1. Raspberry Pi Trading use UK based manufacturing facilities, so yes, it costs a little extra to ship outside of the UK.
2. Raspberry Pi Trading do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront. So supply will always be limited for devices like the Zero, while demand is high.
3. The profits from the sales of all Raspberry Pi devices are used to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We do charitable work to further Computer Science education around the world. The target audience is educators and children, and that will always be the focus. That it happens there are hackers out there that want to use the device is great, but not the priority.
4. The popularity of the Raspberry Pi range is mainly down to the amazing community we have and the huge support available from that community.
#2. Sadly this fact undermines the real utility of RPI for development.
Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1.
Why develop on a platform that you can never put into production? I don't even mean producing "x million units", I'm saying you won't even be able to buy 30 of them for an internal company project.
I understand that RPI mission is education and thats admirable - however they should be completely upfront on their product pages about this....each should state "DON'T USE THIS IN A PRODUCT" across the top.
The pi zero was sold at a loss... It is/was a marketing manuever to absorb more of the diy iot market share; which is the reason there is a 1 per customer limit. As well as the reason microcenter requires in person purchase and not online.
Secondly the pi line, like the Arduino line, along with everything else of that nature, are 'development platforms.' You don't buy a developer kit in mass intending to resell as an end product...
The pi, Arduino, beagle, etc have an excessive number of Io pins, often a variety of sensors, multiple options for power source and corresponding voltage regulators and other features useful for development. When you take your design to market, you simply draw your own schematic/PCB layout and place an order for a board without the unused sensors, io's, regulators, etc. The schematics provided for the pi and other platforms are quite modular and easy to understand. One can simply remove all the io's, accessories from busses, regulators, clocks, and whatever else isn't required. One can then tweak the PCB layout to fit their form factor, power requirements, component tolerances and whatever else to suit their exact use case, to minimize cost.
> You don't buy a developer kit in mass intending to resell as an end product
Beaglebone black-like system boards are used for both development & production. I almost shipped a system like this personally. With the BBB, you can get slightly modified versions, in bulk, and with enough availability to satisfy purchasing. Even if you couldn't, the SoC on the BBB can be bought from TI. I imagine there are similar things for more modern, powerful SoCs. Many companies like isolating the complicated timing sensitive board design (as needed for NAND and off chip memory) from the rest of their design, and don't necessarily have the skills in house to do that type of layout. Pre-made boards like the BBB provide a lower cost option than a completely custom board.
With the RPis, you can't even buy the SoC. I'm not aware of anyone you can buy slightly modified (ie: unneeded components pulled) boards from in bulk.
Complaining on HN is not the right solution here; if you genuinely want to fill a production run of thousands of devices with embedded Pi, speak to the foundation directly.
If you're producing a product where you need thousands of something maybe getting a custom-built ARM board is a better plan than using a Raspberry Pi.
Making your own ARM board is fairly expensive for one-off things, but for volume it's not a huge obstacle. There are any number of vendors capable of producing these for you to almost any specification.
He's not talking about creating a commercial venture that would necessitate thousands of devices. He's talking about an in-house project on the scale of dozens. Would contacting them directly get me that quantity at that price?
I could walk in to Microcenter right now and pick up basically as many as I wanted. I know everyone doesn't have a Microcenter within a few miles of them, but they've had them in stock continually since about three months after the release.
It might be different in other countries, but I have to imagine that anyone in the US could get their hands on a Zero if they wanted one.
> It might be different in other countries, but I have to imagine that anyone in the US could get their hands on a Zero if they wanted one.
A zero, sure. But I want like 20, haha. Unfortunately my nearest Microcenter is 600 miles away. If I can't get 20 for $100, they're not really $5 each.
Their Orange County/Tustin location is the only one left in California, apparently. I built my "graduation present" PC with parts from there in 2008. They've apparently got about 2 dozen locations around the country, along with the web store.
Also, why for the love of god can't they just license the name to some secondary source w/ quality control stipulations?
Mandate a slightly higher cost-per-unit (5% or somesuch) and sell it as the Raspberry Pi Zero Commercial. With (critically) guaranteed compatibility with the consumer model. I can't imagine there wouldn't be Chinese factories lining up for the opportunity.
Then use the licensing revenue to help fund Raspberry Pi's mission.
You are dramatically underestimating the complexity and difficulty of "w/ quality control stipulations".
I work in electronic device design. On a good project designing a complex device, 2/3 of the work will be iterations of design (software, electronic, mechanical, industrial). When you've finished designing it you've then got another 1/3 of getting it manufactured at a decent cost with a decent yield. And that's assuming that you have an existing relationship in China with a high end manufacturer. Weeks and weeks of trips out, production runs, implementation of QA.
Given that, how would you go about ensuring that what's coming out of a factory in China is actually up to scratch?
And even if you did, the processor on the Pi uses an unusual chip-on-chip technology that most board makers don't have the capability to build.
> When you've finished designing it you've then got another 1/3 of getting it manufactured at a decent cost with a decent yield.
The difference here is that this is an already proven design? Have a competitive bid process for the right to market under the trademark, eliminate factories you flat out don't trust, then require ability to randomly sample and test on Pi's side.
If pass rate drops below agreed parameters, revoke the trademark and pick another factory. Then let the factory self-QA or face the consequences.
I can't imagine there are no factories in China that can make a profit on a chip that's being made profitably in the UK.
The only argument I can see against it would be that a commercial market doesn't exist in any volume. But I can't imagine there wouldn't be decent profit vs {insert lower priced Pi clone here}.
... The other argument would be if Pi has an exclusivity agreement with Sony UK (who I believe is the majority manufacturer) that precludes this kind of deal in exchange for pricing?
> "unusual chip-on-chip technology"
You mean the package-on-package mounting of the SDRAM on top of the BCM2835? Defer to your experience, but if Raspberry Pi is doing this then how expensive/rare is the investment?
I'm honestly trying to reconcile the following statements: "They're hard to manufacture" + "We make a profit on each one sold" + "We can't afford to make them at commercial scale"
Picking a manufacturer is a several month-long process by itself, and would require building out an operations/production engineering team for ongoing production.
Imagine producing 50,000pc/mo and having to do in-depth quality inspection on an sample size of, say 500pcs. Who is going to do the inspection? That's a lot of Pis.
How do you distribute? Do you ship a box of 50,000 to your warehouse and then mail them out 1 at a time to customers? Do you form retail partnerships?
How do you front the money for a 50,000pc order? Say they cost $3 per board, that's $150,000 up front in capital tied up for, say, 1 month of lead time, 2 weeks of transit time, and 1 month until you get paid by the customer - that's $425,000 at any time tied up in inventory (150k*2.5months). Do you negotiate payment terms with the supplier? It's difficult to negotiate terms without a history. Who does the negotiation?
What do you do when your box of 50k has an defect?
None of these issues are insurmountable, but there is a lot of necessary overhead that comes with mass production of anything. Deciding to MP Pis is an organizational decision that requires significant changes to company structure and resource allocation.
> I can't imagine there are no factories in China that can make a profit on a chip that's being made profitably in the UK.
One of their aims was to produce things in the UK. They didn't meet this initially, but with scale managed to bring production at least largely within the UK.
Their initial scale at the first launch was too small to work with UK manufacturers, a bit later with the first version they were able to order large enough runs to have production in Wales iirc.
Is it hard to guess why designing electronics could possibly be good/interesting work? It involves programming, design, physics, math, and making real things we use everyday - medical devices, cars, satellites, cameras, etc
They weren't trying to convince you that it's a pleasant occupation. I'm sure that the content of the comment would have a different emphasis if they were.
