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It’s like $100 per board now once you add a power supply and a case. More if you also add storage. Cheapest Intel system on Amazon is $139. The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability. That was kind of lost along the way.

The lower-end, power-efficient market is being rapidly devoured by the ESP32. A $20 Pi will still use much more power than an ESP32 while also being less reliable and still 3x the price.

The RPi company looked into the future and saw microcontrollers eating the lower end of the market, which is why they are now chasing performance.

Unfortunately IMO they are not executing on this well. The RPi 5 requires 5V at 5 amps to run properly. It's now near-impossible to run via the 5V header pins, no existing power supplies can support it, and at 25W of power consumption the Intel systems you mention are now serious competition.

EDIT: actually it's worse than that. Here's a $99 Intel system that claims 6W power consumption: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXL2MPM?ref=product_details&th=...

Aside from GPIO headers it's hard to justify a Pi 5 over that on any grounds.

They designed and built their own microcontroller. This chasing performance narrative doesn't make sense.

And let's be real, it doesn't have 25W power consumption. You can attach enough things to it to get to 25W if you try really hard but that's hardly the same thing. The latest cheapo Intel parts are contenders (at ~10W, where the pi 5 actually operates) and if you just want perf you're better off with that. But if you want a low-level connectivity, a rich community, docs, and tailor-made projects, you still want a pi.

The RP2040 isn't a very compelling microcontroller though. The only interesting thing about it is the programmable peripherals, but we've seen that before, e.g. from XMOS and in practice the protocols & peripherals you're going to use 99.9% of the time are completely standard - I2C, SPI, I2S, UART, counters/PWM, etc. For the rare case you need something custom and high speed there are really cheap FPGAs now.

The ESP32 supports all of those protocols and Wifi and Bluetooth, and it has low power sleep modes. And there are RISC-V versions which is quite nice from a a warm fuzzy point of view.

I think RPi still has a place for hobby electronics projects where you want GPIO. I don't think people are going to use it as a standard computer (desktop / media server / etc) though.

> I think RPi still has a place for hobby electronics projects where you want GPIO.

But any sane design would offload the IO to a more capable MCU that has more than a single SPI channel, among other weird limitations.. Sure, hobbyists often do weird things, but the niche for RPi is pretty much 'basically a computer, but you could theoretically blink an LED' - the actual experience of using those peripherals is much worse that what you'd have in Arduino or Platformio. Try attaching an interrupt handler to a GPIO pin on Linux, now you need to write a kernel module :)

RPi's niche is really as an SBC supported by mainline Linux and a giant community. That's why it had supply shortages - that's a huge value add to the electronics industry and the money was too good to resist pivoting to commercial users over education and hobbyists. Grabbing an Altium/KiCad/etc footprint and slapping a compute module on a board while prototyping with a Pi is still the fastest way to go to market with a well supported Linux CPU. All the other manufacturers have really really shitty BSPs in comparison, even if you're just offloading everything realtime to an MCU.

ESP32/ESPHome may have taken over the lower end with its easy config but there's still no real Pi competitor. A decade after the first RPi release, I still dread using any other platform when I have to design a board that requires more compute than an ESP32.

> All the other manufacturers have really really shitty BSPs in comparison, even if you're just offloading everything realtime to an MCU.

The irony here is that other SOC/SBC makers are focused more on throwing a barely stable design onto AliExpress for $20 than investing in good upstream support that would allow them to charge a premium.

Raspberry Pi wasn't always able to charge a premium, that benefit came from years of investment into software and community. I have not yet seen another SOC vendor or board partner realize this in any significant way.

You're not looking in the right places. I've had great experiences with EmbeddedTS, and their kernel seems to be close to upstream.

> The TS-7250-V3 is an industrial grade SBC based on the NXP i.MX 6UL with a 696MHz Arm® Cortex®-A7 core and 512 MB or 1 GB DDR3 RAM

This is their latest "High performance industrial grade embedded computer" that I can see on their website

Of course you'll have good upstream support for something as old as the i.MX6UL, it's been out for 8 years (7 years at the time they released the TS-7250-V3).

No wonder Raspberry Pi has upended the market, when a single core Cortex-A7 is the competition.

Even an Allwinner chip that has a terrible BSP at release has good upstream support 7 years later.

How would they get traction when they have Raspberry Pi right there next to them?

Besides the price, anyway.

Spending money on linux devs who are available to help work through problems and keep systems up to date.

And how would that work compared to the army of free ones on the Raspberry Pi side?

> All the other manufacturers have really really shitty BSPs in comparison,

I disagree. The NXP (i.MX line) and the TI (am62x) and the STM32 MP1/2 all have good mainline support.

What you say is true of most of the Chineese chips and of mobile chips but if you go with mainstream suppliers targeting the industrial / automative markets these days mainline Linux support is good at the SoC level. At the SoM level some are better than others but it's not that hard to pull the approriate DTS into your mainline kernel build even if it isn't already upstream.

RPi is probably better for hobbyists but that's not due to the mainline status but a community more in tune with hobbyists than the more industrial products.

I've built professional embedded Linux systems based in i.MX5/6/8 and STM32MP1 with mainline based BSP rather than vendor stuff but have only ever used the RPi for one off tools.

> the niche for RPi is pretty much 'basically a computer, but you could theoretically blink an LED'

I honestly think that's where most of the demand is. It's an aspirational product, like a jacket you could theoretically go up a mountain in or a watch that works underwater or whatever.

90% of the demand? Probably.

That said, if you’re rolling a DIY remotely manageable industrial automation project? It’s the obvious choice.

Hard to beat being able to apt-get openssh, python, etc. etc. and the ecosystem of pluggable hats for just this purpose.

How to access GPIO interrupts:

https://roboticsbackend.com/raspberry-pi-gpio-interrupts-tut...

That's not an interrupt but an event sent from kernel's gpio subsystem. It may skip some events and there's not much guarantee on the delay between the interrupt itself and event userspace gets.

The RP2040 doesn't itself have wifi, no, but the Pi Pico does have a version that additionally has a wifi chip

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/20174

Sure but if you're using a separate WiFi chip you can use any microcontroller. And it still consumes too much power in sleep mode.

XMOS was around for a long time, but for whatever reason I never saw it used much. There are so many RP2040 projects floating around on github now, showcasing the programmable IO ports. That's very helpful if you want to tinker with something yourself.

I think the next revision is going to be more interesting. Remember, this was their first go at a product in this space.

They made it from scratch recently and chose ARM over RISC-V.

This is testament on how out of touch they are.

I'm out of touch. What would you use instead of ARM?

RISC-V. But really ARM is a totally legit choice at the moment, not out of touch at all, and I say that working for a RISC-V company.

The entire ARM ecosystem is far more mature than RISC-V, plus the main RPis are ARM so they have experience with it and probably access to ARM people.

The main reasons to use RISC-V currently are cost and customisability. There are also some quite high quality open source RISC-V cores you can use off the shelf.

RISC-V is only really directly helpful for those building their own silicon (sure "anyone" can implement a RISV-V core in a FPGA but that won't give you the performance of an ASIC).

If you just want to buy a chip and put it on your own board you don't really care that much about the ISA as long as the toolchain, bootloader, kernel support is there and stable (which is pretty much the case with RISC-V now).

But if you're desiging your own silicon the ability to make or modify an existing open source RISC-V implementation can give you the flexibility that currenlty only the very largest players in the ARM ecosystem that have architecture licenses have (I think that's pretty much limited to Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung).

I expect the smaller but important players like NXP, ST, TI will be bringing out RISC-V chips taking advantage of this.

ARM have also been talking about making their fees dependant on the price of the final product so that could also push people to RISC-V, not just to pay less but also to not have to jump through the hoops that would be required to provide all the information to do that.

Yes, they made a microcontroller to compete with the ESP32, but the ESP32 has orders of magnitude more market share and ecosystem. Not to diminish what they accomplished with the RP2040; it's an impressive chip.

But as for whether they're chasing performance, the RP2040 isn't their flagship product. The Pi 5 is.

And I've had a Pi 5, under heavy CPU (not peripheral) load, start throwing undervoltage warnings when using a 5V3A power supply from a Pi 4.

https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21

Power

    Idle power draw (at wall): 1.8 W (See note)
    Maximum simulated power draw (stress-ng --matrix 0): 9.7 W
    During Geekbench multicore benchmark: 7.9 W
    During top500 HPL benchmark: 11 W (2.75 Gflops/W)

Huh. Maybe I had a bad power supply, then. Interesting.

This is compellingly saying that I was too hasty in assuming the low voltage warnings were from the 18W supply topping out. Thank you for this.

Seen same power warnings, when powered by RP4 5V/3A. Had to use 5.1V power supply to get rid of them.

It's been that way since the RP3 - heavy load resulting in rainbow square. Use the official power supply labelled 5.1v and the square disappears

Maybe it's a spiky 9.7w. :-/

A very real problem. Also power supply/chip tolerances and a little extra gunk on a pin somewhere can line up unfavorably.

Personally, I had tons of power issues due to underspec cables with a Pi4. Irritating.

Agreed, just the other day i ran a pi 5 with official power supply through a kill-a-watt while watching youtube etc and it was generally below 10 W at the plug

The ESP32 is not the real threat. The real threat are new integrated chips from small Chinese companies that are coming down the pipeline - like the SG2002. They run RISC-V, have integrated RAM and run Linux.

They greatly simplify the whole SBC and effectively bridging the gap between RPis and Arduino - in cost and easy of use

It's not a full desktop experience, but they're running full Ubuntu - so you code on your laptop and it'll run on the thing - run whatever language you want and blink lights, shoot out emails or do whatever other hobby projects you want using your desktop dev environment. No fiddling with icky micro Arduino/ESP32 libs.

RPi have shown themselves to be a Broadcom shop - so their product direction is dictated by Broadcom's chip offerings

Example: LicheeRV Nano

https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/02/08/licheerv-nano-low-co...

The problem with the Chinese SBCs is lack of up-to-date LINUX support. Chip manufacturers are eager to provide Android support, but don't care a great deal about Linux support, which is, for them, a tiny niche market. Android will run on significantly out of date kernels, so the chip makers typically bump their kernels to the minimum Linux kernel version required to run a reasonable modern Android. Their Linux ports are based on Android kernels, so they lag significantly behind. And SBC manufacturers just use the kernels provided by the chipset manufacturer. The recent Orange Pi Rockwell-based SBCs, for example, shipped with a 4.x Linux kernel for their Linux port, at a point in time where Raspberry Pi OS was using a 6.x kernel.

Raspberry Pis do lag too, but they have significantly newer kernels, and are supported directly by several mainline distros.

I've chased a number of alternatives to Raspberry Pi in the interval where Rockwell SBCs were beating the pants off Pi 4s, only to find that they were shipping 4.x Linux kernels. My particular application uses USB audio devices, which don't really work prior to extensive rewrites of the USB audio stack in the 5.15 kernel. Raspberry Pi OS kernels are 6.1 or better. And Ubuntu on raspberry PI has later kernels than that (not sure which currently). Versions of Linux prior to 5.15 supported very old USB Audio 1.0 devices, but not currently available USB Audio 1.1 devices.

I imagine you would run into significant problems with video drivers being out of date on non-Pi devices as well. Raspberry Pi had to do their own Vulkan port, which seemed to require significant development effort.

I don't think that's likely to change soon. Rockwell doesn't really have a strong incentive to improve their kernel ports beyond what's necessary to support Android. And smaller SBC manufacturers aren't likely to have the resources to do a kernel port themselves.

You're not wrong.. but I also somehow doubt this is a dealbreaker. The reality is that nobody typically really cares about the kernel version they're running. It just rarely comes to bite you (like in your example). There are often vague security implications - but they always feel mostly theoretical

Furthermore if the platform is popular enough the community starts to step in. You can even see in the comments section of the previous link:

https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/02/08/licheerv-nano-low-co...

Some hobbyist went through the trouble to rebase their patches on top of a newer kernel version: https://github.com/sophgo/linux_5.10/pull/1

Furthermore, b/c unlike Broadcom/Rpi chips, these chips are widely available for commercial use - I'm gunna guess 3rd party companies are more likely to dedicate resources to maintain the software stack (even if the chip manufacturer is doing a crappy job of it)

Does llvm have good riscv support for cross compiling? In my experience, even aarch64 isn't universally supported as a cross compiling target and building on embedded devices is an exercise in patience. I never even considered trying riscv chips in production since I assumed libs would be a hassle.

Even on rpi4, it's near impossible for a normal person to use the gpu because videocore6 is so locked down that you get zero lib support or documentation. And I'm pretty sure the only assembler is still from reverse engineering instead of the manfr.

>> The real threat are new integrated chips from small Chinese companies that are coming down the pipeline - like the SG2002.

Exactly. Then there is more powerful Lichee Pi 4A (https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a) which directly competes with RPi4 and more powerful chips are in the making like P550 (https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550).

I think it's the right time for IPO. RISC-V development is making huge progress fast. They are also upstreaming some changes. While SG200x is quite old and has unfinished Vector 0.7 extension, new chips claim to have vector 1.0. The documentation is still lacking but their progress is clearly visible.

I think this hits the nail on the head, especially longer term. It's hard to compete with this level of low-cost production with steadily improving specs. Raspberry Pi seems caught in the middle with getting more powerful and expensive in a market that wants either very powerful/expensive or good enough/supercheap. Even a pretty full "desktop" mini computer R7/32MB etc is down to $300 and change. If RAPI files for an IPO I'll be keen to see what kind of margins they are generating.

I've used both RPi and microcontrollers, though my last RPi purchase was for a unit that's been running my home file server for years.

