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Comment by aequitas | Hacker News Reader

"There is no HDMI support, you’ll need to add some more chips (that are probably in a BGA package), but, hey, it’s only a dollar."

And a power supply, IO, RAM, ROM, board, etc. The BOM quickly adds up.

I don't know what the price of the RPi CPU is, but my guess is it's not far off $1 in bulk.

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Broadcom has a very high minimum order quantity. There's also an onerous license that won't allow you to use the Rpi software if you build your own broadcom board.

https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/blob/master/boot/LIC...

Also, you more or less need the binary blob with the license agreement that forbids use on non-Pi boards in order to boot that chip. It runs on an undocumented CPU architecture and initializes a whole bunch of undocumented but essential hardware. There's an open source replacement which is just barely capable of booting Linux and giving a serial console, but the developers basically gave up and recommended people use something like one of the Allwinner chips instead.

This was my thought, its cool, but you will still need to buy things for power management at a minimum.

Anyone have a drawing? Curious if it NEEDS capacitors to function.

It will do, almost every digital IC will require decoupling capacitors for stable operation.

You don't need to wear a seatbelt either. Sometimes thing go slightly less than perfectly though...

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