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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

#71

Post by colejohnson66 »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #38
jrockway wrote: post #18

I'm impressed with how fast people buy them out after stock availability is announced. A few months ago, I got a notification that the Pi 0 2 was back in stock, and I have my eye on a couple units for 3D printer projects. An hour after the email was sent, all 700 had been sold. (Adafruit's emails helpfully say how many they had when the email was sent, which is how I know how quickly they burned through the stock.)

The market must be trying to tell us that they're under-priced. People want cheap computers badly, and "cheap" might be as much as $200. I had a lot of trouble finding an x86_64 box for under $400 a couple years ago, and ended up settling for a no-name with a shitty firmware that wouldn't boot GRUB for half the distros I tried to install.

It’s not that they’re underpriced, but that there’s a chip shortage and scalpers are taking advantage of it.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#72

Post by Ao7bei3s »

bri3d wrote: post #56
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 st…

What you're missing is that it's not about compute, it's about fun. Pi's are fun, because Pi cluster's have _real_ hardware redundancy and real risk of hardware faults. Clusters of VM's are boring (what's the point of having a cluster then?), and NUCs are too expensive to buy three or five of. Clusters of real servers are even more expensive, and living room incompatible.

Energy efficiency does not matter: First, a Pi costs $5 per year in electricity. For the price of one NUC, you can buy the entire Pi cluster _and_ run it for years. Second, this is home use, not enterprise use. Don't assume the nodes are actually constantly utilized. The numbers are a lot less unfavorable for the Pi when you look at realistic workloads, by which I mean idle (~4W/Pi vs ~11W/NUC).

I object to calling it "running clusters for no reason". Hands-on experience, fun and motivation are perfectly valid reasons. And this is extremely cheap as far as specialized hardware goes. Please compare with professional training approaches (run 19" servers in lab, or rent EC2 instances), other hobbies (e.g. horseback riding), or professions (e.g. aviation).

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#74

Post by mmastrac »

alar44 wrote: post #70
cjcampbell wrote: post #34

I do appreciate the effort here; however, I suspect this is going to make it even harder to find affordable units due to how fast the scalpers scoop up any readily discoverable inventory. I’ve been struggling to come up with 35 for a class I teach in the March. I would typically have my students buy their own devices, but pivoted when I saw the writing on the wall. Until this tracker was published yesterday, the Pi H…

No one is scalping Pis. They simply aren't valuable enough to scalp. There is a massive electronics shortage, in case you haven't heard.

People are scalping anything with a name and a value. Unifi $40 cameras are being scalped for 2x.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#75

Post by gmiller123456 »

squarefoot wrote: post #67

The Raspberry Pi isn't the only board around. If you need something very specific then fine, but most software that runs on it, either has been already ported, or can be easily compiled to run on many other boards. Just spent less than 5 minutes and found loads of boards that run Linux out of the box. Most of the NanoPi at friendlyarm.com are in stock, so are most of the Pine64 boards at pine64.org; many H3 based Ora…

Not to mention you can often get a refurbished mini PC on Ebay cheaper than the higher end RPi's. I've seen a lot of people have switched to them for their projects. Only use a Pi now if you really need low power, small form factor, or GPIO pins. And often the GPIO case can be tackled with an esp8266 or something similar. The niche market the RPi and other SBCs used to fill is definitely shrinking.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#76

Post by jcun4128 »

squarefoot wrote: post #67

The Raspberry Pi isn't the only board around. If you need something very specific then fine, but most software that runs on it, either has been already ported, or can be easily compiled to run on many other boards. Just spent less than 5 minutes and found loads of boards that run Linux out of the box. Most of the NanoPi at friendlyarm.com are in stock, so are most of the Pine64 boards at pine64.org; many H3 based Ora…

I used to be into cheap computing, Toshiba Chromebook 2 has 4GB of ram, 1080P screen, can buy on eBay for like $40. I've put a Linux OS on it and was able to run a VM inside it ha.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#77

Post by stragies »

ectopod wrote: post #57
stragies wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The thing to do here is: Sort by rising price, note the SoC names, look them up on their respective "linux mainline kernel port progress page" (links below), and then look in the vendor sub-folders of the mainline linux Hardware compatibility list (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boo... /vendorname/) to look for the DTS of the ODM name of the board.

Then you'll need to just figure out a way to bootstrap-boot/install Debian bullseye (ideally with the 5.15 currently in backports) on that board. Just look on the Armbian site for instructions for devices with the same SoC for that.

I have several of each of these bought over the last few years running Bullseye:

Allwinner (sunxi): https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

Amlogic (meson): https://linux-meson.com/hardware.html#support-matrix

Rockchip: http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Status_Matrix

Similar pages can be found with "MySocName linux kernel mainline port progress" for other SoCs, if the board/family is worth considering.

Depending on your exact needs make sure to get a board with USB3, GE, (supported) Wifi/BT, (well(-ish)) supported GPU.

Just make sure, you get the final boot configuration right, or you'll start over ;)

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#78

Post by Terry_Roll »

cjcampbell wrote: post #34

I do appreciate the effort here; however, I suspect this is going to make it even harder to find affordable units due to how fast the scalpers scoop up any readily discoverable inventory. I’ve been struggling to come up with 35 for a class I teach in the March. I would typically have my students buy their own devices, but pivoted when I saw the writing on the wall. Until this tracker was published yesterday, the Pi H…

If you are really struggling to get a job lot, the link below may be an option. Its something which could become a lunchtime/after school club/activity to get them fixed quickly but it can also help your students learn about repairing stuff because the Right to Repair is now a thing in the US, UK & EU so becoming familiar with repairing circuit boards will be a life skill, if not a hackers life skill. :-)

https://blog.jmdawson.co.uk/i-bought-200-raspberry-pi-model-...

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#79

Post by mattl »

spicybright wrote: post #54
34679 wrote: post #2

If you live near a Micro Center, they always seem to have them in stock. They sell them in-store only.

Went to the boston one 3 times in the past month. Didn't have any kind of Pi there.

Did you ask anyone? I’ve found they often don’t have stuff out but do have it in the back.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#80

Post by [deleted] »

cjcampbell wrote: post #34

I do appreciate the effort here; however, I suspect this is going to make it even harder to find affordable units due to how fast the scalpers scoop up any readily discoverable inventory. I’ve been struggling to come up with 35 for a class I teach in the March. I would typically have my students buy their own devices, but pivoted when I saw the writing on the wall. Until this tracker was published yesterday, the Pi H…

[deleted]
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