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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

The most amazing thing about the Zero was that it was 5€

Even at 10€ it was tantalizing. Please, give us something in that price range.

> 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.

Is that a change in the valuation of the pi or of the dollar?

Covid shortages and RAMageddon changed the valuation.

The dollar had just over 30% inflation since the start of COVID. But not all prices increased equally, for anything with RAM or NAND they skyrocketed in the past year.

> Is that a change in the valuation of the pi or of the dollar?

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.

Got mine for circa $7 a few years back. Absolutely best tiny computer I ever had. It sips power, and is rock stable for me. Only one issue: it doesn’t reboot for some reason, it shutdowns. I can tolerate that for $7. Apart from that, I’m very happy with that tiny beast. Got three of them. And at that price, I’d buy 10 more and give them for free for friends, already setup with some services. I just hope they’d go really cheap at some point, once the bubble bursts or something.

Are they as well supported as the RPi? I heard software support was bad compared to the Raspberry Pis

Your best option is to look into Armbian (https://armbian.com/) for these, they do the Lord's work when it comes to making sure these alternatives aren't destined to be ewaste when vendors abandon them. I'd say Radxa are probably in 2nd place after Raspberry Pi when it comes to support, but Armbian still makes that a lot better.

They are two different things. You're not running a full blown Linux OS on the ESP32. But many of the simple projects people used the Pi for can be done with the ESP32.

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