He was describing why doing QA is hard, and I'm suggesting (not to you clearly) some good reason for doing it still exists or he wouldn't be in that business.
"Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1."
Only true for Pi products. If you're willing to spend $7 you can get esp8266 nodemcu hardware delivered from amazon prime in arbitrary quantity.
Theres a problem where no matter how many times its stated, "you can buy ONE if you pay six times MSRP or live within driving range of the one retail store on the continent selling them or if you import from the UK or eastern europe" vs I need six for an IoT experiment involving micropython and I2C environmental sensors. I can't buy six $5 pi or even six $10 pi but I can have six ESP8266 boards by thursday afternoon for $35 total. Which is less than single pi zero plus "development kit of parts" costs, ironically.
A $5 computer that's impossible to actually purchase is much less useful in practice than a $7 computer delivered in two days by amazon prime in any quantity I'm willing to pay for.
Its interesting that above $40 or so there is an infinite supply of rasp pi 3 and beaglebone blacks. Everything is widely available except for cheap pi.
esp8266 is not even close to being a replacement for rPi. The specs are orders of magnitude worse. 160KB RAM, 1MB flash, 80MHz CPU, no GPU. None of the builtin modules for networking, wifi, etc.
I think I agree that there really isn't a comparable competitor to rpi .. rpiZero W offers a lot for an iot module at such a great cost. maybe something like the CHIP, but not even?
I'm currently working on an agriculture sensing iot platform and going to try to use rpiZero W with the current spectrum sensor from nanolambda. http://www.nanolambda.net . luckily they have the rPi api,sdk already.
> Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1.
It's quite possible to get more, if you need to (though probably not multiple ones at the same time). Just use the shops the the RPi foundations recommends and choose to be informed via email when this shop again has some in stock. Then as soon as possible buy one.
But the problem is you can only buy one. We use Pi 2Bs for some commercial projects and it's ok because in principle we could order in 1000 next-day from RS (currently 12k in stock) or Farnell without restrictions.
Practically the Pi Zero-W would fulfil all our system requirements, it'd probably be better because it's smaller. However, we can't risk it because the supply chain isn't there yet.
You are lamenting that a product released today is not available in sufficient quantities to be used in your commercial product? Sounds like an unreasonable expectation.
To counter: the Pi Zero is coming on for 18 months and is still regularly sold out.
I'm not expecting mass quantities on release, but the problem is that you can only buy one which makes development difficult. And if it's anything like the original zero, we'd have no idea when it will be available in quantity. Often it's useful to have more than one board e.g. one bare dev board, one in an enclosure/prototype. Having a month or more lead time for a replacement isn't practical.
Not only does Broadcom refuse to sell chips to companies wanting to make Raspberry Pi compatible boards, but the PCB design is not public and the license on the closed-source binary blob required to boot the thing forbids use with non-Raspberry Pi boards.
You're far better off going with one of the Allwinner-based boards like the C.H.I.P if you intend to do this at some point in the future.
The closed design and closed-source kernel blob are troublesome. We need a completely open source board design similar to the Pi that manufacturers are free to produce without licensing. We could have an organization that does QA and vets individual manufacturers for quality and compliance/conformance with the board's design. The RPi Foundation's choice to remain so closed-source is a bit confusing and puzzling, considering their non-profit and educational mission and goal.
> We need a completely open source board design similar to the Pi that manufacturers are free to produce without licensing.
Unless I'm mistaken, the Beaglebone Black uses chips that are available for purchase from TI (and from which I think you can get datasheets, even as an individual), boots the mainline kernel, and provides CAD files for the board: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Hardware_Files
> The RPi Foundation's choice to remain so closed-source is a bit confusing and puzzling, considering their non-profit and educational mission and goal.
Their founder and key personnel was/are employed by Broadcom. IIRC, essentially Broadcom thought of the Pi as a fun side project and were completely blown away by the demand.
The other problem is that people have written stuff, and loads of that, specifically for the Pi CPU/GPU - which makes a move away from BCM next to impossible:
- anything involving accelerated video isn't easily portable (e.g. omxplayer)
- anything that relies on a given special function of the CPU mapped to a specific GPIO pin might break with another CPU (e.g. extension boards)
- anything that relies on other rpi-specific hardware features (CSI, DSI) will be hard to port, but then again you don't really have a choice with non-usb/i2c camera or display modules...
Look into the Next Thing Co GR8 -- it's a vaguely similar SOC (the thing in the Chip Pro) but is (in theory - I haven't investigated) available in small quantities and with an accessible datasheet.
The latter. Their chips aren't sold through distributors, and they'll pretty much only give the time of day to high-volume OEMs. They stonewall companies that are big enough to get in-person visits from sales engineers from other major vendors (TI, Freescale, Xilinx). Raspberry Pi cofounder Eben Upton was a technical director at Broadcom, so he had inside connections.
They normally deal in massive quantities. Asking for a couple thousand units just isn't worth the effort. That's what makes the RPi Foundation unique -- Broadcom _does_ deal in small quantities for them in support of the mission.
>2. Raspberry Pi Trading do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront. So supply will always be limited for devices like the Zero, while demand is high. [emphasis added]
This is not true. If it were true, they would welcome a mass payment up-front as this would solve their "do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront" issues which you cite. Instead, I was banned from their forum (forever) despite being a contributor in good standing, for wanting to arrange such an up-front payment with others who were interested, even though I already removed any Raspberry Pi branding from my bid (i.e. the bid would be in generic terms), meaning they would be free to consider the bid but do not have to accept, and even though I greatly limited discussion to just a few posts in their off-topic forum and was clear that they did not officially sanction such a bid from us. (My bid also would have been for lower specifications and a higher per-unit price than the official raspberry pi zero specifications and price, to further make fulfilling it easy.) Their official reason was that I was generating too much mod mail for them to deal with (even though throughout the site they encourage people to message the mods about anything and everything), since hundreds of people were extremely interested in ordering mass quantities. I feel I went out of my way to be extremely fair and transparent, did not make any sort of misrepresentations, or imply they supported me, etc. I went out of my way not to talk in terms of their competitors as well but to support Raspberry Pi in every way possible.
So there is huge demand, but, no, capital constraints are not the reason that the Raspberry Pi Trading foundation does not wish to make x million raspberry pi zero type devices upfront - even if it would further their cause.
I don't have additional visibility than the above and have shared what I know.
Capital is more than just cash. There is land, buildings, and equipment. I honestly don't know any details about the group's situation, but I am put in mind of a story: doubling the order cost four times the price for the simple reason that the supplier could handle the smaller order with the existing factory. In order to meet the larger order, however, he would need to build a new factory.
The natural word for that is "capacity" rather than "capital".
For what's it's worth we targeted between 1 and 10 million units as a one-time bid (without them having to continue to guarantee availability ), and also targeted a ridiculously long fulfillment period, like a year - which would be enough to build any capacity they want, to fulfill that one bid. With the understanding that in the meantime (while the bidders' wait the year or however long) a newer version could be announced, no harm no foul and the bidders would not get that, and also that this is a way for the bidders to support the foundation, without getting support (such as supplier support) in return.
Finally, we thought that Broadcom might not want to flood the market with cheap chips, so we positioned it as a genuine set of orders around 1000 pieces, by entrepreneurs. (For real.) This would then lock these small-time entrepreneurs in with the Broadcom family (there are other ARM suppliers), and Broadcom could therefore upsell them on the rest of their full production solutions, since the small sellers would not have unlimited access to more chips and if their small marketing takes off they will want to place large orders for chips that are actually available, on their custom PCB.
