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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I know you're not trolling but that comes up every.single.time. alternatives to RPi are mentioned. We get it: it's cheap. I can get a running Linux board for $30 so kiss off.

There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion. So there's no answer to that.

But I know what my time is worth and I'd rather spend $150-$200 more on a Beagle X-15 or Boundary Nitrogen or Toradex Colibri and get the documentation and schematics and all the source I need to make it do things like eMMC and PCIe. If I spent more than 2-3 hours on hacking chips into the board I've already lost.

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I've played around with a few other boards besides Pi, and I'm always let down by the kernel support. A lot of them are stuck on ancient kernels or you're at the mercy of their BSP drops.

The Beagles at least have mainline kernel support, but things like pine64 and odroid still rely on a lot of patches or binary blobs.

Thanks for pointing out the X-15, though.. I've not looked at Beagles since the Beaglebone Black. It looks like an impressive board with mainline kernel support.

The Allwinner A64 has nearly complete mainline kernel support at this point, hence the release of the PinePhone: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...

Well, for hobbyists just messing around on their own time, "just pay $200, your time should be worth more than that" isn't really a sensible answer.

If you're a software engineer with the skills to mess with low level interfaces like that, $200 doesn't seem that insane, especially since those are general purpose boards that can easily be repurposed. I mean of course I realize that for many people $200 is a lot of money but I'm willing to bet that for the average HNer it's really not that big of a deal.

Besides TFA's chip requires desoldering and resoldering an SMT chip from the RPi's tiny and densely populated motherboard, not exactly Soldering 101.

Moreover if you're really just starting with low level programming, want to mess with basic electronics and things like that then don't get into PCIe, actually don't even get into Linux. Just get a cheap-o ARM microcontroller board, a multimeter and a $10 saleae digital analyzer clone from ebay and play with that, you'll learn a lot more that way.

$200 isn't a big deal for something you really want, but at the margin, on projects that you don't even know you're going to bother finishing, it's the difference between being able to justify taking a punt on it and not.

That's why the Raspberry Pi is so popular.

I agree with everything you said about using cheap microcontrollers to experiment with basic electronics projects.

Not if you want to install such a computer in every single room of your house.

Or if you want to build a cluster, like this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78H-4KqVvrg

Yes, but for the cases where you don't need to do that, the Pi can blow it out of the water.

I have an STM32-based controller board next to me (I'm a firmware developer) and I had originally suggested that instead of us spinning up a custom board, we use a BeagleBone or RPi Compute Module and build out the I/O and take advantage of all the OSS out there. I got a lot of pushback that I wasn't willing to fight (I said it a couple years ago with the same results), but if we had gone that route, the entire project would have been done months ago. Same would have been true the first time I brought it up on that other project.

Sure the Pi's are cheap and attractive, but it's the ecosystem that provides the real value. And these days, with software usually being the main cost of the project, you can't beat OSS.

I recently did an embedded job where we essentially used a mkrzero as our dev board. It saved us a ton of time on writing the firmware, since we didn’t need to wait for and debug prototypes. And the final schematic took way less time as well, since we could reference the mkrzero for things that might require guessing what the datasheets actually require.

There’s a lot to be said for having a commercial product with multiple revisions to avoid painful guesswork.

The Rev4 I referred to in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23680157 used an OSHW board as a reference for a chip I had never used before and I was able to incorporate the Arduino library for it. Just brought the new hardware up yesterday. OSS/OSH saved me tons of time.

The RockPro64 has an x4 PCIe slot. The 2gb model is 60$ and the 4gb one is 80$. Add ~20$ for accessories and you have a nice little board that should be faster than the RPI and has more features.

If it is anything like the Rock64, it will also be unstable, negating much of the benefit.

I have one that's run well for a year. It's only been offline when I've powered it off myself.

Mine hard locks regularly requiring a power cycle. It is even worse with more recent kernels.

Rockchip's PCIe is kind of a joke, you can't use a GPU there because there's not enough BAR space. But yeah, you could run an NVMe drive or a big NIC, I guess.

Also, the heterogeneous 2xA72+4xA53 CPU setup is ehh.. :/ What's really cool about the RPi4 is that there's four A72 cores. And now 8GB RAM. And https://rpi4-uefi.dev.

I've put a 4-port SATA controller in mine and use it as a NAS. Haven't benchmarked it but it works well.

> There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion.

Can you elaborate on this? Who is subsidising the Pi, and why?

Broadcom. They get a lot of kickbacks from the British government, AFAIK.

Edit: Not sure why downvoted. Broadcom very much is able to write off a ton as donations to charity, since the rpi foundation is a British charity. They also get sweet heart deals from the UK based on that. The UK gets the ability to put a passable personal computer on every child's desk, like they've been attempting to do since the BBC micro days.

> Broadcom very much is able to write off a ton as donations to charity

If I donate $1000 dollars so that I can "write it off," do I come out ahead financially?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ

If you count your engineers' spare time as billable hours donated to charity, and then sell the chips to that charity at cost, but write off the profit as charitable donations to reduce your overall tax burden, you sure do. Particularly for chips that weren't going to be sold anyway (the original SoC was from a Roku like device that had been EoLed and Broadcom had been left with a surplus of the chips they didn't know what to do with).

Which I'm not counting as a negative. This is successful example of charitable giving where everyone wins.

Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case.

This is the whole reason why the rpi foundation is a charity, to allow these financial structures.

> Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case.

I'm not saying it isn't a real process. I'm saying it isn't magic. Reducing your taxable income by $1,000 doesn't mean you save $1,000.

I never said it did.

But marking your engineers' spare time as donated since your contract owns everything they produce anyway, and selling chips at cost and marking the profit as a donation when you were probably going to take a loss on them does in fact net you ahead.

My gut says these SoCs are being sold below cost.

IDK, even rpi4 is still on 28nm which is the cheapest process per gate right now. And they really have very few gates allthibgs considered. I could absolutely see somewhere between $5 and $10 at cost, not counting R&D.

Where are British schoolchildren getting these Pis? Mine aren’t. The school where my sister works isn’t giving them out, either.

The closest I’ve seen to what you describe was a BBC Microbit my son was given as part of holiday club but that was sponsored by Maxell, not the British government, Broadcom, or anyone else.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3435277/how-the-raspbe...

Also the Microbit was designed by BBC R&D with government grants. Maxell is just the distributor.

Disclaimer: I am a STEM Ambassador (volunteering position) in West Sussex, working with local schools and libraries on IT projects, including using the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi isn't a giveaway item and so schools need to make an investment in hardware or obtain sponsorship to kit out their STEM resources with them.

1M BBC micro:bits were distributed free to Yr 7 pupils as part of a project in 2016 - schools had to register/apply at the time, so if your school did not participate their pupils would not have received anything, however, as you have mentioned, other sponsorship also made units available.

Best have a word with your school's STEM/Technology people to see how they are supplementing your children's curriculum with technology resources.

Until you need to buy thousands of boards. And having a maintained software stack for a long time has a very high value in my humble opinion.

>> There's no other board in this range because the other chipmakers aren't subsidizing their boards or ecosystems in this fashion. So there's no answer to that.

So the answer is "No, there is no alternative in the same price range."

$200 for an ARM Board? No thanks.

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