My thought is that they cater to different uses, because RPi (and its ilk) support an operating system. So you can decide whether you need or want an OS or not. For instance my file server benefits from all of the networking, file system, and so forth, of Linux. It supports, at the very least, a workable UI for setup and diagnostics via SSH and a terminal program.

A microcontroller is preferable for applications where you don't need a full blown OS, and where the size, cost, or power consumption of something like an RPi are burdens.

In some cases, an RPi is overkill but provides the convenience of hosting things like onboard dev tools. And unit cost isn't as much of an issue if you're not planning on selling or duplicating something. And an additional option is a microcontroller running as a peripheral to a full blown PC, where you get the benefits of the GPIO, but the comfort of desktop software tools.

My general advice for those getting into hardware-related hacking is to give both a try and develop your own taste for which one is preferable for which use.

To pile on here, every Pi I have used (like a dozen at this point) worked fine for years, Pi 5 bricked itself randomly within 4 months of purchase with the complete accessory sets installed (coolers/case etc.) Left a bad taste to blow my savings as a student on the newest and greatest Pi to tinker around with, and it bricks, when the second hand heavily used 4s and 3Bs work fine with constant years of use.

The ESP32 seems like a very different product to me. The pi has megabytes/gigabytes of memory and can reasonably run linux. Were people really using them for the same things?

I've personally used Pis for things much better suited to microcontrollers, many many times, purely because I understood Linux and did not understand how to program microcontrollers.

Now, the tooling around ESP32s is so good that that's no longer a reason. I would never reach for a Pi over an ESP32 unless I need something an ESP cannot offer, like USB ports or compute or gigabytes of memory.

> I've personally used Pis for things much better suited to microcontrollers, many many times, purely because I understood Linux and did not understand how to program microcontrollers.

This describes my trajectory over the last 10 years with the Pi perfectly too. I think a lot of people have jammed a small SBC like the Pi into what should be a micro-controller shaped problem hole, because it's comfortable and familiar.

It's just like hacking software at a dev day job, and it runs a Linux distro everyone is super comfortable with. It has GPIO you can learn how to call from any language you like, I already know ssh/systemd/apt etc etc. It will get the job done, albeit often less efficiently and reliably than a microcontroller, and I didn't have to spend a lot of time learning things.

I also think the huge success of ESP32 in the last few years has meant you don't see SBCs being used for what should be micro-controller problems as much in general anymore. Ten years ago, you regularly saw Pi 1/2 etc in this role in a lot of projects online. Speaking for myself, I avoided Arduino in the early years because I didn't want to step out of my lane etc.

Agree with everything you said. To expand on this:

> Speaking for myself, I avoided Arduino in the early years because I didn't want to step out of my lane etc.

Personally the reason I've avoided Arduino is the absolute pain in the butt that it used to be to get it connected to a network. Almost everything I build benefits from some sort of connectivity, and the Arduino was only really good for things that were purely offline. Even before the Pis had wifi, they had ethernet and I could just plug them in.

And now that ESP32 exists there's no reason to buy the wifi-enabled arduinos they now make, at 8x the price.

The esp32 s3 is a beast

I think the Pi is for people who want to run Linux and also be able to direct-drive voltage pins. Cheap intel systems are way better at running linux, and esp32s are way better at driving the voltage pins, but the former doesn’t offer easy hardware-pin accessibility through python and the latter has you figuring out which filesystem library to compile into your binary.

> the latter has you figuring out which filesystem library to compile into your binary

For what many people are doing with them, ESPHome has simplified the process to programming an ESP32 to do what they want down to nearly nothing.

"Running Linux and being able to direct-drive voltage pins" is certainly still an existing market, but it is rapidly being encroached upon in both directions.

Yes! This is the space PI is still best for, in my opinion. The intel SBC achieve GPIO by adding a microcontroller to the board (as far as I know), but with PI you can drive those pins directly.

The ESP32 is meeting the needs of people doing IOT things that they used to do on the Pi.

Why deploy a $25 Pi for a custom weather controller that uses ~2.5w, when a $5 ESP can can do the same thing on 25mW, and run off a battery?

ESP32 is obviously not a desktop or server platform. Personally, I don’t think Pi’s are either: flaky and fussy power requirements, and packages aren’t always cross compiled to arm64. I’ve wasted enough time compiling my own packages, and encountered my share of random issues that I’ll never use it as a server platform again.

Maybe off-topic, but are there good solutions for esp32/other microcontrollers controlling zigbee devices ?

I found a bunch of libraries (e.g., https://github.com/espressif/esp-zigbee-sdk), but nothing that seems easily usable as a zigbee controller/hub to flip switches in the house, out of the box.

OTOH, running home assistant on a pi is monstrous: overly general and bloated for my use case, need a beefy Pi to get decent performance and not need >1 minute to reboot after a power outage.

Zigbee support is a relatively new feature. I believe the C6 and H2 variants of the ESP32 are the only ones to support it.

> Were people really using them for the same things?

Yes, I was talking to someone who was using a Raspberry Pi as a hot tub controller. Something a $1 ESP8266 could easily do.

Amusingly, I recently talked to someone who built a hot tub controller with an ESP32; it runs on a battery that lasts for half a year.

I received an 8 channel ESP32 board today that I’m planning to use to replace the failed ~25 year old control board that failed in my hot tub.

> Were people really using them for the same things?

No, generally not. Sure, there is overlap. The power requirements, processing elements, available peripherals, storage capacity, form factors, tool chains and cost are all in very different classes, however.

That’s probably an N100. Its actual TDP is 15 watts, but it works reasonably well when capped at 6W.

They are good devices, but they are bigger than Pi and are whiny. Their fans never turns off and creates background noise. I have quite a few of them.

On the other hand, Pi’s 25W contains tons of overhead for other devices. A 5TB external hard drive still requires way more power than a 1 TB one or an SSD.

I have 2 n100 boxes and none of them have fans at all. Set at 9W and never had a problem so far.

Interesting. All models I have found had fans.

It’s easy to dissipate 9 watts with some clever design.

From what I know it seems the router-oriented designs are mostly fanless, like this[1] semi-random example.

[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004360072281.html

I stand corrected, one is like that thing, no fan The other is a T9 mini PC. It is really small with 2 network ports. It apparently has a fan. I have never heard it. Which is significant to me because I also have some NUCs and those are the only fans in my office and they are annoying in the silence.

Thanks, probably I missed them due to skipping router/multi NIC systems during shopping.

the rpi has had no power management controls forever. they dont care

What about the Nano Pi?

> The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability

No, not really. If it was just affordability you could buy a used ProLiant server for the same price on Facebook Marketplace and have 20x the computing power.

Raspi has been about the perfect balance of: power consumption, affordability, form factor, and computational capability all in one.

If you can manage your project with a unit that is roughly 2x the form factor, you can get the same power consumption (less?!) with an N100, at the same cost, but double the processing power: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...

No, it was absolutely about affordability and education. Pi was never about compute power, it was focused on a general purpose CPU that ran Linux and had I/O that enabled tinkering.

They lost their way trying to cater to businesses that wanted Pis to drive digital signage or be the basis of some IoT deployment.

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity [...] We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world."

https://web.archive.org/web/20110506002027/https://www.raspb...

This was also the appeal, despite using binary blobs and some incredibly unfortunate design decisions (ethernet over USB for example), people loved these little things because they were cheap to a fault- intended to be almost disposable for education purposes. All can be forgiven with cost saving as the goal.

That has definitely been lost; they are still excellent education devices, but at the pricepoint I would have a pit in my stomach buying a couple hundred for students… assuming I could even get them of course.

If I was teaching kids I would reach for CircuitPython and one the many many RP2040/ESP32 boards.

It's just so much fun.

I think the real differentiator is support. There is so much hardware and software support for Raspbery Pi. This is why I use them.

It's something like "the iphone" of SBCs at this point. Many others are using it and writing about it specifically, and it's pretty damn commodity. If you break one, another can (since the supply crunch) be sourced pretty quickly and easily and just dropped in where the old one was.

They committed to manufacture each Pi models for a number of years. This is important for those building a product around it.

False. I was an early adopter and the price was the main point of RPi - there were also more powerful and expensive boards from different companies.

Latest Raspberry Pis are expensive but also quite powerful. If you want a cheap single board computer that can run Linux, you have the Pi Zero ($15). You also have the Pico ($4), which is an alternative to the ESP32.

They cost more than that on amazon.

I find this amazon obsession with people on the internet (I assume Americans) to be baffling and disturbing, it's always amazon this, prime that every time the concept of purchasing something online comes up.

Mouser has the Zero for 15$, 16$ if you want presoldered GPIO headers. 4$ for a Pico. RS Online has them for 4.25$. There are probably hundreds of vendors that offer them for the same price if you plop the term into your favorite search engine. Amazon is the last place I'd look, but then again I absolutely do not understand this mindset that online shopping == amazon that some people seem to have.

e: formatting

Amazon usually reflects the final cost of an item.

If amazon is overpriced, the item might not be available from other channels/requires lots of work to get.

Another (related) point is that amazon is less risky than other options. You can usually get something cheaper from ebay/alibaba/banggood/etc

Somebody always has some nitpicky example, but in my experience amazon has reliable shipping and a predictable low-friction way of getting a replacement or your money back if something goes wrong.

Fair enough, but I do not understand why people seem to put so much trust in Amazon. Ali et. al. is of course a crapshoot every time, based on the threads that pop up here every few weeks Amazon seems to be an endless supply of poor quality goods, counterfeits and whatnot as well.

You make it sound like it's either Amazon or chinese crap made to last 2 minutes.

Not either or, because most of the stuff amazon sells is from china.

They are just like TCP/IP for a purchase from china, with buffering in the US, chunking, retransmit and guaranteed delivery.

You can probably be more efficient with UDP from china, but you could lose packets.

Amazon is now selling the "chinese crap made to last 2 minutes":

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=grip+strengthener&rh=n%3A14333021...

I will no longer use Amazon for anything where I actually care about quality or getting a legitimate product.

A few weeks ago I ordered the same USB charger a second time and got a different (but similar) item altogether.

Good news, you can have both!

Was looking for a specific computer part not that long ago and only place I found indicating stock was seller on Amazon.

Never shopped there before but finally bit the bullet and made an account.

Deposited $300 gift card. Amazon blocked my account completely (can not even contact support) and not long after got an email telling me it's due to sanctions suspicion and they require full KYC (including proof of residency and employment!) before I can ever see my $300 back again. I really don't have the energy to fight them for it...

Still asked a friend with existing Amazon account to order it for me. The seller cancelled the order saying "out of stock".

Our thesis is that seller is a money laundering front without actual product. Somehow Amazon's not closing their accounts, though....

> Mouser has the Zero for 15$

With $8 shipping that will take ??? days. Meanwhile they have one for $19 on Amazon with two day shipping and no need to register on some other site for a one-off purchase.

For somebody doing electronics even slightly seriously, mouser or digikey or similar aren't going to be a one-off.

Free shipping after some amount (varies with where you are in the world apparently) and I get my parcels from Mouser in 2-3 days shipped over the Atlantic. RS is even faster.

It’s just convenience and trust. No need to input addressess or make another account plus good return policies.

I thought the point of RPi s easy connectivity to spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio with a powerful(1) filesystem and network stack behind it. What easy way to give a NUC spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio?

(1) esp-idf is not in the same league as linux.

Adafruit sells a $15 board to let you use spi, i2c and gpio over USB. It also has their connector for easy i2c expansion with their family of sensors and breakouts.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

On the other hand, a Pi zero is <$10. I remember them being $1 at Microcenter for a time.

Is the cheapest Intel system as power sipping as the Pi's?

Here's a 6W, $99 intel system: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXL2MPM?ref=product_details&th=...

An $80 Pi 5 is 25W.

An N4000 provides about half the CPU performance (single threaded), and half the cores that a Pi 5 has.

However, the N100s are very competitive. Maybe even faster and cheaper, and less power hungry.

I have a hard time believing that system only has 6W total power draw.

A friend did that with a ThinkPad x200 over a decade ago, so I can believe it easily.

You should have a much harder time believing a Pi 5 draws 25w in this comparison. 6w from a small form factor N4000 Intel system is perfectly achievable.

Pi is not particularly “power sipping” either. Not every usb brick is capable of powering today’s Pi’s, which indicates peak power draw of over 5W.

Then why buy a Pi5 if you don’t have the juice?

I can get a 1GB Pi3 model B shipped to my door for £27 which will run off of any mobile phone charger from the last five years (heck, I just plug mine directly into the USB socket built into the wall outlet) and connect it to any TV from the last ten years with a £2 HDMI cable.

Cut your cloth.

Compared to Intel it still is - a 5V/3A brick is sufficient for all Pis, with Intel if you have USB power it's usually higher-voltage USB-C.

No, they aren't. You need 5.1 or 5.2v, otherwise you get stability issues. Learnt that the hard way.

>The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability. That was kind of lost along the way.

Now the point is about the coolness factor. Which is measured by the Euclidean distance from architecture X to x86.

Affordability is gone, sure. But there are many other virtues of the platform. Low heat, power consumption, heat, weight, physical dimensions, and integration.

You can get a SFFPC with 7th Gen i5 for like $40. Apart from low power cost and form factor (and I guess gpio), you would probably just get the SFFPC

And overall size. I hope they build more smaller form factors like the Pico and the Zero. That's what differentiates them and the rest.

I don't think inflation is Rasberry Pi Ltds fault.

I don't think inflation is RPi's excuse either. It affects Intel too you know.

I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.

This also signals very clear to investors what this enterprise is about.

This is already the setup, the foundation owns the trading company and it is the trading company going to IPO.

