#2. Sadly this fact undermines the real utility of RPI for development.
Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1.
Why develop on a platform that you can never put into production? I don't even mean producing "x million units", I'm saying you won't even be able to buy 30 of them for an internal company project.
I understand that RPI mission is education and thats admirable - however they should be completely upfront on their product pages about this....each should state "DON'T USE THIS IN A PRODUCT" across the top.
The pi zero was sold at a loss... It is/was a marketing manuever to absorb more of the diy iot market share; which is the reason there is a 1 per customer limit. As well as the reason microcenter requires in person purchase and not online.
Secondly the pi line, like the Arduino line, along with everything else of that nature, are 'development platforms.' You don't buy a developer kit in mass intending to resell as an end product...
The pi, Arduino, beagle, etc have an excessive number of Io pins, often a variety of sensors, multiple options for power source and corresponding voltage regulators and other features useful for development. When you take your design to market, you simply draw your own schematic/PCB layout and place an order for a board without the unused sensors, io's, regulators, etc. The schematics provided for the pi and other platforms are quite modular and easy to understand. One can simply remove all the io's, accessories from busses, regulators, clocks, and whatever else isn't required. One can then tweak the PCB layout to fit their form factor, power requirements, component tolerances and whatever else to suit their exact use case, to minimize cost.
> You don't buy a developer kit in mass intending to resell as an end product
Beaglebone black-like system boards are used for both development & production. I almost shipped a system like this personally. With the BBB, you can get slightly modified versions, in bulk, and with enough availability to satisfy purchasing. Even if you couldn't, the SoC on the BBB can be bought from TI. I imagine there are similar things for more modern, powerful SoCs. Many companies like isolating the complicated timing sensitive board design (as needed for NAND and off chip memory) from the rest of their design, and don't necessarily have the skills in house to do that type of layout. Pre-made boards like the BBB provide a lower cost option than a completely custom board.
With the RPis, you can't even buy the SoC. I'm not aware of anyone you can buy slightly modified (ie: unneeded components pulled) boards from in bulk.
Complaining on HN is not the right solution here; if you genuinely want to fill a production run of thousands of devices with embedded Pi, speak to the foundation directly.
If you're producing a product where you need thousands of something maybe getting a custom-built ARM board is a better plan than using a Raspberry Pi.
Making your own ARM board is fairly expensive for one-off things, but for volume it's not a huge obstacle. There are any number of vendors capable of producing these for you to almost any specification.
He's not talking about creating a commercial venture that would necessitate thousands of devices. He's talking about an in-house project on the scale of dozens. Would contacting them directly get me that quantity at that price?
I could walk in to Microcenter right now and pick up basically as many as I wanted. I know everyone doesn't have a Microcenter within a few miles of them, but they've had them in stock continually since about three months after the release.
It might be different in other countries, but I have to imagine that anyone in the US could get their hands on a Zero if they wanted one.
> It might be different in other countries, but I have to imagine that anyone in the US could get their hands on a Zero if they wanted one.
A zero, sure. But I want like 20, haha. Unfortunately my nearest Microcenter is 600 miles away. If I can't get 20 for $100, they're not really $5 each.
Their Orange County/Tustin location is the only one left in California, apparently. I built my "graduation present" PC with parts from there in 2008. They've apparently got about 2 dozen locations around the country, along with the web store.
Also, why for the love of god can't they just license the name to some secondary source w/ quality control stipulations?
Mandate a slightly higher cost-per-unit (5% or somesuch) and sell it as the Raspberry Pi Zero Commercial. With (critically) guaranteed compatibility with the consumer model. I can't imagine there wouldn't be Chinese factories lining up for the opportunity.
Then use the licensing revenue to help fund Raspberry Pi's mission.
You are dramatically underestimating the complexity and difficulty of "w/ quality control stipulations".
I work in electronic device design. On a good project designing a complex device, 2/3 of the work will be iterations of design (software, electronic, mechanical, industrial). When you've finished designing it you've then got another 1/3 of getting it manufactured at a decent cost with a decent yield. And that's assuming that you have an existing relationship in China with a high end manufacturer. Weeks and weeks of trips out, production runs, implementation of QA.
