Other considerations, for building it into a product, and for even one-off hobby use:
* For software reliability and sustainability, what Linux distros are supported, do they upstream all changes, do they rely on closed drivers or blobs, etc.?
* For one aspect of security, what's the provenance of design and manufacturing?
> * For software reliability and sustainability, what Linux distros are supported, do they upstream all changes, do they rely on closed drivers or blobs, etc.?
This has been the only reason to buy only RaspberryPis (when I could actually get them).
Sure, buy some <other-fruit>Pi, two years go by, the latest available linux version is 1.5 years old now, no new software support, no new kernels, no nothing. Sometimes it's even impossible to download the image in the first place.
I think Pine64 is another one to look at for software support. It's not immediate as they don't design the chips, but they do work on mainline Linux support for their products. The PinePhone Pro and Pinebook Pro both using the RK3399 SoC is pretty well supported by mainline now, so you can run mainline Linux the not-Raspberry Pi boards with RK3399s (Orange Pi 4, Rock Pi 4). Armbian probably the one to provide updated installs.
Pine64's newer QuartzPro64 board uses an RK3588, so I hope to see good mainline support there too as the Orange Pi 5 and Rock 5 (no longer a Pi) use the same SoC.
> two years go by, the latest available linux version is 1.5 years old now
You still get support 6 months after release? Last time I bought an <other-fruit>Pi it came with a kernel that was already 2 years out of date on the day it was built (including binary blob proprietary drivers which only worked with that version), and that was it...
> Sure, buy some <other-fruit>Pi, two years go by, the latest available linux version is 1.5 years old now, no new software support, no new kernels, no nothing. Sometimes it's even impossible to download the image in the first place.
You searched in the wrong place. Board vendors give us something to play with,but they're not a community and we should never rely on their distros as they'll stop any development or support when a new model appears, which isn't a problem at all. Distros with recent, very often mainline, kernels do exist also for boards not produced anymore, just look at Armbian and DietPI.
Armbian Debian for the Odroid C2 (out of production) with a kernel that is newer than the one running on the laptop I'm writing this post with.
I can understand a RasPI user saying "but I can download the OS image on the RasPI site!". That's true, and I concur it's very handy especially for newbies who find a common place in which they can do everything, but that's more an anomaly than the norm. Would we go for example to Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, etc. websites to download a Linux distribution for our shiny new laptop? Nope, we rather head to Debian, Arch, SuSE, Manjaro, Alpine, etc. sites. That's exactly what we should do with embedded boards. The problem isn't that other boards than the Raspberry PI do not have updated software, but rather that those who provide it aren't popular as they deserve.
With a good quality power supply, SD card and a battery backup, that's not too problematic. Most people however either cheap out on these or they get fakes, which is a problem on its own.
You should NOT use writable FS (except for a specialized one on a separate partition/device for user settigs) even with EMMC! And then you don't need battery backup.
Using writable rootfs goes against industry practices and is a disaster waiting to happen... like the one with emmc in Tesla's central panels.
- the network card of my first Pi (some 2 model) failed
- a PI Zero completely died years ago
- a PI Zero 2 W doesn't boot anymore but it apparently powers on
- a number of SD cards failed after months of use, but that's to be expected. I turn off swap and don't write log files much [1]
I'm left with a couple of PI 3 but I don't have a use case for them anymore and frankly the unavailability of the product doesn't make me feel like investing on it. It's becoming a kind of retrocomputing.
I switched to Odroid HC4 to build a NAS with it's two SATA slots. I can recycle a ton of disks I put in a drawer along the years. It's about 4 W with the disks off, plus whatever a disk consumes: 2 W for a 2.5 1 TB HDD and 9 W for an older 750 GB 3.5 HDD. I have other disks to test.
Edit: actually I'm using a PI 3 with a TV Hat to stream free to air TV to my phones and tablets around the home. I'm never sitting in front of the TV set.
Thought it was me but out of 3 Pis I had all of them died rather sooner than later… To make things worse I barely used two of them. The only one I’ve got left is still randomly losing HDMI signal, I never know if I’ll be able to see anything when connecting it to any kind of display. Another one just stopped working all of sudden after just a year of working as a weather station. The third one sat in a drawer for a year and a half and wouldn’t run once I got it out.
