pi 4 from CanaKit back in January, it took 54 days to get to my house. It felt like a long wait at the time, but looking back, it wasn't that bad, given the chip shortage. Took me another month to get around to setting it up anyway.
Supporting OEMs is definitely the right choice. I even shifted a project away from the pi for now because of the shortage, and there are alternatives, but if I had already invested in product that depended on them and couldn’t order them, it would be a much bigger loss. Even from a hobbyist point of view, I’d feel more confident using them knowing that OEMs get priority shipments.
Second that opinion I think OEMs provide so much value to the Foundation that goes to the hobbyists in the end that I cannot be angry that I cannot buy a Pi just because I want.
For learning purposes, you don't really need that many Raspberry Pis to get started. I recently slapped together a cluster with 3 pi and figure I'll add more overtime as I need/desire them.
I do agree, though, that cluster projects should have a low priority!
i disagree, the rpi is not just a hobbyist tool, it's a learning tool and something for folks creating on the low-end or implementing custom solutions to use.
For a major vendor (someone linked some korg devices below) to loot this market is no better than the auto vendors who are buying washing machines simply to pull out microcontrollers, or cryptominers destroying the GPU market.
Major vendors can hire fabs to push out their own designs. The RPi is a licensed implementation of ARM, it isn't an industrial platform, from a supply chain point of view, clearly.
Everyone who is shipping a product based on RPi is doing so because they were able to get cheap individual samples to build on. Now that's not possible for new folks.
RPi was designed as an affordable learning computer, now there is not an affordable learning computer available to anyone who can't buy 10,000 parts or whatever.
I get the impression right now they're stuck at "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
If you view the current supply shortage is a temporary issue (as much as it doesn't feel very temporary right now), then not being able to provide stock to "us" is also a temporary issue. But failing their OEMs is a long-term issue - if not a permanent one. If Sharp's commercial display business takes a hit because they bought into the rpi ecosystem, and it bit them in the ass - they will not be back (See also: Apple vs nvidia). You seem to take the view that the OEMs deserve it for taking "our boards" - but rpi still take the hit when partners leave them. (and OEMs are a snowball effect: being able to point to examples like Sharp helps them win the next OEM - and I'm pretty sure that if they start publicly losing partners, the loss would only encourage the next loss).
For the rest of us - there's not many great contenders. I'm surprised at this - traditionally pi-alternatives have struggled from the lack of community. If someone else has a way around the supply shortages, this would seem like the best time to get in there and steal that community. But so far they haven't, so there's the best chance we're just going to sit here and wait for the return of the pi.
It's not ideal, it's not fair, life's a bitch. I am annoyed that it impacts me, but I can't begrudge rpi for taking the most sensible option.
For my project, I could get most of the functionality I needed from an Arduino board by attaching some additional modules, but for more powerful SBCs, I’ve been impressed by Olimex products, although they may have limited quantities available.
Damned, I like their boards/schematics/wiki. Single-page wiki entries with /most/ of the info I want (connector=FOO, voltage=BAR, power converter=BAZ (oh, so it's claimed 12V, but commenfary says 9-14V is definitely in the range and the chip manufacturer for the power regulator (like on my NanoPC-T4) says I'll be safe with 5.5-28V).
Cool.
Their boards do have some problems (none that have bothered me for long - look at the schematics and realize that that port is easy to over-tax so swap the cables and life is good), the different software distro's (Ubuntu this, Ubuntu that, Buildroot, Android Xx an Yy) are nice as examples when I'm replacing it with my own.
> They are still prioritizing OEM customers (who have built their products around the Pi)
I think of the magazine, MagPi. An OEM customer? Indirectly. How can you sustain a hobbyist magazine on the Raspberry Pi when the hobbyist cannot get a Pi for less than $100?
They were annoyingly supply constrained the first 2 years iirc. And the last 1.5 years or so. But for a long stretch in the middle there (like 2014-2021), not so much.
From what I remember with the launch of the Pi, I think the demand far exceeded their expectations. Remember that the thing was launched as an educational computer for schools, with a model A and B variant. At least from this article [1] it sounds like they contracted the work to build the boards out to Premier Farnell/Element 14. They originally had to do a lot of the manufacturing in China to keep the board cost low.
Eventually Sony stepped in and offered production capacity at a place in Wales UK which I think improved availability a lot.
Yeah, until mid-2021, I could reliably find the majority of Pi models in stock (usually with 10+ units) at my local Micro Center—and that was including CM4s, which quickly disappeared off the shelves and by September 2021 were unobtanium.
