Well, so much for that I guess
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?
Any N300 based PC is under $200, tiny, low watts, faster than a Pi5, and can run any distro because it’s a regular PC.
OrangePI
I had one and returned it. The hardware was good but the software was total ass
That’s the biggest issue. Support.
Most of the success of the RPi is due to rasparian and community support.
The official ones are a mess, but depending on your needs, you can use armbian. It supports orange pi boards, and is a nice and up to date distro.
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).
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.
Arduinos all the way down I guess
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.
Oh! Great idea - kid’s computer. I’ll be stealing that for my next project. Thank you!
looks at your name
Uh-oh. Guys. I think he’s going to steal someones baby instead of making one himself…
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.
Change name from RPi to RIP
RaspberryBye.
Now, it stands for “Raspberry Intellectual Property”, in addition to the obvious colloquialism.
F
Time comes for us all.
Gotta buy a share just so I can write angry shareholder letters
So on an unrelated note, what’s the best alternative available right now?
Radxa
Honestly… when I was doing my research, for the power consumption and the flexibility of Raspberry Pi, nothing came close to it, at least not at the time (2016). Since then, I’ve never even bothered to look at it’s competition.
Garbage. They started this in order to provide very poor people the means to program and create things.
Public? Like, owned by a state? Isn’t that good?
Also state owned is only really useful for infrastructure, where it doesn’t make sense to have multiple providers and monopolies are easily attainable. Like roads, rails, electricity, internet backbone infrastructure and providers, social media, etc. Democracy is the currently best way we know of managing monopolies.
For other stuff, you probably want employee owned democratic collectives. You would still have competition on the market, but its ordinary people that have the say. This would give more power to the people enthused about the tech and long term success, then all the short term gains.
I think in English that’d be called being nationalized
Owned by everyone who wants to buy them. Yes, it is good.
So that settles it. I have to get one now before they enshittify the new models.
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).
Ew
That is due to power reasons ,but they could have just underclocked it by default.
I don’t buy it. USBC can deliver quite a lot of power
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 )
Maybe those packages are bulky or something.
What is the power reason if i may ask?
I dunno maybe cpu? Really it is actually stupid why didn’t they just make it optional.
Tbh, i cant make an opinion without technical details :')
Eh, the only thing that made RPi better than the alternatives was the size of the community and the amount of testing done for their hardware.
RIP.
Looking forward to whatever SBCs the community migrates to in the next year or so.
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.
I’ve had lots of fun with the very affordable Pi Zero 2w. Will pick up a few more before they disappear.
Can you hook up a screen to those and run python?
Yes indeed.
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.
Excellent! The (cheap) i96 pi had all but a video output so I never got it to work…
Cool project, how do you display the tide (upcoming, there, outgoing etc)? Do you have some battery to the clock or how do you set the date/time?
Edit : is it some sort of regular python (3?) or some tiny-python?
Edit2: no ethernet 😭?
Friendship ended with raspberry pi Now Pine 64 is my new best friend
Rockchip processors is where it’s at these days. Every pi alternative runs an RK3566 or RK3568
For true open source it’s gotta be RISCV instead of ARM. Bbut it might be too early days for that.
Yeah I mean Pine64 produces RISCV boards
Oh I didn’t know that. I was familiar with Scifive for higher end RiscV stuff, and MilkV for the cheaper and midrange boards.
It was some kind of non-profit previously right? What happens with the money paid for the shares they floated?
I think they’re playing the same game OpenAI is. Nonprofits can “own” for-profits.
No, it’s not rational or ethical or reasonable, but it’s a thing, because Capitalism gotta Capitalism.
Nonprofits can “own” for-profits.
One of the saner reasons for this structure is that the non-profit owns the things the for-profit works on. If the for-profit goes under, all things are still owned by the non-profit, so some large tech company can’t swoop in and yoink anything available.
This includes any and all data generated by the for-profit, which means your data is “safe”.
The non-profit could sell the for-profit, or it would inherit the debt of the for-profit if it didn’t bankrupt it.
They’ve already gone downhill since 2020 when they couldn’t keep up with the demand and focused on B2B sales. This really isn’t a surprise to me
I thought they started from the idea of creating an affordable device mostly for people that need and can’t afford a proper computer… I guess money gave them amnesia
They did, and they still have the rpi foundation with that goal, as well as the for-profit subsidiary.
It’s a flaw with effective altriusm-- you have a goal of fixing some large scale problem and at some point you realize you need large amounts of capital to expand your impact. But the interim period you are just going to be amassing wealth with this idea of doing good. And even then, you may never reach a point where you feel like you earned enough to solve your problem. I.e sam bankman fried
Now I’m not saying that rpi foundation hasn’t done good in the world. I’m just saying that they did start off with a lofty goal and it is clear that they are wanting to expand and make more money. Maybe this means someday they’ll be able to do even greater things through the rpi foundation… but I’m not optimistic
I have to say I haven’t looked into RPI history, I only remember a video where they were marketing a device that is affordable and very much suitable for learning programming, mostly aimed at kids. Remembering that and seeing them now on the exchange kinda leads to a contradiction in my mind. Especially since a year ago you couldn’t even buy a device if you had the money, let alone if you couldb’t afford one as they intended at the beginnings.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
Shit. I guess my or anyone else’s loyalty hasn’t mattered. I’ve bought two competing products during the drought and now we are going to have maximum suckage from them since the investors will be driving the bus now. How long before they intentionally hold back functionality and hide it behind some bullshit subscription?
Outside of a few small local businesses that actually care about doing right by people, loyalty hasn’t mattered for decades dude. Companies don’t give a shit about any of us. Why even bother thinking in terms of loyalty, it’s completely misaligned with how they operate.
