Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
bret.dk
bret.dk
While people do often use pis to do things you could do with an esp32, an ESP32 cannot do the majority of things a Pi can do.
Personally I use ESP32s for GPIO to control things around the house and have one Raspberry Pi acting as a hub.
In some of the tinkering applications, RPis are shoehorned into the very operarional model that is followed by ESP32s.
ESP32s may be harder to debug but they allow us to remove a big chunk of the complexity that lies between our code and what we want the device to do.
I think your criticism is more in line with "they are not exactly the same as RPis". And that is fine.
I chose my wording very intentionally. My criticism is exactly what I said.
It’s like comparing a bicycle to a light duty farm truck.
Do you need a full blown Linux desktop to blink a led light? Or drive a servo? Or even have a HTTP server? No.
Microcenter sold it for $5, limited to 1 per customer. Additional ones were $15 each.
It was a wonderful time to live nearby.
A pi zero is to play with, an esp32 is so tiny, that it is more of a build for a single thing, and then set it and forget it doing that single thing.
You cant really stack more and more cool stuff onto it and keep building on it.
Then I just pull in all my components. The ones I use will get compiled, the ones I don’t won’t.
Mostly works fine. Eventually you will run out of NVRAM to save binaries on, but another esp-32 is like $3.
Blitz-scaling LLM for fictional future revenue assumes competing technology will remain immutable. It is a false premise with dire consequences for the credulous.
China is already filling the vacuum within the flash/ddr/cpu/gpu market, and quality/speed will rapidly improve with domestic use. We are already seeing blank label storage clones emerging in international markets. =3
Other datacenter prices aren't up 500%. CPUs, tape storage, mainboards, racks, cases, PSU, infiniband hardware, HVACs, all price stable.
But consumer grade RAM? Up 500%. USB disks? They're hundreds of dollars.
Also low density platter is up 2-300% as well. Don't tell me people are building out datacenters with 16tb spinning disks, I don't believe you.
It's companies that have price fixed doing it again.
Their EPS are up like 60x. Their stock is up like 10x and we're supposedly like "well I guess this thing you could sell for profit at $20 is now $960, cool"
And what's micron doing with it? $35 billion stock buy back. Alright. Asshole prices it is.
Prices of cheap 10 year old tech continues going up at crypto asshole speeds. Everyone should be insanely angry.
These prices aren't going to stop until either a non cartel player enters the market or there's a DOJ that's not just a bunch of kalshi and crypto scam bros.
We'll see what happens when everyone hears "black Friday? Nah, bro, prices are up another 20%, lol"
Micron made the mistake of letting the dog drive, and ultimately tied their brands fate to a dubious high-risk/high-reward market. The dram situation has already hit SSD/HDD, ram, and PC sales... as consumer dram chip supply chains are choked off by the hyper-scaling hardware investment loop demands.
"Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall." (proverb 16:18)
>Don't tell me people are building out data-centers with 16tb spinning disks
Inexpensive JBOD HDD storage is still around $25/TiB, and while higher than tape ($7/TiB) it remains viable. The dram cache chips on the HDD PCB are likely more expensive than the old hardware now.
Personally, I have gone with old 25GB BD-R ($21.50/TiB for Ridata disc) for archival storage. It is janky, but the lowest cost cold-backup solution at the moment for home-scale projects. The 7 year disc MTBF should push past the 2032 estimated hype-bubble supply chain DDoS.
BD-R are slow to burn/access, hard to auto-load, and not a viable option for LLM/bitcoin project folks. I thought the tech was EOL 10 years ago, and yet here we are. =3
Because in the EU whether it's amazon or AliExpress, the cheapest I can get one now would be 4,50 Euros a piece, and that's only if you buy them in bundles of two or more.
Or is it that the UK lacks the lunacy parcel taxes and duties of the EU so things are much cheaper over there?
https://www.reichelt.com/de/en/shop/product/esp32-c3_soc_wif...
But even paying 5-30€ for a devkit still seems insanely cheap to me; that's like several bars of chocolate at current prices, even kids can afford that (or make someone buy it for them).
Obviously, in the context of hobbyists at home, we were talking about the ESP32 SBCs, and not the bare solderable chips themselves.
>But even paying 5-30€ for a devkit still seems insanely cheap to me
Yeah but I wanted to know if the 1,50 price is realistic since it's quite a big difference, 200%+, between those two price ranges.
If price differences didn't matter for hobbyists, then Arduino wouldn't have been killed, and ESP32 taken over the world.
Clearly both people and businesses are highly price sensitive, especially in the current economy.
>that's like several bars of chocolate at current prices, even kids can afford that (or make someone buy it for them).
Needless whataboutism straying from my point, as with such line of reasoning, you can justify anything that's bad: "Getting punched in the balls isn't so bad, because you could always get cancer which is much worse."
