It's amazing how much they've lost the tinkerer audience over the last few years. Unless you really need the GPIO, there are far better and cheaper alternatives for a low power computer.
> It's amazing how much they've lost the tinkerer audience over the last few years.
They haven't lost it. Their goal was to kickstart something and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The space has moved - a usable computer now demands a lot more than the original Pi, and they realized that - this is why their tinkerer platform is the RP2040 family. The market is very healthy and the ESP32 family has a huge space.
What RPi brought was the idea that a platform with good software support would allow for a revolution in the space above the power of an Arduino.
Depends on what you want to do. ESP32-S3 devices are ridiculously cheap and come in a myriad of form factors. If you want a RP2040 form factor, they're like $5 each. They've got Bluetooth and WiFi built in, plus plenty of GPIOs.
If you need compute with a bit more horsepower, the myriad of NUCs or thin PCs exist. If you need both in a single board, then the myriad of other SBCs that aren't Raspberry Pi's...
a RPI is just a SBC with GPIO pinning (which isn't at all unique to RPI.).
The main reason it was/is the popular behemoth is not because of it's tinkerability, but because it got mainstream appeal and RaspianOS is polished enough for the average windows user to go "wow, neat."
THere is no "knock off pi", there are many many popular SBCs with the same performance at cheaper cost (O-Pi, arduino), not to mention the mini PC space (NUCS, ie intel asus.)
If you're a hobbyist, pick up some used thin clients from Ebay. I lost a couple of pis recently, and instead of replacing them, I bought a batch of Wyse 3040 thin clients for about $23 each, power supply (which is 12V) included. 2Gb RAM and a 4-core intel Atom - roughly equal to a Pi 4, but at (what is now) 1/3 the price.
Even if you want the GPIO the RPI Zero or Pico are much better options. If you want fast computation on top of that simply buy any other computer and send signals to the Zero or Pico for the GPIO pins.
The RPI Zero 2 has micro-USB ports ... there are plenty of reasons given for this, which arguably made sense 5 years ago. I'm not sure about 2026 though.
People are still using Arduino boards with USB-A mini B ports. At least for micro USB you can easily find cables everywhere. Hardware world is kind of slow in that regard. You can always go for ESP32 if you want though. Cheap and USB-C.
You could just use an old second-hand phone for under $60. You’d get a built-in battery, much more RAM, and a screen included. For the output, just use a $3 ESP32 connected over Wi-Fi or USB. Seems like a much better deal for a lot of projects.
Making any recent second-hand smartphone a SBC-equivilent field computer is always a custom job/not scalable.
OF course, that shouldn't matter for most tinkerer jobs like a CarPi. But anecdotally, I tried using my old iphone 13 (idk why I tried this) and then a couple old galaxies for my car project taking data from bluetooth dongle and relaying to a custom gui I made. Of course also dealing with power cycles and screen, data trasnfer etc.
Very, very quickly it became easier to justify buying a SBC for the same project
The goal of the Raspberry Pi was to have a SoC that could run Linux on a very cheap board, but that's no longer the case. There are cheaper options on the market today... and if you really need to use Linux... an old smartphone can be a testing solution. I also recently used a Xiaomi router (it has little internal memory) to run Linux (OpenWrt) and do some testing
Yes but also find a phone that is not top of the line and can be flashed with a custom ROM/kernel like linage OS, or Ubuntu touch, postmakret OS, then you can customize and have your pie and eat it too. Since you won't be needing the phone to have security for you banking stuff
For a bit more physical space, used laptops have the same and more.
I run a headless laptop as a server and it works great, and just sips power. It didn't have Ethernet built-in, so I just replaced the WiFi card with one and it worked just fine (and also let me panel mount the connector for a DIY 1U enclosure).
While I did not get it myself, I recently saw a business laptop I was hawking with 8GB of RAM and a relatively modern CPU sell for less than $50 on eBay. All that was wrong with it was a bad back panel; just some broken plastic which I wouldn't have been using regardless.
I could see myself running a whole rack of headless laptops in the future.
It's more likely than me buying a single new Pi at these prices.
[sigh]
I've lost track of the number of times that I've suggested that instead of an ESP32 with small TFT screen for some web or BLE enabled project that doesn't require any I/O, you could just use a cheap phone or tablet and make life much easier. I'm downvoted every single time. I guess some people take pride in doing things the hard way.
Maybe because old phone is not a replacement really? It will work for a very few of the projects people want to run on ESP32, and it has all the downsides the tiny ESPs don't have.
Memories. A long time ago I used to sell a little board that plugged into a printer port and added a power driver to the outputs and some buffering to the inputs so they were 12V-tolerant.
I've been making clusters from decommissioned thin clients, but they are mostly for the sake of managing clusters, not any useful compute. The workloads are Hercules emulating a VM/370 with or without MVS, and various SimH emulations of vintage computers of various sizes.
> there are over a hundred of them across every continent except Antarctica, and several of them ship worldwide, so there’s almost certainly one serving your region.
They forgot to mention 99% of them are out of stock.
It's amazing how much they've lost the tinkerer audience over the last few years. Unless you really need the GPIO, there are far better and cheaper alternatives for a low power computer.
> It's amazing how much they've lost the tinkerer audience over the last few years.
They haven't lost it. Their goal was to kickstart something and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The space has moved - a usable computer now demands a lot more than the original Pi, and they realized that - this is why their tinkerer platform is the RP2040 family. The market is very healthy and the ESP32 family has a huge space.
What RPi brought was the idea that a platform with good software support would allow for a revolution in the space above the power of an Arduino.
Do tell! I know Microcenter has a house brand for Arduino now but I didn't see much in the way of "knock-off brand" for Raspberry Pi
Depends on what you want to do. ESP32-S3 devices are ridiculously cheap and come in a myriad of form factors. If you want a RP2040 form factor, they're like $5 each. They've got Bluetooth and WiFi built in, plus plenty of GPIOs.