Any suggestions for a generic cheap but good ITX running Linux from a vendor I could use for a small home server? I have two System76 Meerkats which I love (one for personal, one for work) but I don't want to fork out that much money for a home server to host things like PiHole and VaultWarden. I looked around last month for a RPi but as this article says they aren't to be found.
search for 'orange pi zero LTS', shipping included is less than $30 now, I got it for $18 all included before the pandemic(a case, power adaptor). it's solid to run pihole for me.
Pretty much anything that can run Linux and has a network port would work. Most languages, libraries and well known software has been ported to work the same way on a lot of hardware. Save for low level hardware specific code, the rest is more or less standard.
The Orange Pi other users suggested is a good choice, as would be the very similar NanoPi, and many others.
However, although the scarcity hits more the popular boards such as the Raspberries, others also became somewhat harder to find, so I would suggest for example to take note of which board is supported by a well known distribution, then look for vendors offering it. A good start would be the Armbian and DietPI download sections in which you can easily find dozens of boards and devices with their support status.
Something like a Dell thin client or what they call a Micro Form Factor could do the job. I got a couple of the micros to play around with and they're nice machines that sip power. I prefer them to rpi's now and with the pricing/availability issues of the pi's, they're price competitive used on ebay. I'm thinking there are a lot of offices that went remote and are unloading their desktops these days.
I got a Dell thin client (Wise 5070) recently for next to nothing ($85 including shipping). Its a much, much nicer machine than anything ARM I've ever had, and has no problem running more or less anything Linux you'd like (its a recent-ish Intel Celeron with UEFI firmware).
These are really great as a router/firewall. Multiple Ethernet ports, a low power (fanless) x86-64, battery backup for RTC (which is missing from a lot of SBCs), good connectivity for storage and wifi modules.
I do wish it had video out as that would simplify setup & diagnostics for me, but the serial console is fine.
Not ITX, but if you are willing to accept a custom form factor (which are even smaller) check out ServeTheHome's Project TinyMiniMicro, they are great bang/buck for that kind of thing. If you can wait for some company to go through an upgrade and dump a load up on ebay or whatever, you can get particularly good deals.
They aren't going to be quite as small or efficient as a Raspberry Pi or equivalent, but instead you get full x86-64 cores, and they are still pretty small and efficient.
Check out the recent additions to Topton's lineup on their Aliexpress store. They have a couple with multiple SATAs. There are some video reviews of their other units on ServeTheHome's YT channel.
There's cheaper devices available in the same form factor as the Meerkats. Intel's NUC11ATKC2 has a recommended retail price of $130, so it's a bit more pricy than a Pi as you'd need to add about another $50 for storage and memory; but it's also a lot more powerful.
I run my homeserver in a Lenovo m920q I bought for about 300USD (but it's a 32GB, 1TB NVMe 9th gen i5 model, there are models from like 100USD up).
These 1-liter PC's are amazing, almost completely silent, idles at like 4W, but has enough grunt to transcode for plex and other stuff like that.
Another alternative is a laptop with a failed display, from ebay or your local thrift store. Plug in an old monitor from the same place when you need to, or ssh in.
I recently bought a used thinkpad from my local university surplus store for $25. Installed Linux Mint on it, then pihole and it's now my home lan ad blocker. Love it.
My Xigmanas based NAS runs off a Supermicro X7SPA-L mainboard I bought used on Ebay; I also built a similar one for relatives of mine with roughly the same configuration and they both still work flawlessly after years. If you can find a X7SPA-H board, it employs 6 internal SATA ports, though for more ports you can always add a cheap SATA+eSATA PCI-E controller, such as the ASM1062 based one I have on my NAS; they're cheap on Ebay. The CPU's TDP is around 10 to 13 Watt; certainly higher than a Raspberry PI 4, but in the same ballpark and well worth the gain in performance and expandability. Speed is not stellar, still enough for most tasks including serving different HD video files (important: files, not streams) to more Kodi boxes.
A future development I want to explore is using one external eSATA box so I can add more drives. I'm not sure however about any incompatibilities between BSD (or Linux) or the PCI-E controller and external SATA port multipliers.
If you're OK with something that is like a 30W electrical load, you can do basic things a lot cheaper by buying a used ex-corporate "SFF" or "USFF" Dell or HP x86-64 desktop PC for under a hundred bucks on ebay. They fit in a quite small space under a desk or similar.
