Yeah its really too bad. I used to love the company but now I just don't see them making things for hobbies. Anyone know of some good alternatives? Ive heard good things about lepotato?
I had so many ideas for things we could use these for that completely revolutionize what is now a terrible user experience. No idea how to implement on these ideas, but it's a start I guess.
Yeah but most rpi projects don't need a powerful alternative. I don't need a full computer to run octoprint... But it's still too hard and pricy to get a RPi
They were never about hobbies. We were a niche that they were happy to have, but they never cared. Origionally it was about education (which has a large overlap with hobbies so they served well).
My guess is that I tried 6 or more OSes on it. Like 2 would run at all, and in every case there kept being a lot of issues. It felt like it was hardware no one cares about supporting except one dude who made a version of Ubuntu for it. The whole damned experience was janky AF.
Got a RPi 5 and was able to get Arch running on it and it feels faster despite being objectively slower than the OPi
I sank a ton of time trying to get several OSes running on it, including that one, with almost no luck. Out of the few that even did run, there were always piles of issues. You assumed I only meant the official OSes but I didn't.
I have been using Odroid boards for many years. I currently have 3 C4 boards and 1 older C1 board. My kids use them as their computer in their rooms. Hardkernel is the company behind the boards, they also provided the official Home assistant blue devices that came pre installed with HASS.
The pandemic shortage marked the end of the RPi as a hobbyist board. All the stock when to companies, and every hobbyist shop jacked the prices, and scalpers even more.
A moment of silence for the company that once connected hobbyists with affordable hardware. It was never perfect, but the profound impact on makers and industry is undeniable.
I will remember you for what you once were, not what you came to be.
That's going to be a fun way to learn pod tolerances and affinities. Although... it's also a great way to play around with multiarch clusters without accidentally burning a hole in your wallet from AWS/GCP usage.
There are, and I think the only real difference has been the community support. The community was behind the original pi and the guides, images and support show that, and it continues to this day.
If this becomes "enshittified" then communities will grow around the alternatives, it's likely there will be an overall winner (or winners per class) and we'll move on. The device itself wasn't ever the whole story.
If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.
I think a bunch of others gained some footing in the market when Raspberry Pi had supply chain issues during/after COVID. When I last shopped for a Pi, I saw a ton of other options.
Not the same form factor and around twice the price, erying es intel motherboards are a steal at their current price. You do need RAM / Storage / ATX PSU they end up a much more performant' piece of hardware.
The Q1J2 (20 threads) board I have despite it being an ES chip has given me no issues. Running most of my home services on the board with a coral nvme m.2 + nvme + sata storage. Can even do dual ethernet via the a+e m.2 and add-in more sata storage via m.2 to 6x sata board.
I've got a pi somewhere in the mounds of boards at home, but would rather spin up another container / pod / nspawn on my erying board vs go through the motions of setting up a pi.
Nope, it has been ongoing since 2013. From Adobe stopping physical sales of Creative Suite, to the Xbox One being announced, to Apple flattening iOS to the point of it looking like ass, the enshittification has started at this point in time. And their excuse was to be "more modern", my ass.
The new ones are power hungry expensive monsters anyway. There are cheaper clones out there and I had pretty much decided never to pay for the gucci brand anymore.
The last project I did with one was build a moon and tide clock - all written in python with a motor controller, external display and individually addressable led lighting.
They’re also great as diy audio streaming devices for whole home audio.
I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.
Pi Picos (which are notably microcontrollers and not computers) have had clones for like $2 on Aliexpress for some time now, and devices like the Orange Pi and similar have existed for years.
The RK3588 is pretty nifty, and is the first Mali GPU (610) where ARM themselves have contributed the firmware upstream and have helped with Collabora with Panfrost development
Bleeding edge, still, but kernel 6.10 and Mesa 24.1 have GPU support
The 5 is already somewhat enshittified. The Non Standard USB power that makes you buy a propietary PS is one example (which I found out after buying one for my son).
I agree. Pi5 apparently uses 5v@5A max, which is outside the usbc-pd specs. Not sure why they didnt go for usbc-9v in and use onboard components to convert the power to something lower for cpu ( which i assume it already does from 5v )
The end of a beautiful era - hats off for all the folks who made the pi what it is, the folks who will now be forced to make us sorrowful for what it will become.
For months it was impossible for me to get any Pis at MSRP and then my employer suddenly bought 30 of them to use for signage around the office. That's when I knew the non-profit hobbyist/enthusiast org was gone.
I'm not worried about it though. In the meantime a lot of other stellar SBCs have emerged on the market.
Honestly I still haven't had a chance to try them out myself so I can't make a specific recommendation but that market has been exploding recently. I have a sort of nice problem where people keep gifting me their Raspberry Pi's once they aren't sure what to do with them so I keep accumulating them without trying.
That being said, the big ones I've had my eye on lately are things like the Odroid N2+, the Jetson Nano, the Rock Pi or the Banana Pi. Some of these cater more towards being integrated into projects that need a lot of GPIO, others are focused on just being a low cost low power headless server or thin client.
The SBC market seems healthy enough that by the time I need another SBC I'll have a lot of options. Biggest loss is just that having one extremely popular hobbyist board made it really easy to find solutions to issues in the community and now there is just a lot more variety out there.
You couldn't buy anything in retail because of scalpers. British shops decided to stop scalpers, so would only sell to existing customers who bought Pis before shortages. So, for example, I had no issues getting 3 more Pis. But if you would make a brand new account you'd see them out of stock permanently. This system worked like a charm! But they should've done it earlier.
Raspberry Pi Holdings has always been a for-profit company. This isn't some sort of new news with them going public.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a separate organization that has not gone public and continues to operate as a nonprofit. In fact, the IPO was structured to raise some funds for the foundation's global impact fund.
I am not saying that the IPO is a good thing, in fact I'm pretty certain it isn't, but it's worth knowing that Raspberry Pi is two different organizations with two different missions.