From a quick scan it's not clear to me what share of ownership of RPi ltd the foundation would retain post IPO other than the foundation will be selling at least some of its stake:

> The Offer would be comprised of new Shares to be issued by the Company and existing shares to be sold by certain existing shareholders, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Raspberry Pi's existing majority shareholder.

Are non-profits allowed to own any stock in publicly traded companies in Britain?

According to this: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... yes.

Note that the foundation has had a majority stake in RPi ltd (as a private company) for a long time this is not a new structure.

Yes, but as shareholders they must still act according to their 'purpose', which is a term in UK law that a charity can choose when it is set up as part of its charter, and then every action must be in accordance with.

Purpose of spinoff = get dividends to fund the original purpose

Non profits aren't generally charities.

Yes. large non-profits can need to invest a lot of money.

Isn't this already how it works? Raspberry Pi Ltd is a different company to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

AFAIK, yep. Jeff Geerling (hi jeff!) has a great video about this. https://youtu.be/hrhE6MnGi1A?si=IeHs2GKYqPjqPXSb&t=305

Hello there ;)

I would like to know how much the Pi Foundation would still own—could be an interesting dynamic there. And good for them to be able to use some of that profit for good (they do a lot of neat things for education / STEM).

Hopefully the foundation still controls the majority of votes regardless of the % ownership stake. They do too much good in the world to go full-blown public corpo

What are the economics of buying into a stock that has a 51% stakeholder, and doesn't pay dividends, outside of "line goes up"?

I know this is kind of a standard in tech, but it still eludes me where the value of the stock is.

LOL you act like the entire market isn't "line goes up" regardless of 51% or not.

And no its not just tech

Yes, it's "line goes up", but more in the P/E ratio sense, where the price of the stock doesn't reflect the true value of the company, however outside of tech you can usually reason that there's either dividends being paid, or the stock has a base value because if a company performs, and the stock price is low enough, it's worth for another entity to buy it out and take control of it. This gives a stock some real value, and company performance has real impact on the price of the stock. In the case of tech comapnies, it's often no dividends, and the owner has 51%, so the stock gives no share of the profits, and no voting power.

Traditional answer is that there is future potential that they would issue more stock (to sacrifice their 51% stake) or at some point start to issue dividends.

Raspberry Pi has paid out about $50 million in dividends already to it's parent company.

Line goes up is the same as dividends. If you genuinely don't know, you can easily find the reason why it's economically the same, while being fiscally more efficient to not emit dividends by doing a quick googling.

You completely missed the point of the question. They're not the same. Dividends give you a share of the company's profits, thus pay based on company performance. "line goes up" mechanics assume somebody will buy your stock because there's a shared illusion that stocks have value, even though they, in case of tech stock, don't pay dividends, and give no voting rights.

It is you who missed the point. Google the fiscal difference between dividends or no dividends and you'll understand. There's nothing preventing you from selling exactly as much % shares each quarter as you want to create your own dividend, specially with fractional shares. These days the difference is merely fiscal and people that say "if there's no dividends its all fake" seem to want to portray it as bad when for most people it's way better to let it compound and only sell and trigger taxable events when they want to. I don't see how the board of some company deciding when I have taxable events is an advantage if the company removes the same value of shares from circulation by doing a buyback.

Dividends are just adding financial inefficiency and removing choice from the shareholder.

Since you're still struggling, I'll try to be as clear as possible. Why does a stock have value if it doesn't give you a share of the company profits, or voting rights?

You're adding voting rights into the discussion when they are separate from dividends is something I don't understand. You can have voting rights and no dividend.

Regarding the share of the profits I already explained. You have your share of the profits in form of liquid stock that you can decide to sell. It's the same thing.

The discussion from the beginning was about the value of stocks. Traditionally it's a share of profits in the form of dividends and voting rights. If the stock doesn't pay dividends and the founder has 51%, then you get none of that, so why does the stock have any value. That's the discussion here. Try to read and understand the question before engaging next time.

You're talking about old things. Its not common anymore for voting rights and dividends to be as intertwined as you say, and you keep ignoring all I said about fiscal differences while telling me to read. Anyway have a nice day was still good to type down our thoughts.

I think you can rephrase the question as “where is the value in owning stock? If it’s only that you hope to sell it to someone else at a higher price later, isn’t it just a pyramid scheme? At least with dividends and voting rights there are clear and tangible benefits apart from speculation”.

And the answer could then be that you’re investing in a company which allows them to grow, and your money with them. Or that you store your money in a medium that hopefully at least keeps up with inflation (especially if you’ve spread the risk). Or just that you’ve taken a gamble and hope that other people will think the stock is worth more at some later point than it was when you bought it.

It's as much a pyramid scheme as believing the government will buy back your government bonds or backup your dollar. End of the day you always need to believe any asset you own has its valued derived on other people wanting to buy it off of you, if you call that a pyramid scheme then the whole financial system is a pyramid scheme. You probably don't value your car or your laptop or your house as zero just because nobody might want to buy them off of you, while technically true.

You know other people can look at a balance sheet of a company and also judge it's value based on how much it produces and on the expectation of future buybacks that will increase your share's worth. I wouldn't call the absense of dividends the maker of a pyramid scheme.

When you buy bonds, the government guarantees it'll buy the bonds back. It's a loan with interest. When you buy a stock that doesn't have any inherent value, due to a lack of tangible benefits of ownership, then you're gambling that somebody in the future will buy it from you for no real reason other than a shared illusion that the piece of paper has a worth, and is somehow tied to comapny performance.

Again, it's the lack of dividends and the lack of any other tangible benefits of owning the stock like voting rights. I feel like you're so far down the "line goes up" rabbit hole of stock trading, that you can't even think clearly about what you're actually buying, and why would anybody buy it from you in the future.

Whoever reads this without knowledge will think voting rights have something to do with dividends and you keep making this wrong assertion.

So as a warning to whoever reads this, do a search for "dual class stocks", and see how many companies sell stock without voting rights as % of any index. Then see how many don't issue dividends. You'll see it's a completely separate subject.

I don’t think you’re fully getting what they’re trying to say. They’re not asserting that dividends and voting rights are somehow inextricably linked or that you can’t have one without the other.

They’re simply listing the two things they think actually provide any real value when owning stock, as opposed to ”line goes up”.

In other words, they’re asking why owning stock has actual value. They dismiss ”line goes up”, which only leaves dividends and voting rights. By that logic, if you aren’t paid any dividends and you don’t have voting rights, what is the point of owning the stock, except to gamble? That is what they want to know.

And then I think that what you have been saying, correctly in my opinion, is that ”line goes up” actually does have real value. But no one is trying to claim that dividends and voting rights aren’t separate things.

I agree with you, as indicated by the second paragraph I wrote. I was just paraphrasing and tried to answer what I believe the other person was asking (I’m happy to be corrected if it was not).

Thanks for taking the time to understand my question. It goes without saying that without any tangible value, you're just gambling that somebody will buy a stock from you in the future. I'm wondering if there's some other mechanism at work here that gives these tech stocks value, other than, as you said, basically a pyramid scheme mechanism of buying stocks because somebody with the same "line goes up" mentality will do that in the future and buy us out.

Why would they not pay dividends?

So they can invest in themselves. The usual reason.

> I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.

Ah yes, the OpenAI approach :)

I’m not really sure you get what the smell of money does to most people

Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever, instead of functioning on their mission and doing what’s right. This may mean moving manufacturing to China, using lower cost components, etc etc.

The first order bit of better outreach is a low price point, which they've completely lost the plot on.

If going public is what takes them to realize it, I'll cheer it on.

Yeah. I just don't see how they could possibly grow in a way that satisfies the stock market. The only way to create an appearance of such growth is to go Boeing and essentially burn down the house for warmth. For an organization like this, it's basically always step one on an irreversible death spiral.

From my experience doing IT in industrial manufacturing, there is a ton of room for them to replace expensive PLCs where they aren't really needed. The company that makes the big fancy automated machines also make the simpler auxillary ones that supplement their main offerings. Since they know how to build with PLCs, that's what they use instead of sticking a Pi or some small form PC in it instead. Stuff like barcode readers on a manufacturing line or some simple piece of QA equipment at the end of the line measuring the height of a bottle or something. Adds thousands of dollars to the BoM but is complete overkill.

> From my experience doing IT in industrial manufacturing, there is a ton of room for them to replace expensive PLCs where they aren't really needed.

From my experience with PLCs, they are hardened and robust to the extreme degree required by the harsh environments in which they are used. Last time I looked, the R Pi was the complete opposite. It can be crashed by just a nearby camera flash, and then leave its SD card corrupt to boot. Fine for hobbyists (apparently). Not fine for industrial applications.

Compute Modules are targeted squarely at industry. Environmental hardening is provided by the cabinet you install them in.

I built an RPi 4 based plasma cutter and I've never had a crash. You don't get more EM interference than that, short of putting it in a microwave.

Right, I'm not suggesting they replace critical PLCs. They are overused in places where those requirements aren't necessary just because PLCs are what their engineers know.

There's strong diminishing returns in this sort of growth. With anything, you can optimize it until you can't. The market requires you to grow forever. How will Raspberry Pi Ltd still be growing in 50 years when the entire orchard of low hanging fruit is long since picked barren?

I don't know, how does any other company do it?

I've started seeing PI show up on the DIN rails in some industrial equipment, usually HID related. PLCs are built to safety critical standards, a PI with some error might go executing code off into never-never land, where a PLC will fail to a known output state. Obvious oversimplification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_integrity_level

It's not an insurmountable problem though. Have a watchdog voltage with a relay or something. Engineering reliable failure modes is trivial.

> From my experience doing IT in industrial manufacturing, there is a ton of room for them to replace expensive PLCs where they aren't really needed

Just for fun try to find a way to get a Pi mounted up to a DIN rail with an enclosure that can resist industrial vibration and has good particulate penetration/filtering and ruggedized connectors. Good luck finding accessories that aren't 3D printed with materials that will break down when coated in machine oil or in direct sunlight.

Now try to figure out how to get whatever monster you built installed in an ISO 9001 or AS 9100 shop.

Again, I'm not talking about machinery that actually needs PLCs, I get that. A lot of stuff doesn't have vibrations, temperature, safety issues etc. but is built around PLCs out of tradition and BoM reasons.

"Here's our end of the production line fan that blows dust off of your product for $4k because we used a PLC." There is lots of stuff like that that just has no business using a PLC.

I (thank god) got out of manufacturing IT around 2000 but I still have friends working in that industry. A guy I know makes an absolute fortune frankensteining old MFM drives together and fixing resistors on 10base-T network cards because someone thought the exact same thing and subbed out a PLC for a computer to save a few bucks.

Trust me, I loathe PLCs, but Allen Bradley will still sell you a drop in replacement for something the now retired previous guy put in service 15 years ago.

Yeah I'm out of it now too. You still have the same issues running PLCs. I've had to find old ass network cards on EBAY. I understand why PLCs are used. I turned down a project building a machine using Arduino's and raspberry Pi's because it was inappropriate for the application. But there is definitely a subset of manufacturing equipment that doesn't require PLCs. I've already seen it happening scanning networks and seeing devices show up with RPi MACs.

> Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever

Providing a return to shareholders does not require increasing profits. Investing constant or declining profits into acquisitions or share buybacks can provide the same returns to shareholders.

What is "right"? They haven't been a good value for over 2 years.

The goal hasn't ever been about producing a device cheaply. It's about supporting education, encouraging tinkering and changing attitudes [1]

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/

"...hasn't ever been..." is not true. Someone above posted an earlier statement from the archive.

Every altruistic thing is easier if you're trying to do it with a $10 product rather tham a $100 product, all else being equal

Good thing they still offer a $10 product then - the Raspberry Pi Zero.

and the RP2040! There is not much to differentiate it with ESP32 at the moment, but it's their first shot at a microcontroller.

Good value for what? They have never been good value as desktops because the early ones were too slow. Now there are better little computers.

But as hobby computer, they are still a good value. There are faster boards and cheaper boards, but which ones are good? More importantly, which ones will be supported in five years? How easy it to install software? I read about distro that promises support, but then have to check the list of hardware it supports.

I have six year old Pi 3. I can install latest 64-bit OS on it. For my plans, something small and low power is an advantage.

Hardkernel has supported their ARM boards for 10+ years. The Odroid XU3/XU4 line, for example, was released a decade ago and still has active development from the manufacturer with recent kernels and images.

I was really excited about those hardkernel boards 10 years until I got one and found I had to use their outdated custom version of Ubuntu and still half of it didn't work.

I assume things have gotten better since then but they don't have 10+ years of good support.

Lower cost of components doesn't mean lower quality. What made the cost lower is logistics and the availability of components within the region.

Yup, cue the imminent enshittification. E.g. your Pi6 will require sign-in and come with ads.

I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech. I think I remember them losing 30 £100M+ companies to the US exchange last year including some big really big names. I know this phenomenon isn't isolated to the UK either. With all the issues in Hong Kong over the last few years, companies have fled there too.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.

It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US. I don't think that's good for anyone, including US folks. Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.

> Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.

Those might be factors but I'd wager the dominating factor to choosing to list in a US exchange is the monthly volume of ETF flow on the indexes you join. In the current world I think this factor dominates many others.

Could you or somebody else explain to the ignorant why that should matter to a corporation? If I want to buy or sale shares of my company once a month or less, why should it matter to me how many millions or billions of ETF flow through any particular index? How does that affect the equity of my company?

Key piece is "ETF flow on the indexes you join".

Any ETF that a company is a part of increases demand for the stock which will increase the share price.

I'm willing to expose my complete ignorance by questioning this wisdom.

I get that a startup wants a high stock price so they can raise as much money as possible while giving up as little control as possible. Of course there are other circumstances where corporations' best option for raising cash is to sell shares. So in those circumstances, this reasoning still holds.