Will almost certainly cost a lot less than buying a new mini-itx motherboard and compatible case, power supply, ram, etc.
randomly chosen example in 20 seconds of searching, figure that the shipping cost is actually $25 of the price here, built into the final buy it now price.
It's also worth looking around your local area for auction houses selling old hardware, a lot of ex-gov and ex-enterprise hardware gets sold off at these places for pocket change.
I got a refurbished thin client, a Fujitsu Futro S720 with 2GB RAM (expandable via 2 slots) from ebay for 20€. Havent had the need to upgrade the RAM, but I put a 512gb mSata in it. Works great.
I bought an old used Buffalo TeraStation like this[1] and followed online directions for getting a generic Debian install on it. Its intended use is a NAS so in addition to running my Linux services, it can act as my media server, too. You can probably still get them at a bargain (~$100) from ebay.
I bought a Lenovo Mini PC M53 on EBay. It came with with 4GB RAM and I added a 500GB SSD. It's running Debian as a small office server (Apache, SMB, SSMTP, Node-RED and Mosquitto).
Not ITX, but since you're responding an RPi thread, you may possibly be interested in Hardkernel's products, which have always been very competitive with RPis - in my opinion, simply better than them, although less popular.
Something like the ASRock J3455-ITX will do the job. 10 watt quad core, though my beef with this board is it features an m.2 B key wifi slot instead of an M key for an NVMe storage device which is a poor choice. There might be a better board out there with a similar low power celeron.
I have an older asrock j1900 celeron board running my 9front CPU/Disk/Auth server at home 24/7. No issues and it has been solid. At the current electric rate it costs about $2/month.
I went that route, regretted it, and bought an x86 synology. It has a docker environment that can easily be client-side encrypted and backed up to S3 or similar.
PC Engines' APU 2 line is also great, assuming it meets your needs.
You can get an Intel NUC 11 Essential kit [1]. It comes with a low power N5105 Jasper Lake with 4 cores. This is an atom core (Tremont), the rev before Gracemont (Intel E-core) built on Intel 7. It's about $165 with case, power supply. You need to supply RAM (DDR4 SODIMM) and SSD (M.2 2280 NVMe or SATA). It's probably one of, if not the best bang/buck small unit on the market from a major US based vendor.
It seems that Pine64 has good boards that would be useful for many tasks performed by PIs, at a pretty good price. They say they have them all in stock, I'm probably going to pull the trigger as I don't need any raspberry-specific shields.
I recently purchased a Quartz64B, which turns out to be a very new model. If you're looking at a board from Pine64, I'd say go for the Rock64 if you want something more likely to work with your preferred OS.
Jeff, if you're reading this, your website is pretty much unreadable without the reader view in Firefox. It's not just the tiny font which is solved by zooming, it's the combination of font choice and white text on black background.
I see black text on white background in Firefox (and Chrome) here. So this might be a problem on your side? But otherwise, yes the font is way to small.
If "Settings->Theme->Dark" is a weird browser configuration, then yes. I see white font on a black background, which looks great on many other pages and doesn't hurt my eyes looking at sunspots while most of the page is basically staring at the sun.
There are dozens of us - dozens! - and Jeff's page looks uniquely bad. Something about the font weight, perhaps? The strokes are so thin as to disappear. Zooming to 150% makes it much more readable.
Can you tell me more about your configuration? On my Mac, at least, the site is quite legible in both light and dark mode. The main thing I'm wondering is what font is being picked up. On my Mac, I see Georgia... maybe it's just when it switches to Times or 'serif'?
Text looks fine to me, Firefox on macOS. Perhaps you could make use of the "system font stack", which might fall back to a decent Serif font on other OSes.
Oh wow, that's bad! I guess I haven't tested in FF on Linux recently, but I just updated to default to Helvetica/Arial/sans-serif, and in my quick peek from Ubuntu it seems to look a bit nicer now.
For dark mode, the site shows white text on pure black, to help shave energy use on OLED displays. For light mode, the site shows black on pure white.
The text should look great across most browsers/sites, and I make sure the layout flows well if you increase or decrease font size... but if you can send a screenshot of what you're seeing and your device/screen configuration, I can take a look at what might be going on.
> For dark mode, the site shows white text on pure black, to help shave energy use on OLED displays. For light mode, the site shows black on pure white.
That's exactly the problem. Too much contrast is a thing with text and can make a website uncomfortable to look at (for me at least). It's hard to find a source for that, but most people seem to agree (see ~95% of other sites).
That's not a problem on commodity LCDs (maybe the one you're using) because "black" is fairly bright, but on OLED especially that's almost infinite contrast.
