Well I guess the lack of availability that never let me get into pi’s the last few years was a good thing. R.I.P.
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.
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.
There are two separate entities: the raspberry pi foundation which is the charity and unchanged, and the raspberries pi holdings company which has always been the business side of the project. The corporation contributes to the foundation a significant amount of money which is not changing. The charity is the majority stakeholder in the company.
Here’s the founder explaining it
The end of a beautiful era - hats off for all the folks who made the pi what it is, the folks who will now be forced to make us sorrowful for what it will become.
Gotta buy a share just so I can write angry shareholder letters
I’m guessing this means new pi versions soon.
RPi6 XL Plus - ad free
$4.99/month. It’s essentially just a cup of coffee!
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.
Can you use pine 64 in the same way as a RPi?
Yes(ish) They are not yet as powerful as RPi. But if you have a low power usecase then yes.
Broadly yes, as a “user”.
Begun, the Clone Wars have.
Pi Picos (which are notably microcontrollers and not computers) have had clones for like $2 on Aliexpress for some time now, and devices like the Orange Pi and similar have existed for years.
Well, they’ve been going on for a couple of years now, Master Jedi
Well, so much for that I guess
I honestly never thought I’d see this day. It’s like announcing Linux just went closed source!
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?
I’m using a lepotato for Home Assistant. Works very well for months now, but I’m a bit worried about long term distro support
Lattepanda mu is apparently a very powerful alternative.
Yeah but most rpi projects don’t need a powerful alternative. I don’t need a full computer to run octoprint… But it’s still too hard and pricy to get a RPi
Bigtreetech’s btt pi is quite good for printer use - and general use tbh, but it is geared towards printers
I had so many ideas for things we could use these for that completely revolutionize what is now a terrible user experience. No idea how to implement on these ideas, but it’s a start I guess.
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).
Libreboard
Arduinos all the way down I guess
Orange or banana pi
Radxa for RISC-V SBCs with GPIO.
Have a couple boards and the software support leaves a lot to be desired. Armenian is a godsend, but sadly cannot fill every gap.
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.
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.
The only downside I see with LePotato is that it has no SteamLink client (for now). Otherwise, there are plenty of OSes made for it. I have one SD card for CoreELEC to watch things on the TV, and one with Batocera for game emulators.
OrangePI
I had one and returned it. The hardware was good but the software was total ass
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.
My guess is that I tried 6 or more OSes on it. Like 2 would run at all, and in every case there kept being a lot of issues. It felt like it was hardware no one cares about supporting except one dude who made a version of Ubuntu for it. The whole damned experience was janky AF.
Got a RPi 5 and was able to get Arch running on it and it feels faster despite being objectively slower than the OPi
That’s the biggest issue. Support.
Most of the success of the RPi is due to rasparian and community support.
Never take software from a hardware company.
I sank a ton of time trying to get several OSes running on it, including that one, with almost no luck. Out of the few that even did run, there were always piles of issues. You assumed I only meant the official OSes but I didn’t.
Out of ignorance I literally thought this was a joke. “Orange you glad I didn’t say raspberry?”
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.
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
I mean, the market did what the market does.
They released a device with the intent of being a tinker kit for programming and interacting with the physical world. The next technological jump for hobbyists from PIC to Arduino, became an ARM SBC.
Of course, they released a cheap ARM SBC, and industry quickly learned that these are great for rapid prototyping and any case that called for a small low-power Linux system.
I wouldn’t say they lost their way. There’s still a great hobbyists market around it, and tons of good competition. I’d say it’s more like they are a victim of their own success.
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.
Loved the Pi for hosting small services around the house. I’ve just replaced my Pi4 with a N100, 16GB, 512GB SSD mini pc which is so much faster, not to mention cheaper than a Pi5.
Can you compare power consumption to the Pi 4? Just an estimate, double, tripple,…
Not sure what a pi4 uses, but my NUC (16gb ram, 1tb NVME, quad core i3 up to 2.4ghz) running my smart home (HA in a VM) and a few other small services in LXCs uses ~7W on average. Loads more compute power if I need it at half the price. Even if a pi4 draws half the power, that’s only $8 saving per year.
I have a dell wyse 5070 with a j4105 cpu that runs home assistant with frigate and z2m around 3-5W with a bluetooth and zigbee stick attached. If more processing is needed it will boost to 15w for example during docker container updates, but it will also perform much better in these situations than the PI does. It costed me ~85€ from a refurbish shop and even had 1 year warranty. It came with 4gb ram, 128gb ssd, power supply and case ofc. It was a no brainer at the time when just the PI4 alone was like 80€ for 4 gb ram version if you could find it in stock. And that didn’t include case, power supply or sd card.
Indeed this. Plus my minipc has dual ethernet which is handy as I run Proxmox and use the second nic for migration traffic. The mini pc is way better than the Pi for my usage.
I’m glad they came out as what they already were.
It was clear that they did not feel as a non-profit foundation for many years now.
For months it was impossible for me to get any Pis at MSRP and then my employer suddenly bought 30 of them to use for signage around the office. That’s when I knew the non-profit hobbyist/enthusiast org was gone.
I’m not worried about it though. In the meantime a lot of other stellar SBCs have emerged on the market.
Which would you recommend any as the best Pi replacement?
Honestly I still haven’t had a chance to try them out myself so I can’t make a specific recommendation but that market has been exploding recently. I have a sort of nice problem where people keep gifting me their Raspberry Pi’s once they aren’t sure what to do with them so I keep accumulating them without trying.
That being said, the big ones I’ve had my eye on lately are things like the Odroid N2+, the Jetson Nano, the Rock Pi or the Banana Pi. Some of these cater more towards being integrated into projects that need a lot of GPIO, others are focused on just being a low cost low power headless server or thin client.
The SBC market seems healthy enough that by the time I need another SBC I’ll have a lot of options. Biggest loss is just that having one extremely popular hobbyist board made it really easy to find solutions to issues in the community and now there is just a lot more variety out there.
Raspberry Pi Holdings has always been a for-profit company. This isn’t some sort of new news with them going public.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a separate organization that has not gone public and continues to operate as a nonprofit. In fact, the IPO was structured to raise some funds for the foundation’s global impact fund.
I am not saying that the IPO is a good thing, in fact I’m pretty certain it isn’t, but it’s worth knowing that Raspberry Pi is two different organizations with two different missions.
One is a tax shelter for the other got it.
Oh shit I missed one of these again.
Well, shit.
Now I’m glad I didn’t get plugged in to their ecosystem.
