CEO: Raspberry Pi stock to hit 1M units monthly, starting in July | Hacker News Reader

CEO: Raspberry Pi stock to hit 1M units monthly, starting in July

arstechnica.com

58 pointssohkamyung95 comments

A million unit for me to run twice and then collect dust in that universal drawer

If you're serious, there's plenty of people that would buy them off you at higher than retail price.

"But you can't sell it because you might need it again and not be able to find one!" ~ my brain re: the RPi 4 in my utility closet

Setup pi-hole and have an ad free network for all devices in your home. It's easy enough to setup and doesn't require any maintenance at all.

Had bad experience blocking some sites from working completely. Especially social media. It was years ago how are things now?

There will always be a few websites whose main engineering thrust is making sure you, the user, are looking at their advertising.

> Especially social media

Sounds like it’s working as intended!

They should refurbish old, unused Pis for resale. It benefits the community by offering affordable options and promotes sustainability. The organization can generate revenue and attract new enthusiasts. Let's give those forgotten Pis a new life

Alternatively put them on ebay for 0.99 and let people be happy with their findings.

When they are closer to what they used to cost they're useful for things like Tailscale exit nodes and Pi-Holes.

I have never used a pi, but I have at least 4 of them in by basement.

Microbit is another story, great to use with kids. I think world wide they have sold 25 million units.

If you are from the US and they're 4/8GB, I can rid you of them. I'm looking for them to build a cluster no scalping intentions.

I really hope this is true, I have a display in my home I have been wanting to setup for close to a year (the monitor is even already mounted) but I just did not want to support scalpers.

If within a couple months I can buy a new PI for retail that would be great.

Can't wait to fill the dead sea with more salt from the scalpers tears.

Yes please. Flood the market, so that other better SBCs also have to compete on price again. :)

I’ve been trying to buy a CM4 to run Home Assistant, while in parallel, trying to buy a house. Buying a house was easier, and only slightly more expensive than rPi scalper prices :D

If the goal is to run Home Assistant, a secondhand thin client like HP T620 is more than enough and can be bought for like $30.

The Rockchip 3588-based Orange Pi 5, 5b and 5+ are readily available. The MSRP is a little higher than RPi4 but they have significantly more CPU/GPU power and I/O. The new 5+ looks to be a viable desktop replacement with m.2 NVME, dual 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, dual HDMI 2.1 and USB 3.1.

Significantly more = 6-8 times the compiling performance. I was quite impressed as how fast the RK3588 is.

But are they running mainstream kernel or some weird patched one which means at one point they will stop providing updates?

nvm I just saw it supports debian

Not mainline yet.

It's running a weird unsupported kernel, though iirc mainline 6.3 mostly works now (just don't expect hardware video encode or decode to work anytime soon, if ever on a rockchip soc running Linux)

Why not? Video decode acceleration works fine in mainline Linux on other Rockchip SoCs. This one will likely not be very different.

And there's already AV1 decoder driver posted for inclusion mainline (so the work is happening):

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/ab2b13e31e1af52ae52b0678b0abd5d...

> The MSRP is a little higher than RPi4

If by a little you mean about twice. I'm sure the Orange Pi 5 is a lot more powerful, but it's reflected in the price.

I have been running Armbian on a 5 as home server for some time with a ton of services. It has performed impressively well with 2TB NVME and additional 8TB of drives I have connected. It is a relatively powerful home server with low cost, power, and price.

I switched to Intel NUCs. Some of the older models can be really cheap

Any downsides to these compared to a Pi? Heating, noise, power consumption?

It’s going to be all of those but especially power consumption and form factor. I’d be interested to see someone log how much power they use on idle/serving simple k8s tasks, etc.

Plus, they’re just not well built if you have to open them up for any reason. Do-able, but not confidence instilling.

Plus, at the scale enterprise probably uses NUCs they should sell second hand at 50-100$. But of course nowadays that gets 2xed by some middle man. At that point, it’s not such a compelling case to buy something they probably kept booted 24/7 for 5 years.

Or buy one of these RPis, accept the salt of that deal, but at least it’s actually new.

That's basically my impression. The Pi has been notoriously pricey these past few years, but computing-power-per-dollar is far from the only consideration when picking an alternative.

I think it really mostly comes down to power consumption - you can get a brand new mini PC with something like a N5095 celeron for not much more than $100. And it's also the pi ecosystem vs the x86 ecosystem.

You can probably get everything you need working on x86 in my experience. The Pi still needs some binaries. Granted, I’m thankful and we all benefit from the blob, but still.

No GPIO header ofc, unless they make ones with coprocessors, like the Lattepanda.

I'd add reliability and operating system support to that list.

I'd be nice to see a Raspberry Pi 5 upgrade sometime soon too

It'll be nice to be able to buy them again hopefully. I'm not paying scalpers $145 for a Pi 4.