At any rate, whatever the issue was, it wasn't capital.
I suspect the reason is quite obvious. They are losing money on every unit produced.
This is a "loss leader" strategy to get devs committed to the Broadcom platform only to find out "actually $5 computers don't exist, they are really $35".
Go to Mouser / DigiKey and put in the part number for the Broadcom chip, choose a very high number as quantity - look at that price.
Further contact a PCB and Assembly outfit and get a quote from them for a small board with a 100 or so SMD placements. You will see that $5 is complete fantasy.
RPI Foundation could've just marketed this as "cheap development platforms for you to try out your code, but only 1 per customer". Instead they've tried to maintain that this is some sort of "real product" that is commercially available at otherworldly low prices.
I'm a bit confused as to what happened here, were you trying to conduct a multi-million dollar deal through their community forums?
> My bid also would have been for lower specifications and a higher per-unit price than the official raspberry pi zero specifications and price, to further make fulfilling it easy.
Higher or lower, different specifications would have meant a lot of overhead in designing, testing and certifying a new design.
> Their official reason was that I was generating too much mod mail for them to deal with (even though throughout the site they encourage people to message the mods about anything and everything), since hundreds of people were extremely interested in ordering mass quantities.
Were you trying to corral hundreds of people into making a single bulk order of a new pi, but without the pi branding? That sounds like an enormous headache with regards to delivery, liability, etc. Also you say hundreds, hundreds of people buying need to be purchasing tens of thousands each before you're talking about x million devices. Were the hundreds of people all realistic purchasers with $100-200k ready to put down in advance?
> This is not true. If it were true, they would welcome a mass payment up-front as this would solve their "do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront" issues which you cite.
That would be just pre-ordering, which has other costs to a community. Letting the first people buy 10 for various hobbies probably doesn't help the community as getting the new device into 10x as many hands.
I have to say, somewhere industry must have dropped the ball if a small company whose focus isn't even consumers makes such an impact.
Where are the commercial offerings?
Maybe CHIP will take this space, but electronics industry has really neglected hobbyist electronics. Maybe there's a reason, e.g hostility to the idea of hobby electronics disrupting industry?
It's exactly economies of scale and support. Pi is still pretty tiny as a business and benefits from community goodwill and input. Only now are they achieving the millions of units shipped which are needed to achieve good economy of scale.
To be fair, the tinker board is only 50% more and does include additional features (some extra speed and GbE). The US release is happening right now, so that could affect availability worldwide as Asus tries to launch with sufficient quantities. I somehow was able to order one, sold by Amazon US no less, and get it last week; there's not even a listing anymore.
Not too bad for a product that was announced late January.
That doesn't explain the zero's price. They are making a loss on those, and a quite big one at that. It is not possible to make something like the Pi Zero for less than double it's retail price.
I think it is the same problem that is facing the likes of mobile phones, economics of scale. The factories basically need a minimum number of units before it is worth setting up the production line.
It's called a BeagleBone Black/Green. I can buy 1000 of those tomorrow off of Mouser. And I can go talk to TI to get a volume discount if I'm buying bunches.
The RPi is a neat toy good for one offs and the community is excellent. The $5 is cool marketing, but it's vapor when you go to fab it.
However, when I need to support something commercially, I need datasheets and customer reps. I get that for the Beaglebone while the situation for the RPi is laughable.
I ordered mine sometime last year, and was able to get them fairly quickly when they finally delivered. Guess they couldn't keep up with demand after initial backers.
Still, if there were more commercial players, there wouldn't be such a frenzy around the few offerings..
That will be perfectly fine just as soon as I can buy more than one at a time.
As long as the sales are one offs, its not a $10 device yet. I hope it will be. There was something decidedly fishy about the "$5" Zero that has never ever been available more than one at a time.
I'm not saying that there was a secret conspiracy, but if you happen to be a distributer who makes his margin on each transaction, not each unit, and your source is chronically short, a de facto Zero situation emerges where you make far more on the limited supply available by forcing extra transactions. Sadly this largely negates the purpose of offering an ultra-cheap item in the first place.
I would guess that they were one at a time because demand has been so high. By the time I was finally able to order a zero I lost interest in it and started using other boards. The question is if you want to get it into as many hands as possible or to people that are going to use a lot of them. But also people bulk order and sell at a markup. Stuff like this[1] still isn't uncommon ($23 for a pi zero on Amazon). At that markup I'd rather just buy a pi, arduino, or whatever. At $5 if it is a zero vs a msp430 I'm getting the zero for ease of use.
There was a brief period at my local Microcenter, after the supply started to catch up with demand and before the "limit 1 at $5" policy. I bought five of the hundred or so in the locked plastic box. I think I could have bought twenty, all at $5/each.
Marc - I've had so much fun with Raspberry Pis! Really appreciate the work you do. Have you considered setting up a kickstarter-style pre-order system? I think a lot of people would sign up and it might give you guys more predictability.
> 2. Raspberry Pi Trading do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront. So supply will always be limited for devices like the Zero, while demand is high.
It is too bad that this can not be partially remedied in some fashion. Of course you need to ensure you do not over estimate demand, but if you can sell for sure X number of devices in the launch period, you should be able to find capital somehow to be able to pre-made them to ensure reach your potential.
IMO this is an area where something like kickstarter might come in handy.
Let some hackers who are willing to wait a bit pay the cost a while before anything ships so they have a somewhat guaranteed amount of purchases before they even start.
Of course that introduces other problems (like making it harder for the "target audience" of people learning to get ahold of), and you still need to do a lot of work to make sure you don't over/under charge, but it's an option that seems like it could work well for them.
> too many partial brits here [...] Seriously, shame on you. Just go brexit yourself
Surely you know that you can't comment like this here. This is a bannable offense. Even without this your comment broke the guidelines by name-calling, but this bit is beyond the pale. Please don't do it again.
Well, okay. I can agree that the "go brexit yourself" was too much. I'm sorry about that. Noone should be accused of that kind of stupidity.
(To clarify: I really, really did not mean "exit yourself". I did mean go do something stupid and self-destructive - but not lethal - like Brexit.)
But is it really too much to call a particular company/organization incompetent (in this particular issue it was implied that the incompetence was in terms of sales forecasting, marketing promises and logistics abilities)?
Directing a pejorative at an entire entity (org or individual) is probably name-calling, which the HN guidelines ask you not to do, but I'd say it depends on the context. If it's embedded in a clearly thoughtful comment, it might be fine. If it's embedded in a ranty-indig comment, it's a problem. The first three bits of your comment are the latter, so even without the swipe at the end, it's still a bad HN comment.
You clearly have a substantive point based on experience, which you could phrase thoughtfully if you wanted to. Then it would be a much better contribution—readers would learn more and you wouldn't be starting a fire. I realize that putting aside the pyrotechnics takes away some of the fun of the internet but (a) there are compensating rewards and (b) it's a tradeoff we all have to commit to in order to keep HN alive.
I just finished a project where this would have been perfect.
You can do wireless keyboardless headless setup. You can do it without connecting anything but power.
On the SD card, place a file called "ssh" (no extension) so SSH is enabled, and configure wpa_supplicant with your wifi details. I found this on the RPi Stack Exchange [1](thanks scruss)
...On the full up-to-date Raspbian...
