101–110 of 110 posts
> and an equally small, advanced silicon chipset. That's like the old cartoon joke: "Thinking quickly, Dave [the Barbarian] constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone." The RasPi is incidental to the complexity of the system. Methinks they only used that for the headline attention. Success!
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Raspberry Pi is a corporate endeavor as well. They also have employees, and a payroll to maintain. Seems a bit harsh to blame them for selling their products to the customers who are most able to pay for them, which enables them to stay in business. (Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay.)
> Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay. You're arguing for the parent comment with this. The "foundation" was intentioned as for hobbyists and people who wanted to learn while being affordable that's how it was sold to the general public. Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable". An analogy would be healthcare. Capitalism and affordable+for-many are…
Funny how Vodafone manages to write an entire article about a femtocell they built without using that word a single time.
This. Also calling a piece of hardware a 'network' sounds weird to me.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17190918 You're very wrong, that was not what it was for. Dr Upton says that will help the project grow much more quickly than previously thought. "We didn't realise how successful this was going to be," he said. "This means we can scale to volume. Now we can concentrate on teaching people to program." What a lie that turned out to be!
And yet the annals of history are littered with open source education efforts that failed, because they weren’t able to figure out a revenue model that was sustainable to their creators. Maybe this thread is just a lightning rod for a bunch of OSHW anger but there’s compounding good that comes from a huge customer like Vodafone buying a shitload of Pis. The major thing I can think of is higher volume for the Pi found…
Normally you'd be right. But apparently (the unsubstantiated rumor is that) Broadcom is pissed that RPi built a for profit company on top of the IP licenses Broadcom thought they were donating to a nonprofit and is stone walling RPi wrt getting larger orders than previously negotiated or working with them on an RPi5 and that's the major issue with the continuing stocking issues.
This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…
this makes me nervous to design anything substantial around an RP2040 with a Raspberry Pi at least you could port your application to any board that runs Linux just by moving the code over but if your project depends on the PIO subsystem in any way, you're locked in to buying their chips forever; you can't just take your code to another platform
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And yet the annals of history are littered with open source education efforts that failed, because they weren’t able to figure out a revenue model that was sustainable to their creators. Maybe this thread is just a lightning rod for a bunch of OSHW anger but there’s compounding good that comes from a huge customer like Vodafone buying a shitload of Pis. The major thing I can think of is higher volume for the Pi found…
> The major thing I can think of is higher volume for the Pi foundation, which means more negotiating power with their chip suppliers or price breaks at a certain ordering volume. Normally you'd be right. But apparently (the unsubstantiated rumor is that) Broadcom is pissed that RPi built a for profit company on top of the IP licenses Broadcom thought they were donating to a nonprofit and is stone walling RPi wrt get…
Seems like they’re cutting off their nose to spite their faces at this kind of volume, though.
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> Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable". This reveals a misunderstanding of the economics of both chipset vendors and electronics manufacturing. The more Pis that the foundation can make at one time, the cheaper their unit costs can be, by encouraging competition from suppliers and getting price breaks from chipset vendors. Large customers like Vodafone buying 10k or 100k is a huge advancement towa…
> In the long term, they’ll probably be able to build more Pis at higher quantities and cheaper unit prices. My retort is - then you misunderstand the gap between Android and iPhone. MediaTek+Qualcomm vs Apple [0] It's too simplistic to think just because you produce more you'll make more money. There's an absolute maximum in the pricing-volume curves. Even if you have to pay more for the chips, if you can simply cha…
I don't have enough info on historical pricing of RPis to say, but it certainly seems to benefit their stated mission of education (and unstated one of industrial SBC supplier) to have lower per-unit pricing at retail or wholesale.
Though I get the feeling I may be arguing in the face of a bunch of folks who just want to mob the Foundation for taking a course they don't personally agree with.
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You can bitch about RPIs or you can go support something else . Lots (9000+) of Beaglebone Blacks over here -> https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/BeagleBoard-by-Seeed-St... TI documentation is stellar (except the graphics--which nobody documents) unlike the RPi or any of it's clones. The chips are all available at volumes less than millions. You don't have to sign NDAs in order to get stuff. The Linux is standard D…
It's not perfect. There was (not sure if they fixed in subsequent hardware revisions) an issue with the ethernet not working about 50% of the time, and this required cutting the physical power to the device to fix. https://community.element14.com/products/devtools/single-boa... I found this out the hard way after building an IOT vehicle logger using these boards, had to work in a hardware self-reset to rework the boa…
I agree, about the "nothing is perfect", though. The lesson when you do stuff in embedded really is "Trust nothing."
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You can bitch about RPIs or you can go support something else . Lots (9000+) of Beaglebone Blacks over here -> https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/BeagleBoard-by-Seeed-St... TI documentation is stellar (except the graphics--which nobody documents) unlike the RPi or any of it's clones. The chips are all available at volumes less than millions. You don't have to sign NDAs in order to get stuff. The Linux is standard D…
> You can bitch about RPIs or you can go support something else. I will and thanks for your comment... I'm pretty much Debian and Debian derivatives only so you convinced me. I've got eight Pi I think. I started with the "Model 1" (which wasn't called that back then), on which I was running RasPBX (Raspbian with FreePBX+Asterisk) hooked to a SIP trunk to power four Cisco VoIP phone at my wife's little SME. Worked fla…
The RPi foundation has been subsidizing board cost since practically the beginning. This is nice in that it puts boards in everybody's hands.
This is bad in that it sucks the oxygen out of the space since anybody who doesn't have a benefactor willing to throw cash to subsidize the cost gets pushed to the side. Then, when the money finally dries up (and it will always dry up), the space immediately becomes a barren wasteland because everybody else got driven off.
It's doubly bad since mere mortals couldn't actually get their hands on the SoC chip at the heart of the boards. So, nobody else could take over when the RPi foundation decided to bail out.
Which is where we are now.
This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…
You can bitch about RPIs or you can go support something else . Lots (9000+) of Beaglebone Blacks over here -> https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/BeagleBoard-by-Seeed-St... TI documentation is stellar (except the graphics--which nobody documents) unlike the RPi or any of it's clones. The chips are all available at volumes less than millions. You don't have to sign NDAs in order to get stuff. The Linux is standard D…