A refresh for a Pi Zero with real sleep. lower power consumption and moving away from GPIO would be awesome. Stuff like a dedicated i2c connector, PoE support and display over USB-C.

M5Stack and other esp32 based ecosystems rule the world for MCU so the Zero just need to be linux SOC with all the fancy bells and whistles with good driver support

^^^ when I tell people tangential to the field that the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port), they're astonished. It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it

They'll do whatever they do.

Maybe a tick-tock release cycle (one with new features and some speed, the next with the ~same features and more speed) is where they're headed, and maybe that makes sense. They wouldn't be the first.

I'd love to see even-lower-RAM versions, though. Most of what I use Raspberry Pis for at home for is not RAM-hungry at all.

My Pi4 network router has 2GB because that was the smallest/cheapest version at release when I got it, but the system itself consistently only uses about 64MB of RAM. It'd do perfectly well and have a ton of breathing room with just 128MB of RAM (which will never happen, but if it did happen...).

I suspect the Pi4 that I use as a set-top box with Kodi would be fine with 512MB.

I've used Zero Ws for all kinds of things over the years and never felt RAM-starved with their little 512MB of RAM.

So I'm learning towards 512MB.

But sure: 1GB options would also be fine even if it does double the price. Our comments serve to demonstrate that there's room in the marketplace for different SKUs with different memory capacities. :)

We need a 5 lite. The specs of the 5 without the massive power draw and heat generation

Ideally each RPi generation should keep the same price (or lower now that it's gotten so high) but with better performance. If they can't do that they just shouldn't create a new generation.

> Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.

Yes, that would be kind of a dream device, perhaps also if it could suspend the os when asleep so it doesn't have to boot every time but I guess that might the standard way of doing it.

I'd be interested in seeing them partner with some of the other interesting and open-ish players, like Pine64 or Radxa, to push for a more standardised, unified SBC landscape.

But that's not as good for PR as "bigger, faster, better" even if that comes with the problems you mentioned.

I wonder how they are positioned now in the market.

During covid I wanted a small low power always on server. I thought about Raspi, but at the time it was expensive and I went with an intel nuc, for a similar price.

Now if I wanted to do hobby electronics, I heard I should look into esp32 or stm32..

Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.

Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.

I think exactly the opposite: we have no shortage of embedded crap we can buy; what is useful is dismembering intel. It would be better if the pi were risc v but this will do for now.

Is there some serious astroturfing going on with the N100/N150, or am I just jaded?

I have a bunch of old intel atom boards laying around. The Intel Compute Stick (TM) burnt out its flash root drive in a few months. The C2000 board I had burnt out the clock pin to drive the bios. I have a Clover Trail with a PowerVR GPU (I thought I was getting an intel GPU because it was branded Intel Graphics or similar, but nope!) that lost Windows support very quickly after launch, and has no GPU drivers for any other OS.

Instead of being fooled 4 times in a row, I looked into using an N150 for a NAS, but this time I held off a bit until after launch so I could research it first.

Lo-and-behold, they all have crazy PCIe / memory subsystem data corruption issues. I guess there are some chicken bits for the OS developers to set if the kernel can stay up long enough after boot without a panic.

Why would anyone buy this for a NAS / embedded use case?

A Raspberry Pi with sleep and hibernation is like asking Valve to make Half Life 3. They just can't. It doesn't compute.

The entire raspi foundation is a marketing department. Raspi products is making zero sense ever since the Pi 2.

> encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150.

It’s nerdier to say you built your homelab on a Raspi, and that’s what keeps the foundation afloat.

A very small point, but pulling from a feather form factor BOM to compare.

$0.12 for microUSB female connector (rated 1A) $0.26 for a USB-C female (rated 3A). Needs 2 x resistors (< $0.01), 20% larger board area

I think the power capabilities are the biggest item. If you want to pull higher current from a laptop for development or supply from a wall, you have to switch to USB-C.

I don't think either of these prices are that aggressive - pretty sure the cost comes down at volume.

I cannot fathom why USB-C would make any difference. It's not like USB-C is intrinsically better for this use case? If you're doing hardware development, your desk is likely full of in-development crap anyway and a micro USB cable more or less won't make any difference whatsoever, nor is the Pico likely to the only thing needing a micro USB cable.

Edit: one thing I can think of where micro USB connectors are better: if you broke off the connector, it's much easier to solder it back on.