But what about when I've gotten past funding shortages and I'm a successful company and I want to invest in myself and take back some ownership? Now I have to pay some premium because of something that has nothing to do with the value of my company?

Or what if I'm ok not taking back ownership. I'm content to just stay with 60% ownership or whatever? Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?

In short, high stock prices only benefit me when I'm selling. So this reasoning baffles me for anybody with an ownership mentality.

I admitted upfront that I was exposing my ignorance. I'm willing to learn from anybody who will show me a bigger picture. But I dread a bigger picture that assumes that future success at any level can only be obtained with leverage.

> Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?

Like it or not, your job as a manager in a company is to run that company for the people that own it, same as if you manage a local grocery store for your neighbour Jeff that owns it. Jeff will be happy if his store appreciates in value the same way the shareholders of the corporation (its owners) will be happy if it goes up in price.

So as an employee of the company (the CEO is one too), you care because your job is to care, and in the case of senior management you also have a legal duty to care and the company can be sued if you don't.

>Now I have to pay some premium because of something that has nothing to do with the value of my company?

The value of your company is decided by the market participants with supply and demand. There's the academic idea that your company can be valued by your profits and losses, but the truth is, those more less to do with with the value of your company than the potentially demand for your shares. In other words being in an ETF may be more relevant to your stock price than the debt on your balance sheet.

>* Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?*

You might not care, but the other 40% might. It's tempting to think the other 40% is just amorphous group of shareholders, but it's likely it includes your business partners, or employees who will want to see the stock rise so they can eventually sell. And those partners and employees, upon learning that you aren't maximizing their shares may choose to leave, ultimately damaging your business.

In other words, once you have multiple owners, as long as the green line goes up, everyone is incentivized to continue doing well.

Wouldn't the share holders care more about the profits of the company which are then being given as dividends instead of the price they can trade the share price at?

Isn't the amount of profit the company is making (and how that will change) what matters and not what its share price is?

Most companies don't pay out dividends. Google paid out its first dividend in 25 years and it's only 20 cents a share. Your wealth increases faster from the share price going up vs a dividend and it's not even close. Couple that with the fact that you don't have to sell - you can just borrow against your shares to get liquidity, most are far more incentivized to care about the stock price.

Put another way: the US investors put a lot of net new capital every month.

Theoretically, more capital means, higher demand for equities and hence better prices for the stock. Of course, this does not apply to all equities equally.

ETF's generally have a buoying effect since the ETF just passively buys shares in your company depending on demand for the ETF, not demand for your company specifically. It also gives a mild proximity effect, where all star companies will attract dollars to ETFs that you are also part of.

> ETF just passively buys shares

FWIW: ETFs also passively sell, too.

We may all ignore that bit when stock markets just seem to keep on rising, but if (when) they start falling the ETFs will be following the crowd too.

Last I read (https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance...) companies seem to be undervalued on the LSE, it seems to be like if I ran a company I might be leaving money on the table listing there.

Agree that centralisation isn't ideal.

I'd argue that thinking solely in terms of potential investment opportunity isn't capturing the whole value of trading on your local country's stock exchange. It's more money and a larger investor pool today, but less choice and power over one's destiny tomorrow. These sorts of economic micro-decisions accumulate. Where to put a company HQ, what stock exchange to trade on, hiring locally or abroad, selling up to foreign equity funds. As individual business decisions, the leaders might think it's an insignificant drop in the pond and simply the most important thing is making revenue tick up, but there are consequences to that being your only metric of success. It's jumping ship while the rest of the crew is trying to plug holes and bail it out. You've successfully escaped the sinking ship but are now in deep, shark-infested waters.

Perhaps I've just been reading too much on geopolitical power dynamics lately, but as a British person, I fear our economy is suffering from a death-by-a-thousand-cuts from seemingly "insignificant" decisions that pass on tiny parts of our sovereignty to other countries. In the case of companies trading on other exchanges, we're leaving ourselves more open to the whims of the investors on that exchange whose priorities and sentiments don't match the spirit of the country of origin.

The wealthiest and most popular exchange brings in the most money. Exchanges realize this and try to sweeten the deal if their exchange is short on a few things. It is not all about money on the table.

What sweetners are there? They'd have to be pretty impressive to make up a significant shortfall in value.

From memory at my previous company, that was on LSE AIM, the discussion around LSE wasn't about Brexit or anything like that, it was the amount of investment capital available in US exchanges. The US has definitely got something right with incentivising investment.

> The US has definitely got something right with incentivising investment.

Vacuuming retirement savings of tens of millions of workers and piping the funds directly to Wall Street? I think that captured investor-class who pony up billions but don't vote at AGMs has led to excesses that are negative to society as a whole.

> Vacuuming retirement savings of tens of millions of workers and piping the funds directly to Wall Street

Can you be specific? Do you mean people putting their money into pension funds?

Most tax-advantaged retirement savings schemes channel retirement money to listed companies and/or Wall Street investment funds by default - pension funds included.

What does "channel" mean here? Do you mean they choose to invest there? "Channel" implies something being done secretively.

> "Channel" implies something being done secretively.

No, it does not.

  channel: direct toward a particular end or object[1]

Brexit has had an impact on the amount of investment capital that would park itself in UK exchanges. Investors seeing dimmer prospects in the UK would rightly park their cash in the US

Trading becoming centralized in the US is a different thing from trading happening exclusively on the NYSE.

As far as I understand, we are so far away from that reality since Reg NMS that we are facing the opposite problems, if anything: A proliferation of markets that brokers are obliged to trade at in the interest of providing "the best price", the combination of which has created a giant industry of latency arbitrageurs.

> Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.

What's the risk here? That if the NYSE establishes a monopoly, it could extract a 0.5% tax on every trade?

I feel the theoretical possibility of wealth being extracted from you is somewhat insignificant compared to the actual extractions you are subjected to in the UK.

> What's the risk here?

A monopolistic stock exchange could, off the top of my head: increase fees, engage in rentseeking behaviour, impose unfair rules, discriminate (against companies and traders) or reduce the quality of service.

Listing on different (or multiple) exchanges ensures that they engage in proper competition.

> compared to the actual extractions you are subjected to in the UK

An apt example of why it's healthy to have competition. A working professional or business could relocate to a country where less of their wealth is taken from them.

But your parent comment's point is that the harm from lack of competition among exchanges is a possible future thing, while the harm from being domiciled in a business-unfriendly jurisdiction is far greater and happens right now.

> What's the risk here? That if the NYSE establishes a monopoly, it could extract a 0.5% tax on every trade?

Whilst shares may be listed on the NYSE, they don't have to trade there - there's a number of alternative exchanges/ECNs/books/pools/brokers that will happily buy and sell NYSE listed shares cheaper/quicker than NYSE.

What if there was a large scale fraud on the exchange, and shares that were supposed to be owned by a person or fund were "owned" by several different people at once.

Or can someone provide a reason that's impossible?

Bearing in mind I've personally seen screwups with processing thousands of credit card transactions with a software update.

I'm sure those reasons are valid, but just the simple fact of the US stock market having much higher valuations than the UK market right now makes me wonder why they'd do an IPO in the UK. They'll get more money for the shares they sell in the US.

> I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech.

London has never attracted tech companies. Even when I was in the field over 20 years ago the combined market cap of tech was tiny. Only smallish British companies IPOed on London.

ARM was small when it originally listed. Now it is large and was not British owned - why would they list in London.

> It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US.

Financial markets centralise for liquidity. IIRC some dual listed European companies are moving to London.

It's (slowly) changing.

Chinese companies are now considering LSE as an alternative to NYSE/NASDAQ for their dual-listing IPOs due to laxer oversight and auditing requirements, especially now that FCPA enforcement is in full swing and third party audits by Western organizations are required, which Chinese regulators are preventing.

That said, it's hard to beat the primacy of the American, Chinese, Singaporean, and increasingly Indian market (at least 2 late stage startups ik in the Bay Area are looking at listing on the NSE because they want to IPO but $100-200M in ARR and consistent growth is not enough to successfully list in the US anymore).

There's an excellent book just out about this and how the US has taken over the UK business world: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199503848-vassal-state

Dual class shares are part of the picture here. They are very common in the US, and allow founders to have their cake and eat it. UK regulators have historically frowned upon this, but that stance is beginning to soften.

I'm not sure what the real disadvantage is though. Like, as a British person I can easily buy shares in companies listed in the US. If a British company IPOs on the NYSE but keeps it's HQ and most employees in the UK, does that actually say anything about the UK economy, or just a bit about the LSE specifically and maybe some corporate law details?

The stock would be denominated in another currency, and the amount of your capital gains would be affected by forex rates.

Forex would have very little impact. If company earnings are in GBP and that increases relative to USD, the stock price would also increase (in USD) which should lead to roughly the same GBP returns either way.

Definitely important, but it's more a consequence rather than an economic indicator.

There is a lot of general flight to safety in the US, but I think the UK is a special case. The UKs economic decline is irreversible at this point. Crumbling (literally) infrastructure, completely isolated elites, out of the EU, inability to build basically anything. Why hang around to find out where the bottom is...

Does it matter any longer which exchange things are listed on? I can trade any stock on any exchange regardless of where it is. I guess only trading hours and holiday schedule would make a difference.

At volume, the stamp tax on UK stock would be significant.

More fundamentally companies tend to be valued higher on the US exchanges, which gives companies a bit more freedom of action to raise capital from the market to fund their plans.

I don't think UK Gov will cry too much abount RPi. They certainly would be leaning hard on the board of, say, Shell, if that corporation decided to list abroad instead of London (as their former CEO has mooted).

Taxes and currency exchange factor in.

US has very strong and deep capital markets. There's a reason New York has been the financial capital of the world for the last 100 years and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

It hasn't gone well for several UK companies listing through SPACs on US exchanges recently. Think that's given plenty of reason for a rethink.

I can't think of a SPAC, regardless of nationality, that actually succeeded other than Cellebrite. SPACs in their current usage are basically vehicles to circumvent securities fraud and generate wild amounts of money based on hyperbolic slide-decks via PIPE and NAV offerings pre-DA - the amount of EV and Quadcopter plays that were obvious vaporware getting traction in 2020-2022 was insanity.

I've been tracking SPACs as a curiosity. The only ones on my list that are above the $10 starting price are DraftKings, Hims & Hers Health, and Grindr.

In other words: gambling, erection medication, and gay hookups.

Lynk Global are merging with SLAM this year to list publicly which is the only other one I'd watch out for - decent business model, first to debut the satellite to unmodified phone tech in a commercial fashion. GENI will probably recover as well.

Lynk Global will competing against Starlink — which is already manufacturing and operating at scale, and is vertically integrated with their launch provider... which will soon be lofting _much_ larger and more capable satellites on their new launcher. I don't see what worthwhile niche will be left for Lynk to play with.

The cynic in me can't help but wonder if somebody is hoping to cash out via whatever investors haven't yet noticed the writing on the wall.

I think the lesson in the past couple of years of SPACs is that all the companies that sounded obviously important and useful turned out to be massively overvalued and built on sandcastles of hopes and dreams. Lynk does sound like one of those.

And what those few companies that were actually successful — the “gambling, erection medicine, gay hookups” of my previous post — have in common is that they operate businesses that might have some trouble raising money through the gatekeepers of a traditional IPO.

(Logical conclusion: if I ever invest in a SPAC, it’s got to be a drug-dealing furry porn site for crypto traders at minimum.)

They have an actual commercial direct to device service launched, demonstrable, and scalable. I'd also look into the architecture of Starlink versus bent-pipe and other designed-for-purpose system, rather than the retrofit we get from Starlink.

This in contrast with their SPAC competitor AST SpaceMobile, who AT&T just announced their strategic partnership with for Commercial service up to 2030 yesterday and spiked their stock 40% in premarket... to still be about $6.50 off the NAV lol

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/att-ast-space...

So yeah, I think the analysts and Engineers are hedging their bets. Starlink has launch capacity but that's about their edge as the incumbent at the moment. The rest have LEO satellites up and are ramping up constellations as we speak.

Off the top of my head out about DraftKings $DKNG and Vertiv Holdings $VRT. Huge successes there.

True that the majority have been major disappointments but you can find some good ones.

I think of SPACs the same way I think of Regulation Crowdfunding [1]. If the company could have reasonably IPOd, they would have; if they're opting for a reduced process method, it's likely because they wouldn't look good in the traditional process, and it's best to avoid them.

OTOH, it's not like I'm investing in individual stocks anyway, I'm on team Boglehead, and everything is in index funds, other than equity based compensation which I don't have at the moment.

[1] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

I'm not sure, but there are other ways of listing besides SPACs, like ADRs

I just wish they would let Pi users in on pre-IPO shares like Reddit

Hopefully the proposed British ISA will help make things better.

I would like to think it's also partly a message that this move isn't about profit seeking. British companies do not have legal duty to maximise their profit. NYSE investors might not appreciate this foreign idea.

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354

> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.

There is no legal duty to maximize profit.

Not "profit", but a duty to maximize shareholder value.

eBay Domestic Holdings, Inc. v. Newmark A Delaware Corporation has a duty to maximize shareholder value. That's the majority of all publicly held US corporations.

So I may generalize and state, _as a fact_, that the majority of public companies in the United States of America are driven primarily by insatiable avarice in a legal duty to their shareholders.

> Jim and Craig did prove that they personally believe craigslist should not be about the business of stockholder wealth maximization, now or in the future. As an abstract matter, there is nothing inappropriate about an organization seeking to aid local, national, and global communities by providing a website for online classifieds that is largely devoid of monetized elements. Indeed, I personally appreciate and admire Jim’s and Craig’s desire to be of service to communities. The corporate form in which craigslist operates, however, is not an appropriate vehicle for purely philanthropic ends, at least not when there are other stockholders interested in realizing a return on their investment. Jim and Craig opted to form craigslist, Inc. as a for-profit Delaware corporation and voluntarily accepted millions of dollars from eBay as part of a transaction whereby eBay became a stockholder.