Hopefully, it will put a downwards price pressure on middlemen/resellers, now that buying directly is prohibitively expensive.
Add 2€ to that for the new handling fee from 1st November onward.
They also seem to have no way to really tell item categories apart, so it's effectively a fee per single item. You can buy multiples and only get the extra charge once, however for example, if you order one ESP32-C3 and one ESP32-C6 from the same vendor, you will likely be hit with 2 * 6.05 even though technically they'd fall under the same item category.
EU doesn't care about hobbyists, it cares about protecting the interests of the monopolies of the major retailers who lobby the politicians, who disliked that people could order the same Chinese shit they sell at 100x markups, directly from China, and cutting them off as middle-men.
But don't worry, in their heads, this way we'll get to on-shore our HW/electronics manufacturing industry back. Any day now. I can already see the factories pumping out ESP32s "Made in the EU", popping up everywhere across the EU, creating jobs and a competitive electronics industry. Alarm clock buzzes
In November last year I could still buy them for €1.57 each.
A lot of things have changed since then: EU taxes and duties, AI-induces HW shortages and price hikes. For example RPI prices today are untenable compared to a year ago.
That's why I asked about the prices of today. Whatever people paid in the past, is not necessarily applicable anymore.
If you need an actual computer there are so many options along those lines now, and almost all of them are better than a Raspberry Pi in various aspects. Finally, if you just want to put some stuff on a screen then most TVs already have an operating system and a web browser on them, target that and you can get rid of the computer dangling off the back entirely.
Would be super cool if TVs (or monitors, that also have some brain and an OS running on a small SoC) could be flashed with an X terminal.
Even then, you can get a USB to GPIO adapter. I don’t use RPis much these days and it’s kind of a shame because RPi + Python usually has a quicker dev loop than C + esp-idf. I need 5 of some of them though, and I’m not buying a dozen RPis these days.
But I'd be more concerned about computing staying open in general - not only as open source but at least open and accessible standards, interfaces, open to individual development, open to tinkering.
I see a concentrated push from almost all sides to lock down any platform, lock the hardware and build black box devices, lock the software under layers of attestation and certifications, all in the name of "security". I use the quotes because I don't believe security is the top concern, or even a concern at all, it's about taking the control away from users.
For now the open-computing world is still bustling and accessible but the intention to curtail this is there, with technical or legal measures.
This isn't like precious real estate on HKI, technology pricing is supposed to be more capability for less money, as it has been for hundreds of years.
Even at 10€ it was tantalizing. Please, give us something in that price range.
A few years ago we could get our hands on a Orange Pi Zero, with wifi, Ethernet, and 512MB of RAM, for less than $10. I think I bought mine for slightly over $5.
Now they sell for a tad over $30. What a shame.
We now have the ESP32 line of microcontrollers. That should scratch some of the itches.
I believe that revenue maximization plays a role. So it's inflation in a way, but not the kind where bom costs are forwarded to consumers.
A Pi400 is a very capable 4GB ram Linux machine, working out of the box. I have a few, each doing a different job. I just ssh to them with a beefier machine plugged on LLMs tools, and it's really fun and exciting.
Then Mini pcs, you can get a good deal here and there, for a more capable machine with a little bit more flexibility.
ESP32s are also awesome and I have been playing with them but not as a replacement of these light linux servers.
Marietta's did not have any Pi400s for sale (I love mine, with its built in keyboard; it is my main Kali hackbox) but did have lots of Pi5 (4gb was ~$100 IIRC; 1gb was ~$40).
I've picked up two 7" touchscreens, which seemlessly integrate into any Pi project (mine are both now installed on Pi 3b+ PiHoles, to display realtime DNS traffic 24/7); if you buy the returned/open-box, each screen is less than $50 (no more fumbling for HDMI cables).
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Unrelated: the RTX5070Ti (purchased May 2026 for $999) is now $1449! The 5060 (purchased July 2026 for $329) is now $459; no 5090 in stock (of course).
This has been my hack for a while: eBay "NUC", reduce the price slider, select 'But it now' and get one with all internals included. But even that has now dried up.
An old Workstation I purchased for £400 2 years ago now sells for ~£1.5k. The old GPU [+] I purchased on Amazon for £45 now sells for £3k.
There is 100% a need for cheap Linux SBC's with enough compute to cause some trouble.
[+] Top top tip: For old GPU cards with old CUDA, just get <insert favourite LLM> to rewrite the CUDA stack for older CUDA. Fun times.
Frustratingly, many other SoMs and SBCs use this chip. I don't understand why there is no recall on this - in my opinion - trash product. It's an odd feeling to be the only one experiencing this. I am 100% confident this is a design flaw in the CYW43455. I've seen this also on a Pine64 CM4 compatible SoM, which has a completely different SoC. This is on both the official and custom carrier. Cypress, fix your shit!