Given that, how would you go about ensuring that what's coming out of a factory in China is actually up to scratch?
And even if you did, the processor on the Pi uses an unusual chip-on-chip technology that most board makers don't have the capability to build.
> When you've finished designing it you've then got another 1/3 of getting it manufactured at a decent cost with a decent yield.
The difference here is that this is an already proven design? Have a competitive bid process for the right to market under the trademark, eliminate factories you flat out don't trust, then require ability to randomly sample and test on Pi's side.
If pass rate drops below agreed parameters, revoke the trademark and pick another factory. Then let the factory self-QA or face the consequences.
I can't imagine there are no factories in China that can make a profit on a chip that's being made profitably in the UK.
The only argument I can see against it would be that a commercial market doesn't exist in any volume. But I can't imagine there wouldn't be decent profit vs {insert lower priced Pi clone here}.
... The other argument would be if Pi has an exclusivity agreement with Sony UK (who I believe is the majority manufacturer) that precludes this kind of deal in exchange for pricing?
> "unusual chip-on-chip technology"
You mean the package-on-package mounting of the SDRAM on top of the BCM2835? Defer to your experience, but if Raspberry Pi is doing this then how expensive/rare is the investment?
I'm honestly trying to reconcile the following statements: "They're hard to manufacture" + "We make a profit on each one sold" + "We can't afford to make them at commercial scale"
Picking a manufacturer is a several month-long process by itself, and would require building out an operations/production engineering team for ongoing production.
Imagine producing 50,000pc/mo and having to do in-depth quality inspection on an sample size of, say 500pcs. Who is going to do the inspection? That's a lot of Pis.
How do you distribute? Do you ship a box of 50,000 to your warehouse and then mail them out 1 at a time to customers? Do you form retail partnerships?
How do you front the money for a 50,000pc order? Say they cost $3 per board, that's $150,000 up front in capital tied up for, say, 1 month of lead time, 2 weeks of transit time, and 1 month until you get paid by the customer - that's $425,000 at any time tied up in inventory (150k*2.5months). Do you negotiate payment terms with the supplier? It's difficult to negotiate terms without a history. Who does the negotiation?
What do you do when your box of 50k has an defect?
None of these issues are insurmountable, but there is a lot of necessary overhead that comes with mass production of anything. Deciding to MP Pis is an organizational decision that requires significant changes to company structure and resource allocation.
> I can't imagine there are no factories in China that can make a profit on a chip that's being made profitably in the UK.
One of their aims was to produce things in the UK. They didn't meet this initially, but with scale managed to bring production at least largely within the UK.
Their initial scale at the first launch was too small to work with UK manufacturers, a bit later with the first version they were able to order large enough runs to have production in Wales iirc.
Is it hard to guess why designing electronics could possibly be good/interesting work? It involves programming, design, physics, math, and making real things we use everyday - medical devices, cars, satellites, cameras, etc
They weren't trying to convince you that it's a pleasant occupation. I'm sure that the content of the comment would have a different emphasis if they were.
He was describing why doing QA is hard, and I'm suggesting (not to you clearly) some good reason for doing it still exists or he wouldn't be in that business.
"Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1."
Only true for Pi products. If you're willing to spend $7 you can get esp8266 nodemcu hardware delivered from amazon prime in arbitrary quantity.
Theres a problem where no matter how many times its stated, "you can buy ONE if you pay six times MSRP or live within driving range of the one retail store on the continent selling them or if you import from the UK or eastern europe" vs I need six for an IoT experiment involving micropython and I2C environmental sensors. I can't buy six $5 pi or even six $10 pi but I can have six ESP8266 boards by thursday afternoon for $35 total. Which is less than single pi zero plus "development kit of parts" costs, ironically.
A $5 computer that's impossible to actually purchase is much less useful in practice than a $7 computer delivered in two days by amazon prime in any quantity I'm willing to pay for.
Its interesting that above $40 or so there is an infinite supply of rasp pi 3 and beaglebone blacks. Everything is widely available except for cheap pi.
esp8266 is not even close to being a replacement for rPi. The specs are orders of magnitude worse. 160KB RAM, 1MB flash, 80MHz CPU, no GPU. None of the builtin modules for networking, wifi, etc.
