According to Pi Locator, there hasn't been an 8gb RasPi in USA since October 2022. Best to move on to another company that prioritizes retail rather than donation-commitments.
I do have a RasPi in use that runs some heavier software like a Hue bridge emulator written in Python (diyHue), and for some of my projects I now have that Pi do more intensive computation centrally and then just dispatch results to esp32s.
I'm currently building one of those refresh-once-a-day framed e-ink "newspaper on the wall" projects. In the picture frame I just have the panel, an IT8951 display controller and an esp32, all running off a LiPo pouch, mostly in deep sleep. The RSS scraping and pdflatex+ghostscript pipeline to produce the image is running on the central Pi in this.
A single Pi may be all you need if your projects live on a network!
If it's "on the wall", why isn't it powered by an ac adapter?
Time will tell, but I'm hoping for at least a couple of months on a 1100 mAh. Napkin calculations had me at 6-7 months.
It's e-ink, so I can shut down the entire display and controller after the refresh, and the ESP32 is in deep sleep until it wakes up on timer and performs a network fetch and display update, then back to sleep.
> If it's "on the wall", why isn't it powered by an ac adapter?
Effort :-) It's a picture frame on a wall, I don't want to have an externally visible cable going into it and burying a cable in the wall is more work than all the rest of it.
In practice this is unattainable, because batteries are not ideal, and there's quite some efficiency loss from e.g. voltage regulators. But you can realistically get to years of hibernation.
Of course the power draw is much higher if you e.g. need to permanently keep a WiFi connection open and can't sleep (there's lower-power alternatives to WiFi like ESP-NOW for some applications), but I just need a connection for a very short time to fetch a 1600x1200x4 image. And to power a full display refresh on the e-ink panel.
If you think about it, a Kindle or similar also runs for days to weeks off a single charge, and that has a lot more interaction and computation going on during use, a more powerful processor with higher power draw and it sleeps less deeply and for shorter time. My application is suitable to extend beyond that by a large factor.
Plans to get another, as some redundancy would be good and it strains transcoding video, but you can pile a surprising amount onto one.
13.3", the largest I could afford :-)
But I actually only watched the first 30 seconds and then got hooked on the idea. The impl is mine :-)
Down side is it just released, so the software support is still in its infancy. And it doesn't have wifi+bt built in, so you need to use a dongle or use up the NVME slot for adding that functionality.
Various kernel-devs on ActivityPub had some very very nasty things to say about rk3588 board stability. Different folk, on different boards. Maybe this time will be better, who knows, and maybe better drivers will improve things, but seeing such sad kernel devs has been demoralizing.
For some use cases they're great though, as long as you don't need specific features.
I did use a beefy usb-c power brick, rated for 40 watts to ensure it's never getting less power than it asks for.
So far I'd say it's at least as stable as my RPi, and doesn't have anything ugly like storage or network connected via USB.
As a router or small server for running DNS, PiHole, and related services I'd recommend one of the Rk3588 systems, I bought a NanoPi R6S. The 8gb flavor is $120, $140 with a nice metal case. It's pretty fast, I compared compiling rust and it was 6-7 times faster than a RPi4 8GB. Even has two 2.5gbe interfaces.
However progress has been made, various reports of it working, some progress, some accepted patches, some rejected. More info at:
https://forum.radxa.com/t/any-progress-with-mainline-linux-k...
Also: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/5bec43fe-ff81-bc68-...
I'm wondering if it was a real Sandisk.
Since I got about 10 at the same time it sucks: I'd have to individually test them before entrusting any of these with any data.