For what it's worth there are third-party rp2350 boards with USB-C connectors if that's important to you. Heck, WaveShare has one with two USB-C connectors: https://www.waveshare.com/rp2350-usb-c.htm

You can at least buy USB-C boards from other vendors since they sell the rp2040/rp2350 separately. If you want wifi it gets a little more complicated unfortunately.

i understand that if they implement a port, it is usually well done (besides the unfortunate 27.1w 5a bs for the rpi5). so unlike cheapo electronics that do come with barely working type c.

however, while in one hand we are happy to (albeit temporarily) raise prices based on ram situation, in terms of design, there is simply not enough money for the port. especially when now they are adding ecosystem items that do cost money to develop and maintain.

this explanation made sense pre-ipo but no longer imho.

There are broadly available third party RP2350 boards with subc and a variety of additional capabilities if that is important for you.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/en-us/collections/rp2350

https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-pro-micro-rp2350.html

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2913.html

https://www.seeedstudio.com/Seeed-XIAO-RP2350-p-5944.html

It's not $0.50 extra. It's $0.16 extra for a USB-C port assuming you bought the USB-C port on mouser at 10k quantities and threw the micro USB port away.

I just don't get it. Anyone who wants to save a few pennies just buys the chip directly. Their Pico board is primarily for prototyping and one off products, where quality of life is everything and 16 cents is nothing. The adapter cable probably costs more than the amount they saved. That's a dick move.

Unpopular opinion but I actually enjoy using USB Micro B more than USB-C. That's because USB-C is much more complicated and there're non-standard-compliant cables floating in the market. USB-C also has some fancy mode like voltage selection. If it got screwed up somehow leading it to supply the wrong voltage, it could fry your Pico board.

That and a reset button.

Nvidia's software platform for the whole Jetson series was, at least in my experience, absolutely awful on the Jetson Nano and Orin boards I worked on. Has that improved at all? I did not appreciate that the only option they provided was a full desktop version of ancient Ubuntu... and even flashing the OS image was a bizarre process.

Edit: looks like they at least have a better headless option now.

Yup. At this moment in the embedded world Jetson Orin Nano is the best value for money purchase. Absolute beast at the price point.

The 16GB Pi 5 makes the Orin Nano look afforadable.

I've got one set aside to play with v4l2m2m. Once that's working, it should improve video encoding support in my OSS project (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash)

The form factor. It's tiny compared with mini PC. Unlike other SBC, the software support's good that it just work as advertised (GPIO, graphic hardware acceleration, etc.). If you're using it for work, it also has stable supply chain / commitment that you can ensure to be able to obtain a unit in at least the next few years.

But you're right. It's pretty overpriced for its performance. If I'm after the GPIO I'd just use a microcontroller. If I'm setting up a headless server I'd just use pretty much any other SBCs or mini PC. I'm personally not a big fan of Raspberry Pi.

The cheap Raspberry Pi's still available as Raspberry Pi Zero tho, if that's what you're after.

Getting a mini PC with ARM and first class Linux support from the OEM.

Exactly. I think they are a bit more long lasting, but that is debatable.

Here are a few places that I've found pi's:

Rapid prototyping: I created a PoC to take a webcam snapshot every half hour and upload it to a server in an afternoon. Freelance project. Could it have been done with a microcontroller? Yes, but not in 4 hours.

Local digital displays in a gym: we built a system with a number of overhead 60" TVs, each with a pi on a VESA mount to show scheduling and workout information in a gym for a client.

HVAC controller: bid on a project where the customer's original concept was a Pi managing a rooftop HVAC system for large buildings. They outgrew the pi and wanted a new solution.

Data aggregator: collecting sensor information via BLE (bluetooth) and uploading to an internet server over Ethernet.

Remember that "cheap" to a consumer doesn't have the same definition for a business. To most profitable businesses, a $100 computer that fits on the back of a TV and consumes a fraction of its power is cheap. In fact, one of the reasons that Pi's were so hard to find for a while is that the Raspberry Pi foundation was prioritizing industrial/commercial customers over hobbyists.

For a hobbyist, they're quite nice for "I want to SSH into a thing, write my tools on Linux, and still have access to SPI / I2C / GPIO, USB, and whatever hats can plug into that." The Hat form factor, while not technically great and frequently overpriced, is also nice for distribution; both inside a team commercially and on the web as a hobbyist, it's a lot easier to share software and say "hey, buy this pi, this hat, and run this" than "fab this PCB / solder this bundle of nonsense to an ESP."

For a company, they're also nice for "I want to make an IoT device that's heavier weight than an ESP32 and/or I only want to hire Linux Application People and not Firmware People; what's the cheapest Linux module I can get that's widely supported, backed by a real company, and has regulatory approvals" - Pi Zero W. My understanding is this exact pattern is why it's harder to get them as a hobbyist.