Are we that unlucky or they’re so unreliable? Not a single electronic product failed me so often in the last 30 years.
I was just thinking, the best Pi you can buy is the one you can get… This quote was stolen from another fruit computer company (Apple) sales manager who used it in the late 2000s, when Apple had its inventory issues.
Apple Australia director Tony King would say: “Sell what’s on the truck!“, to which he would reply: “Tony, we’ve sold the [bleeping] truck…”
I have one Pi 2, two Pi 3 and one Pi 4 and I hold on to them for dear life. I bought them each when they were first available. Never could get my hands on a Zero though. And now it seems impossible to buy any Pi of any kind.
An Orange Pi Zero 2 is around €50 on Amazon, or €30 on Aliexpress, which seems expensive for what it does.
If a €10 Zero existed I think it would sell like hotcakes; I can think of so many use cases! But maybe it's impossible to do, IDK.
> And now it seems impossible to buy any Pi of any kind.
I almost got a Pi Zero 2 W for 15€ in January, they had 2500, one per customer limit, but the site was heavily overloaded. So I went to bed at around 20:00 with most still available (2100 or so). Woke up at 4 and they were sold out. That was so far the closest I came to one (obviously I’m not buying the available ones for 100€).
I don't see why people are so attached to the pi when much more capable computers - 2013/14 era used Intel NUCs or Mac Minis - are available for a hundred bucks on ebay. Maybe lots of people are using the pi for low-power-draw projects but if people are running a pihole and other services on them you might as well go for the other option.
Can confirm - I use a Mac Mini with a Core2Duo as my main server to run DNS blocking, motion cameras, home automation, etc. It's great - my idle load is using less than 20W and its cool and quiet. It no longer runs new versions of MacOS, but it's been running debian for years now with ZERO problems. My only cost of ownership was replacing the ancient 5400RPM spinning disk as a preventative measure.
That and electricity, yearly it's 175 kWh vs 20 kWh for a PI, so about 45 USD extra at least this year. May go down one order of a magnitude next year. (the prices are
the absolute max I could find for electricity in my area in a year)
I have three Pi Zero's (1) and they are awesome at 0.7 W for any IOT stuff. One I use to collect data from my Electricity Meter (S2 Infrared), submitted to Influx DB; the other two run Snapcast Clients for my Multi-Room Audio System.
The Raspberry Pi people really need to get a grip on their supply issues. It's pretty much unobtanium for as long as they've been in business, clearly the market is there, demand has been large and steady and yet they don't seem to be able to get this sorted out, and that has been the case for about as long as they have been in business. I've yet to see a Pi 'IRL' and I'd love to buy a couple but I do not see it happening.
Maybe I've been fairly lucky, but excepting the initial Pi v1 release I've never really had any problems getting hold of them. Until now of course. I'm desperate for a couple of Compute Module 4's and gawd only knows when they'll re-appear.
No, like parent, I’m talking about before the current issues. Unlike GP, we had no issues getting Pi’s before the current troubles started, which was what they were saying.
I've been playing with Pi's for quite some time now (I used to even run a Pi Jam in my city!) and prior to the pandemic, I never had trouble getting my hands on a Pi here in mainland Europe. When the ZeroW2 was released I was able to grab one on the day of release without issue. The Pico and PicoW have been such a breeze to get that I throw one in with every order when ordering other components for projects.
I saw a discussion (I think on Mastodon). Apparently they believe the supply issues should return to a much closer level of normality in the next couple of months. As they ramp up again they have been prioritising supply for companies who need the hardware to stay alive (i.e. not making layoffs) over retail sales.
Personally, I think that sounds like they're doing the right thing since most "normal" people don't urgently need a Pi.
Well, here's to hoping. As for urgency, the Pi is pretty much ideal for home automation and I've been meaning to transport Home Assistant from my laptop to a Pi for a while now and everywhere I go it is out of stock.
