Been looking for RPI4 CMs for ages now and they’ve been sold out for as long as I can remember. Same with full size RPI4s and some Odroids. Is this just the new normal or are SBCs and CMs going to show up on the market again at some point?
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RPi’s and RPi compatibles got co-opted by a huge number of commercial and industrial control systems companies being used for cheap full-fat embedded systems that needed more than a simple microcontroller, but where industrial PLC’s were overkill or not sourcable. Everything they produce, which is not a lot given covid supply chain whiplash, has now been going towards those customer’s contracts and fuck the little guy consumer they were meant for.
If you want to get into the SBC ecosystem leave rpi in the dust, they’re dead to the enthusiasts and won’t be coming back. There are much better options. See Linus tech tips video on them.
They aren’t even great platforms anymore in comparison.
Other SBCs are cheaper, more smartly designed, and have more features (emmc, pcie, etc)
The big thing RPI have going for them is that they are the standard and all the OS/software/etc end up being super turnkey
In their defence, the pi was never intended to be a powerhouse. Their focus was on getting good software support for a low cost system. This provided a stable foundation that built that turnkey reliability.
A lot of the other board providers have a habit of just creating a powerful little board, and throwing it out there to fend for itself. This is great for competent geeks, but less good for those still learning.
Meh, I don’t know if they need defense. It’s just kind of how it is.
They got big and popular and that means momentum. Momentum is good for adoption and momentum is good for support, but it’s not great for huge jumps in technological sophistication.
I still LOVE the 2040, pico, etc, but there are just better options when you go bigger than that.
The Potato, Rock Pis.
This creator is great for when you want to SBC shop
The raspberry pi was never meant to be a power house. It’s whole goal was to make support and learning easy. A few, very well maintained models, with the same core chips. The last bit is the cause of the shortage. They can’t easily redesign without fragmenting the support base. That is completely against their ethos.
I’ve also found, once you hit a Pi’s limit, that it’s best to go to something more specialist. My go-to options are NUCs for general computing, or the Nvidia Jetson series, for portable brute power. Anything that saturates a pi will quickly saturate the smaller SBCs soon after, as well. They suffer from many of the same bottlenecks.
Any recommendations in the RPi price range?
Look at the Libre Computer boards. I got a Le Potato for 35usd last year and it’s been rock solid. Seems to be about the same performance as a RBP 3B.
Finally someone mentions a product name. I am so sick of these “uh duuuh, there are better alternatives out there, hurhur” commenters who name not a single one.
I’d recommend one if I had tried any of them. The only one I’ve bought is the orange pi 5 which runs significantly higher than the basic RPi $35 and figured was outside the power envelope OP really needed.
Go check out ExplainingComputers on youtube.
https://www.explainingcomputers.com/sbc.html
He basically goes over every SBC possible. The good ones now are the Rock Pis and the Potato series
Thanks! I’ll check it out.
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See Linus tech tips video on them.
See Jeff Geerling’s fab tour video on them instead.
Gotcha. I figured I’d try the RPI this time around since I had such a terrible time with Odroid’s C1 (or C2? It’s been 6+ years).
I’m not tied to the RPI at all, but ameridroid seems to be out of stock of everything low cost and low power with a decent amount of RAM (eg 4GB+).
Have you ever checked out OrangePi? I was considering them before picking up a jetson nano. It’s crazy to think that a rpi4b is going for the same price from resellers as a jetson with cuda and tenserflow support.
Over heard of it but haven’t seen them. The other piece I was looking for was CMs for the Trying Pi that I got. It’s been sitting in a box ever since I got it because … no compute modules anywhere.
Can you provide the link for the LTT video, please?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJvCVw1yONQ
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=uJvCVw1yONQ
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Thank you
Supply and demand, pandemic, chip shortage, scalpers. That pretty much covers it.
These days you can find some kinda NUCS which are way more powerful and customisable for not a lot more than a fully fledged RPI4 with SD card and PSU
At least until the NUCs run out, now that Intel’s discontinuing them
There’s a lot of used mini PCs from Dell, HP, Lenovo that go for cheap on ebay. Those are a good alternative.
These are my go to. I think between rasp pi and the likes of those, Intel nucs and these, these are the best option by far
That’s why I added the “kinda”. There are a lot of small AMD boxes that can do a lot with those Ryzen.
Those small AMD boxes are great. I set up 3 MSI ones as Kodi/LibreELEC media boxes and they work very well, stay cool and quiet while having plenty of horsepower for 4k.
I don’t get why people want these for self-hosting. They’re meant for GPIO and automation control. They’re massively underpowered.
Just use an actual SBC and leave these for electronics.
Underpowered is probably the reason, they’re small and really low powered. A pi could be a 1/10th the power consumption of an x86 computer, and thus less noise and heat.
Back in 2016 or so you could get a RaspberryPi 3 for $35. Add a $5 power supply, $5 SD card and $10 case (or 3d print your own) and you’ve got a nice little piece of hardware for running a tiny project at home for ~$50. More than enough for hosting some simple web services, backup software or something like Home Assistant.
Plus it was popular (which makes it even more popular). It’s always been very easy to find guides written specifically for the hardware, despite it’s limitations.
I think the value proposition has been dropping steadily though. They cost more, are hard to find and there are now a lot more competing SBCs on the market. RaspberryPi still has name recognition though, for now.
They’re great for low strength, dedicated platforms instead of using something with more muscle like a NUC, also where a VM or container can’t be used.