> ...

> Jim and Craig’s defense of the Rights Plan thus fails the first prong of Unocal both factually and legally. I find that defendants failed to prove, as a factual matter, the existence of a distinctly protectable craigslist culture and further failed to prove, both factually and legally, that they actually decided to deploy the Rights Plan because of a craigslist culture. *35 I find, instead, that Jim and Craig acted to punish eBay for competing with craigslist. Directors of a for-profit Delaware corporation cannot deploy a rights plan to defend a business strategy that openly eschews stockholder wealth maximization—at least not consistently with the directors’ fiduciary duties under Delaware law.

The finding was that craigslist was looking to penalize its parent company (eBay) and destroy its own value. The issue was not about making a profit but how shares are sold.

> Notwithstanding eBay’s express right to compete, Jim and Craig were not enthusiastic about eBay’s foray into online classifieds. Accordingly, they asked eBay to sell its stake in craigslist, indicating a preference that eBay either sell its craigslist shares back to the Company or to a third party who would be compatible with Jim, Craig, and craigslist’s unique corporate culture. When eBay refused to sell, Jim and Craig deliberated with outside counsel for six months about how to respond. Finally, on January 1, 2008, Jim and Craig, acting in their capacity as directors, responded by (1) adopting a rights plan that restricted eBay from purchasing additional craigslist shares and hampered eBay’s ability to freely sell the craigslist shares it owned to third parties, (2) implementing a staggered board that made it impossible for eBay to unilaterally elect a director to the craigslist board, and (3) seeking to obtain a right of first refusal in craigslist’s favor over the craigslist shares eBay owns by offering to issue one new share of craigslist stock in exchange for every five shares over which any craigslist stockholder granted a right of first refusal in craigslist’s favor.

And at the end...

> Assuming Jim and Craig sought to establish a corporate Academie Francaise to protect the cultural integrity of craigslist’s business model, the Rights Plan simply does not serve that goal. It therefore falls outside the range of reasonableness.

> ...

> Because defendants failed to prove that they acted to protect or defend a legitimate corporate interest and because they failed to prove that the rights plan was a reasonable response to a perceived threat to corporate policy or effectiveness, I rescind the Rights Plan in its entirety.

I would also point out that this was 2010 in a Delaware Chancery court where the Hobby Lobby case was 2017 in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Thank you for your correction of the parent poster's falsehood.

A peer comment has refuted that there is a duty like this in the US. For the record, it's not true in the UK [1]

In any event, any such duty would be likely to be meaningless. There are so many possible areas of confusion or inconsistency:

- Profit over what time period? - Profit vs shareholder return. - What level of risk is to be taken in generating this profit?

And so on.

[1] http://in-houseblog.practicallaw.com/fallacy-of-the-duty-to-...

Sorry, I really should have said, there's no duty to maximise/provide a dividend. And I didn't provide a reference because I consideree it well known /fundamental (in the UK only, perhaps). I'm glad the supreme court allows "modern" corporate law in the US to offer the same sensible position. If I understand the reference, it was originally driven by companies with a religious aim, but extends beyond that.

US law has never required a maximization of profit. The court case that went up to the supreme court set that down in writing. It rejected a lower court's suggestion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,... )

> Responding to lower court judges' suggestion that the purpose of for-profit corporations "is simply to make money," the court said, "For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives.

The meme of "duty to maximize profit" has no grounding in fact beyond internet comments trying to excuse unscrupulous behavior of a company with the justification that it was maximizing profits.

There is a "maximize shareholder value" (which isn't profits) but this is also recognized to be fuzzy.

https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2023/03/...

> Corporate law has long required directors to act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders. In practice, this duty sometimes translated into a mandate to maximize shareholder value—at all costs. But while some businesspeople may follow that practice, most recognize that promoting shareholder interests invariably entails protecting the interests of others, such as employees and customers. Corporate law accommodates this reality by giving directors wide latitude in exercising their business judgment. Rather than such an impractical mandate that directors maximize shareholder value, courts say they must act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders.

> The flexibility in this framework entices advocates of non-shareholder interests to argue that directors owe a duty not only to the corporation and its shareholders but also to its employees, customers, and other constituents or “stakeholders.” Although this is certainly not the law, stakeholder advocates urge a norm in which directors no longer prioritize shareholder value but feel an obligation to such other constituents as well. Yet if it would be impracticable for judges to enforce a rule of shareholder value maximization, it would be more difficult to formulate a workable legal rule requiring directors to optimize across such contending interests.

The maximization of shareholder value was from Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

> This case is frequently cited as support for the idea that corporate law requires boards of directors to maximize shareholder wealth. However, one view is that this interpretation has not represented the law in most states for some time:

> Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting. -- M. Todd Henderson

> However, others, while agreeing that the case did not invent the idea of shareholder wealth maximization, found that it was an accurate statement of the law, in that "corporate officers and directors have a duty to manage the corporation for the purpose of maximizing profits for the benefit of shareholders" is a default legal rule, and that the reason that "Dodge v. Ford is a rule that is hardly ever enforced by courts" is not that it represents bad case law, but because the business judgement rule means:

> The rule of wealth maximization for shareholders is virtually impossible to enforce as a practical matter. The rule is aspirational, except in odd cases. As long as corporate directors and CEOs claim to be maximizing profits for shareholders, they will be taken at their word, because it is impossible to refute these corporate officials' self-serving assertions about their motives. -- Jonathan Macey

Do not do it!

The mission was always to produce quality low cost computers for hobbyists and kids with open source software.

The moment you IPO you will have shareholders demanding you put profit before people and the users will always lose in that deal.

On top of that, IMO the vast majority of their value as a brand comes from the community that develops for and with the platform. See every review for the alternative SBC market (Orange Pi, Bana Pi, etc.) "Sure it's better/cheaper but they don't have the huge community..."

So, if they IPO, will they first be distributing equity to the community? Or are they just cash-grabbing a retirement play?

Pine64 has been doing much better in that matter for years, I've had a Pine64 since 2016 and a raspberry pi 4 running the same OS (dietpi) and software kept running hotter even though it got released 3 years later and for double the price

Does it feel like this was inevitable anyway? I had heard that the company was already focusing on OEMs and delivering their products to those companies first. Whereas in the early days the RPi company was positioning themselves as having an educational focus (and the hobbyists). I don't know how true this is, but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.

It is quite sad though as they will now have an incentive to profit over 'provide', and it will be nice while it lasts.

> but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.

RPi5 never really had a shortage; there was the couple of months of "preorder" during launch.

During the post-COVID extended Raspberry pi shortage, a big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.

> big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.

To avoid screwing /a selected subset/ of customers that had designed in RPi products.

What's the warning at the start all about? Aren't they violating their own terms by serving it publicly on the internet?

> THIS ANNOUNCEMENT IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO OR FROM THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, SOUTH AFRICA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE SUCH DISTRIBUTION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL.

IPO announcements need to come from approved/authoritative organisations. This one is distributed by the UK's authoritative organisation - RNS news. In the other territories, IPO announcements also have to be made by authoritative organisations. RNS is approved in the UK, but not the other territories.

I don’t know if LSE are obligated to follow laws in those countries, but they may add this disclaimer to help others who may be obligated to follow those laws?

Also I’m not in any of the jurisdictions mentioned, potentially there’s some kind of geoblocking on the document?

I can view it just fine in Australia. Now I'm going to download a car too before I get caught.

It is not a disclaimer. It is a prohibition and yes this distribution to US is a breach. But that's normal for LSE. Barmy.

This is a classic disclaimer put on top of all types of financial documents, you can see it all the time on IPO's, mergers, any type of corporate actions like repurchase offers, shareholders / bondholders meetings etc.

My understanding is that the source knows they have no way of controlling the dissemination of the document, and thus use such disclaimer to attempt to push the responsibility to any party receiving the doc - "ah! see our disclaimer? you should not have read this doc, its on you now!"

> My understanding is that the source knows they have no way of controlling the dissemination of the document

But they do. Geoblocking.

Could someone who links to the document be charged with copyright infringement?

Read the next 2 paras. It's SOP for for listings in the UK under the FSMA.

Raspberry Pi did a lot to revolutionize the micro board/pc market, they truly had an amazing influence on the industry that I’m grateful for. Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered, and their influence spurred a new market that has produced much better alternatives. This IPO just confirms this perspective for me. Thank you raspberry pi for what you did. But I doubt I’ll ever want to buy one again.

It depends upon how you look at it. Something like the Raspberry Pi is considerably more expensive. On the other hand, they started with a very low performance and weak feature set and have evolved into a product with good performance and a much richer feature set. Something like the Raspberry Pi Zero is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi, and its price is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi. Much of the price bloating features were a product of customer request. To be fair, they dropped many hints that it would increase the cost of the product.

From my understanding, support has also improved over the years. Raspberry Pi always had a bit of an edge in community support, but they also had a push to develop free resources for education markets and hobbyists. The former has been traditionally been a high-priced add-on. The latter has traditionally been provided by third parties (more reasonably priced, but still at extra cost). None of this has disappeared, though it does appear to be less prominent than in the past.

I think the big change is in the competition. SBCs were traditionally high cost poorly supported products or even higher cost well supported products (though you were unlikely to get support unless you were a business). Now we have a flood of low cost poorly supported products, albeit with slightly higher standards for support than in times past.

You pay for the OS support. Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.

I think they are referring to those mini PCs -- either new ones from Chinese brands with Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability.

> Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability.

Comparing a refurbished PC to an SBC is like comparing apples to oranges.

I think the only people who are disappointed are the ones who were buying the wrong tool for the job.

You get a Linux SBC if you need some combination of small size, low power, convenient access to peripherals (I2C, SPI, and so on) or other unique features.

If you really only need the most powerful computer you can get for your budget and you don't care about the SBC features, you probably shouldn't have been buying Raspberry Pis to begin with.

You might think it's comparing apples to oranges but it's not. Go to forums and see what people do with raspberry pi. Lots of them use it as a Linux machine (Pi hole etc). You could say it's the wrong tool for the job, but that's what a lot of people do, in reality. And they are not wrong -- when raspi was $35 and the whole package is like $60 it made a lot of sense.

And actually many raspberry pis are sitting around doing nothing, because people realize that they aren't interested in the embedded side of it, but the "computer" side of it is too weak to do anything useful. In that sense it is even worse than a mini PC which has enogh power to do some "real" light computer work.

And I didn't make any of this up. These are real things that I see people talk about, all the time.

I think it will be a good thing to get rid of the people using Raspberry Pi as cheap desktops. It was always a compromise before cheap little computers were available. Now that they are, the Pi can go back to being hobby computer.

There are lots of projects that need a small cheap computer that doesn't really need display.

I was thinking of competitors like the orange pi, which is basically a raspberry pi clone with worse support.

It's still works but I sent mine back with an about 3 days since I couldn't do all the things I could do on a raspberry pi.

Do you mind going into details here? I have a RPi and a friend has Orange Pi. They’re the same, but his was cheaper and is more powerful.

> You pay for the OS support.

No you don't. RPi5, zero upstream Linux support 7 months after release.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SUSE-Upstream-Linux-RPi-5

Zillion dollar (pound?) company, apparently, and they rely on some volunteers from SUSE for even basic upstreaming. If you're paying them for OS support, you're throwing out the money.

> Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.

No they are not. If anything it was always RPi that was its own quirky thing.

Pretty much all of my SBCs are some form of mainline U-Boot booting mainline Linux (sometimes + a few patches) and a standard Linux userspace. Very uniform.

RPi 2+ I have is some weird bootloader that doesn't fit the wider SBC ecosystem, with its own special configuration, and a lot of RPi only tooling to control their firmware running on the graphics CPU or whatever.

If you buy a raspberry pi you have a massive ecosystem to use.

If you buy a different board and things don't work your on your own.

Most boards have some ecosystem to rely on. Either mainline support, some community organized either independently around a particular SoC manufacturer (like linux-sunxi), or around a board manufacturer (Radxa, Pine64, ...), etc.

You're rarely on your own. And even if you are, it's much easier when you have an actual detailed SoC documentation, board schematics, and when things are not some weird ad-hoc thing, but something fairly standard like U-Boot, that you already know and can re-use the knowledge of on any other board, without any vendor lock-in, etc. And when the docs are not some completely ridiculous thing that Rpi was known for years ago.

I'll put it this way, I have a project I'm considering where both a Milk V Duo and a pie zero would probably do fine. But if I follow the raspberry pi example, there's dozens upon dozens of examples for me to look at. If I use the Milk V Duo I'm going to have to figure out that stuff by myself.

The libraries for a pi hat might only exist for the pi for example. I guess I could write my own library though.

Yeah, there's a difference in available public resources between a chip nobody knew anything about just 6 months ago and is just getting upstreamed to Linux in the current release cycle, and BCM2835 from Rpi Zero which has been around for 11 years.

Are you serious? :) At least compare with something like Allwinner H3/A10/... which had similar lifetime.

At the end of the day I know a raspberry pi chip will be supported 6 months from now. I don't know about a new RISC V chip that literally just came out.

What are the better alternatives? I don’t think any have anywhere near the level of software and community support nor stability.

The situation with ARM hasn't changed much unless your budget stretches to Amperes stuff, but the big change is that x86 SBCs and mini-PCs have gotten very cheap, and of course those Just Work with any Linux distro or even Windows. The Intel N100 is incredibly capable for the price.