Home Assistant needs "a computer". There really isn't any particular reason why it needs to be a Pi. (Which is true for a lot of use cases: sure, defaulting to a Pi made some sense pre-2020, when they were easy to get, but if all you need is a small device running Linux, just pick up something else)
>"It's pretty much unobtanium for as long as they've been in business"
I've been using PI4s and had no problem obtaining them so I would disagree. But yes everything was fine until it was not. I had to cancel a product because "unobtanium" and price going through the roof.
> It's pretty much unobtanium for as long as they've been in business
> I've yet to see a Pi 'IRL'
This is such an interesting contrast to where I live in the United States. Until some time in 2021 I could go to Microcenter and expect to find what I wanted on the shelf most of the time. Mail order availability has sort of fluctuated over the past decade, but usually the stuff was available without too much difficulty. I don't think I've ever had to buy one at a marked up price, and certainly not as part of a bundle.
Oddly, Adafruit used to markup their Pis something like five or ten bucks when purchased in small quantities, buy they don't do that anymore. If you're willing to leave https://rpilocator.com running on your PC on Wednesday (it used to be that Wednesday was the day of the week Adafruit sold that week's allotment of Pis, I'm not sure that's still the case but this worked for me in August) you can probably get a Pi 4 from them. This kooky approach worked better for me than Adafruit's email notification of availability. By the time I received their email one Wednesday in June, they were sold out.
Of course rpilocator might locate something closer to home. Adafruit's 2FA keeps the product from being sold out instantly, which is nice.
I’ve never had any problem getting one until this last year. Right now they’re just temporarily prioritising B2B customers - people whose livelihoods depend on it rather than those using it for hobby projects.
Eben has said[1] that he expects supply to improve considerably in the new year, starting with the Zero.
I've always viewed RaspberryPi as an educational focused product first, followed by hobbyists. Prioritizing commercial use runs contrary to my expectations.
You're mixing up Raspberry Pi Foundation with Raspberry Pi Ltd. The former is an educational charity. The latter is a tech company that funds that charity. The more money that is generated by RPL, the more money RPF has to spend on education. They're both non profits.
No, you're mixing up companies with products. Any business built around a RaspberryPi is probably in the business of RPi accessories or they're an ascended hobby project.
We've been able to source a few last month, brokered by RPi foundation directly (basically asking them to help out), after exhausting all other avenues.
Previously we could order a box o' 150 with lead time of about a month without problems.
You say "always", others say "never", I guess my anecdote will split the difference. From my perspective, the first two Pis were easy to get; I remember some noise about Pi 3 selling out very fast (I scored a couple then, IIRC, on the release day), and starting with Pi 4, I've heard they're effectively unobtainable.
The Pi Foundation accidentally stumbled on their true purpose in the marketplace - inexpensive, well supported and easy to build around industrial computers. They have admitted that since the pandemic they have prioritized production for B2B customers. The education/hobbyist market has completely fallen off, so personally I'm moving to x86 variants. The UP 4000 would be an almost perfect replacement but the processors being many years old is unfortunate - if UP would switch to Jasper/Elkhart Lake variants it would be a huge bump in compute in the same package. Odroid H3+ is a nice alternative too. Otherwise NUCs or old 1L Dell/Lenovos seem like the next most popular replacement.
Can't upvote you enough. I'm buying RaspberryPi' since they first launched and I've never seen such a shortage. I lost my stash and somehow I can't find any respectable device for my PiHole setup.
I was just cruising ebay for a used thin client pc to set up as a pihole to replace a flood damaged pi 2, but holy crap are pi's hard to get. Even with the pi-tracker website, if you're don't Immediately buy one listed (or live in Europe apparently), you miss out. Like, even if you miss it by 20 minutes. I've been trying for a month or so to get one, and can't other than the re-sale (read: Marked way UP in price) market.
It's a bit frustrating, but it is what it is, I suppose.
Prior to the pandemic, I rarely had an issue with obtaining a Pi 4. I would usually get them at Adafruit. If they weren't in stock, I would just wait a couple of days and buy what I wanted when they were.