I use them widely in automotive reverse engineering; ESP32 can and does work just as well or better for an end product, but for experiments it's really nice to have a self-contained appliance to SSH into and use SocketCAN on rather than some bespoke firmware project to manage and iterate on.

Given the price and availability issues I suspect the market is "correcting" a bit and companies are hiring Firmware People and switching to true MCUs in places they'd previously have avoided doing so, but it was definitely a thing for a long time.

I think I found a use case, but would love to be proven wrong with some faster / cheaper approach:

I've tired of buying S1 compatible sonos speakers on ebay, so I'd like to build a speaker enclosure with a WiFi device that has a high-quality DAC and the ability to use pipewire or similar to do real-time DSP and multi-room audio sync.

A RPI + third party hat should work well for this, or so I am told.

> I have bought an rpi at every generation. And I still have yet to find an actual use for them.

It's amazing how well these fit into the category of products that people feel compelled to buy, play around with, and then forget about.

Flipper Zero is another product that landed in the same space.

What's sad is that Raspberry Pi does have a lot of legitimate use cases and people who want to use them, but the supply has always been swamped by all of the demand.

I think at this point the brand reputation and software quality are a big selling point.

If you're trying to build a couple of units of some embedded thing where you need to toggle some GPIOs or serial devices in response to requests over the network, but don't have the expertise or resources to do it with a microcontroller, a Pi is a great option - you know you'll have software support, and you know that the vendor will be making the exact thing you bought for 5-10y.

For hobbyist stuff at home, I agree, though. A mini PC is probably better for homelab stuff, and an RP2350 or ESP32 is probably better for anything embedded or battery powered that you want to do.

My use cases:

* Replacement controller for my UFO Catcher - It has WiFi, easy to update, and I can operate the machine remotely with it. It's bolted to the back of small touchscreen that lets me change the machine settings as well.

* Remote printer access - I can monitor from the USB cameras and gather statistics about the prints.(I suspect a lot of 3D printing enthusiasts use them for this purpose.)

Having a small low power computer has been useful for me in those instances.

> I just don't see the actual market position for these things.

Isn't it mainly for learning and hobby-ism?

I have one running Klipper on a modded Ender3.. but I agree with the sentiment.

They also make OK Kodi/Libreelec boxes due to better documented video decode silicon (Intel still better at that).

Which mini PCs are available at the same price with ARM CPUs?

I would tend to agree unless you need those gpio pins. Then there are few other good options.

They have great software support and Google-ability, which also means LLMs understand how to work them. I use them in scenarios where I want both Linux and GPIO. Specifically, right now I have 4 Pi 5s running kiosk displays with RGB LEDs around the outside of each. The displays show a web page, requiring something powerful enough for modern Firefox, and the LEDs are synchronized to the state of the web pages. You could do this with a mini PC and a microcontroller, but it’s just way easier, and cheaper, to use a Pi.

Same here. The 2b, 3b and Zero 2 have the best cost-benefit ratio. I recently migrated the Oberon System 3 to those three boards and particulary the Zero is a great host for this bare-bone system: https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberonsystem3native/. I hope the Raspi company postpones the end of life date of the 3b and Zero 2.

A physical TPM with their overall high-quality software support would be awesome.

I've spent far too much time messing around trying to get TPMs working over SPI or I2C to meet security requirements with 4Bs and 5s over the years.

The Steam Deck price in Canada went up by something like 50% yesterday also - it's now over $1100 for the 512GB OLED, up from just under $700.

Yeah, we have. We decided the world's RAM production capability would be better suited for datacenters so we can cheat on our homework.

These two products don't even have the same use case.

> __These days__ a 175 GBP N95 from a no-name Chinese OEM on Amazon, with 16 GB of RAM and a 500GB SATA SSD is way better value and performance - and importantly - zero fuss - standard setup.

"These days" seems to be over for now. The prices went up there, and now the only affordable option is an old laptop's motherboards with DDR3 sticks. But passively cooled PCs are rare, so the Raspberry Pi still makes sense. As a bonus, it is easier to power and find a small UPS that will keep it running for hours.

And poor software support.

Designing a chip for one person is doomed to fail as a business.

As someone who has just had to migrate a project off of radxa due to ongoing supply issues... good luck getting your hands on more than one or two samples of those :/

Official power supply is sold separately. Pis work fine with unofficial USB-PD power supplies but will limit maximum current for USB devices. I have two Pi 5's and one 4 and they all are perfectly stable when powered with an old Lenovo laptop charger.