Tell HN: Digikey has 1822 Pi4 8GB and 3793 1GB in stock

I used to get really excited about these (given a few pending projects that need a Pi), but they became so few and far between I just gave up on Raspberry Pi and started trying out the alternatives. I think I like the Orange Pi 5 the most. A little bit more expensive, but significantly faster and you can boot off of an ordinary SSD.

Some of these upcoming Intel efficiency-cores-only mini PCs are also intriguing.

sircastor• 3 years ago

The real strength/popularity of the Raspberry Pi has come from its community and all the writing/video work that has been done for them.

That said, a lot of the alternative SBCs really pack a punch, and often can outperform the Raspberry Pi doing the same work. There are just fewer problems already solved for you. In some cases that doesn't really matter.

eliaspro• 3 years ago

I haven't seen a single competitive SBC with a comparable stuff stack. It either needs constant updates by the vendor (as the RPi) or simply upstreamed open-source drivers.

johnklos• 3 years ago

...and they haven't gone down in price, even though they're years old...

I'd be more inclined to try an Orange Pi 5. For $50 more than the Pi 4, you get twice the memory, eight cores that're also faster, PCIe m.2, full size HDMI, and more.

The Orange Pi 5 Plus is neat, too, particularly with dual 2.5 Gbps ethernet, HDMI in and out, and so on.

andrewmunsell• 3 years ago

There has been a significant improvement in availability— Pishop, Chicago Electric Distributors, and Adafruit (for the US) have all had big restocks in the last couple weeks, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find one anymore if you need one

coggs• 3 years ago

I've also switched over to OrangePi. Using the OrangePi Zero LTS in a commercial product. It has FCC emissions compliance. That said, The RasPi community is at least 2 or 3 orders of magnitude larger, so if you get stuck on a weird problem you are more likely to find an answer for a RasPi than an Orange Pi.

andromaton4• 3 years ago

Correction per Lukas_Skywalker: The 1GB units are Pi2

Regarding alternatives: This extended unavailability was annoying and I'm still not convinced fully explained. We use them for industrial applications as monitoring systems, remote access, protocol conversion, etc, so we have been buying from all over the world or at scalper prices to avoid retooling.

Digikey is not limiting quantity to 1.

PointedDreams• 3 years ago

This interview with one of the founders from Jeff Geerling was quite insightful, definitely check it out if you haven't already! https://youtu.be/-_aL9V0JsQQ

andromaton4• 3 years ago

It was. Thank you.

Last July a friend saw a large number at Micro Center. They told him he could buy 5.

He sent me a picture of the credit card reader showing a total cost of $43,059.11.

$54 for the first Pi, and around $10,000 for each extra one.

aborsy• 3 years ago

With so many SBCs and mini PCs, what’s the advantage of PI, I wonder.

The support for X86 is better and we are talking about 10W power consumption.

speedgoose• 3 years ago

Maintained open source software. So many alternatives have shady patches on unmaintained Linux with weird drivers.

Life is too short to deal with that.

glimshe• 3 years ago

That's not a problem you have with mini PCs. Quite the opposite, mini PCs have a software library at least 2 orders of magnitude larger, multiple options of commercial OSs and very mature Linux support.

whiskers• 3 years ago

For UK customers we also have 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 in stock, things are finally starting to improve meaningfully! https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-4

We do ship worldwide but other resellers worldwide are also stocked right now - happy days! :-)

Disclaimer: Co-founder of Pimoroni

tzs• 3 years ago

If you are looking for an RPi4 this site will likely be useful [1]. For many places outside the US they have been reasonably available again for quite a while.

In the US they have been popping in and out of availability every few days for the last couple of weeks at Digi-Key, Adafruit, Chicago Elec. Dist., and Pishop. Here's the listings link for RPi4 in the US at that site [2]

[1] https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI4

[2] https://rpilocator.com/?country=US&cat=PI4

esbeeb2• 3 years ago

I just snagged an 8GB RPi4 here in Malaysia from autobotic.com.my - and they're still available: https://www.autobotic.com.my/raspberry-pi-boards/Raspberry-P...

Note: This vendor is "off the radar" at rpilocator.com. ;)

oneTbrain23• 3 years ago

I moved on to Orange Pi. Both price and performance blow RPi away. Only downside is way smaller community. But then, that's where the fun is. You get to build a lot of new stuff that is needed in the Orange Pi ecosystem.

Tell HN: Digikey has 1822 Pi4 8GB and 3793 1GB in stock

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