> The Intel N100 is incredibly capable for the price.

Hard agree, I have one and I love it. Its currently doing the VM work of what a £10k server did in 2012.

But if I want GPIO, and or battery powered things with linux, then the pi is the way forward still.

Anything else, and a pico/esp32 will do well.

TBH for projects that need GPIO I would be inclined to use an RP2040 or similar hooked up to USB, then any machine can be used as the host. That's pretty much how the Pi5 works anyway, the GPIOs are driven by the RP1 southbridge which is more or less an overgrown RP2040.

> TBH for projects that need GPIO I would be inclined to use an RP2040 or similar hooked up to USB, then any machine can be used as the host

Two separate platforms connected over USB is substantially more complicated, expensive, power hungry, and consumes a lot more space.

The value prop of SBCs is that they're compact and you can do low-level work in a single package. Connecting an RP2040 to a PC and writing software for both is the opposite end of the complexity spectrum.

Yeah but why aren't there more boards with a built in coprocessor like that given how cheap they are now? Iirc only Lattepanda and the Pi Foundation make these sort of boards, and the former is overpriced beyond any common sense.

Keeping the GPIO interface separate does have its advantages, if you accidentally explode a GPIO pin on an external RP2040 board then you've lost a couple of dollars instead of an entire >$50 SBC.

It doesn't have to take up much space either: https://www.waveshare.com/product/rp2040-one.htm

If USB is involved you can't really make a production ready system with it. At least they could put some proper ZH or whatever connectors for UART that don't unplug when you look at them wrong. That's one of the things they did right with the Pi 5 at least.

What kind of GPIO you need? If you need slow (under 1MHz) you can easily slap some USB to GPIO device and Bob's your uncle.

Any reason you can't do GPIO with the ESP32? I've had pretty good luck with GPIO in NodeMCU.

I do! as I said the pico/esp32/rp2040 are useful tools to have lying around. I'm currently using one to be a stepper controller for a project I'm doing now.

However the best thing about the Rpi GPIO stack is the support. If I google "how do I do x with y on pi" I will get lots of resources, along with the official docs (the rp2040 docs are great by the way) and a bunch of hardware that is mostly plug and play.

Yeah, fair; there's something nice about the fact that the Raspberry Pi is "just Linux"; it's not some attempt at an embedded version of POSIX.

You have the full Linux kernel and packages to play with, the GPIO stuff (if performance isn't a huge deal) can easily be controlled by simply writing to files, meaning that you can do quasi-embedded stuff in basically any language you want, or at least any language that has an ARM port to Linux, which is basically everything nowadays.

Still, I'm quite partial to the ESP32 with NodeMCU just because the power consumption is so ridiculously low and NodeMCU + Lua is pretty easy since it has full GC and gives you a node.js-style callbacks that I think are generally easier to work with than doing it myself in C. Most of my embedded projects have moved to the ESP32 as a result.

The top-end Alder-Lake-N N305 is good too! Double the threads, and probably a bit worse performance-per-dollar.

When do you use GPIO with Linux?

Something with higher order processing requirements.

the rp2040w has wifi, micropython and a bunch of GPIO, all running at low hundreds of megs. Great for motor controllers and that sort of stuff. I use them a lot for the sort of things I would have used Pis for.

However thats because its python. If you want rust, or javascript, then the pi is probably still a good option (I know there are native ports, but they are not as common or easy. )

But if you want computer vision, or, can't be arsed with micro based programms, then pi is where its at.

The other type of application is home assistant. I have an N100 running HA in a VM. It would have been easier with all the home security stuff to have it running on a pi directly. (yes you can use esp32 as binary sensors, which is what I do, but its expensive to have things that aren't wifi.)

The same things you'd use GPIO with Linux for on a Raspberry Pi: anything.

Anything is not a useful comment. When? I'm asking for a use case, I haven't seen anyone use them for a specific reason to use Linux. I'm asking about sensors and software that works together better than using it with an MCU

One example that I'm working on is GPS receiver and NTP server. Accuracy requires PPS signal through GPIO. It would be possible to wire up GPS receiver board to microcontroller. But still need server to run NTPd. Or could put GPS Hat on Raspberry Pi and have everything in one unit. It will run on the cheapest $35 Pi, or extra one in my case.

Another I have thought doing is ADS-B receiver mounted outside. It helps to put the receiver close to antenna so would put the SDR and Pi in enclosure, and power it from PoE. Microcontroller can't run the SDR. Micro PC is overkill and wouldn't work in enclosure. Doesn't use GPIO pins.

Very interesting, I haven't used gps but that definitely does need more power (or optimizations). Have you heard of this? https://hackerwarehouse.com/product/portapack-h2-for-hackrf-...

Linux would probably be very easy to built without needing firmware

I've used GPIO on a Raspberry Pi Zero W to talk with DS18B20 temperature sensors, along with an SDR attached with USB tuning in radio traffic and decoding AX.25 packets in software.

I've also used GPIO on a Raspberry PI Zero W to build a Stratum 1 NTP server with nearly spooky accuracy with the PPS line.

Both things worked very well. They were compact, performant, used an inconsequential amount of power, and were very inexpensive.

And both things were very easy for me to implement, largely due to the tremendous amount of software available in the Linux-ey ecosystem.

If I were trying to bodge an MCU into performing these tasks without involving Linux, I'd probably have never gotten either of them done.

Especially if you're willing to go used. 5 year old lenovo, dell, and hp mini PCs are all over ebay as companies dump them due to simply being out of the typical 5 year enterprise warranty. They are otherwise still very potent and capable machines

> the big change is that x86 SBCs and mini-PCs have gotten very cheap

Yes - and at the same time, the RPi has gotten more expensive, rising from ~$25 circa 2013 to $60-$80 for the latest RPi 5. Neither price including power supply and SD card. Of course the RPi 5 has more cores, a faster clock speed, more RAM, and built-in wifi so you do get more for your money.

Once upon a time, you were looking at $25 for a Pi and $250 for intel. These days it's more like $80 vs $180.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is still good value at $35 . If your use case can be handled by a Pi 4, it's a good pick at that price range over the competitors. Most of the competitors are going to have similar i/o, but with a Rockchip RK3566 chip which is slower (unless you're using the NPU)

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is also very interesting for the size and $15 price tag. I also liked the 3A but no one remembers that one.

They're older, but everyone else is still playing catch-up, and Raspberry Pi will produce them for a while. I do hope they have a proper $35 board to upgrade to in the future.

Sure if you are trying to get a cheap desktop computer, the Pi always made a mediocre desktop experience. But if you need GPIO or very low power consumption or a SPI connection with a community that understands its quirks very well I doubt you are going to be happy with an old Intel desktop.

The low power, GPIO and SPI on the Pi are all trash compared to microcontrollers, most of which are also cheaper and better documented.

But if you specifically want to run Linux and have SPI and GPIO on the same chip then sure, the RPi will do that.

OOI, why would any user care what's on the same chip?

Well, often they wouldn't.

In some cases you want to avoid your programmers needing to know two designs, compiler toolchains etc - a microcontroller might push you towards using C, and perhaps all your other code is in Python and you'd prefer to keep everything in Python.

If you're making something like a high precision time server synchronized to GPS, you might want your GPIOs to trigger direct interrupts on the device with the ethernet port. Of course, IIRC the RPi has USB ethernet so it's not a good choice for a truly high precision time server.

Don't forget the 20-40% inflation over the last decade.

Yeah, it's actually insane how much X86_64 stuff has dropped in price.

Yesterday I received two Ryzen 9 mini gaming computers [1], one to replace my old rack mount server and one to be a home theater PC. Each cost about $400, and they are capable of emulating the PS3 and Xbox 360 smoothly (I don't really have any new games so I wasn't able to push the limit too much, but still emulating those consoles requires some horsepower!).

Maybe I'm just out of the loop (very likely), but $400 for a super low-power gaming computer feels insanely cheap to me. The server one in particular will pay for itself in about a year due to power savings alone compared to my rack mount server.

[1] Beelink SER6's for those interested.

The Raspberry Pi is the best if you can find it at MSRP, but I haven't seen that for many years now. You can only find it for at least double and at that price it's not worth it.

There are many alternatives that, granted, don't have a community as big as RPi, but are perfectly valid and can be found at a normal price.

I did a quick Google. The pi 5 4GB MSRP is $60 I think, there are some available on Amazon UK for £54.90 with delivery tomorrow. That's apparently $69.53, so above MSRP, but not terrible. There may be cheaper sources I've not googled hard.

They are at msrp now for large parts of EMEA

rpi5 is at msrp of $80 for the 8gb version and widely available at that price in USA, just bought one few days ago.

Depends what do you want to do but I'd say Dell & Lenovo micro PCs. x86, changeable and upgradable CPU, RAM, and storage. And they are stil very very small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-x0mVgDABA I have severall Optiplex micros at home for selfhosting, playing around VMs etc and I love them.

In Europe you can get one with a 6th gen i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and SSD for ~100€. And of course you can upgrade the CPU for something better, add 32 GB RAM, bigger storage etc.

No GPIO pins though.

Intel chips are becoming dirt cheap. Intel has a lot of cheap dev boards that are more robust than RPi. Maybe not the same level of community support. Recently I bought a refurbished Intel micro size desktop PC to replace my RPi home server.

They've always felt overpriced to me imho - not intrinsically at the sticker-price level, but the workarounds needed to obtain constantly-out-of-stock units, get good-enough on/off functionality, good-enough power-supply, good-enough SD cards eliminated the savings of the device itself being cheap.

I actually appreciate that the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem, and would be willing to pay the premium price for that when I'm interested in buying a new SBC.

I think the price has stealthily increased as the required dressings got more demanding. Like the initial pi could be powered by any random phone charger you had laying around. But the new ones are a lot more picky and demanding. The new one also really demands a cooling solution, which is yet another cost the old one didn't have without being an actual MSRP increase.

By the time you fully dress a pi now it's like $100-130. The pi itself is only like half the cost if that.

My first Pi was a 3 and even that one was picky as hell about its power supply.

> the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem

Please do tell.

The Pi 5 has a power button finally, and a Normally Open jumper that you can wire into to implement a mechanical power-button off-board.

> Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered

They've been underpowered since day 1. That hasn't stopped them being successful.

I agree, and I would add that I think this IPO is the beginning of the end of what we were used to.

The company will end up the way many companies go after an IPO, the importance of product drops in relation to that of shareholder profit.

What are the much better alternatives? I’m not really aware of any

I’ve tried so many times but I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi. It seems well suited for making a NAS or plex server, but other than that, idk. Everything else I want to experiment with is better served by an arduino.

    I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi.

And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.

And the Pi Foundation's refusal to do literally any power management while increasing TDP into the sky with marginal efficiency improvements has diminished its use for robotics and other battery powered applications too.

This has just been one of my largest pet peeves with the entire Pi lineup. The Pi 5 is the worst offender that idles at like 3 watts doing jack shit. That's an entire 3000mAh battery gone in under four hours that would've easily lasted several days on an average smartphone SOC with twice the memory and speed.

That's valid.

My first reaction was "Well, the OS is open -- isn't it? Just set up good power management yourself and publish it for all to use, and it'll probably get accepted upstream eventually."

But then I remembered: The OS is open, but the hardware is not (because -- in one word -- Broadcom).

But maybe with an IPO, they can generate enough cash to get their own CPU started up. Maybe something based around [checks flip-chart] RISC-V or something, with enough documentation to allow people to fix the [checks excuse card] power management problem.

They've certainly shown some willingness to work in that direction with the RP2040.

From my understanding the Pi Foundation was founded by ex-Broadcom engineers and some that still work there. The two are so intertwined that it's not unlike it being the Broadcom Foundation. I think it's rather unlikely that they'd ever move away from using their chips since they are theirs.

Yes, the whole thing did start with some folks who were under Broadcom employ.

Perhaps that will change: After all, how many engineers do you know who feel motivated to hold down regular mid-tier jobs at two publicly-traded companies?

> And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.

Especially with ESPHome making it so easy to integrate with common sensors without writing code.

That said, the Pi Zero W is pretty cheap and small (similar in size to many ESP32 development boards) so it provides a nice upgrade path if you want to do more processing on device, exceed a few megabytes of ram, etc

A Raspberry Pi a fairly tiny computer that can run a "real" OS, and that has a fair amount of GPIO that can be bought new somewhat-inexpensively. It has storage that is easily-removed and swapped (whether for good, or for bad).

If all a person needs or wants is a fairly tiny computer and it doesn't need to be new/shiny, then there's off-lease corpo boxes that are faster/better/cheaper.

If all a person needs or wants is some GPIO to hack on hardware with, and doesn't want a real OS on the back end of things, then maybe an Arduino or ESP32 or RP2040 or something might be better and cheaper.

But if a person needs or wants all of that in one box, then: A Raspberry Pi may well be the right approach. (Some folks like hacking with a real OS; this is fine. We used to use things like parallel ports for this in the PC space but those are long gone.)

Or: If a person needs or wants a well-tuned system that they can just download and use specialized images for and write to a MicroSD card, then: A Raspberry Pi can become desirable.

---

For instance: I use a Pi 4 to play movies with over SMB. I could do that a thousand or more different ways, but using LibreElec on a Pi 4 is the easiest way for me to get there -- just download it, stuff it into an SD card, and boot it up. It becomes an appliance, and this appliance is similar or identical to many other appliances; this makes supporting it easy. (And if I want to do something different with that hardware today, it takes only a few seconds to swap its storage for something completely different -- and swap it back later.)

Or: 3D printing. I can do what many others have done before me and sneaker-net gcode from the PC to the printer, or I can use a Raspberry Pi and a standardized Octoprint image to put that printer on the network instead. Now my printer is a network appliance.

