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Comment by gaudat | Hacker News Reader

The F103 microcontroller on the blue pill is the epicenter of price hiking during the semiconductor shortage. I've seen prices upwards of 35 USD for each chip. It was more expensive to get one of these chip than to get a Raspberry Pi.

I think it is better to use the Nucleo series of evaluation boards from ST now as they have first party support from ST.

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I ordered a NUCLEO-G474RE directly from ST yesterday. I could only add one to the cart, whereas I wanted two. When I recently bought two NUCLEO-F334R8 I didn't encounter this.

So apparently there is limited stock, and someone else that wants one can get it despite me. That's fine; I'll go back later and get another. It's great to see at least one damn company thinking this way.

BTW, they're providing free shipping for a limited time!

You can purchase some of their boards via Mouser directly who is the one fulfilling orders on STs behalf.

Don't the Pis still go for 100 a pop or has that finally normalized now?

I just bought a 4G 4B for $75 Canadian. More expensive than before the pandemic, but not outrageous. Of course, once you add a case, PSU, cables, etc, you are over $100 again.

Prices started to fall during the last months, but they're still far from the pre-shortage years. It will be a slow process, and being the Pi produced by a single manufacturer, they could take more time compared to other similar products.

I can buy pill for $3 and nucleo for $50. I guess it depends on location, but for me nucleo is like a luxury item.

Jeez, I paid 1/3 of that for my black pills, and they're objectively better in every metric.

Those jumped up in price about the same time. Hell, I saw fly by night operations buying up black pill boards just to pull the SoCs off to sell as sketch second sourced chips.

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