>If a wpa_supplicant.conf file is placed into the /boot/ directory, this will be moved to the /etc/wpa_supplicant/ directory the next time the system is booted, overwriting the network settings; this allows a Wifi configuration to be preloaded onto a card from a Windows or other machine that can only see the boot partition.
>Since the /boot partition is accessible by any computer with an SD card reader, wifi configuration is now much simpler.
>A skeleton wpa_supplicant.conf file can be as little as:
This is a great feature to get started, but it's unfortunate that the "ssh" file hack doesn't set up SSH keys and disable password auth, or at least change the default password. That must be done manually. I dread to think how many Pis are out there in this configuration.
I hope that in future, a proper/official headless image will be provided, to provide more sensible defaults. Until then, I made a little tool to patch the Raspbian images to set things up this way:
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it leaves the pi in a ready-to-deploy stage. I just meant it lets you get into it so you can configure it, which you otherwise need a keyboard or wired NIC for.
My biggest problem with the Raspberry Pis is not having enough time. I'm serious. The ultra low price point makes it very easy to go out and buy one (thanks MicroCenter) but then finding time and energy to complete a project from start to finish is currently my biggest challenge.
I have several at home "in production" doing things like Z-Wave home automation, Proliphix thermostat chat-ops, wifi AP, some web scraping scripts...
But, at the same time I have a bunch of other ideas that I have a hard time finding time for.
My next project will be setting up Pi Cameras for home security and this new platform is looking very promising for that. Very exciting, but I'm dreading not finding time for it.
I have much the same problem! I am in the process of using Raspberry Pis to control my model trains. I have sensors in in the tracks that are connected to GPIO pins. I need a network of Raspberry Pis to control my whole system but only one of them needs to be a model 3, the others can be these new Pi zero Ws.
I've spent the past 2-3 months slowly learning about hardware with cheap ESP8266 boards. So much fun wiring small wifi-enabled boards to random sensors and output devices.
I suspect I'll graduate to using PIs in the future, I used to own one that was solely used for emulation, but it didn't survive my international relocation.
Hi! Do you do the z-wave packet radio yourself, with something like the RFM69HCW [1]? Have tried finding some specs on z-wave protocol without any luck yet.
I think some real initiative to standardise common projects, and make them explicitly communal, with the creation of tutorials as the main focus, would do wonders.
I see sites like hackaday.io, for example, and it is all descriptions of personal projects (most unfinished, or early on), and the problem is rife.
A better medium is perhaps "instructables", where the focus is obviously to instruct, and the average quality (result over finesse) encourages sharing, even of unrefined instructables.
incidentally, do you have a project space? Some of those ideas you are working on are interesting, I'm working on a few myself, in collab with local hackspace.
Shipping is 15€ in EU, so still more expensive than Pi itself. It's a shame that they overprice shipping so much, it shouldn't cost more than few € (according to other similar size items I order from Internet on regular basis).
There are several resellers on the EU mainland which have stock, and not too horrible shipping fees. Just ordered mine this morning and got shipping confirmation for arrival tomorrow.
I found at least one UK seller that will ship to the EU for £4 (€4.70) and the US for £5 ($6.20), and they seem to have some in stock still. Just shop around a bit.
One of the best things about rPi products is that for $10 not only do you get the computer, but you are also able to tap into the huge community support behind it.
Folks at rPi Foundation are doing some really amazing work. Congrats!
Hold on there landlubber!
When we said one Pi Zero per order we meant it!
Since we're not completely heartless pirates,
just firm on our policies, we'll let you go
back to your cart and fix this "unfortunate
oversight".
We won't tell anyone if you don't.
- the Pimoroni Crew
p.s. We always announce new Pi Zero stock on
Twitter so it may be worth following for the
latest information!
How robust and dependable is the Raspberry Pi? I've been looking at Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) systems recently, and as far as I can tell, they're third rate hardware loaded up with fourth rate software selling at first rate premiums.
I've been considering rolling my own around a Raspberry Pi, but I'm not sure how dependable they are. Does anyone have any advice on that front?
I imagine that stuffing an RPi into a box in a badly ventilated area might cause some heating issues. They run hot and are not really rated to handle that long-term.
More generally, if you're looking at POS systems, the new hotness is to just use a tablet. Solves the display problem quite easily. USB barcorde scanners usually work as keyboards, so it's not hard to get set up.
If you're looking to do it with a Pi, there are small screens for the device, but I think the parts total will quickly get higher than a low-end Android tablet.
Tablet's get expensive pretty quickly, and they will break. I need at least five EPOSs for "reasons". And I reckon I could have every thing I need, plus replacement hardware on location for a fraction of the cost of using tablets.
I don't mean to sound dismissive (building your own stuff is a good exercise in minimalism) but whatever you're building has a decent likelihood to break as well.
Think about having a custom linux setup compared to Windows. There's some extra stability in one angle, but your wifi stops working every full moon and your keyboard layout gets randomized on reboot.
Though the advantage of building it yourself is that you can replace more specific parts.
PCI[0] compliance might be a problem if you want to accept payment cards. Also, getting banks to recognize you as a payment processor is PITA (disclaimer: I work in POS development).
If by that you mean to simply add display on top of a cash register and pinpad, then yes, RPi will do just fine. However, if you want to manage payments as well, you must conform to PCI standard and get certified which is lengthy and costly process.
Very. I have 200+ digital signs running on customer sites 24x7 playing videos, images, live feeds and showing web pages without trouble for over three years now.
Nothing nearly so impressive here but I recently got my org to buy ~20 RasPi 3s to replace ~20 of these $1500 Cisco DMPs that were EOL and starting to fail.
All they were used for was displaying a webpage that showed the schedule for a given room in the building so the Cisco boxes were always overkill (and the browser built into it was terrible to boot).
So I put together a test setup on a RasPi that just boots LXDE in kiosk mode, opens Chromium with no...er...chrome on the windows and with no mouse cursor, etc, loads the page for that room, and the page itself handles refreshes. Set a cron job to reboot every morning at 4am in case there was any scheduled maintenance done on the server delivering the webpage overnight. Can SSH in to change things and also set up a node.js script I found that allows me to open a URL in my browser and trigger a reboot or shutdown.
All of this was new to me but in the end, I replaced twenty $1500 boxes with twenty $55 kits and it was an excuse to learn/brush up on some things. The best part is that they look even better now because the Cisco boxes could only go up to 1366x768 and now the displays are running at native resolution. The down side is that this isn't a private company (state university) so I don't get any sort of bonus for saving them almost $30k :(
I disagree - that is impressive. Document it thoroughly and put it on the CV. Current and future employers love it when someone can take practical steps to save money while improving functionality.
It's pretty boring to be honest, which is probably why it's so reliable. I sync media using rsync, the movie and stream player is omxplayer, the image and news feeds use Lua and Love2D, and the scheduler is a simple algorithm which was written first in LuaJIT, then Python and soon in Go because of speed and concurrency. The players push their status to a central server for monitoring purposes but I'm replacing that with pull and Ansible. The customer interface is web2py and the schedule creator is desktop wxpython running on Linux, the Mac and Windows.
An old friend approached me with the idea and we have developed it together. He used to work for a media company which had these sort of clients already so we got a head start when they folded and we stepped in to pick up the slack. Subsequent sales have all been word-of-mouth. Product development has been entirely driven by customers: they need something, I put it in and then every player gets the new functionality once it's battle-tested.