There are a lot of suggestions here for things that can be done on any PC rather than a particular piece of hardware (DNS server, VM host, email server) so to throw out the one genuine "something the Raspberry Pi is compelling for, not just able to do too":

IP KVM as with the Pi KVM.

It utilizes the CSI interface for the capture without needing to do it through USB or expensive PCIe addon cards like a normal PC, the USB OTG is used to act as keyboard/mouse/disc drive/usb ethernet, the GPIO is used to control the motherboard power/reset pins, the serial pins are used to provide a console interface in case you need to reconfigure the static IP, some other pins are used to drive a small LCD display telling you the IP and status of the device, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi give connectivity options to access the local webpage where the hardware accelerated encode helps stream the data to you. The local uSD storage is plenty for storing the local ISO images and it's a full Arch Linux system in case you ever need to do anything else (like wget an image directly to the device remotely).

Not only is the hardware extremely well suited (capture, the IO pins, the decoder, the network interfaces, the minimal storage) to the exact use case but it's used in a way that doesn't really make sense to use an Arduino and would cost a lot more (in dollars, power, and space) to get a standard mini PC to do these things.

Of course I've owned 6 Raspberry Pi boards over the last 12 years and this is the only one I ever found to be worthwhile. The others were just for the novelty.

One thing arduinos don't do is things which require a GPU. So if you have a project which you want to output to a display but you also want it very low powered, because it e.g. runs 24/7, a PI is IMO the best device. Something like a Home Assistant dashboard display or a DIY smart mirror for example.

But neither requires a GPU.

Pi-hole: https://pi-hole.net

Hilariously I've spent hours troubleshooting why my Pi running Pi-hole is intermittently inaccessible from my iPhone, despite being able to connect to the Pi from other machines. I still have no clue why. Last night I finally captured a tcpdump so maybe I can see what is happening (the Pi is indeed receiving packets from the iPhone), but it's totally inexplicable. The other Pi I have always hooked up (music player for my speakers) has a bash script that runs every 5 min with cron, to ping the LAN router and restart networking if it can't ping it. Why? Because after a while the Pi would randomly drop off the network and become inaccessible. Countless stuff online gives various troubleshooting which never made any difference, until I employed my hackish "check the network every 5min" which has completely "solved" the problem. Unfortunately this didn't "solve" the problem for the Pi running Pi-hole, sadly.

Sounds like a lack of imagination to me!

The official Raspberry Pi New page has a least a few featured projects every week: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/

The MagPi has articles and a whole monthly magazine on various projects and use cases: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com

I am running a hypervisor (https://blogs.vmware.com/arm/2023/12/15/esxi-arm-fling-1-15-...) on my Raspberry Pi 4. Rock solid.

Currently running virtual machines: * Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave * Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit) * Pihole

All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS.

I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.

Doesn't Synology support running VMs directly on the NAS itself?

I use an old 1st gen Pi Model B+ as a ppp server for my Tandy 1000 SX to connect to the Internet. I can telnet in and adjust stuff if needed. Very handy and fun to play Zork on sdf.org through it.

Similar issue, I have an old desktop as a server already to do all the heavy processing stuff. Only finally found use for RPi to be the brains of my 3d printers.

I run a Mastodon server in a VPC. It's a Rails all and sucks up all the CPU and RAM you can throw at it. A while back when I was almost at my VPC's limits and didn't want to throw a bunch of money at it, I spun up Sidekiq worker VMs on my RPi. That freed up a lot of resources I could repurpose for frontend caching.

I think they are mostly for hobbyists and students so maybe being pragmatic is not the top concern.

Absolutely correct. The form factor of a Pi zero (2) may be good in a handheld but you can easily get one from China or a PSP and get a great experience.

Arduino? You mean the ide or the actual hardware? It's been superceded by esp32.

I use my 3B solely for adblocking via Pi-hole and it works fine most of the time

R Pi in a nutshell. Three sigma and proud of it! :)

I wish they could make a more user friendly rpi that is all in one: router, smart tv, adblock, vpn, private cloud, private media server, wireless charging pad, universal miracast/airplay/chromecast.

Won’t a tiny/small PC would solve that use-case? E.g. a nettop.

I have home automation done with rpi.

They have a touch screen, speakers, and control the lights via gpio. I use the same thing to set timers, play the internet radio in the morning to wake me up, and put the lights off.

Not well suited for NAS at all. Too limited in IO and PCI lanes.

Also not really suited for Plex, since the transcode performance would be awful.

Right, the IO perf has been bad.

But IMHO, no one should be running a NAS without ECC at this point. It's on the "my RAID doesn't scrub the disks" level; it's just begging for silent disk corruption that propagates its way through backups and is impossible to fix with software solutions.

Depends so much what's on the NAS.

Run an email server, send triggers on subject keywords, automate stuff.

home assistant and small/quiet/cheap remote syncthing nodes.

>It seems well suited for making a NAS

No ECC memory, thus no.

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen the words "Shareholder Value". Hopefully that particular disease can be kept away for a while.

The disease of Enshittification ?

Whatever you call it, when you're beholden to the shareholders rather than your customers.

Friedman's Malady

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

If companies that lower profits to benefit society as a whole are infringing on the freedom of their shareholders then any company that breaks the law to raise profits is basically just a criminal for hire. Ignorance is just irresponsible at that point.

And why should we let something that harms society remain legal? At the very least society ought to collect on the damages, and a company that's pushed all responsibility for deciding what is and isn't right to do onto the rest of society has no right to complain when society decides it ought to stop.

Of course there are people who want to abolish law in favour of bartering as well, but I think they think you're allowed to hit them in the face for thinking that.

Of course, perfect economics would assume maximizing long term shareholder value, which means not exploiting your customers. But "Shareholder Value" these days invariably means "short term share price" i.e. burn goodwill to make the shares spike in the next 5 years so they can be dumped profitably, and never mind what comes after.

Arm listing in the US was apparently quite a blow to the London Stock Exchange. What kind of decisions drive a company to choose one exchange over another?

The biggest reason is access to capital. There's lots of institutional investors who are going to primarily invest in US equities, so if you're on the US stock market that's good. Even if those institutional investors do look at worldwide equities they're going to be limited in how much they allocate to it. It's also easier for investors - a single regulatory environment, no currency risk etc.

This used to be mitigated by the fact that other countries would have their own pools of capital, like domestic pension funds but with the reforms to pensions UK pension funds are no longer a particularly good source of capital on the UK stock exchange.

> with the reforms to pensions UK pension funds are no longer a particularly good source of capital on the UK stock exchange.

Surely it's the other way around? The UK pension system has been reforming recently to _encourage_ more equity holdings, especially of UK-based companies.

Way back when Arm were dual listed one of the explanations was that US based customers (meaning US based semi companies) preferred that the company was listed in the US and subjected to a similar regime, in addition to needed capital.

To be honest, that actually makes a decent amount of sense, but I suspect the real reason was to enable US investors to buy into it so they do not then support attacking the foreign interloper in their industry.

it is also incredibly costly and difficult to be listed in multiple stock exchanges.

Generally it's easier from a compliance perspective to list in the same jurisdiction as your shareholders live. Otherwise there can be more admin work with withholding taxes etc.

Also a baseline of liquidity, rule of law, and the absence of capital controls are prerequisite.

the access to investment probably?

more liquidity

I badly wish that chip manufacturers were required to produce single board computers with their outdated inventory. Or at least offer the chips for sale with documentation to reduce e-waste.

Apple’s A* and M* chips for example should all be on SBCs.

If you’re going to consume earth’s resources to produce these things, tell humanity how to repurpose them.

I would go even further - open specs and mass recycle billions of chips and boards of any obsolete mobile device (Samsung, Qualcomm, Apple....).

"Over my rotting corpse."

- Tim Cook, probably

Good time to talk about the rPi alternatives?

I don't think so. I actively use some of the Pi alternatives, and none of them are well-polished and stable as Raspberry Pis.

Also, an IPO doesn't mean that a company will go downhill from there. For example, when Bending Spoons got Evernote, everybody prepared for the worst, but it didn't happen, at least yet. They are genuinely trying to make it better from my understanding, at least for now.

I think the biggest thread to ARM SBC ecosystem is Intel's N series systems, which can run both Linux and Windows 11 equally well. An N95 runs a familiar chipset & ISA with familiar system dynamics and standard ports with good IO performance. They can act as good home servers and entry level home computers.

Who can deny the charm of a small box with a mSATA + NVMe port, WiFi6, a proper BIOS, two screen outs backed by an acceptable GPU?

> I actively use some of the Pi alternatives, and none of them are well-polished and stable as Raspberry Pis.

Exactly.

Pis are obviously not perfect. You can definitely find much better "deals" - but overall it is a very good product for what you're paying for.

There are some killer features every Pi has:

1. Non-brickable: Either your SD Card is gone, or your board is broken. There's no middle.

2. Trusted OS: You can trust the OS from get go.

3. Customizable install with flasher: Spend 30 seconds setting up your Pi before installing it to the SD card. Doing the same setup post install takes hours in some cases.

4. Seamless migration: Poweroff Pi, get the card out, insert to newer Pi, power on, go on.

I'm not adding small yet irreplaceable features like undervoltage warning in the system logs.

I'm running a OrangePi 5B with their original Debian image. While it's not doing any shenanigans from what I see, it needs half a day to convert it from a toy with auto-login to a proper home server, and the OS is finicky. Some mounts fail during boot causing it to enter maintenance mode. Adding "nofail" to boot options makes mounts succeed on every boot.

Interesting device.

> 2. Trusted OS: You can trust the OS from get go.

Mostly true. However I did experience issues that led to less than 100% trust.

When I got my Pi 5, I ordered an NVME HAT and was thrilled to be able to run the Pi from an NVME SSD. Then one day it would not boot. The messages on the screen indicated that it no longer saw the SSD. Booting from an SD card, it also did not see the SSD. Convinced that the NVME HAT had malfunctioned, I initiated a return through Amazon and eventually acquired another. About that time I discovered that there were known SSDs that did not work with the Pi, including the one I had. IOW, a S/W update had caused a working system to malfunction. A different SSD has been working without difficulty.

I was also puzzled that the imager did not list the current version of the OS for a Pi Zero. I asked about this on the official forum and my post was removed without notification.

Also at one point, a system installed to an SD card on a Pi 5 would not boot on a 4B. That has been fixed and in fact, the 5 and 4B use different kernels. One side effect of this is that on `apt upgrade` the process tells me that a different kernel will be used on reboot. (It won't.)

The Pi 5 is a massive shift in architecture and there is still (IMO) significant technical debt that the Pi engineers are catching up with. (But not enough to cause me to look elsewhere.)

We put different meanings behind the word trust.

Yes, Raspbian is not 100% dependable/reliable, esp. when it comes to NVMe boot. They're trying to tune things aggresively for 5. I got three eeprom updates in two days in one case, when they were trying to tune temperature dependent clocking for RAM.

However I trust the OS to not do any backdooring/spying shenanigans since it's mostly pulled from Debian's official repositories.

However, even the OrangePi 5B uses almost the same repos with Raspberry Pi, I had to give it a purposeful dig to make sure.

I watched Jeff Geerling's video yesterday about NVMe hats, and he openly said that the firmware is picky about SSDs. In fact signalling over flex cables is problematic.

I built a BMAX-B4 N95 system for my parents to replace their big tower system. It has two SATA ports. One SATA and one mSATA. SATA port is routed to a slot via a flex cable, and Samsung's 870EVO sometimes initializes a couple of milliseconds late causing system to not to boot. I'll probably move everything to mSATA drive and let it slide, or try another brand of SSD hoping that it'll like the flex cable a bit more.

5. An alternative Amiga/Atari/Commodore/Speccy like form factor. :)

Yeah, but an N95/N100 box is not much bigger than a C64 power brick, either, which is both fascinating and frightening at the same time. :)

I think I can convert my spare Pi3 to a "boot to an emulator" system.

That wasn't really what I was talking about, rather the Raspberry Pi 400.

For the line of thought you replied, I would be more keen on a ESP32 instead.

> an IPO doesn't mean that a company will go downhill from there. For example, when Bending Spoons got Evernote

No that's not an example. Bending Spoons has not IPOed.

Let's change Evernote/Bending Spoons with ARM.

As of yesterday, ARM's architecture powers world's 4th fastest supercomputer Fugaku.

> Good time to talk about the rPi alternatives?

I do not think this changes anything in that regard. As a hobbyist I keep an eye on the competition and during Covid none of the alternatives appealed to me. I'm sure others came to different conclusions and found alternatives suitable.

The situation may be different for someone producing a product based on Pi H/W. They were treated well compared to the hobbyist market during shortages and I don't care to argue one way or the other whether this was good overall. If I was producing a product that needed something like a Pi to work, I would always be evaluating alternatives.

Once the Pi organization is publicly owned, their behavior will determine the need to talk about alternatives.

> Once the Pi organization is publicly owned, their behavior will determine the need to talk about alternatives.

And why do you think I ask, technical reasons?

I can very well imagine the post IPO "foundation" - btw how does a "foundation" IPO? - making Pis unusable for licensing / financial reasons.

Depends what do you want to do but I'd say Dell & Lenovo micro PCs. x86, changeable and upgradable CPU, RAM, and storage. And they are stil very very small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-x0mVgDABA I have severall Optiplex micros at home for selfhosting, playing around VMs etc and I love them.

In Europe you can get one with a 6th gen i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and SSD for ~100€. And of course you can upgrade the CPU for something better, add 32 GB RAM, bigger storage etc.

No GPIO pins though.

Arduino?

Completely different beast. Raspberry pis are full blown computers. Arduinos are microcontrollers with a little supporting circuitry. Even a pi zero beats a standard arduino out of the water.

