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!
oh like... maybe making it open source? Or democratization as in "sell as many as possible"?
New hardware required for modest <insert basic feature> improvement.
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 good. But years down the track, nothing changed. What should have happened is that Upton should have given the industrial buyers a six months warning to find other ways to build their products instead of Raspberry Pi. That never happened. Instead, Raspberry Pi simply turned into a dedicated industrial computing supplier. Businesses have the means and the expertise to redesign their products around different computing technology - they did not need a blanket commitment forever from Raspberry Pi to support their technology directions.
The outcome of this decision has been that Raspberry Pi and Eben Upton have sold out the community that got Raspberry pi to where it is.
He sold out the kids and the schools and sold out the hobbyists.
I think that in the Covid time, if anything, he should have prioritised schools and children. When they were sitting at home in lockdown they could have been learning computing with a Raspberry Pi.
So its now years down the track and nothing has changed. You can't get a Raspberry Pi because they are sold to industrial buyers like Vodafone.
Raspberry Pi's loyal community and especially the kids and the schools deserved better than being sold out.
There's lots of alternatives to Raspberry Pi - give them your loyalty and your money.... here's some:
Wi-Fi supports EAP-AKA which uses the SIM card and carrier's cooperation to seamlessly authenticate clients, so credential management is also solved.
I did try using a bog-standard 5G mobile phone as a dedicated hotspot, but there's quite a speed drop so I assume Android isn't optimised at all for this use-case, which is a shame since 5G routers are essentially stripped down mobile phones.
Huawei seem to dominate the 5G router space (I have one as they were the only ones supplying one at the time I needed one), Nokia have a 'Fast Mile' offering but it seems it's not for the end consumer. They're missing a trick here IMO.
I also would be very reluctant to use equipment from an MNO, epecially since they all seem to be onboard with TrustPid [0] for marketing purposes bullshit.
Software defined radio, offloaded eBPF, RAID controllers, are just the most obvious compute peripherals but there are a million others that could exist but don't.
edit: acronym typo
Stupid company.
it also can be used to hijack your calls and sms based 2FA in a drive-by car in no time.
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.)
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!
They would have sold out either way. What does payroll have to do with who they prioritize to sell to?
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 at direct odds.
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 Debian with everything upstreamed. You have lots more pins. You have two real-time units. It doesn't need special overpowered power supplies or heatsinks--USB 2.0 500mA works just fine even without a heatsink. And you have onboard eMMC so you don't have to wonder whether the craptastic uSD card that came with your RPi is causing those strange reboots.
And the folks doing it all are woefully understaffed and undersupported.
So, everybody can sit and complain about lack of RPi's. Or they can go support something that is actually open source, available and delivering.
Yes, they had their supply issues like everybody else. But TI is happy to actually move chips in ways that Broadcom simply isn't.
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 flawlessly for years. My best one I'd say is in the vintage arcade cab, with a Pi2JAMMA hat bigger than the Pi (!). I've got three towered on my desk, two of them operational 24/7.
So early adopter and user as it gets, not the kind to let the Pi not powered up... But I think this headline and the troubles getting one convinced me and I'm done with that brand.
I'll order BeagleBoards now and run Debian on them.
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 board.
Then there's the room it takes / the formfactor. I've got three Pi stacked on my desk (and 2 out of the 3 are powered at nearly all times). I've got one in my arcade cab, with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. The Notebook wouldn't fit or would look clunky. Also, well, how do you put a hat on a Notebook? How do I put it in my cab and have the JAMMA connector power it?
You're comparing apples and oranges (not that your notebook doesn't look good).
I'm not saying what they're doing is fine but people looking for a Pi aren't looking notebook.
Vodafone is doing the Vodafone thing and pushing out a _prototype_ that just happens to have a Pi managing a $400 RF board. I worked there for 11 years and have seen this thing time and again (I was a product manager for broadband and CPEs, and remember the Linksys WRT54g-3G, a bunch of Sagem and Huawei mini base stations, etc.). You are completely misinterpreting the reach of such a prototype, no matter what the marketroids spun around it.
It’s Mobile World Congress week, so the telco distortion field is at its yearly zenith.
https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-pro-p550
> "This is a premium software development system ideal for developer desktop machines and rack-based build/test/deploy servers for RISC-V software development. RISC-V has no limits."