When we first looked at the market, we realized that no-one really knew how it worked because it's still very young. So we decided to compete on price and reliability. Instead of lock-in contracts and up-front hardware purchases, we charge a small month-to-month rental and the hardware remains ours.
What industry are you looking to use this POS in? Do you want something reliable? What options have you looked at? The bare minimum your gonna need is an Epson TM-T88V, a wired Metrologic, NCR or Datalogic Scanner (spend more than $50 for something decent), and a cash drawer.
Other things you will probably want are a programmable keyboard, NCR 78 or Datalogic 9800i, coin dispenser & an integrated pinpad for processing credit/debit.
Yeah, I'm looking at having a printer controlled cash draw. I don't need a bar code scanner. A Raspberry Pi touch display. And some sort of pinpad hardware and payment processing service I can integrate with. I think that's "all" I need for what I have in mind.
Eh, that is really vague, if you could be more specific I could help ya more.
> I'm looking at having a printer controlled cash draw.
No reason not to use the printer to control the cash drawer, every receipt printer you look at will support 1 if not 2 cash drawers.
> I don't need a bar code scanner.
Do you only have a few items which you intend to have on a touchscreen?
>A Raspberry Pi touch display.
How big/how high resolution?
> And some sort of pinpad
Look at the Pax Px7 or Dejavoo, we wrote PHP bindings for Pax's API. Would recommend you avoid Datacap, most semi-integrated credit/debit offerings are a pretty penny besides the two I mentioned.
In my head it would be booting into Chromium to run an offline web app, and the app would make requests against a CouchDB service on the local network. No transaction data would be written to the Pi's memory.
This is all just spitballing though. I'm literally just considering it.
True. If I need a lof of writes, I hook up an SSD. Also, For some applications, you can roll your own root file system and mostly avoid writes. I.e. Yocto
We have two set up permanently in our shop post room, with barcode scanners attached. Every order is scanned through a Pi. They've been running non-stop for over a year now, and are hard powered off and on again at the mains every single week day. I'd say they're pretty dependable.
I don't know about the Raspberry Pi Zero, but I've been running a reliability test-bench for power semiconductors non-stop since August '16, and the Raspberry Pi 3 hasn't failed me once.
I did purchase an industrial USB Hub though because there were too many USB peripherals drawing too much current.
Sadly its extremely hard to buy any Pi Zero at the sticker price. Its always out or not available - and even if you can get em you only can order a limited amount (in the case were I got lucky it was 1).
The Pi Zero W seems to continue the trend as far as my local distributor is concerned. I get the overpriced USB hubs its where the profit is at but MAN stop frigging teasing its annoying if you can't buy it at that price.
I don't want the adapters - I solder to the board directly and while the sandisk sd card is not terrible its far from the fastest you can get for a similar price.
That's nice, but if I can't get ten, and it's "$10 plus $30 shipping", then it's just $40, isn't it. Let me get ten for $130, and then I'll believe the price.
Not everyone lives where you do, so advertising the price for "this is how much it costs to send to StavrosK assuming they buy nothing else" would probably be less useful than giving the item price.
So, how is the competitive with Xunlong and FriendlyARM making the OrangePi Zero and the Nanopi Neo? It seems to have less I/O and still not have a libre stack, unlike the Allwinner H3.
Is the Raspberry Pi Foundation just coasting on branding at this point to sell products?
Edit: On another note, will the Raspberry Pi Foundation stick with this very limited SOC ad infinium? It seems like a poor choice for a single board computer, you really want I/O and low power usage, but it doesn't deliver on either.
Not just branding - also Pi fans at sites like Hackaday which downplay and dismiss any competing boards. For example, compare Brian Benchoff's article a year ago which argues the C.H.I.P. has been rendered irrelevant because it's $9 and the Pi Zero is $5 while ignoring the fact one has WiFi, with his article today arguing that this is a major step forward because $10 with WiFi is really cheaper than $5 without it while omitting any mention of the similarly-priced boards with WiFi that preceded it:
I bought 2 CHIPs, disappointed. Spec sheet is perfect, but it's not raspberry pi. glitches (sudden full system shutdown when servo turns a little bit faster), and lack of quality drivers/software to work reliably.
If you need a raspberry pi, just buy a raspberry pi.
> Is the Raspberry Pi Foundation just coasting on branding at this point to sell products?
I don't believe beating competition by selling more products was ever part of the RPi Foundation mission statement. The way how I see it, existence of competing products primarily benefits a minority technically-oriented community, not their intended primary audience.
Eh, it seems like the Raspberry Pi Foundation has strayed from an org that started out building SBCs so kids could have a computer to tinker on, and are now entirely focused on being Broadcom's PR and Sales engine. The system on a module was definitely not created with kids in mind, nor was the open GPU driver.
Kids don't care that a Broadcom SoC powers the RPi, nor do they care about kernel level nuances. I believe you've conflated the interests of a minority hacker community with the RPi Foundation's overarching mission of making an affordable compute platform accessible to those who otherwise can't afford one for the purpose of furthering the advancement of education.
O_o Well, I really don't know what to say to you, if your ever in Seattle gimme a holler and I'll introduce you to a room full of kids who are not fans of low quality, closed software.
Hello benn_88,
but will it be possible to order or preorder more than one? Maybe hundreds? Maybe at a different price tag? The RPI zero was interesting but very hard to get by.
cool - can't get the bare Pi Zero w in germany yet - maybe supplies will normalize in a few weeks - It would be a swap in replacement for my current handheld Project.
I disagree with parts of this. Geographical limits do mean some places end up paying more, and some scummy distributors only stock the packs with a higher markup, but on the whole, the boards are available on their own at the right price.
Your real problem is availability. You see a product launch, want 10, 100, 1000 to use in everything from the sprinklers to the toaster and then hit a website where 200,000 other hackers have had exactly the same thought. They're ferociously popular...
So what would you rather? They hold off sales and announcement until they have a million units rotting in warehouses around the world (like a console release)? Perhaps they should spend twice as much ramping up production to burst in the first month (and charge more). Or pre-orders? Kickstarter? Serious here, what option is better (on price, fairness and convenience to you) than what they're currently doing?
In a month or two you'll (again, slightly dependant on geography) be able to order a hundred of these without an issue. If you really are putting in a big order, talk direct to the distributor and they can adjust their order (and maybe their price to you).
Ultimately you don't have to pay more, you just have to be patient.
I don't think the one per customer limit on the original Pi Zero ever got lifted in the entire year and a bit it's been on sale, with the brief exception of ones sold in a $40 bundle with the camera module. It's probably sensible to assume that you will never be able to buy more than one of these at once for anything close to the list price.
I bought a Pi Zero last week from The Pi Hut, arrived in two days, they had loads in stock. Might be a problem with your local distributor? I'm in the UK so supply may well be better here than elsewhere.
I did get tripped up with the camera connector being a different size to normal Pis though, darn it.
[1] www.thepihut.com (I am not affiliated with them in any way)
Yes, it's £9.60 for the RPi Zero W and £2.50 for shipping. You can buy it for £12.10 ($15) total in the UK. Not too bad, eh?
Shipping to Germany from the same UK seller would be £4, or £5 for the US. That's a total of £13.60 / €16 / $17 for Germany and £14.60 / $18 for the US.
On Pimoroni, shipping to Switzerland is also around £4. In contrast, the official distributor for Germany/Switzerland (pi3g) wants 19€ (!!!) for shipping an envelope with a single Pi Zero in it. And it prohibits reselling. In my opinion the Raspberry Pi foundation should do something against this kind of pricing to keep the boards accessible.