> That's not a problem on commodity LCDs (maybe the one you're using) because "black" is fairly bright, but on OLED especially that's almost infinite contrast.
Therefore, instead of having your browser enforce a lowered contrast for yourself, you prefer that the majority of the rest of us, with commodity LCDs, suffer too little contrast by asking for the colors to be changed on the website.
No, you should properly profile your display and set the correct LUT and contrast settings so that you may get clipping in dark scenes, but correct contrast everywhere else.
Design websites for correct display devices, and calibrate your display devices to correct for imperfections.
Asking for users with good displays to intentionally reduce the displays' quality to simulate a bad display is just ridiculous. That's what color profiles, LUTs, and tone mapping are for.
It's the 'font-family: Georgia,Times,serif;' that ends up being Nimbus Roman as a substitute for Times (on my Ubuntu system, at least), and that font looks just terrible in white on a black background. I remove Times, or the entire font-family rule, and it looks great (DejuVu Serif or DejaVu Sans).
I find this very frustrating as well... I got a nice fridge/freezer alarm project working with the pi pico w - and while it also works with esp32 boards the pi pico is supposed to be like $5... but last I checked on amazon... it was $100... gonna stick with esp32 until it is actually $5...
They have been consistently in stock at RRP here in UK for a long time, I bought half a dozen of them for various IoT projects around the house in the last 6 months, never had any trouble finding them
The pico (w) had pretty good availability from most official resellers everytime I checked. Sellers on amazon often jack up the price which is why you shouldn't buy a pi on there.
Raspberry Pi availability has been such a bottleneck for PrintNanny.ai (deployed to a Raspberry Pi 4).
Rather than wait around for stock to become available, I've decided to expand to Rock Pi and Orange Pi. I had to roll my own Linux distro and build tools to match the experience provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation (e.g. SD card imaging tool). ... but where there's a will, there's a way.
https://twitter.com/grepLeigh/status/1572683931769778176
Sometimes people write iot projects and target the pi because they are familiar with it (it's like a computer with gpio) when their use case could be better served by a less powerful microcontroller such as the esp32. Perhaps people in this group can use this as an opportunity to learn esp32 development. It's arduino ide compatible and has good support on platformio.
Depends what you're doing I guess. My most complex project is a network enabled display that shows all the stats from my PC, it queries my machine every second and displays graphs for temperature and GPU/CPU usage. No issues with micropython and an ESP32 board doing that.
Even the ESP32 is a bit "like a computer" compared to most microcontrollers. It's usually used with its stock RTOS which has its own tasks for WiFi, HTTPS, etc. and has a filesystem. Your apps are separate modules inside the RTOS system which sticks around.
That's not a super unusual setup for a microcontroller system, though those types of systems were often larger industrial systems running WindRiver VxWorks, etc. not cheap chips for your IoT lightbulbs. Even when using an RTOS my perception is the most common setup is that the RTOS is just compiled and linked into your firmware image like any other library.
It was a bit of a culture shock when I started using ESP32s because I can't buy STM32s anymore. I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to embedded systems and I didn't like the idea of having someone else's code control so much of the chip, but it's the pragmatic choice.
A lot of folks have pointed to rpilocator, but my experience is that they made the situation far worse. Prior to the launch, I was able to buy a couple of pi’s per month without too much effort (registering for stock notifications). Since rpilocator, I’ve only managed to buy about 3 pi’s in total. Unless I’m able to drop everything on a notification, there’s no chance. And even if I can do this, I get the feeling that I’m competing against a crowd that’s automated the purchasing process.
I can’t speak for others, but I use the Pi for student projects in an undergrad networking course. I previously required students to supply their own, but I now have the option to rent from me at cost.
With the current situation, I am not certain that I will have enough supply for my next class.
It wasnt until a few reads to the end of your comment that YOU are renting them to students...
Get a thread going on HN requesting old PIs... shoot ive given so many away... but in return, share your coursework/connect your students with other students...
249 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] thread> They are still prioritizing OEM customers (who have built their products around the Pi)
OEMs use RPis? What are they using it for, does anyone know, got any examples? I've always assumed RPis to be a hobbyist tool. All the blog posts, documentation, examples I encounter are around the hobbyist's mindset. I've not encountered any "business" oriented documentation or examples or blogs.
Edit: Everyone, thanks for the examples. I'm going through each one. It's like a whole new world opened to me.