How often do you need a full OS?

Are you browsing HN with an Arduino?

Are you browsing HN on a pi?

No, of course not.

So thus, neither Arduinos nor Raspberry Pis are things that need to exist.

Uh? All the time??

While the Arduino can replace a Pi in many projects I've seen, if you're reason for dropping th Pi is to avoid the issues corporations bring to the table, you're not going to be any happier with the Arduino.

Do you also compare sandals and shoes, claiming they have the same purpose? Sounds ridiculous? Well...

My visceral reaction to this was “well shit, RPi was supposed to be a non profit to lower the costs of computers, and now they’re going to be another boring computer company”, and that makes me sad. I know that Rapsberry Pi has been a dual for-profit and non-profit for quite awhile, so in theory nothing really changes, but it feels a bit weird.

However, it appears that unambiguously for-profit companies have managed to make affordable SBCs (e.g. Hardkernel, Nvidia), without having the same constraints of trying to save the world associated with it. Maybe Raspberry Pi IPOing will increase availability and funding?

Tough to say. I haven’t actually used a name-brand Raspberry Pi for awhile, and have opted for a competitor for the last several years.

Please no. They make good, beloved products that are fairly high quality.

Wild how far they are from their original stated goals. Maybe they were just full of it the whole time.

That would be cool. I would like to follow their journey. Their numbers, their earning calls etc.

I would like to see more smaller tech companies on the stock market. The giants like Microsoft and Google are way to hard to understand because they have so many products and so much stuff in the pipeline.

Are there any interesting examples of smaller tech companies which are publicly traded?

Not so sure.

Interesting opposite: Valve

Superior money milking machine without the pressure from shareholders, because they can focus into the benefits of the end users with few products and long term sustainability.

No need to rush for increased profits every quarter so that someone can sell or admire their stocks.

Valve has a market cap of about $8B though. Quite big already.

Also, I don't understand games at all :)

There was a good interview with Eben Upton back in Feb on this topic (and others): https://hackaday.com/2024/02/28/floss-weekly-episode-772-ras...

Let's normalize private industry again.

My pension contributions need to go somewhere, and without a flow of new companies going public it's just gonna bid up and up the price of the old guard.

For real. I want more companies like Valve. Not publicly traded, not trying to squeeze every last dollar for the sake of it, just doing what they think is cool when they want to do it.

It seems I lost my faith in Raspberry Pis a lot sooner than most people. I gave up on them around the RPi3 days because it stopped working with the random chargers I had just laying around my house. I traced the issue back to my power supply having too much voltage ripple, with it still being within the spec for USB. Essentially, I needed to run it with their charger which was built to work better than industry standard.

This, coupled with the mini HDMI ports basically requiring an adapter, means that you more than total the cost of the Pi just in peripherals to get it up and running. It all seems like a waste of money anymore.

No, your random USB power supplies were just particularly shitty. It doesn't need to be their power supply, it just needs to not be a piece of crap.

agreed that mini HDMI is bullshit.

running a company and pricing things is a dark art. there's so much psychology to it, getting you in the door at $40, then up charging for add ons is a time honored tradition sales tactic. win or lose, judge it on the out-the-door price as long as you compare it to the out-the-door price of other options (Intel NUC, Droid, orange Pi, any NAS)

It doesn't even matter to me. I stopped using them personally and have been pushing back against them professionally. They have bad performance, bad thermals, many limitations in the peripherals, are not reliable, and are impossible to get.

And have a long history of hardware design mistakes.

On top of that, Eben Upton has publicly made statements showing pointless loyalty to ARM and ignorance on current/past developments in RISC-V.

For Raspberry Pi to stay relevant, many things would have to change.

And will be bought by private equity and rode into the ground not long after.

Why don't they license their name to other entities, essentially allow approved clones? Muddying your non-profit goal by operating a for-profit, publicly-traded company seems suboptimal.

Same old story, the customer will shift from the people buying it to the shareholders. This would be a shame.

It seems to me RPi kind of lost the attributes that made it interesting in the first place.

That's dissapointing. I was hoping they'd be happy getting enough revenue to stay private. What do they need to raise capital for?

They haven't been able to keep up with global demand for what, half a decade now? That's a problem that you can easily throw money at and make it go away. This gap in supply and demand has led to many clones gaining popularity too, and while that's good for the end user because more choice, it's bad for their business.

Supply hasn't really been an issue since the Pi5 launched, PiLocator shows that nearly every official vendor has both variants in stock right now.

The Pi Hut even ran 10% off deals a few weeks back, it's not something you do when demand is higher than supply. I think they seriously overestimated the amount of Pi 5s that would be sold.

They don't have to agree that it's their job to change the fundamental mission of the business into one of being accountable to shareholders.

They can, of course, but it's by no means a forced choice.

Sure they have, the pandemic was a huge, but temporary, issue.

Something more capital wouldn't necessarily have helped with either.

They can't keep up with demand so that's one problem that could be solved with money.

Man, I can't wait for there to be 7 variants of RPi 6 all with some nondescript name and none of which actually offer exactly what I need, because they had to flood and segment the market.

They should stay private and build on the quality brand they have rather than trying to grow because reasons.

> I can't wait for there to be 7 variants of RPi 6 all with some nondescript name and none of which actually offer exactly what I need

So you think with fewer variants, one of those few is more likely to meet your needs? Doesn't having more variants make it more likely that one will suit you, or at least get closer?

This is the paradox of choice. If there is 1 option, a person gets it and it's not perfect, but it's fine. They know what they're getting and make it work. If there are a bunch of variants there is a greater expectation that one of them will perfectly fit the need, and they are always left wondering if a different one would have been better, and are thus left feeling unsatisfied.

Some choice is good. Too much choice is problematic.

This TED talk probably explains it better. https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi...

For me it always lead to confusion, indecision and not buying anything when there’s too many choices

> So you think with fewer variants, one of those few is more likely to meet your needs?

Yes, because being over-specced doesn't matter if it's cheap enough.

If they can't keep up with demand people will go elsewhere. Focusing on brand and perception instead of fulfilling demand is not a fundamentally good strategy.

This is what market theory says, but there are a lot of competing products at attractive price points and it hasn’t happened yet. The lack of community, software, and examples makes the competitors less attractive. The same thing happened with Arduino. There were a lot of competitors that offered more capable silicon, but the community and software libraries were the real appeal.

It is happening. It started years ago.

In 3D printing in (say) 2019, for instance: It was ridiculously common to use a Raspberry Pi with a printer -- for all kinds of reasons. They were cheap (enough), and they worked well (enough), and they were available (enough).

Few, if any, questioned whether the Raspberry Pi was the right thing to use, for it was ubiquitous and well-understood.

But when Pis became more expensive and/or less available in 2021 or so, people didn't just stop doing stuff with their printers.

They instead found alternative platforms to do things with: They bought used corpo mini-PCs, repurposed cheap-shit Android TV boxes, used old Android phones, and (of course) trudged through the weeds getting things working various other SBCs.

Not just market theory, but practice and common sense. People buy what there is. Companies can ride some brand recognition for a bit (I personally waited for them to get new components available) but it won't last, and any customers new to the idea won't wait. They'll pick of the available options.

I genuinely don't understand what this has to do with what I said. I understand this decision upsets you for some reason, but it has nothing to do with the discussion.

The point is just because there is demand doesn’t mean it needs to be met at the cost of the product or brand itself.

Literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Okay, but how do you know it'll be like that? The demand is for the product they are currently selling, not the options you made up.

Because this is always what happens when there are investors involved. They want to maximize the return of their investment over the short to midterm with a complete disregard for the long term brand damage.

Yes, I'm looking forwards to being able to choose from the Pi 6 Power, the Pi 6 Pure, the Pi 6 Play, and the Pi 6 5G, each product being actually a completely different product with completely different branding depending on which continent you're shopping in, and with the process being reshuffled annually.

Have their production issues been a function of money? I assumed it was components (pandemic related) and maybe manufacturing capacity (because they manufacture locally instead of China, for instance)

If it's a problem to be solved with money, it's likely they could do so with higher prices or loans. Even if they raise money through stock, it will end up with higher prices to make returns for investors. Public companies have higher regulatory overhead and will be at the will of the investors to make more money.

That's what debt is for.

Another way to keep up with demand is to jack up prices until the demand meets the supply. That's what I fear. They have the brandname recognition to pull it off.

And their RP2040 was a huge success so they may want to go more into producing their own chips.

Now we just need a 5V version of it while everyone continues to produce parts that don't work with 3V signals nor level shifters. Looking at you WS2812 and analog sensors.

I doubt this will ever happen they may do 5v tolerant inputs but outputs? Highly unlikely. Already the RP2040 uses its own regulator to make 1.1V for itself. The smaller the process and higher the frequency the lower the voltage. So the future is clearly not moving toward 5v.

I can't remember the last time I actually used a Raspberry Pi. These days there are millions of cheaper, more powerful, "Raspberry Pi compatible" boards that are actually stocked. I don't see any reason to even need one of these in 2024.

I also never looked at RPi 4s and 5s but for a different reason. Cheaper is good but I don't need "more powerful".

I'm using a 3B+ (or whatever) with a TV hat to convert free to air channels to IP streams that I can watch on my phone and tablet. The winning point is obviously the TV hat but also the low power consumption. It's 3.82 W right now.

I'm also using an Odroid as my home server, because there where no RPis available and because I can plug two SATA 3 disks in that machine. It's using 3.71 W. Given the load I put on it I could be OK with a less powerful server that would consume even less Watts.

Hopefully this will give the average consumer the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions. I'd very much like to see a new PI that doesn't have wifi, bluetooth or any other wireless technology.

I don't see any connection between going public and giving the average consumer more input into the direction of the company. Making a company public means the company is beholden to operating in a way that maximizes return to the shareholders. Sure an average consumer can buy shares in the company but the average consumer isn't going to be sitting on the board.

> Hopefully this will give the average consumer the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions.

Will give the average investor the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions.

Why? They had that with the zero… I’m guessing those sold a lot less.

They have specifically limited consumer's ability to purchase the Zero's, so there's definately more demand for them than they're selling.

The Pi isn't one thing - it's a group of computers at different prices - you can develop on the expensive one and run your production code on a much cheaper one.

a weird source to receive this news, nevertheless it seems that this is another evolution of the commercial arm of the company.

there can still be potential benefits of this move for the foundation's goals. economies of scale and increased commercial embedded use cases can push for adoption of ARM in basic computing.

i just hope that they finally set up their own distribution as it is still a pain to buy their devices for a fair price.

I called this back in 2012. Despite all their talk of being a non-profit and changing the world, it always felt this was more of a "feel good" thing than their actual mission.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is still a non profit, isn't it?

This filing makes no mention of it and appears to state quite the opposite.

> Raspberry Pi has a strong track record of revenue growth and profitability. For the year ended 31 December 2023, revenues were $265.8 million, with gross profit of $66.0 million, and operating profit of $37.5 million, as well as adjusted EBITDA of $43.5 million.

The filing goes on to provide various forward looking statements regarding growth and profitability. I find no mention of the original mission.

The filing mentions the Foundation multiple times?

> Raspberry Pi is a subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK charity founded in 2008, with the goal of promoting interest in computer science among young people. Raspberry Pi has distributed approximately $50m in dividends to the Foundation since 2013, which has been used to advance its educational mission globally.

I have first hand experience with not being able to get RPis for educational purposes while the employers I worked for were ordering them by the 1000s.

These discussions are missing the larger point which is that it feels the .com side of Rpi is eating away at the original mission of the company.

> the .com side of Rpi is eating away at the original mission of the company.

Fun fact. E Upton long ago resigned from the board of the original (charitable) Raspberry Pi company and set up the commercial company now known as Raspberry Pi.

Sounds about right and this is exactly the sort of thing I suspected would happen from the start.

I think you're confusing Trading with the Foundation. Go and have a look at the websites to educate yourself on the difference.

https://www.raspberrypi.com

https://www.raspberrypi.org

There's pleanty of information in the 'about' pages.

I don't think so. Maybe I'm misremembering, but I distinctly recall when the Pi was first created, there was only one entity and it was non-profit.

Correct. There was a split. E Upton resigned and created a new commercial company which then confusingly changed its name to Raspberry Pi Ltd.

The R Pi commercial company dropped "Trading" years ago.

Their "do no evil" phase lasted pretty long at least compared to places like OpenAI at least. At the end of the day are there any significant companies that managed to maintain a mission that wasn't "make tons of money for already rich people"?

This is why we need Exit to Community: https:/.e2c.how

Intel N100 has sent raspberry pi to the drawer.

That prediction was just too easy [0], and it has now been finally admitted.

Time to them to dump their shares on the community.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28773122

that would explain the focus on services like the VNC replacement they've released

those won't be free for long

Can you buy the shares in Australia?

Not sure how you get in on the IPO, but once they list on the LSE it'll be quite trivial to buy shares on the usual platforms like Stake, SelfWealth, CommSec, etc. Not much different than buying on the ASX.

Thanks mate!

Farewell Raspberry Pi.

What are some alternative boards with comparable specs?

Risc-V boards soon maybe. See Lichee Pi 4a (https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a).

[dead]

Let the enshittification begin

This was my immediate thought, it's the beginning of the end.

Maybe I'm becoming bitter and cynical, but all I can see are things being ruined after IPOs and the like.

IPO means company already gone shit. I will stick to ESP32.

How the enshittification begins..

[dead]

Enshittification incoming.

R

Hiring a proud surveillance cop to sell surveillance cop stuff to governments must have been a boon if they're considering an IPO. Zero consequences for being assholes to critics then lying about the criticism to the press.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/zh51l4/raspberr...