Same situation as you - pi zero is always out of stock. But in the video included in the post they are saying they will manufacture a lot more quantities of this compared to pi zero so fingers crossed.
This brings up a question I've been meaning to ask: how hard is it to solder a 40 pin connector to a Pi Zero. Do you need a temperature controlled soldering iron?
10EUR irons are terrible! You have to be far more skilled to deliver the right amount of heat, and for some cases (small pad close to a chip without a shunt) it's hard to solder well without causing damage. They can also be pretty inconsistent temp-wise, making precise, skilled timings impossible.
It so happens the lead-free solder needs more heat, more heat leads to longer solder times, killing more components, or damaging their lifespan, forcing you to breath more of the extra toxic lead-free flux fumes. Do not use lead-free solder for hobby work.
Because lead poisoning isn't a huge issue for hobbyists.
Common rules are: Work in a well-ventilated area, don't eat while working, don't use your soldering iron to heat your coffee. But those apply while using lead-free solder as well.
Real answer: you would have to be soldering for hours every day for months to be exposed to more lead than can be cleared naturally. Full-time component assembly workers do get that much exposure, so they need to take precautions to avoid poisoning. For hobbyists, you would have to eat quite a bit of solder at once before you would develop any poisoning symptoms.
edit: so, it's the frequent repeated exposure to lead (i.e. in paint and as a sugar added to wine[0]) which is harmful, not any single individual (non-acute) exposure.
heavy metal leaching in rubbish tips is an environmental issue, one being tackled by much of Europe, starting with regulations on lead-containing electronics.
Don't eat the solder? Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to lead-based solder. Caution: lead-based solder may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds. Lead-based solder contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at. Do not use lead-based solder on concrete. Discontinue use of lead-based solder if any of the following occurs:
itching
vertigo
dizziness
tingling in extremities
loss of balance or coordination
slurred speech
temporary blindness
profuse sweating
or heart palpitations.
If lead-based solder begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head. Lead-based solder may stick to certain types of skin. When not in use, lead-based solder should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Failure to do so relieves the makers of lead-based solder, Wacky Products Incorporated, and its parent company, Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability. Ingredients of lead-based solder include an unknown glowing green substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space. Lead-based solder has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq. Do not taunt lead-based solder. Lead-based solder comes with a lifetime warranty.
I bought one PI Zero W from the Dutch distributor a few minutes ago. It's linked in the blog post. I didn't have to buy anything else and I couldn't buy more than one item.
The German distributor seems to be selling only 30x items and the French one doesn't have an Add to cart button for the W, maybe still out of stock. It's in stock at Pimoroni. I didn't check any distributor outside EU.
I've been happy with SanDisk microSDHC UHS-I 8 GB cards so far. They are cat 10, advertised up to 48 MB/s. Which SD cards do you recommend?
I used to use them as well - but I had some fail for some reason and then I bought a samsung evo + card in 32GB during a sale. I have been using those ever since since the iops seem to be noticeably better.
Aaaand you can't even get a bare Pi Zero from Adafruit. Of course they're "out of stock" for the "W"'s... But they're glad to sell you a overly inflated price of $24.95 for a Zero kit. bah.
I bought two Zeros for $5 and <$5 of shipping earlier this month. I still had to go to two different distributors, but Canakit and Adafruit were in stock in the US.
$10 is an awesome price point. I've never toyed with any of these, but i think i'll pick one up!
How long do you think it'll be before i can safely hook up powered electronics into a system like RasPi? I'd like to make my home "smart", but i don't want to have random IoT vulnerabilities in my home. So a simple network of tiny linux machines powering desk lights/etc will be plenty for me. However, hooking electronics up is dangerous, so i'd rather wait until a professional makes it accessible to someone like me.
Look into a protocol like z-wave - you can already get switches, outlets, heating controllers etc and it can be done without an internet connection. You can get a USB Z-Wave dongle[0] and then use Home Assistant [1] on a Pi to control everything.
Something like https://www.adafruit.com/products/2935 combined with a flavor of raspberry pi then. The linked product is barebones but the actually dangerous part has already been done for you.
I would get a Z-Wave daughter board and use Z-Wave devices for controlling the electronics. Z-wave devices aren't Internet connected so you only have to worry about locking down the Pi.
Apparently there's already an open source project called Home Assistant for this purpose.
Didn't see info on power consumption. Has anyone run zeroes completely wireless using a battery and Bluetooth LE or something or should I be looking elsewhere.
Guess they were feeling some heat from the new Orange Pi Zero and possibly the C.H.I.P too. The omission of WiFi from the Pi Zero was a massive pain because there just wasn't the USB connectors to add it easily.
That's great, recently I ported Redis to the Pi, and the most exciting device for IoT applications looked to be definitely the Pi zero, but the lack of built-in wireless networking was a big limit. At the same time the doubled price tag of the "W" version does not easily allow to use the zero directly as a building block of certain IoT devices or consumer products. What I hope is they'll be able to retain the features and lower the price at the same time.
This is perfect. I bought two Zeros a few months back and my ONLY issue with them was how cumbersome having to use a USB hub was for wireless and keyboard connectivity. Looks like this may still require that for initial setup, but it makes discrete placement behind a TV much easier once that's taken care of.
I, for one, welcome the $99 soapbar computer war that's about to unleash.
It is unbelievable how Apple is missing this train. They could put 100 million soapbars in all homes in the world without even making a dent in their main products. All aluminum case, just like an Apple TV.
This would be intended for the 6 billion thirld-worders like me that don't have access to the internet, not for the one billion that can afford a $1000 iMac.
Plug it to any TV via HDMI, attach a keyboard with trackpad and there you have it, instant knowledge at your fingertips. You can't imagine how much I have learned about carpentry, electric motors, water wells, metal foundries, solar, agriculture, stuff that is really life saving in less developed countries like mine. I dug my own water well watching videos from youtube using a 2" PVC pipe and a hose and found water just ten feet under the ground so never again will suffer a drought like past years.
Youtube, Wikipedia and sites like Khan Academy are a godsend and if only more people in the world could have access to them imagine all the knowledge and productivity that could exponentially grow from that.
The more people has access to information the better the whole world will be. And while the Raspberry Zero W is cool for playing and automating stuff, it is not enough for providing internet access to a third-worlder like me. Just upgrade it a little more and sell it for a little more and let people do the rest. America can continue enjoying their expensive toys while we catch up and help you build better toys.
I just hope the will produce enough of them. For a project I was looking to buy 5-25 of the 'normal' Raspberry pi Zero, and no supplier had them in stock. We had to go with the normal Rpi 3, which (besides being more expensive) is a lot bulkier.
I am very happy about this. Finally no more USB hubs hanging around my Pi Zero to have WLAN and keyboard access at the same time (yeah, yeah, SSH I know...). Just ordered two pieces over here in Germany, I hope they will arrive by the weekend. :-)
I wonder if there would be a basic model like this with an included touchscreen. That would be perfect for kiosks and any type of wall mount setup like a code entry or whatever. That seems like a common use case to me.
It sounds great, going to skip the zero (was never in stock) and go straight to the zero/W, this is perfect for remote sensors and actuators (I think, don't have it yet, going to order 5 to start)
Yes, you could but it's still kinda overkill for just a bunch of sensors and actuators. With limited soldering a Wemos D1 mini would do a much better job. Use the raspberry as an IoT home server to push the sensor data to.