I believe most of them don't advertise the fact they use Raspberry Pis as it might cheapen their offering in the eyes of customers
They leave an SSH port open (found with nmap) and I've asked support if I can have the password, but they won't give it to me. >:(
My system is now currently powered down. I think it'd be cool if someone were to reverse engineer it and write their own FOSS firmware for the system. Shouldn't be too hard, right?
[1]: https://mygardyn.com/
(assuming it's a standard version and you haven't already)
Couldn't you just grab the SD card out of it and inspect the file system, then try to get the password through that? You'd have to spend some time bruteforcing it most likely, but it should eventually (tbh, seeing solutions like this I'd expect quickly) give you the password.
Checking the website it seems to be a kind of PaaS, plant as a service. Am I reading that website correctly? They are offering remotely-managed plants for rent?
There's some CAD models for various parts; I'd rather 3D print some of the e.g. rockwool baskets and caps rather than buy from the company. If you get one, make sure you stay on top of root maintenance. You could also certainly find the plant food for cheaper.
It can produce a ton of lettuce if that's what you want to grow. We liked trying different greens. I grew some nice jalapenos as well. Can't recommend much other big fruiting plants though—they're trickier to take care of.
https://futurehome.io
There are also hundreds of boards that work with the CM4 to build different types of systems or integrate into automation, industrial gear, and commercial products—this is a tiny listing that doesn't even cover stuff that uses the Pi 4 or older Pi models: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm
(edit for clarity)
There are cheaper alternatives, but there are not better supported alternatives. The most expensive rPi is a rounding error in terms of engineering time. Why bother saving ~$30 if you have to spend $1k worth of engineering time to diagnose a compatibility issue on some less well documented board.
* depending on volume.
For a couple hundred/thousand devices doing industrial automation yes. For a million and up, it makes sense to pay an engineer 3 months to reduce the BOM by 10 cents.
Our volume would be well below 1 million at market saturation. More important for us to be able to iterate and customize.
You can also reduce your write wear with putting stuff like temporal logs in ram etc.
Wouldn't use them for something mission critical but for statistics where you don't mind missing a few minutes like in this case they're ok.
Also I'm using a Pi to do some tests for a project that will run on custom hardware (not even Broadcom) eventually. Saves time when you don't have to deal with Yocto and editing dts files just to talk to something on spi and see if it can do your job.
Korg released a few new digital synthesizers in the past couple of years: Opsix, Wavestate, and Modwave. They are all running Raspberry Pis inside.
Texas Instruments has a big catalog of cheap and DSP-capable chips.
Yes. As an example, we use RPi in MusicBox[0], together with HifiBerry[1] sound card, as a music player appliance.
In fact, you can still buy (well, you could, if you could buy any) RPi 1's, since OEMs tend to standardize and stick to a platform. Our base platform is 1B+, for example.
[0] https://musicbox.com.hr/ (Croatian only, sorry, it's for the local market)
[1] https://www.hifiberry.com/
I opened it up and I can confirm it has a Rpi inside.
https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/wavestate/
https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/opsix/
Although that's with the CM3
Stratodesk makes them now:
https://www.stratodesk.com/solutions/raspberry-pi-thin-clien...
How Good is the new Raspberry Pi 4 as a Thin Client? (2019)
https://www.stratodesk.com/how-good-is-the-new-raspberry-pi-...
https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-cm4-ser...
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/tv-thats-not-necs-pi-...
https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/control/range_cn/index...
https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asiair-plus
It is used in a lot of products, specially legacy products that have been given a “facelift” to switch from buttons + screen to touchscreen.
I’ve been always against it when it comes to the non-CM versions.
The foundation receives donations, both private and public, and works as a non-profit with the original goal of giving every kid a computer, and now more broadly to teach through their platform. Having private companies leeching off it for me is very much scummy behavior.
A company I worked for used the 2B, 3B and 3B+ in a bunch of products. My complaints were dutifully archived in the trash.
The private companies are funding the foundation. It’s hard to call it leeching when the pi is a comparatively expensive board compared to alternatives
Except that if you look at their financials, it’s clear that they make very little on them. The sales of Rpis are not how they keep going, it’s all the other activities around it.
> It’s hard to call it leeching when the pi is a comparatively expensive board compared to alternatives
It’s not only about COGs, support is a big ticket in this area, and one that most manufacturers are way behind. Also, yes, there are some cheaper SBCs, but most of them are sold at “ask us for price”, and they aren’t any cheaper, especially at low volumes.