In 2023 they are just so slow now when there’s better arm products on the market :/

Which ones at the $50-$75 price point?

Edit: Thanks for all the responses, got some good options!

This, for example: https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...

Honestly the major sticking point of Pis for me is that their microSD cards are wholly unsuitable for anything that may lose power or requires long term reliability. Most equivalent manufacturers such as the one above ship with eMMC, which won't get corrupted by sudden power cycles.

At that price point why not just buy an Intel based single board computer?

Which one?

Do you have an example of an x86 SBC with similar or better price, processing power and power consumption? I tried to find one a while back, but couldn't really find anything suitable, they mostly seem to be in the $100-$150 range.

Atomic Pi Dev board kit is $50 on Amazon. Also doesn't suffer from this weird trend that computers should only have USB power as an option.

My real point is once you are out of that "it's a cheap board I can get for $30" type territory it makes more sense to get something substantial.

In an industrial application you're likely to be using the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, which has an eMMC option. You also have the option of using an industrial SD card with one of the other Pis.

If you're using a Pi at home and need greater reliability, a quality portable SSD [0] will get you pretty far. The systems I run that way have always been quite fast and reliable.

(don't use an SATA to USB adapter if you can help it, they tend to be flaky and it's a very strange place in a home system to try and save a few bucks, even though a lot of people do it)

[0] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable...

I've had 0 issues with pis (system of 50-ish pis running sensors, signage and video running 24x7 for 2+ and 3+ years) that are running on the industrial SD cards and booting into overlay filesystem.

What's your preferred industrial SD card?

Sandisk industrial 16GB.

I was skeptical when I first tried them. I figured it would be too tempting a target for counterfeiters-- source the cheapest SDs available, screen the sandisk logo on them and sell on amazon for $12/each. Fingers crossed -- so far, so good.

I run a journaled filesystem on my pis and haven't had corruption issues so far

The Nanopi r5s is quite a bit slower than the rpi4.

Here is one designed to replace RPi in the 3D printer control board role.

https://www.amazon.com/BIGTREETECH-Adapter-Carrier-Control-R...

I can’t even get a pi4 at that price point…

Not everything needs massive amounts of speed. Most projects benefit the more from a good price, good ecosystem, and low power consumption.

I thought lack of "low power consumption" was a problem with Rpis from the beginning. No real power off. No suspend to RAM. etc.

Leading to awful hacks like these: https://blog.balena.io/enabling-deep-sleep-for-your-raspberr...

We replaced the pis un our work with other products but the software support is problematic compared with the pis.

Also, there are much more accessories, like thermal cases or cluster PCBs for the pi.

None of the "better" other products have even halfway passing software support. The developers release 1 old kernel with tons of bugs that boots on the board, and that's it.

I have a khadas. Use it for development. Not had any issues at all. It’s not laggy in ubuntu compared to pi4… more expensive tho but worth it.

This is the killer aspect of the RPi, that there are tons of well supported drop-in software solutions for it. Other boards can be made to work, but the RPi will just work.

The Todd Howard bar.

Yeah, frankly for a hacker or enthusiast this is probably not an issue, but if you're looking for something like PiHole or a small emulation box then the fact that the Pi is "standard" and has standard drop-in solutions is worth a non-trivial amount of money, even if the hardware is not as good as competitors.

What are they slow for?

BS. He gave a similar rosy outlook end of last year. Then apparently had their "worst quarter". Pi 4's are still nowhere to be found but apparently well stocked for "commercial customers"

It's never been that the supply was particularly low, just that the vast majority of them were going to large orders to be included in products. Much like the GPU vendors were selling directly to miners.

Of course its a lie. CEOs are being paid to lie, thats their main job. Eben has ZERO influence on whether Avago will increase the manufacturing rate of some obscure outdated SoC with only one client.

I recently hacked together a "parental control" filter (e.g. "block Roblox after 9PM) by way of PiHole and some shell scripts. As the name implies, these usually run on a RaspberryPi, which have been impossible to find.

I picked up an ODROID C4 from Ameridroid and have been really happy with it. It lacks WiFi, but it wasn't necessary for my purposes.

I'd love to be able to get Pi Zero W, but not enough to scour every third-party dealer's site hoping they're in stock.

Check rpilocator.com--the Zero W has been available in the U.S. for a week as I write this.

PiHole will run in a VM these days, and doesn't use many resources. For example, I have a copy running on a Pc Engines OpenBSD router.

The real time clock is busted inside the VM, but it's using an early version of their hypervisor; that might be fixed now. Other than that, it works fine.

What's the point, anymore? There are incredibly inexpensive Celeron-based SBCs on the market that vastly outperform the pi4 in any metric you can think of.

Unless there's a pi5 on the horizon with higher clock speeds, better memory bandwidth, better I/O, more bus lanes, etc, who the hell would want a pi anymore?

