Guess I should stock up while I can huh?
I’ve been a RPI fan since the beginning and have used their boards for all sorts of projects and tinkering. But it’s hard not to feel like it’s losing sight of what made it attractive in the first place: low power and low priced computing. It had its charm in buying a Pi Zero and just chucking emulators on it and handing them out to folks who might want to have a go.
But with the more expensive, more powerful hardware you just can’t really use them for things like that anymore. Just too expensive and too much oomph for the use case.
We’ll see if the company finds its way. But this usually isn’t a good sign…
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The new ones are power hungry expensive monsters anyway. There are cheaper clones out there and I had pretty much decided never to pay for the gucci brand anymore.
I’ve had lots of fun with the very affordable Pi Zero 2w. Will pick up a few more before they disappear.
Can you hook up a screen to those and run python?
Yes indeed.
The last project I did with one was build a moon and tide clock - all written in python with a motor controller, external display and individually addressable led lighting.
They’re also great as diy audio streaming devices for whole home audio.
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Now, it stands for “Raspberry Intellectual Property”, in addition to the obvious colloquialism.
RaspberryBye.
RiP
Witty.
RiP
Gotta buy a share just so I can write angry shareholder letters
e_e
So on an unrelated note, what’s the best alternative available right now?
Honestly… when I was doing my research, for the power consumption and the flexibility of Raspberry Pi, nothing came close to it, at least not at the time (2016). Since then, I’ve never even bothered to look at it’s competition.
Maybe Orange PI.
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It was a fun run.
I hope someone else comes up with a similar product soon.
I’m pretty sure there are a lot of similar boards out there
if I made a k8s cluster with all the options I could have a fruit salad
That’s going to be a fun way to learn pod tolerances and affinities. Although… it’s also a great way to play around with multiarch clusters without accidentally burning a hole in your wallet from AWS/GCP usage.
OrangePi comes to mind.
Banana Pis are great
There are, and I think the only real difference has been the community support. The community was behind the original pi and the guides, images and support show that, and it continues to this day.
If this becomes “enshittified” then communities will grow around the alternatives, it’s likely there will be an overall winner (or winners per class) and we’ll move on. The device itself wasn’t ever the whole story.
There are a ton already. RPi stopped being interesting 5 years ago.
I really liked my RP 4.
I got a Pi5 and it’s doin WORK for my partner when they’re working from home all day and watching stuff on the internet!
It’s my last pi for sure.
If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.
Did anyone buy the Pi Zero at $5 or did we all mass hallucinate?
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Not the same form factor and around twice the price, erying es intel motherboards are a steal at their current price. You do need RAM / Storage / ATX PSU they end up a much more performant’ piece of hardware.
The Q1J3 board I have despite it being an ES chip has given me no issues. Running most of my home services on the board with a coral nvme m.2 + nvme + sata storage. Can even do dual ethernet via the a+e m.2 and add-in more sata storage via m.2 to 6x sata board.
I’ve got a pi somewhere in the mounds of boards at home, but would rather spin up another container / pod / nspawn on my erying board vs go through the motions of setting up a pi.
There are definitely Rpi “card form factor” x86_64 SBCs. UP Board for example is one of those.
I’ve been debating an X86 for all my favourite old school games.
Can i get a little Tristan Pinball up in here!?
Similar products exist, but I don’t think any of the others have quite the same level of official and community documentation.
I haven’t looked into it in years but Arduino used to be pretty similar.
Arduino is a microcontroller, Rpi is a SoC that runs an OS… quite different.
Similar situation. Arduino made microcontrollers accessible to the masses like raspberry made low cost computing accessible.
I think a bunch of others gained some footing in the market when Raspberry Pi had supply chain issues during/after COVID. When I last shopped for a Pi, I saw a ton of other options.
Well, so much for that I guess
I honestly never thought I’d see this day. It’s like announcing Linux just went closed source!
Yeah its really too bad. I used to love the company but now I just don’t see them making things for hobbies. Anyone know of some good alternatives? Ive heard good things about lepotato?
Any N300 based PC is under $200, tiny, low watts, faster than a Pi5, and can run any distro because it’s a regular PC.