There are so many alternatives that are often cheaper and more powerful. Here’s a recent summary of the alternatives:
"Raspberry Pi wasn't invented to boost shareholder value or turn its founders into billionaires: it was created as a charity to increase the number and calibre of students applying to study computer science at Cambridge, to give young people access to programmable hardware at a low price, and to equip a new generation"
Whereas Raspberry Pi today:
"We're selling to industrial buyers."
This is a GPUs-in-the-hands-of-miners-not-gamers situation, but I think starving the educational community is a bit more venal than starving the gaming community.
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
[1] https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/hardware/5b
You have 4x lanes of Pcie 3.0 and the Rock 5b has 2.5gb Ethernet too.
Software support isn't there yet but it's slowly getting better.
For instance a RAID card has to accept data from the motherboard and write it to the disks as fast as the disks allow.
We could do a PCIe card, but what I'm hoping for is to be able to dig ourselves out of the binary blob problem with have where Linux barely controls the actual hardware these days, and security concerns aren't something you can volunteer to fix. Our peripherals are pretending not to be computers but really they are and have been for some time.
If vendors aren't going to give us Open hardware, which it seems is never going to happen, then 'general purpose' expansion cards might be a forcing function.
What are these in the context of your comment, though?
[1] https://www.netronome.com/media/documents/eBPF_HW_OFFLOAD_HN...
> Your latest bill $-0.02 on [... blah blah...]
From a telco provider I no longer use. Turns out they finally stopped messaging me in November last year. I wonder if they worked it out or whether their system gives up after 10 years.
Hopefully you don't have to wait that long!
Sorry for the diversion, I'll make another pilgrimage to the Vodafone place nearby tomorrow, it's possible they had "billing our customers negative numbers" above Raspberry Pi fun on their TODO list!
It could be worse: we are talking about a retail consumer phone network operator here: so I'm thinking... operator-mandated nonremovable shovelware pre-installed in the only supported base OS image. Oh, and Candy Crush Saga too.
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.
I agree, about the "nothing is perfect", though. The lesson when you do stuff in embedded really is "Trust nothing."
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 towards that goal.
In the short term? Yeah, maybe some shortages of SBCs.
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 charge more you'll make money hand over fist. That's what this thread is saying that the RPi foundation "sold out".
The last sentence is incredibly hard to achieve, but if your brand is a household name like iPhone or R.Pi then you can start jacking up the price and as long as you have correctly identified the price insensitive (or less sensitive anyway) you price to the max of the particular group.
[0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-ap-ma...
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.
https://www.jctres.com/media/downloads/jctres07202105007/%5B...
Beverly Rubik
Department of Mind-Body Medicine, College of Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences, Saybrook University, Pasadena CA, USA; Institute for Frontier Science, Oakland, CA, USA
Robert R. Brown
Department of Radiology, Hamot Hospital, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Erie, PA; Radiology Partners, Phoenix, AZ, USA
Michal Heger
Department of Pharmaceutics, Utrecht University, the Netherlands; Department of Pharmaceutics, Jiaxing University Medical College, Zhejiang, China
The review process for submission and subsequent comments/suggestions to gain publication can be read here. https://www.jctres.com/media/filer_public/5b/02/5b021dc8-6d5...
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 foundation, which means more negotiating power with their chip suppliers or price breaks at a certain ordering volume.
Might mean you don’t get any Pis now.
Also might mean they drop the per unit cost by $5-10 in a year.
Not that I expect any of these facts to make you feel any less angry or betrayed or whatever, but they’re net goods for the Pi Foundation, and the OSHW community if they do indeed come to pass.
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.
Seems like they’re cutting off their nose to spite their faces at this kind of volume, though.
- Equals ~1/3rd of Bitcoin's energy consumption (~115 TWh per year, 2022) [6]
- A pile of 8 million tons of coal is ~1/2km (~1/3 mile) in diameter and 167m (549ft) high [3]
- Poland uses 10 million tons of coal a year to heat households (2017) [4]
- Annual world coal production 7,741.6 million t (2020) [5]
33bn kWh [0] = 4.056.268 TCE (Ton Of Coal Equivalent) [1]
33bn kWh / 6.7 kWh/kg [2] / 1.000 kg/t = 4.925.373 t
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/apr/15/spam-mcaf...
[1] https://www.justintools.com/unit-conversion/energy.php?k1=te...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal
[3] https://www.sightline.org/2013/07/03/what-8-million-tons-of-...
[4] https://www.dw.com/en/coal-rich-poland-faces-winter-of-energ... -> https://www.dw.com/en/can-poland-end-its-toxic-relationship-...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_prod...
[6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin...
[0]"Industry"