I didn't have much of a need for Pi 4s in the past, but that has changed. I could use 3 or 4 more Pi 4s. Thankfully, I have plenty of Pi Zero W's. In the past, Adafruit put a limit of one Pi zero (per configuration) per order. Every time I ordered something, I added a Pi zero W & a Pi zero W with an installed header.
Right now I've got almost a dozen Pi zeros for the projects I'm working on. But I do agree with you, they could have sold as many as they made.
The huge advantage of the RPi is that I can get it up and running doing things that are useful for me just by following online guides. Whereas I ran into lots of problems when trying to do useful things with other SBCs (I'm not a "computer professional" the way most people on this site are). I don't doubt that others are more capable, but the RPi lets me just get on with my projects with minimal fuss.
An important figure that I'd like to see is the energy efficiency. In a lot of applications, the microcontroller is going to be asleep 95%+ of the time.
For those, what I want to know isn't really how fast it can do $COMPUTATION, it's how many time it can do it before I have to charge the battery.
What about hardware support for video encoding (h.264) in those alternatives?
Some time ago, best to my knowledge, if this is a feature you depend on - Raspberry would be the only option you can get that came with a working GPU drivers that support video encoding out of the box.
62 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread* For software reliability and sustainability, what Linux distros are supported, do they upstream all changes, do they rely on closed drivers or blobs, etc.?
* For one aspect of security, what's the provenance of design and manufacturing?
* Hardware reliability?
This has been the only reason to buy only RaspberryPis (when I could actually get them).
Sure, buy some <other-fruit>Pi, two years go by, the latest available linux version is 1.5 years old now, no new software support, no new kernels, no nothing. Sometimes it's even impossible to download the image in the first place.
Pine64's newer QuartzPro64 board uses an RK3588, so I hope to see good mainline support there too as the Orange Pi 5 and Rock 5 (no longer a Pi) use the same SoC.
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...
You still get support 6 months after release? Last time I bought an <other-fruit>Pi it came with a kernel that was already 2 years out of date on the day it was built (including binary blob proprietary drivers which only worked with that version), and that was it...
You searched in the wrong place. Board vendors give us something to play with,but they're not a community and we should never rely on their distros as they'll stop any development or support when a new model appears, which isn't a problem at all. Distros with recent, very often mainline, kernels do exist also for boards not produced anymore, just look at Armbian and DietPI.
Armbian Debian for the Odroid C2 (out of production) with a kernel that is newer than the one running on the laptop I'm writing this post with.
https://imola.armbian.com/dl/odroidc2/archive/Armbian_22.11....
Armbian Debian Bullseye for OrangePI PC (out of production) with pretty recent kernel.
https://imola.armbian.com/dl/orangepipc/archive/Armbian_22.1...
DietPI Debian Bookworm for NanoPI M1 (out of production), no version data but Bookworm is the latest Debian release.
https://dietpi.com/downloads/images/DietPi_NanoPiM1-ARMv7-Bo...
etc.
https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported
https://dietpi.com/#download
I can understand a RasPI user saying "but I can download the OS image on the RasPI site!". That's true, and I concur it's very handy especially for newbies who find a common place in which they can do everything, but that's more an anomaly than the norm. Would we go for example to Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, etc. websites to download a Linux distribution for our shiny new laptop? Nope, we rather head to Debian, Arch, SuSE, Manjaro, Alpine, etc. sites. That's exactly what we should do with embedded boards. The problem isn't that other boards than the Raspberry PI do not have updated software, but rather that those who provide it aren't popular as they deserve.
A company I was at used it in a product for the rapid prototyping capability.
Using writable rootfs goes against industry practices and is a disaster waiting to happen... like the one with emmc in Tesla's central panels.
- the network card of my first Pi (some 2 model) failed
- a PI Zero completely died years ago
- a PI Zero 2 W doesn't boot anymore but it apparently powers on
- a number of SD cards failed after months of use, but that's to be expected. I turn off swap and don't write log files much [1]
I'm left with a couple of PI 3 but I don't have a use case for them anymore and frankly the unavailability of the product doesn't make me feel like investing on it. It's becoming a kind of retrocomputing.