I keep reading this, but I power all mine with 5v phone-chargers via the mini USB socket. There are output pins for 5v and 3v so you can choose the appropriate power for your display/whatever. I've seen nothing go wrong.
This is a legitimate complaint at the moment, but with more and more development boards going 3.3v it just means you should always have logic level converters on hand. Luckily they are readily available, quite cheap, and small
I'm pretty new to Arduino and the ESP8266, but doesn't this involve breaking out all the pins to another board to do the level conversion? I was hoping there'd be a converter in shield form.
Ah yes, I am not aware of a logic converter shield at the moment, most are in an IC or a small breakout board like the sparkfun below.
I tend to avoid shields in projects as they are more expensive, take up more space, and not as flexible (can't be used as easily with another board e.g. teensy 3.0 vs arduino uno)
I'm glad both exist for sure. My favorite thing about the chip is lipo charging built-in. But micro-sd, HDMI, and the camera connector on the Pi are useful too.
Does anyone have a project idea for a Pi? I bought one a couple weeks ago to make a VPN server but I found out my router had that functionality built in anyway.
I'm looking for a fun project to scratch my engineering itch. I've been a non-engineer for too long.
I have an amazon echo for voice recognition functionality if that opens any doors. But I can't rewire my apartment since it's not mine, so I can't do much home automation.
> But I can't rewire my apartment since it's not mine, so I can't do much home automation.
If you're willing to pay some, that's not that much of an impediment. Something like the Phillips Hue bulbs are self-contained inside of the bulb (at least as far as powering it goes) which means you don't need to mess with any wiring.
I can't find any information on the site, but it looks like they've put a U.FL footprint on there this time (given that it's connected to the antenna feed), so you could solder one on fairly easily. Can anyone confirm? This would be really nice, currently you can't put the Pi3 in a metal box and get the wireless benefits.
Does anyone know whether its Bluetooth adapter works well with Bluetooth Low Energy beacons in Raspbian or similar? I'm interested in using BLE from non C languages - .NET, Python, Erlang. Have anyone had experience with BLE and RPi3/zero and can share his/her experience?
Yay. Another "Raspberry Pi" device for X$ that in reality is going to be 2X$ + .5X$ shipping. Or frankly, just want be obtainable for any price for the first 3 months.
In about getting sick of how they're handling supply issues and pricing. Yeah 10$ ? Bullshit.
Idk about the rpi zero but rpi3 is widely available now in brick and mortar stores. Once the initial demand is met, should just be able to buy from Amazon or something with free shipping.
Meh. I certainly get the addition of the CSI connector, makes for a pretty cheap wireless camera now - but what I really miss is a DSI connector, and real DSI displays instead of the I2C displays everyone seems to be using.
Why would I buy the Raspberry Pi Zero instead of an OrangePi PC ($15) or an OrangePi Zero ($8.99)? With the latter, I can actually use an M.2 SSD with the HATs available for it, and I'll get 40MB/s unlike the Raspi's 4 to 5MB/s, and both OrangePis are able to run a fully libre stack with kernel 4.10 and have much more CPU grunt than this Raspi (4x Cortex A7 @ 1.2Ghz vs one ancient ARMv6 core at 1Ghz).
The built in ethernet port, full size USB port and ability to easily add POE support are just gravy on top to make it easily usable, rather than have a dozen dongles and a USB hub hanging off it needlessly.
I don't see Broadcom supporting their chips very well with the Raspberry Pi, you basically can't use most of the boards functionality on Debian without adding a bunch of blobs.
Wrt community, linux-sunxi and Armbian are both in better states than the Raspberry Pi community on their forums or on Reddit, if I google for dhclient issues with the Raspberry Pi I'm gonna get nowhere fast on fixing said issues.
This is the same for every ARM board if you want multimedia support. (Because these companies do not allow you to publish their IP)
Ofc if you only connect a punch of hard drives to it and a ethernet cable you are not gonna appreciate what possibilities a Raspberry Pi and their quite open software stack are able to offer you. Get a camera and hardware encoding involved in your tinkering and you will have a bad time for sure.
Uhh, when you actually talk to Allwinner, they are generally pretty helpful unless its not their IP to give. I've emailed Tyle at Allwinner in the past to clear up some chunks of code in the kernel 3.4 BSP, and I found most of the time the code was intended to be under GPLv2, which he clarified.
How is libmmal for the Raspberry Pi's camera libre by the way? The license looks to be proprietary, definitely the opposite of open.
Well, I can easily use, for example, Plan 9 or RISC OS, on a Raspberry Pi without any porting effort whatsoever. Some of us have use cases that do not simply involve Linux.
I am more interested in GPIO support in embedded boards. With RaspPi it is very probable that I will find a snippet to read a specific temperature sensor via I2C or bit banging for example. For the rest of the options (orange pi, banana pi, even odroid, etc) I have not heard such good things.
Literally, once I got my Pi, I got a DHT22 from my arduino box and in less than 3 minutes I could read it.
You can access GPIO, I2C, UART via standard kernel interfaces. Which is the whole point of the kernel. Learn those and you can use the code on any SBC running Linux.
Other usecases than yours listed.
The RaspberryPI Zero is really small, has a camera connector as well as a lot of software and documentation.
Not everyone uses a RaspberryPI as a homeserver replacement.
Okay, people who read this and want to go and buy the Orange Pi Zero: PLEASE read the following before purchasing!
> I can actually use an M.2 SSD with the HATs available for it
The NAS hat costs $7 extra plus shipping ($4 to EU for me). [0] And to my knowledge there is no case for the Ornage Pi Zero which can accommodate the NAS hat.
> and POE support
It doesn't support POE out of the box, and it's not 802.3af/at compliant. [1] You can use a passive PoE injector, but 5V in a CAT5/6 cable won't get you very far. You can use a higher voltage, but then you need to add a DC/DC voltage converter and unsolder some resistors from the PCB.
In short: it's a lot of work to get POE working. It's not really worthwhile.
Also the WiFi on the Orange Pi Zero is a piece of shit. [2] Performance is crap and there's high packet loss. Allwinner's driver is a steaming pile of shit and no one from Xunlong or Allwinner is working to make it any better. The stock images from Xunlong are using kernel 3.4!
Several people from Armbian are trying to improve the driver, but there's no public datasheet and the firmware of the wireless module is pretty crash happy.
Also it's 2.4GHz 1T1R (same as the Raspberry Pi W) so the performance is always going to be bad, even after (or if) Armbian manages to fix up the driver.
- *Does the Orange Pi Zero outperform the Raspberry Pi (Zero, W, 1, 2)?* Yes.
- *Should I buy the Orange Pi Zero for my project that needs WiFi?* No.
- *Should I buy the Orange Pi Zero for a project requiring USB and Ethernet?* Yes!
- *Should I use the images from Xunlong for my Orange Pi <whatever>?* Please no! Use Armbian ( https://www.armbian.com/ )
Images from Xunlong are using an ancient kernel and don't have proper power/thermal management for the SoC. With Armbian and the mainline kernel, temperatures are under control and you don't need a heat sink unless you're using 100% CPU all the time. Also, cores don't randomly shut off due to overheating.
> The NAS hat costs $7 extra plus shipping ($4 to EU for me). [0] And to my knowledge there is no case for the Ornage Pi Zero which can accommodate the NAS hat.
Sure, but your gonna be able to max out the ethernet port on an OrangePi Zero, whereas none of the Raspberry Pis can even fill half of a 100Mbps ethernet port. Printing a case isn't all that hard, or you could always build it from thin plywood, cardbord or something else if you want a case.
