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It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#51

Post by NoPicklez »

ycmjs wrote: post #35

This reminds me of trying to buy a graphics card last year.

I'm still amazed that I managed to get a EVGA 3080 in December 2020 (Australia).

I paid around $200 more than RRP at the time, I remember I got slandered online for doing it. To think that even now in 2022 you'd have to pay approx $500 more than what I paid and still struggle to find one is just ridiculous.

It even amazes me that people can't find PS5's. I've been around for a fair share of major console releases but this is mindblowing.

Sorry, off topic a bit.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#52

Post by montecarl »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #40
amanzi wrote: post #24

This site doesn't seem to take bundles into account. I just had a look at The PiHut and they have some Pi 4 devices available if you're happy getting them as part of a bundle (e.g. case, power supply, etc). The rpilocator website is currently showing The Pihut as being out of stock of all Pi 4 devices.

This is a trick/scam often practiced by retailers of any product where demand is higher than supply. For example if you want to buy the new XBox right now, it's relatively easily available when bundled with a lot of pricey accessories, but essentially impossible to buy on its own. Do not reward the greed of retailers who do this.

How is this greed? The alternative is that they will be out of stock and only sold by scalpers. I've needed raspberry pis for work and if some people were not selling them at 2x their MSRP then I wouldn't have been able to find one quickly.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#53

Post by bri3d »

amelius wrote: post #31
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An HP Thin Client might be nicer in some ways (x86 instead of ARM, say) but the lack of GPIO wouldn't make them a replacement for some RPi projects (and I haven't ever tried to install Debian or Ubuntu on one, not sure how unusual the hardware is).

> but the lack of GPIO It's easy to hack a GPIO together using the USB interface or I2C interface that's inside every HDMI connector.

On-SoC based GPIO driven by register access is pretty dramatically different from GPIO driven over a bus in terms of timing.

Also you need a microcontroller at the other end of the USB or I2C. Which means... you need a microcontroller anyway?

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#56

Post by bri3d »

globular-toast wrote: post #20

It's a shame that so many are simply wasted. Lots of people bought multiple units in the past to run toy clusters for no reason. I myself have a Pico I got free with the magazine that I've yet to use. There must be thousands gathering dust that people could make use of. Edit: In fact, if anyone does want to play with setting up a cluster (like for kubernetes or something) you can do it easily with VMs. Two great opti…

This, it baffles me to no end that people insist on using Raspberry Pis, which are almost comically slow and not really that energy efficient, to run things like K8s scheduled containers, sometimes even buying $200 backplane boards to do so, which also defeats almost any sort of price advantage.

There has to be something about the Pi that drives this, but I can't figure out what it is. Yes, Raspbian is easy to get start with, but no easier or harder than booting a VM locally or on the cloud with an image. Yes, Pis are small, quiet, and low power, but so are NUCs. Sure they're cheap, but once you buy 4 Pis and some fancy backplane manager, you could have easily gotten a NUC or a used PC instead.

Please just buy a real computer!

Pis are exceptionally good for a lot of real use cases where the form factor, GPIO capabilities, or pre-approved module certifications are essential. Not being able to get them because of "cluster" use is annoying.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#57

Post by ectopod »

stragies wrote: post #39
Spooky23 wrote: post #19

The Target near me has them in stock from time to time. For projects, try HP thin clients on eBay.

Previous-Gen QuadCore ARM TV boxes are available in masses for 30EUros on European Amazon. Most of them have close-to-mainline, or even mainline kernels available to boot/install a normal debian bullseye. Somewhat reduced IO interfaces, a bit less RAM, maybe a bit less singlethread perf, but SPI, I2c, USB, HDMI and others are available. Buy 5 for the price of one RPI-SET.

Can you recommend one?

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#59

Post by ThatPlayer »

greggsy wrote: post #9
SloopJon wrote: post #3

I looked online the other day for an 8 GB Pi 4, and could not find any, including at Microcenter (which claims to show store availability). I also looked to see whether the Jetson Xavier AGX is available. This used to go for $700, but I didn't really need it then. Now that I could use it, it's selling for at least twice as much.

The 8gb pi4 has been OOS across the market for a few months, which leads me to believe that memory modules are the main bottleneck. The price increase of the Xavier (which come with 32 or 64gb memory onboard), seems to support this.

Another point of data is that they brought back the 1GB pi4, and increased the prices of the other pi4s

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-shortages-and-...

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