I switched to Odroid HC4 to build a NAS with it's two SATA slots. I can recycle a ton of disks I put in a drawer along the years. It's about 4 W with the disks off, plus whatever a disk consumes: 2 W for a 2.5 1 TB HDD and 9 W for an older 750 GB 3.5 HDD. I have other disks to test.
[1] https://ostechnix.com/how-to-write-log-files-in-ram-using-lo...
Edit: actually I'm using a PI 3 with a TV Hat to stream free to air TV to my phones and tablets around the home. I'm never sitting in front of the TV set.
Are we that unlucky or they’re so unreliable? Not a single electronic product failed me so often in the last 30 years.
We’re in the realm of philosophy here.
Apple Australia director Tony King would say: “Sell what’s on the truck!“, to which he would reply: “Tony, we’ve sold the [bleeping] truck…”
An Orange Pi Zero 2 is around €50 on Amazon, or €30 on Aliexpress, which seems expensive for what it does.
If a €10 Zero existed I think it would sell like hotcakes; I can think of so many use cases! But maybe it's impossible to do, IDK.
I almost got a Pi Zero 2 W for 15€ in January, they had 2500, one per customer limit, but the site was heavily overloaded. So I went to bed at around 20:00 with most still available (2100 or so). Woke up at 4 and they were sold out. That was so far the closest I came to one (obviously I’m not buying the available ones for 100€).
There's also the QUARTZ64 boards from Pine64 which are definitely available and include fun things like a neural processor: https://pine64.com/product-category/quartz64/
Examples: https://botland.store/raspberry-pi-400/17918-raspberry-pi-40...
https://botland.store/forbot-sets-and-courses/14856-forbot-k...
I saw a discussion (I think on Mastodon). Apparently they believe the supply issues should return to a much closer level of normality in the next couple of months. As they ramp up again they have been prioritising supply for companies who need the hardware to stay alive (i.e. not making layoffs) over retail sales.
Personally, I think that sounds like they're doing the right thing since most "normal" people don't urgently need a Pi.
I've been using PI4s and had no problem obtaining them so I would disagree. But yes everything was fine until it was not. I had to cancel a product because "unobtanium" and price going through the roof.
> I've yet to see a Pi 'IRL'
This is such an interesting contrast to where I live in the United States. Until some time in 2021 I could go to Microcenter and expect to find what I wanted on the shelf most of the time. Mail order availability has sort of fluctuated over the past decade, but usually the stuff was available without too much difficulty. I don't think I've ever had to buy one at a marked up price, and certainly not as part of a bundle.
Oddly, Adafruit used to markup their Pis something like five or ten bucks when purchased in small quantities, buy they don't do that anymore. If you're willing to leave https://rpilocator.com running on your PC on Wednesday (it used to be that Wednesday was the day of the week Adafruit sold that week's allotment of Pis, I'm not sure that's still the case but this worked for me in August) you can probably get a Pi 4 from them. This kooky approach worked better for me than Adafruit's email notification of availability. By the time I received their email one Wednesday in June, they were sold out.
Of course rpilocator might locate something closer to home. Adafruit's 2FA keeps the product from being sold out instantly, which is nice.
Eben has said[1] that he expects supply to improve considerably in the new year, starting with the Zero.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/yswb2d/raspbe...
https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asiair-pro
Previously we could order a box o' 150 with lead time of about a month without problems.
The crunch is real.
I googled it and this was the first result haha.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/10-reaso...
You see /r/RaspberryPi posts all the time when people find them in the wild (ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/zasupv/pi_spo...)
It's a bit frustrating, but it is what it is, I suppose.
I didn't have much of a need for Pi 4s in the past, but that has changed. I could use 3 or 4 more Pi 4s. Thankfully, I have plenty of Pi Zero W's. In the past, Adafruit put a limit of one Pi zero (per configuration) per order. Every time I ordered something, I added a Pi zero W & a Pi zero W with an installed header.
Right now I've got almost a dozen Pi zeros for the projects I'm working on. But I do agree with you, they could have sold as many as they made.
For those, what I want to know isn't really how fast it can do $COMPUTATION, it's how many time it can do it before I have to charge the battery.