> It doesn't support POE out of the box
No, but you can wire it for any type of POE you want, whether that be 5v, 12v to 24v, or proper 48v POE. The traces are already there on the PCB, and at that price point I doubt anyone could fit in a buck converter to make it do 48v POE without increasing the cost by a few bucks.
> WiFi on the Orange Pi Zero is a piece of shit.
That and every other SBC, I've got a Raspberry Pi 3 on the shelf that I wrote off due to poor wifi performance. SBCs with small integrated antennas just aren't gonna have amazing wifi. Most of what was in the BSP is now mainlined in kernel 4.10 by the way.
Armbian is decent, I've been quemu-debootstrapping my own images though since I'm not a fan of all the modifications they make to Debian.
This is on a Raspberry Pi 2, which acts as a ClusterHAT controller. On a Pi Zero attached to it, which uses a virtual USB network adapter (bridged on eth0 of the controller), I get the following:
> No, but you can wire it for any type of POE you want, whether that be 5v, 12v to 24v, or proper 48v POE. The traces are already there on the PCB, and at that price point I doubt anyone could fit in a buck converter to make it do 48v POE without increasing the cost by a few bucks.
So, you can buy an extra buck converter^ and solder it yourself --removing additional resistors on the PCB-- and it still won't be 802.3af/at compliant, or you can just buy a proper PoE adaptor for $10. [0]
^ Please show me a buck converter that does 48VDC->5VDC for "a few bucks"
> What? You definitely don't need to remove any resistors onboard.
Yes, you do if you're using a voltage higher than 5V. Read the wiki page:
If you plan to use a buck converter at higher voltages, remove R135/R136 (75 Ohm) as they will dissipate a lot of heat and may burn out! See the picture on the right and below in the gallery for which resistors to remove. [0]
WiFi on the Chip is also a piece of shit. It's why mine is sat on a shelf doing nothing. Are there any boards like this which actually have decent wifi?
> Are there any boards like this which actually have decent wifi?
Doubtful. It's a race to the bottom for any SBC which isn't a Raspberry Pi or ODROID.
It's highly unlikely someone will make a board that costs $15 and has great WiFi, because everyone blindly buys the $8 board (because cheaper = better!) with shit WiFi and then complains about how crap all these Chinese SBCs are.
Especially when websites post stories about these board releases never bother to update their articles and essentially just give the manufacturer free advertising. [0] [1]
Hell even Intel tablets running Windows 8.1/10 are using shitty 2.4GHz Realtek SDIO based WiFi that still isn't supported in Linux.
In the race to the bottom, good software support is sacrificed first.
Risk-adjusted pricing: If you buy one of the many alternatives out there, maybe you've got a 50% chance of it working? So the 'real' price doubles on those alternatives. People do this kind of risk mitigation in their head all the time.
When I say 'working' - i'm talking about the reviews of the alternatives that almost always talk about how hard it is to download the software and get them working, there's always some snag.
You may be "calm now", but nobody wants to read this. And at this exact moment there is a perfect comment directly above this at the top of the thread. Not only are you, and those like you, not the center of the universe, nobody wants to spend their time sifting through these comments on public boards. I know I'm screaming into the hurricane here, but if you were both entitled enough to post this and also self aware enough to know that its a self-serving rant maybe, just maybe, think before you start mashing keys.
As far as the subgenres of rants go, that one wasn't so bad. The frustrated love was closer to the surface than it usually is, the author showed some awareness of ranting, and the comment contained some substantive stuff ("I solder...").
I appreciate how frustrating ranty comments can be, especially when they rank higher than they deserve—which is nearly invariably, as steaming indignation always gets lots of upvotes owing to some bug in human firmware. But it would have been better not to take the thread in a personal direction.
To be honest I think your post is more distracting than the one you're replying to (and likely mine more than yours). Complaining about lack of stock is a fair comment and I don't mind reading it. It also creates conversation about where to find it for cheap, why it's limited, etc. (as seen by the replies).
Maybe? I guess thats a fair response. I just had a pretty allergic reaction to <rant> and what came off as really, just whining, especially since as I pointed out, the comment directly above it (for me, at the time of posting) was an almost word for word rebuttal of the attitude of op. Maybe I just need a break from this site, getting to the point where logging in to see people complaining, constantly is weighing me down. Thanks for the comment.
I was merely giving voice to the annoyance anyone would feel when hearing about the Pi Zero for the first time trying to buy it only to discover that whoever had it in stock only sold it bundled with a lot of stuff you don't want. I overplayed it a bit for humorous effect.
My comment caused quite a few follow up comments from people who had probably similar feelings checking out the Pi Zero so I don't think I entirely missed the mark here.
I will add to this: the Arduino ecosystem is more valuable in that it can be used with your own board design. Install the open source boot loader into something like at atsamd21g18 and "sketches" can be downloaded into your own board.
Want to use RPI ecosystem? Forget it, the hardware and bootloader are closed.
I see CPUs from AllWinnder used in some of these R-PI near-clones, such as PcDuino4 Nano. Anyone have luck buying these chips?
I'm relatively new here, so I apologize if I broke any rules. What do you find most inappropriate in my comment, the wording or the content?
Articles about new Zeros make me angry because in other places I won't name people (including me) get silenced for any criticism to the strange production & distribution model of that board.
But the criticism stands: everybody and his dog wants one RPi Zero, but after over one year it's still produced in extremely small numbers.
In all seriousness, what company would like its most desired product kept unavailable for such a long time?
"This is going to get downvoted but..." is just complaining about down votes. It's not a rule, but the community tends to down vote for complaining about down votes.
Ok, thanks for the explanation. Of course the accusation wasn't directed to everyone: unfortunately elsewhere it's getting very common for some... well, let's call them fans, to silence any critics to anything Raspberry, even those trying to be constructive.
One doesn't simply use the word "shill" on HN or they consider themselves lucky they're not downvoted to hell, flagged or banned on the first sight. You're free to tell whatever comes to your mind on HN except when it comes to talk about shilling. For some strange reason even seeing the word it pushes everybody's buttons.
That "some strange reason" seems pretty obvious to me. It's an insulting attack against the person, rather than discussing the content of their comment. It's little different from calling someone an "idiot" or "jackass." In a way, it's worse: being an idiot or a jackass is at least somewhat innate, whereas shilling is a deliberate choice to disrupt a community in exchange for money.
You're portraying it like somebody directly calls or implies another one shill, but that is almost always not what happens in HN comments. The comments I generally see in HN complaining about shilling are about either products or companies and most of the time they are top post (ie. not an answer to another comment, and even when they are not top posts they are not addressed to the comments or commenters they are replying to. I've yet to see a commenter explicitly or implicitly blaming another commenter a shill. (and it wouldn't be logical anyway, calling attention to shilling about a topic is more effective than arguing with individual commenters which may or may not be shills).
"Shills will downvote this to death" is pretty obviously directed at other people on the site. Does it really need to be directed at a specific person to count?
1. Raspberry Pi Trading use UK based manufacturing facilities, so yes, it costs a little extra to ship outside of the UK.
2. Raspberry Pi Trading do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront. So supply will always be limited for devices like the Zero, while demand is high.
3. The profits from the sales of all Raspberry Pi devices are used to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We do charitable work to further Computer Science education around the world. The target audience is educators and children, and that will always be the focus. That it happens there are hackers out there that want to use the device is great, but not the priority.
4. The popularity of the Raspberry Pi range is mainly down to the amazing community we have and the huge support available from that community.