Out of curiosity, what are some use cases that would fit this criteria? VMs and containers are very capable and it’s much easier to debug a failed VM than a failed piece of hardware.
My pending or existing projects.
A software defined radio server. Lives up top of an antenna mast running off PoE with an RTL tuner connected.
ADSB receiver, similar to above, but on a fixed frequency.
The above 2 could be virtualised in theory, but there is an advantage in having the cable to the antenna short and thus the sbcs live up antenna masts in an enclosure.
MMDVM hotspot for ham radio (this might not count as it HAS TO use the gpio pins on the pi, this can’t be visualised even with a USB port passed through.
As an audio server that would bitstream 24bit/96kHz to an amp.
Primarily the external postgresql db for my k3s cluster.
I use mine to run pihole and an always-on syncthing client. Way more power-efficient than x86.
I have one behind my TV that controls LED lights, although that may count as electronics. I’ve used PIs many times for when I just need a cheap computer doing computery things such as playing audio from spotify out of a speaker. They’re small enough to fit pretty much anywhere with the help of some velcro.
For one they make terrific 1Gbps routers with SQM. The Pi 4 has a pretty capable CPU.
Not to steal your post but I have had the same issue and my concern is always on OS support since some of the alternative boards I have tried in the past were stuck on custom kernels or old OS versions, has anyone had better luck these days? It has been a few years since I have tried any though.
Also, if you aren’t familiar with it this website has a bunch of real time inventory listings for the various Pi models.
Yeah I think that was another huge complain I had when I started out with an off brand SBC (Odroid C1). I think you had to do stage things to get a kernel to work and to be honest, my days of compiling kernels went out with the 90s. I remember reading years ago that the RPi had kernel integration with mainline oses like Ubuntu, so I wanted to give that a try as a dedicated key store machine and some other stuff.
I’ve got two clusters of nucs currently so they aren’t exactly foreign to me. Just wanted to find something cheaper and lighter to do some dedicated db work on. Sounds like I’ll just get another i5 NUC off eBay.
Yep that was exactly my thought process haha. For what it’s worth, raspian is pretty good and Ubuntu 22.04 works great on the PI4, I have 4 or 5 around here and they have been awesome.
Now I am curious though, what are you going to use for the key store? That is one of the things on my list to set up pretty soon here as well and I was going to put it on a pi myself. Also, if you haven’t seen this thing or this thing? They are pretty neat and I was going to get one just for the novelty haha.
Raspberry Pi is based on smart phone chips, very specific chips from one manufacturer. Raspberry Pi Foundation is not the main customer for this manufacturer and chips used for Raspberry Pi are not their only product – and now, during the big ‘chip shortages’ and supply chain problems other customers and other chips are given priority. There are no (or not enough) new chips for Raspberry Pis so there are no new Raspberries, so availability is dropping and prices are soaring.
I guess the same is true for most other SBCs.
For my hobby projects I switched to Raspberry Pi Pico. It is not a SBC, you won’t run Linux on that, but it is a very capable microcontroller board which is enough for my needs. It is way cheaper much more available. And I won’t look back – it occurred to me that things are much simpler when there is no whole OS on my devices and everything the device does is in my own code.
There are no problems with Pico availability, as it is based on a simpler, custom chip, designed by Raspberry Pi Foundation and manufactured for Raspberry Pi Foundation – they are no longer dependent on a single supplier.
Still the same situation, high demand, low production capacity, part shortages. Try finding an alternative SBC.
Personally I really like the BeagleBone black (https://beagleboard.org/black), because it has integrated flash (no more rummaging for a micro SD card), and lets you ssh over USB. (no more debugging network connectivity, or searching for a unused monitor). It still can boot from a micro SD or USB drive, so if the flash breaks (or gets bricked) it’s easy fixable. The best part is no USB Mini-B connectors that break after ten uses. (Those things are cancer, they are absolutely awful and everywhere)
One thing to be aware of with them is the lack of on board WiFi, so if you need that make sure to get a USB WiFi radio.
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Take a look at Pine64 Quartz64 boards as a decent alternative
Take a look at LibreComputing’s RPi clones on Amazon.
Cool recommendation! I just bought one!
I am hoping with all hope that it will let me replace my Roku for streaming.
As great as the functionality of the Roku is, the constant advertising makes me loath this thing. I do not want it anymore.
Yes. I bought a libre pi to use as a backup DNS. Besides the minor tweaks, it’s been running perfectly. Also only ~€75 for the libre+case+SD card combo.
I’m looking for SBCs which can accept 2 SD cards, one for the OS and another to run k3s. Know anything?
I was under the impression that it’s mostly Raspberry Pi stuff out of stock nowadays, and similar boards from Odroid and Orange Pi are easier to find? I see both of those in stock at Amazon right now, though I don’t know the exact models you want.
For a while there Adafruit was stocking pi4bs every business day at around 11am est, was able to get one by camping it at that time. Make an account first and add your address and payment
But that was a few months back I don’t know the situation now
Le Potato aka Libre Computer is still on Amazon in the US for $35.
Assuming you are in the US linkEdit: at the time of posting, the above store was in stock. They go fast
redacted
Last month it was hard to find these in India, but since few days RPIs are back in stock, got a couple of Pi4s (75$ each) and Zero 2 Ws (20$ each) for myself. Checked now, they are still in stock.
which site did you use to purchase those?
Bought RPi 4Bs (4GB) from thingbits and Zero 2 Ws from silverlineelectronics