If you need compute with a bit more horsepower, the myriad of NUCs or thin PCs exist. If you need both in a single board, then the myriad of other SBCs that aren't Raspberry Pi's...
a RPI is just a SBC with GPIO pinning (which isn't at all unique to RPI.).
The main reason it was/is the popular behemoth is not because of it's tinkerability, but because it got mainstream appeal and RaspianOS is polished enough for the average windows user to go "wow, neat."
THere is no "knock off pi", there are many many popular SBCs with the same performance at cheaper cost (O-Pi, arduino), not to mention the mini PC space (NUCS, ie intel asus.)
If you're a hobbyist, pick up some used thin clients from Ebay. I lost a couple of pis recently, and instead of replacing them, I bought a batch of Wyse 3040 thin clients for about $23 each, power supply (which is 12V) included. 2Gb RAM and a 4-core intel Atom - roughly equal to a Pi 4, but at (what is now) 1/3 the price.
if you're just trying to interface a bunch of pins to a usb port you can buy a pack of 3 USB-C ESP32s on amazon for like twenty bucks now.
Things get more expensive with specific ADC needs/etc
Even if you want the GPIO the RPI Zero or Pico are much better options. If you want fast computation on top of that simply buy any other computer and send signals to the Zero or Pico for the GPIO pins.
The RPI Zero 2 has micro-USB ports ... there are plenty of reasons given for this, which arguably made sense 5 years ago. I'm not sure about 2026 though.
People are still using Arduino boards with USB-A mini B ports. At least for micro USB you can easily find cables everywhere. Hardware world is kind of slow in that regard. You can always go for ESP32 if you want though. Cheap and USB-C.
Why would anyone buy a Pi when they could simply burgle the home of a friend or neighbor and steal their computer?
good future HN headline.
my turn :
"2029: Using JEV to decide which bunker dweller is next on the menu."
You could just use an old second-hand phone for under $60. You’d get a built-in battery, much more RAM, and a screen included. For the output, just use a $3 ESP32 connected over Wi-Fi or USB. Seems like a much better deal for a lot of projects.
Making any recent second-hand smartphone a SBC-equivilent field computer is always a custom job/not scalable.
OF course, that shouldn't matter for most tinkerer jobs like a CarPi. But anecdotally, I tried using my old iphone 13 (idk why I tried this) and then a couple old galaxies for my car project taking data from bluetooth dongle and relaying to a custom gui I made. Of course also dealing with power cycles and screen, data trasnfer etc.
Very, very quickly it became easier to justify buying a SBC for the same project
The goal of the Raspberry Pi was to have a SoC that could run Linux on a very cheap board, but that's no longer the case. There are cheaper options on the market today... and if you really need to use Linux... an old smartphone can be a testing solution. I also recently used a Xiaomi router (it has little internal memory) to run Linux (OpenWrt) and do some testing
Yes but also find a phone that is not top of the line and can be flashed with a custom ROM/kernel like linage OS, or Ubuntu touch, postmakret OS, then you can customize and have your pie and eat it too. Since you won't be needing the phone to have security for you banking stuff
For a bit more physical space, used laptops have the same and more.
I run a headless laptop as a server and it works great, and just sips power. It didn't have Ethernet built-in, so I just replaced the WiFi card with one and it worked just fine (and also let me panel mount the connector for a DIY 1U enclosure).
While I did not get it myself, I recently saw a business laptop I was hawking with 8GB of RAM and a relatively modern CPU sell for less than $50 on eBay. All that was wrong with it was a bad back panel; just some broken plastic which I wouldn't have been using regardless.
I could see myself running a whole rack of headless laptops in the future. It's more likely than me buying a single new Pi at these prices.
[sigh] I've lost track of the number of times that I've suggested that instead of an ESP32 with small TFT screen for some web or BLE enabled project that doesn't require any I/O, you could just use a cheap phone or tablet and make life much easier. I'm downvoted every single time. I guess some people take pride in doing things the hard way.
Maybe because old phone is not a replacement really? It will work for a very few of the projects people want to run on ESP32, and it has all the downsides the tiny ESPs don't have.
Swapped a Pi for a used Dell micro in my closet rack and the thing I didn't expect to miss was GPIO, had to add a cheap Pico for the fan and sensors.
If the Dell is old enough, you can use a printer port for some GPIO. Pretty trivial to use.
Memories. A long time ago I used to sell a little board that plugged into a printer port and added a power driver to the outputs and some buffering to the inputs so they were 12V-tolerant.
Forgot about that until you mentioned it.
Hah, memories.
Wrote a Turbo Pascal program for that. Good times.
There are now cheap PCIe cards that provide 40-pin GPIO headers, check eBay. You might need an M.2 to PCIe riser if you don’t have a PCIe slot.
Even easier: there are direct USB-GPIO adapters.
I didn’t know that, thanks for the info. That’s a lot easier.
[flagged]
Oh no, I would be annoyed about the price hikes if I could actually buy a board anywhere...
Is it finally time to open my unused SBCs drawer and dump them all on ebay?
feels like a lot of money.
I suggest you get a jetson nano instead if youre doing robotics or anything serious with an RPI.
If you just want a cheap computer, you're probably better off with a second hand laptop, probably cheaper too
I've been making clusters from decommissioned thin clients, but they are mostly for the sake of managing clusters, not any useful compute. The workloads are Hercules emulating a VM/370 with or without MVS, and various SimH emulations of vintage computers of various sizes.
> there are over a hundred of them across every continent except Antarctica, and several of them ship worldwide, so there’s almost certainly one serving your region.
They forgot to mention 99% of them are out of stock.