As opposed to losing money, which is what happens with consumer sales with at least one model, hence limiting to one per customer
If you are using a model from Raspberry from which they have a margin (essentially all the things on the Compute Module line), that's fine by me, it's great that the foundation can use that as an income stream.
I feel very differently when you use models that are obviously sold at a loss to pad the margins on your product.
I've come across a commercial HVAC system (like the big units on top of office buildings) based on the RPi Compute Module. Actually seen that from two different companies.
There was a subreddit that's now subsumed into /r/Raspberry_pi that was all about sightings of Pi's used in commercial products like airport displays, billboards, kiosks, etc.
The longest stock lasted was about 24 hours a couple months ago. I think people have scrapers even for their local Micro Center website so they can find when they're in stock and go snag one immediately.
The Micro Center near me usually has a large bag full of Pico and Pico W, though, as well as practically every HAT and official Pi accessory.
https://rpilocator.com/tips-and-tricks.cfm
Probably partly as it's extra profit, but also to discourage multi-buys I guess. I dunno if it discourages the scalpers.
These bundles never appear on rpilocater.
And yes it discourages the scalpers - while the stuff you get in the bundle is usually worth the price being asked for it, to a scalper it's worth 0 and it makes it difficult to make profit flipping the boards themselves. Same principle is successfully used to fight PS5 scalpers.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/raspberry-pi?product_t...
I wasn't able to actually find any website other than eBay at 100+ quid that have them in stock, even as kits.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-essentials...
Rather than remove one from their case, I decided to run to Microcenter to just grab a new one.
Nope. Not a single Raspberry Pi in stock. I was honestly shocked. I was completely unaware of the shortage.
I have a feeling Broadcom is the main problem here, they probably prioritize other customers. Which is surprising in some ways because a lot of raspberry pi foundation members are ex-broadcom or still even work there.
However I guess the other companies are willing to offer more whereas if the pi became more expensive there would be a lot of uproar (and rightly so because it defeats the purpose)
It's possible they see this as some sort of marketing, but I don't think they are using it to drive a sales funnel of low-volume customers.
The original goal (remember that?) was to make it a cheap educational Linux system. And it was a nice idea. The cheap sticker price got it noticed compared to the other more expensive (but better supported) ARM single-board computers. And here we are.
I sure as heck don't know what Broadcom's endgame is here either, because like you say they don't even answer your call if you're <100K EAU. So unlike other EVKs that can be used to rip apart and spin into real projects, you're stuck with RPi as a standalone unit.
The chip shortage is hurting everyone, but at least with other SoCs you can find them from multiple sources eventually. Or use a broker if you're desparate.
I was a big Beaglebone Black supporter, but figured the winds were blowing towards the Raspberry Pi, so just started using that instead. Now I'm here with the need for several mini Linux boxes and instead I have nothing. Beaglebone Black feels outdated. Raspberry Pi is unobtainium. Unfortunate where the random walk leads.
The hobbyist market has weirdly strong network effects: we saw this with Arduino, too, which was a lot more expensive than its competitors! I assume there is a measure of influencer marketing here that old-guard tech companies didn't grasp.
10 years ago, the beagleboard was a game changer, though. They are still making beaglebones and beagleboards, both of which are cool, but they are last-generation computers with lots of useful embedded SoC features, while the Pi is a computer first.
In my many argumen^H^H^Hdiscussions with RPi users here and elsewhere, the counter-argument for Pi has always been the community support is excellent. And, yes, it is. When you aren't large enough to get a TI or NXP FAE to answer your email then having a robust community is great. But it was built ground-up from all the RPi fans having the object in their hands and little else to do with it.
When TI dropped OMAP I left for Freescale, now NXP. I've been developing on i.MX for well over a decade now and have really enjoyed it. Their foothold in automotive has allowed them to keep growing the line and branching it out in different ways, more so than TI or Broadcom will.
The idea of "community support" is kind of interesting - it clearly had an effect here, but I'm not so sure how they got it. I guess the foundation just made it very easy for people to talk to each other about RPi projects, while TI put you on some forum in a dark corner of their website.
And I believe you're right about the community support. The RPi groups have been run by actual owners and enthusiasts, whereas the factory support forums in my experience have been minimally maintained with almost no interaction from anyone at the actual companies.
I didn't like the way TI exited the Android world; I'm glad the beagleboard lost. However, my ideal is for both TI and Broadcom to lose.
Which is why i soooo excited they bought VMWare.
Relying on Raspberry Pi as a business means relying on the goodwill of Broadcom - which is a severely broken company.
