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It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

jeffgeerling.com

41–50 of 114 posts

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#41
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, why didn't you put them in production?

Well, they were in a sense my first production environment, but I outgrew them. The big problem is they're not chonky enough. Most of the stuff I'm working on doesn't distribute all that well. I have some smaller services, but they're so small they don't really eat much resources from my server either. If I had machines closer to 32 Gb it might be worth adding additional nodes, but 8 Gb is too small to do anything us…

I'm presently running four RPi4-8GB units for a prototype HA VPN. Even though they have Gigabit Ethernet, they usually max out around 100Mbps. I'm assuming this is because Eben Upton and company chose to not pay extra for the ARMv8 Cryptography Extensions. I wish they would produce a slightly more expensive RPi that included them.

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100458/0200/function...

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#42
post #33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's getting worse, not better. The secondary and tertiary component suppliers are running dry.

Is it time to start looking for a job outside of IT already?

A lot of hardware people have been asking themselves that question lately, and wondering if maybe it's time to start looking for a job in IT.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#43
post #17
post #5

Why all the obsession over the pi now all of a sudden? The pi4/400 has been out for a couple of years at this point. Yet they’re still out of stock?

The Pis, and especially the compute module forms, are used for more than just clasroom toys and low power geek desktops. The CMs are a long term support item that, in recent forms, are FCC certified with wireless. Because it's a "module," with onboard wireless/antenna/etc, you don't have to perform the (quite expensive) certification tests for a wide range of products that can then have a perfectly good little comput…

Yeah, same. I have an ag robotics application that I can prototype with stock on hand (glad I prebought a few Pi Zero W now) but I won't be able to scale up my test fleet for the foreseeable future, and that's going to be a problem.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#44
Really makes the 12.5k units in stock number (For the Pi 4 Model B 8gb) at RS Online look suspicious...

I'm assuming it's just horribly out of date, or some terrible caching failure. Or just lies.

https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/raspberry-pi/1822098

Or it's just a weird pile of unsold Pi 4's because that storefront only serves half the world trading under that name. (NA's storefront is different, and has them OOS)

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#47
I think Pi 400 should be fairly obtainable. I just bought one used off Offerup for a reasonable barely-used price, but before doing so, I had researched many of the standard retailers and many (1/2 to 2/3 of the US Pi retailer list from what I recall) had the Pi 400 showing in stock, eg Makerbright, Canakit, etc.

Whether they were/are actually in stock or if long delays are possible might be another question/story.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#48
post #36

With all the Pi's that are stuck in peoples' drawers, collecting dust from half-finished projects (ahem, not myself of course...) then perhaps a pi-bay might be a thing with pursuing :)

Some hackerspaces do have systems like these for extra parts (e.g. I ordered 10 buck converters for cheap but I only need 5, so I'll put them in this drawer here).

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they were in a sense my first production environment, but I outgrew them. The big problem is they're not chonky enough. Most of the stuff I'm working on doesn't distribute all that well. I have some smaller services, but they're so small they don't really eat much resources from my server either. If I had machines closer to 32 Gb it might be worth adding additional nodes, but 8 Gb is too small to do anything us…

I think you made that search engine right? That's why you need 32GB RAM?

Yeah, I've got some pretty unusual hardware demands that way. A pi or two goes a long way though.

Re: It's dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker

#50

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…

Ironically the Pico is the one where they seem to have an abundance of silicon (they sell the actual RP2040 chip by the thousands in reels, and there's plenty of stock. Most of that's down to how tiny the actual silicon is for the RP2040—you can print hundreds (thousands?) on a single silicon wafer.

Yep, some have credited this to the 'completely re-imagined' design of the chip. I don't know about that, but they aren't very big. Maybe it's due to the logo-shaped BGA :)

Also, there's some things you just can't get in a VM, like power management or the absolute worst kind of bugs: networking bugs!

https://xkcd.com/2259

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