Orange or banana pi
The pandemic shortage marked the end of the RPi as a hobbyist board. All the stock when to companies, and every hobbyist shop jacked the prices, and scalpers even more.
OrangePI
Out of ignorance I literally thought this was a joke. “Orange you glad I didn’t say raspberry?”
I had one and returned it. The hardware was good but the software was total ass
The official ones are a mess, but depending on your needs, you can use armbian. It supports orange pi boards, and is a nice and up to date distro.
My guess is that I tried 6 or more OSes on it. Like 2 would run at all, and in every case there kept being a lot of issues. It felt like it was hardware no one cares about supporting except one dude who made a version of Ubuntu for it. The whole damned experience was janky AF.
Got a RPi 5 and was able to get Arch running on it and it feels faster despite being objectively slower than the OPi
Never take software from a hardware company.
I sank a ton of time trying to get several OSes running on it, including that one, with almost no luck. Out of the few that even did run, there were always piles of issues. You assumed I only meant the official OSes but I didn’t.
That’s the biggest issue. Support.
Most of the success of the RPi is due to rasparian and community support.
I have been using Odroid boards for many years. I currently have 3 C4 boards and 1 older C1 board. My kids use them as their computer in their rooms. Hardkernel is the company behind the boards, they also provided the official Home assistant blue devices that came pre installed with HASS.
Oh! Great idea - kid’s computer. I’ll be stealing that for my next project. Thank you!
Radxa for RISC-V SBCs with GPIO.
Have a couple boards and the software support leaves a lot to be desired. Armenian is a godsend, but sadly cannot fill every gap.
I’m using a lepotato for Home Assistant. Works very well for months now, but I’m a bit worried about long term distro support
The only downside I see with LePotato is that it has no SteamLink client (for now). Otherwise, there are plenty of OSes made for it. I have one SD card for CoreELEC to watch things on the TV, and one with Batocera for game emulators.
I had so many ideas for things we could use these for that completely revolutionize what is now a terrible user experience. No idea how to implement on these ideas, but it’s a start I guess.
Arduinos all the way down I guess
Lattepanda mu is apparently a very powerful alternative.
Yeah but most rpi projects don’t need a powerful alternative. I don’t need a full computer to run octoprint… But it’s still too hard and pricy to get a RPi
Bigtreetech’s btt pi is quite good for printer use - and general use tbh, but it is geared towards printers
They were never about hobbies. We were a niche that they were happy to have, but they never cared. Origionally it was about education (which has a large overlap with hobbies so they served well).
Libreboard
Remember today when you reflect on what was stolen from us.
I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.
Begun, the Clone Wars have.
Well, they’ve been going on for a couple of years now, Master Jedi
Pi Picos (which are notably microcontrollers and not computers) have had clones for like $2 on Aliexpress for some time now, and devices like the Orange Pi and similar have existed for years.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Introduced in 2014, the Pi gained the familiar 40-pin GPIO header and 512MB of RAM, yet it can hardly be called a ball of fire when compared to more modern hardware from the company.
Pi supremo Eben Upton was delighted with how things have gone so far and said in a statement: "The reaction that we have received is a reflection of the world-class team that we have assembled and the strength of the loyal community with whom we have grown.
“Welcoming new shareholders alongside our existing ones brings with it a great responsibility, and one that we accept willingly, as we continue on our mission to make high-performance, low-cost computing accessible to everyone.”
Some users have expressed mixed feelings about the IPO, noting that the money would be helpful for R&D and new projects, however, the flotation underlines the fact that the company is a business.
As for the future, Upton told The Register earlier this year that while he remains at the helm of the organization, it would continue to do interesting work and try to keep making money.
The Reg hopes this is the case, but think it’s fair to say that pleasing both the corporation’s customers and shareholders might end up being more challenging than obtaining a Raspberry Pi 5 at launch.
The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Now I’m glad I didn’t get plugged in to their ecosystem.
Garbage. They started this in order to provide very poor people the means to program and create things.
Booooooooooo!!! Boo I say!
I SAY BOO!!!
Lame