You need a laptop/expensive graphics card, you needed it back them when you started on a "waitlist" (official or your own), and after them becoming available, you buy one laptop/card, and you're done.
With raspberrypis, everyone doing anything with them outside of purely first time hobbyists, will order 5, 10, 50, however much they can get, because the waiting is killing the business. When rpi zero w 2 came out, it was hard to get, but the moment I could get one, I bought 3 pieces, even though i needed only one at the moment, but I knew, if I needed more, I wouldn't be able to get them for months again.
Well, Nvidia and AMD GPUs have only shown improvement because the writing was on the wall that Ethereum was going PoS and the downturn in worldwide economies made the rest of the shitcoins unprofitable.
Basically if this is survival mode during the chip shortage, I hope they can do everything possible to make it through this in good shape.
Also I have enough pi's for my needs already, I'd love to build a cluster but IMO cluster projects should be of the lowest priority customers.
I do agree, though, that cluster projects should have a low priority!
For a major vendor (someone linked some korg devices below) to loot this market is no better than the auto vendors who are buying washing machines simply to pull out microcontrollers, or cryptominers destroying the GPU market.
Major vendors can hire fabs to push out their own designs. The RPi is a licensed implementation of ARM, it isn't an industrial platform, from a supply chain point of view, clearly.
Everyone who is shipping a product based on RPi is doing so because they were able to get cheap individual samples to build on. Now that's not possible for new folks.
RPi was designed as an affordable learning computer, now there is not an affordable learning computer available to anyone who can't buy 10,000 parts or whatever.
If you view the current supply shortage is a temporary issue (as much as it doesn't feel very temporary right now), then not being able to provide stock to "us" is also a temporary issue. But failing their OEMs is a long-term issue - if not a permanent one. If Sharp's commercial display business takes a hit because they bought into the rpi ecosystem, and it bit them in the ass - they will not be back (See also: Apple vs nvidia). You seem to take the view that the OEMs deserve it for taking "our boards" - but rpi still take the hit when partners leave them. (and OEMs are a snowball effect: being able to point to examples like Sharp helps them win the next OEM - and I'm pretty sure that if they start publicly losing partners, the loss would only encourage the next loss).
For the rest of us - there's not many great contenders. I'm surprised at this - traditionally pi-alternatives have struggled from the lack of community. If someone else has a way around the supply shortages, this would seem like the best time to get in there and steal that community. But so far they haven't, so there's the best chance we're just going to sit here and wait for the return of the pi.
It's not ideal, it's not fair, life's a bitch. I am annoyed that it impacts me, but I can't begrudge rpi for taking the most sensible option.
Damned, I like their boards/schematics/wiki. Single-page wiki entries with /most/ of the info I want (connector=FOO, voltage=BAR, power converter=BAZ (oh, so it's claimed 12V, but commenfary says 9-14V is definitely in the range and the chip manufacturer for the power regulator (like on my NanoPC-T4) says I'll be safe with 5.5-28V).
Cool.
Their boards do have some problems (none that have bothered me for long - look at the schematics and realize that that port is easy to over-tax so swap the cables and life is good), the different software distro's (Ubuntu this, Ubuntu that, Buildroot, Android Xx an Yy) are nice as examples when I'm replacing it with my own.
I think of the magazine, MagPi. An OEM customer? Indirectly. How can you sustain a hobbyist magazine on the Raspberry Pi when the hobbyist cannot get a Pi for less than $100?
Eventually Sony stepped in and offered production capacity at a place in Wales UK which I think improved availability a lot.
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/made-in-the-uk/
I got mine last July before the spike: https://i.imgur.com/2jzmhhA.png
The Orange Pi other users suggested is a good choice, as would be the very similar NanoPi, and many others. However, although the scarcity hits more the popular boards such as the Raspberries, others also became somewhat harder to find, so I would suggest for example to take note of which board is supported by a well known distribution, then look for vendors offering it. A good start would be the Armbian and DietPI download sections in which you can easily find dozens of boards and devices with their support status.
https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported
https://dietpi.com/#download
https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm
I do wish it had video out as that would simplify setup & diagnostics for me, but the serial console is fine.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx4_QCX_khU
https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
They aren't going to be quite as small or efficient as a Raspberry Pi or equivalent, but instead you get full x86-64 cores, and they are still pretty small and efficient.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
A future development I want to explore is using one external eSATA box so I can add more drives. I'm not sure however about any incompatibilities between BSD (or Linux) or the PCI-E controller and external SATA port multipliers.