I think I agree that there really isn't a comparable competitor to rpi .. rpiZero W offers a lot for an iot module at such a great cost. maybe something like the CHIP, but not even?
I'm currently working on an agriculture sensing iot platform and going to try to use rpiZero W with the current spectrum sensor from nanolambda. http://www.nanolambda.net . luckily they have the rPi api,sdk already.
> Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1.
It's quite possible to get more, if you need to (though probably not multiple ones at the same time). Just use the shops the the RPi foundations recommends and choose to be informed via email when this shop again has some in stock. Then as soon as possible buy one.
But the problem is you can only buy one. We use Pi 2Bs for some commercial projects and it's ok because in principle we could order in 1000 next-day from RS (currently 12k in stock) or Farnell without restrictions.
Practically the Pi Zero-W would fulfil all our system requirements, it'd probably be better because it's smaller. However, we can't risk it because the supply chain isn't there yet.
You are lamenting that a product released today is not available in sufficient quantities to be used in your commercial product? Sounds like an unreasonable expectation.
To counter: the Pi Zero is coming on for 18 months and is still regularly sold out.
I'm not expecting mass quantities on release, but the problem is that you can only buy one which makes development difficult. And if it's anything like the original zero, we'd have no idea when it will be available in quantity. Often it's useful to have more than one board e.g. one bare dev board, one in an enclosure/prototype. Having a month or more lead time for a replacement isn't practical.
Not only does Broadcom refuse to sell chips to companies wanting to make Raspberry Pi compatible boards, but the PCB design is not public and the license on the closed-source binary blob required to boot the thing forbids use with non-Raspberry Pi boards.
You're far better off going with one of the Allwinner-based boards like the C.H.I.P if you intend to do this at some point in the future.
The closed design and closed-source kernel blob are troublesome. We need a completely open source board design similar to the Pi that manufacturers are free to produce without licensing. We could have an organization that does QA and vets individual manufacturers for quality and compliance/conformance with the board's design. The RPi Foundation's choice to remain so closed-source is a bit confusing and puzzling, considering their non-profit and educational mission and goal.
> We need a completely open source board design similar to the Pi that manufacturers are free to produce without licensing.
Unless I'm mistaken, the Beaglebone Black uses chips that are available for purchase from TI (and from which I think you can get datasheets, even as an individual), boots the mainline kernel, and provides CAD files for the board: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Hardware_Files
> The RPi Foundation's choice to remain so closed-source is a bit confusing and puzzling, considering their non-profit and educational mission and goal.
Their founder and key personnel was/are employed by Broadcom. IIRC, essentially Broadcom thought of the Pi as a fun side project and were completely blown away by the demand.
The other problem is that people have written stuff, and loads of that, specifically for the Pi CPU/GPU - which makes a move away from BCM next to impossible:
- anything involving accelerated video isn't easily portable (e.g. omxplayer)
- anything that relies on a given special function of the CPU mapped to a specific GPIO pin might break with another CPU (e.g. extension boards)
- anything that relies on other rpi-specific hardware features (CSI, DSI) will be hard to port, but then again you don't really have a choice with non-usb/i2c camera or display modules...
Look into the Next Thing Co GR8 -- it's a vaguely similar SOC (the thing in the Chip Pro) but is (in theory - I haven't investigated) available in small quantities and with an accessible datasheet.
The latter. Their chips aren't sold through distributors, and they'll pretty much only give the time of day to high-volume OEMs. They stonewall companies that are big enough to get in-person visits from sales engineers from other major vendors (TI, Freescale, Xilinx). Raspberry Pi cofounder Eben Upton was a technical director at Broadcom, so he had inside connections.
They normally deal in massive quantities. Asking for a couple thousand units just isn't worth the effort. That's what makes the RPi Foundation unique -- Broadcom _does_ deal in small quantities for them in support of the mission.
Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1.
Why develop on a platform that you can never put into production? I don't even mean producing "x million units", I'm saying you won't even be able to buy 30 of them for an internal company project.
I understand that RPI mission is education and thats admirable - however they should be completely upfront on their product pages about this....each should state "DON'T USE THIS IN A PRODUCT" across the top.