I disagree; BT is several orders of magnitude more complex, since it includes many more layers than Wifi (which is really just a physical layer for carrying Ethernet).
Amazingly powerful hardware for the price these little things.
Just use a USB adapter with a decent antenna.
Or literally any $1-3 SPDT RF switch? >80% of which are directly optimized and advertised for wifi and bluetooth?
https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C47117600.html
Here's a capable switch for $0.07.
The output trace needs to be impedance-controlled, but it could be a regular GPIO, or an external antenna connector/footprint.
Every other desktop platform has had self-describing hardware with loadable drivers for 30 years now.
Why is it like this?
Having at least 1x1 802.11ac that's capable of working in the 5050 to 5900 MHz band will be a huge feature improvement. Such as to connect to a 'modern' AP running in an 80 MHz channel.
There's tons of environments where 2.4 GHz is a CSMA hell of noise and the performance in a single 20 MHz channel will always be crap, and ranges/real world distances between AP and pi will be very limited because of the extreme noise in the 2.4 band.
I do like the Pico series and it would be cool to have one of those with memory protection.
The ones I got are light blue colored (easy to identify in the cable drawer), very flexible, with solid smooth rubber connector housings.
They stopped making the lpddr2 dram that the old SoCs used a few years back, and now most of the stock has dried up.
The Pi 4 SoC used lpddr4, and I’m pretty sure they are still making it.
It's one of the few products I look at with awe and which makes me feel good about the tech industry.
I managed to build a WiFi temperature sensor (which can be substituted with any analog sensor) which streams its data to a web platform (I also built), encrypted over HTTPS (with CA certificate verification), using a $10 Raspberry PI Pico W; built in a single weekend. I can connect it to my phone's WiFi hotspot from anywhere and stream data to my web platform where it displays a realtime chart. $10.
The Pi5 is even slower than N100 cpu, which is low power mobile laptop cpu.
I remember programming ATMEL ATMEGA8s and being amazed as how much I could do with them, so to me, the fact that devices of that size can approach even half the clock speed of a cutting-edge computer, and have multiple cores, is mind-blowing.
If you're going after perf per watt, then sure the Pi will likely win. But not possible for raw performance if what you said is true about having a modern CPU with 5.5 Ghaz boost clock.
i'd understand using micro-usb on a $5 sbc, but now with themselves charging for accessories, especially on the rpi 5 with the $15 power supply, something's gotta give.
i appreciate the challenges with properly supporting a standard at a reasonable component cost. but in a sea of poorly designed usb-c, doing micro-usb otg for the new zero would be outright ridiculous if they go ahead with it.
the video out has similar grievances where a cheap usb-c dongle is better than adapting hdmi in niche, fragile ways. i hope the model a still allows using the bandwidth provided by the soc to still add ethernet and regular connectivity for those who would rather implement it themselves.
whether the focus is at commercial partners or still the foundation's core audience, i hope they stop nickel and diming on the simpler components going forward. tough times to make hardware as usual but i hope they keep on trucking with the releases.
I myself am guilty as hell of this, of carrying my own remixed software, juggling patches atop upstream, and feeling like getting it upstream would be far more work and labor (and ultimately like I don't really have the confidence to assert to upstream). Meanwhile upstream is screaming their heads off everywhere that they can't take it anymore, that they are not ok. It sucks that we have such amazing power, such competency, but our scaling & social functions aren't scaling into the godlike powers that are now on tap! Alas.
If not for the success of Raspberry Pi, Broadcom would have zero SBC presence today. Like many companies chasing the high volumes and high margins, they don't see the market value in a segment like this. Thus things like poor docs and weird blobs. Raspberry Pi is open to the degree it is despite Broadcom, not because of it.
Ironically, that Broadcom tie could have caused RPi to eventually lose ground to other SBCs - because the likes of Rockchip just deliver more bang for buck in SoC dept. Broadcom doesn't seem to be investing in staying competitive in the segment. So RPi's edge is just the ecosystem being more important than raw price/performance.
For now though, that's pretty much on hold, because SBC price tags are increasingly DRAM dominated instead.
Pine's Quartz64 has different peripherals attached but still afaik one of the best ways to track upstream support. It hasn't changed much since Linux 6.1 and I don't know if that's because there's nothing new or the page is just out of date. https://pine64.org/documentation/Quartz64/Development/
They did this with the Pi400 (keyboard added), maybe now faster pcie and external device support, faster networking, indicator LEDs, built in UPS, maybe even a built in SDR (both media players and hacking tools would benefit).
For who 'needs' it, USB-Ethernet dongles exist.