Will almost certainly cost a lot less than buying a new mini-itx motherboard and compatible case, power supply, ram, etc.
randomly chosen example in 20 seconds of searching, figure that the shipping cost is actually $25 of the price here, built into the final buy it now price.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/204098861051?hash=item2f853d77fb:g:...
1: https://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-TeraStation-Network-Attached-...
Not ITX, but since you're responding an RPi thread, you may possibly be interested in Hardkernel's products, which have always been very competitive with RPis - in my opinion, simply better than them, although less popular.
Currently, they offer the C4 (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4), and the blazing fast N2+ (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram-2).
The N2+ not only ships the A73 (the successory to the RPi's A72), but it also runs it at high frequency.
I am actually a big fan of the H2(+), but sadly, went out of production (it's an x86, whose form factor I absolutely recommend).
EDIT: There actually are x86 SBCs. Two random picks:
- https://www.axiomtek.com/Default.aspx?MenuId=Products&Functi...
- https://www.seeedstudio.com/ODYSSEY-X86J4125800-p-4915.html
I have an older asrock j1900 celeron board running my 9front CPU/Disk/Auth server at home 24/7. No issues and it has been solid. At the current electric rate it costs about $2/month.
I think I'll never be back to Raspberry after all this drama. Fool me once, etc.
PC Engines' APU 2 line is also great, assuming it meets your needs.
* Gigabyte Brix - size, performance, features, expandability, longevity
* Chromebox (Asus) - size, performance, expandability, longevity
* R.Pi - size, support for Debian, longevity (I confess a particular fondness for the Pi 400)
* Odroid - size, performance
[1] https://www.tech-america.com/item/intel-nuc-11-essential-nuc...
https://pine64.com/product-category/single-board-computers/
There are dozens of us - dozens! - and Jeff's page looks uniquely bad. Something about the font weight, perhaps? The strokes are so thin as to disappear. Zooming to 150% makes it much more readable.
https://systemfontstack.com/
https://i.imgur.com/xdMq8SJ.png
and here's a screenshot at 150%:
https://i.imgur.com/hKcCBo7.png
I do see something funny going on with the ligature for 'ff' in "different vendors" and "official retailers, " especially at 100%.
Running `fc-match serif` says that the fault being picked up is DejaVu Serif [0]
[0] https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/Samples.html
What's so bad about white-on-black? Light-gray-on-a-bit-darker-gray and similar are the evil choices.
The text should look great across most browsers/sites, and I make sure the layout flows well if you increase or decrease font size... but if you can send a screenshot of what you're seeing and your device/screen configuration, I can take a look at what might be going on.
That's exactly the problem. Too much contrast is a thing with text and can make a website uncomfortable to look at (for me at least). It's hard to find a source for that, but most people seem to agree (see ~95% of other sites).
That's not a problem on commodity LCDs (maybe the one you're using) because "black" is fairly bright, but on OLED especially that's almost infinite contrast.
Therefore, instead of having your browser enforce a lowered contrast for yourself, you prefer that the majority of the rest of us, with commodity LCDs, suffer too little contrast by asking for the colors to be changed on the website.
Design websites for correct display devices, and calibrate your display devices to correct for imperfections.
Asking for users with good displays to intentionally reduce the displays' quality to simulate a bad display is just ridiculous. That's what color profiles, LUTs, and tone mapping are for.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-w?varia...
See "Buy now" on https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/ for your country
Rather than wait around for stock to become available, I've decided to expand to Rock Pi and Orange Pi. I had to roll my own Linux distro and build tools to match the experience provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation (e.g. SD card imaging tool). ... but where there's a will, there's a way. https://twitter.com/grepLeigh/status/1572683931769778176
Maybe my board was just ram starved, but my impression is you want to go bare metal with the ESP.
I have an old Pi Zero W and I love it. I watch Adafruit for the new version constantly but no luck.
That's not a super unusual setup for a microcontroller system, though those types of systems were often larger industrial systems running WindRiver VxWorks, etc. not cheap chips for your IoT lightbulbs. Even when using an RTOS my perception is the most common setup is that the RTOS is just compiled and linked into your firmware image like any other library.
It was a bit of a culture shock when I started using ESP32s because I can't buy STM32s anymore. I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to embedded systems and I didn't like the idea of having someone else's code control so much of the chip, but it's the pragmatic choice.
With the current situation, I am not certain that I will have enough supply for my next class.
Get a thread going on HN requesting old PIs... shoot ive given so many away... but in return, share your coursework/connect your students with other students...