> And then the RPi foundation knifed everbody in the shortage by shunting all the RPis to commercial companies like FormLabs.
The Foundation did no such thing because it doesn’t manufacture the boards and it’s not their decision.
The Trading company manufactures the boards, and it chose not to destroy its commercial contracts (all of which experienced limited stock too, particularly of CM4s, even though they were prioritising CM4s), which kept the lights on. They were already selling dramatically more units into commercial channels (Citrix for example) than to hobbyists.
The two entities also introduced the Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico W in the pandemic era, which were wildly popular and kept their educational goals on track, as well as giving suppliers like Pimoroni and Adafruit something to design absolutely amazing products around, with a microcontroller that wasn’t supply-constrained. IMO they more than made the case that most people don’t need a whole linux box to run a physical computing project.
I don’t get the whining. Do the little Intel boxes work for you? If so, use them and leave Raspberry Pi in the dust; there’s more than one way to add GPIO, SPI, I2C and PIO to your projects.
(Side note: the Beagleboard is a Texas Instruments product, is it not? I am not convinced its origins are all that different to the Pi, in that regard. If TI couldn’t compete on price and marketing, that is on TI, surely)
Beaglebones were popular for a while for GPU farms for crypto, and the shortages were way worse than raspi. I fried one in a PhD project and had to spend a few hundred dollars to get a new one. I used to swear by beaglebones, and they had some nice features, like one usb cable to provide power, expose a serial console, and bridge your internet connection to the board. And one killer feature: 2 independent microcontroller cores that can access the main CPU's memory directly. You could use them to bitbang almost anything. Over time though, most of the newer beaglebones focused on one specific feature and used several different form factors, and most lost the features I loved. BeagleV fire looks interesting but it's missing wifi.
Back in the day (like 12+ years ago) I used some intel SBCs with GPIO, i2c etc. At that time they were nice because they just worked with your favorite linux distribution and put your binaries on it. At the time it was painful to setup an environment for cross-compilation. Today that's easy.
Raspberry Pis are never the best SBC available, and have some very closed aspects but they are usually available, have good community and corporate support and are supported for a long time. I've bought a lot of the other SBCs out there and after a couple of years you find that you're almost the only user left, and the vendor has 30 new products and don't support yours. Then one day you're trying to update your linux kernel for feature y but it breaks feature x, and searching for help yields workarounds and patches, or even OS images for the same issue... for rasberry pi. After a few times, you learn to stick to raspi, or maybe Jetson if you need more.
Funny you mention Intel. I got burned by Intel Edison getting discontinued. Intel has certainly burned their bridges with the embedded industry and I certainly would never buy from them if they chose to re-enter.
Edison was really enormously promising, but it sort of only existed as a reactionary product in that whole ed-tech/maker bubble that blew up and then shrank a few years back.
The Foundation did no such thing because it doesn’t manufacture the boards and it’s not their decision.
The Trading company manufactures the boards, and it chose not to destroy its commercial contracts (all of which experienced limited stock too, particularly of CM4s, even though they were prioritising CM4s), which kept the lights on. They were already selling dramatically more units into commercial channels (Citrix for example) than to hobbyists.
The two entities also introduced the Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico W in the pandemic era, which were wildly popular and kept their educational goals on track, as well as giving suppliers like Pimoroni and Adafruit something to design absolutely amazing products around, with a microcontroller that wasn’t supply-constrained. IMO they more than made the case that most people don’t need a whole linux box to run a physical computing project.
I don’t get the whining. Do the little Intel boxes work for you? If so, use them and leave Raspberry Pi in the dust; there’s more than one way to add GPIO, SPI, I2C and PIO to your projects.
(Side note: the Beagleboard is a Texas Instruments product, is it not? I am not convinced its origins are all that different to the Pi, in that regard. If TI couldn’t compete on price and marketing, that is on TI, surely)