What would you recommend as an obvious "you'd have to be a fool to prefer a Pi 4 to this" Celeron-based SBC choice, and how much does it cost?

Beelink N5095 with 8GB RAM and a 256GB M.2 drive goes for $130 on Amazon. If you want just the board, the case is easy to strip off. The only reason not to do this is if you want GPIO pins, but USB->FTDI->Cheap Arduino board is an easy workaround to that.

The pi is dead.

For some people lack of GPIO, increased power usage with the need for active cooling, and a 40% price bump will be offset by the advantages of faster CPU, x86, and the storage. It feels more like something that will live adjacent to the Pi 4 rather than killing it, to be honest.

> If you want just the board, the case is easy to strip off.

On the contrary, I think I'd be worried running it without the case and cooling.

I just use my old android phones now.

I use Optiplexes and ThinkCentres

If you're not using the GPIO it's a dreadfully slow and power inefficient phone anyway.

Honestly I am surprised that the demand for Raspberry Pis is this high. Where are all these Pis going?

Home projects, I need a couple for home automation.

I use them for test systems at my job. Where formally we needed a whole dedicated PC or laptop, we can now just throw a $20 rpi at it with ease.

Projects like this too: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/cluster

They're amazingly powerful for the money. Prior to the shortages they were great for retro game emulation, little linux boxes for fun/kids/specific uses, home automation, whole-network ad filtering, etc etc.

That is incredibly niche usage. It doesn't come close to explaining why they have been basically absent from retailers for years(?).

All those niches add up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

Home Assistant, Adguard Home etc. Nice little device to run containers on.

>Where are all these Pis going?

Lots of commercial systems use them, for digital signage, and all kinds of automation in industrial, retail, basically they're in nearly every embedded device at this point.

It's hard to find a small to medium sized hardware/IoT company that doesn't ship commercial products with PIs in them.

Not all of these are currently active but here are the distinct Pi's in my house.

- PiHole

- Home Automation controller

- Camera / temp / humidity monitor for grow closet and at time 3d printer

- A 3d printer I used to have had a raspberry pi as it's board (I think, maybe it was a clone).

- I'm pretty sure my CNC machine uses a pi

- As another commenter mentioned, I used to have a Pi built into a NES for emulator purposes.

Also mobile robots, various industrial controllers, home media centres I guess?

My drawer.

Imagining a drawer made out of PCBs, in which you store hobby wood.

Maybe boards should all incorporate a standard slot-and-tab system to turn them into a building toy instead of ewaste.

I have a pi-hole, and old 1B that doesn't do anything currently but filled a bunch of projects over time, and a Pi Zero that I've played around with for a couple projects and might have a more permanent IoT project if I can get additional Pis. I have another project that sort of works on a Pi Zero, but really needs a Pi Zero 2 so it's not laggy.

Right now I'm an illogical state of mind due to the shortage. I want to preserve my unused Pi Zero so I can prototype projects, yet if I can't get additional Pis then what's the point of prototyping? I've ended up looking at alternatives and had a hard time getting many things to work on them, but the lack of Pis forces me to struggle with those problems.

We installed a three phase load shedding device for a school in January

It was just a Pi and relays

Tens of thousands of dollars

I have hardware out in the field deployed at breweries/pubs that have died over time and needed replacements. my own stock of pi3's is now depleted, and I've been looking for replacements daily.

What do you use them for, if you don’t mind me asking?

lighting and displays - the pi's work well because they have decent GPIO support and were easy and cheap to acquire when the original hardware was built.

they are overpowered for what they're doing, but usually rock solid for years at a time.

Home projects. I've got a few that I use as Airplay receivers, Calibre OPDS book server, automatic updates and builds on my static sites, Twitter bots, HomeAssistant etc.

Super handy for anything that needs to run in the background without much supervision.

Hoping the stock increases soon as I've got a bunch of old displays I want to turn into digital picture frames.

What kind of case do you put these in? Or do people run naked boards?

I have one pretending to be a grandfather clock (it used drive a servo that rang a physical chime via a little motor driver controlled by GPIO, but the servos would burn out every year or so, now instead cron just plays some .ogg files of a clock striking). But for straight-up servers, wouldn't a bunch of docker containers (or even some shell scripts and cron) cover many of those other uses? I tend to think of the Pi as a sort of 'physical container' that gets me a full OS (with networking, package mgmt etc.) which can be great if you only need one thing in one place, but I also have a little fanless NUC-alike running a bunch of containers.

SBitx ham radio transceiver. https://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v2/

My understanding is that the vast majority of them end up in products. Embedded in all kinds of systems. IoT, assembly lines, signs, lobby displays, interfacing with all kinds of dumb systems to get them an internet interface. $5 for a Pi-0/pi-0w is hard to beat on anything that ships less then many 10,000s of units.

Only a very small percentage are sent to hobbiest/makers. Much like how the GPU manufactures (or their distributors) sold directly to crypto miners.

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