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Pi "foundation" gets fatter

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james_s:
Ok so more than double the power consumption, 3x the cost (used) and physically at least 4 times the size, none of the IO, not even in the same class of product at all, total non-starter for most of my applications and the used/refurb market would dry up instantly at a small fraction of the RPi volume. A lot of things the Pi gets used for a PC like that would be totally inappropriate, handheld video game console or the 12" tall mini arcade cabinets my friend builds with them? Not gonna happen. Wall mounted device for home automation? Not gonna happen. Robotics? I guess if your robot is big enough and you don't mind kludging the IO by adding external hardware, but that excludes a huge range of smaller robots. Autonomous drone? Good luck with that. Wearable device? Yeah right. I built a multi channel video streaming device with a stack of 6 Pi Zeros, all six of those fit in a space much smaller than a single mini PC, natively produce the required composite video and the total cost was lower as well. There is a huge gap between a fullblown mini PC and a microcontroller that you seem totally blind to because it is not a need you personally have.

My own sample size is small yes, but TENS OF MILLIONS have been sold and they continue to sell like hotcakes, new versions regularly sell as fast as they can pump them out. The educational market they originally targeted is a tiny portion of what they actually sell to. People clearly love these things, it isn't just me. You are the exception, not the norm and one of the few people I've heard moaning about them. If they're marketing in the space of professional computing that's news to me, everyone I know that uses them is a hobbyist. It's a $40 toy, not an enterprise grade computer, I've said that before.

bd139:
We have other boards ranging from simple STM32 to full 64 bit ARM. That’s my point as well.

They sell because of marketing, not because of merit.

It’s the wrong tool for nearly every job it’s pitched at you’ve put out.

And millions of them end up in in a drawer, shed and eventually e-waste  :-//

james_s:
Frankly I don't think there's any debating with you on it, you have something in the way of a pathological hatred for the whole thing and you will never understand what makes it popular and you will never change your mind. It does a lot of things reasonably well and it's cheap. It has reached critical mass, there is no other similar platform that is even remotely as well supported in the hobbyist community, and as with anything of this sort the software availability and support will make or break it. Same reason the Arduino is a smashing success, it is not the best at nearly anything, it has plenty of flaws, but it is extremely popular and widely supported. The fact that there are no bargains to be found on used RPis does not support your assertion of millions of them ending up as waste, even used ones are still in demand, if someone offered me a pile of old RPis I would happily accept them and put them to use, but that has never happened because even the old ones are still useful and people hold onto them. Every device will of course eventually end up as waste, nothing lasts forever, but a 10 year old Pi will have retained a much greater percentage of its original cost than a 10 year old PC.

Like I said before, if there's a viable alternative I'm all ears, here are a handful of my constraints:
Price under $50 brand new
Size comparable to or smaller than the RPi
Power consumption under 10W full load, 4W idle, lower is better
Onboard ethernet and wifi
Runs a full Linux distro
Built in GPIO, including SPI, I2C and 1wire
Built in USB
Easy out of box experience, I can have a Pi up and running in <20 minutes so I want something comparable
Widespread support, either from the vendor or from the external community

As far as I can tell, there is nothing. There are a few Pi clones that come close, but they are not appreciably cheaper and they are lacking in the support.

But again, I suspect this is futile, you aren't the target market, you wouldn't understand.

bd139:
I've stated my reasons clearly. I don't think I need to go over them again. Your argument with support is flawed because they delete the negative scenarios.

But you're still missing the point.

Start with the application requirements and work back to the device.

Not start with the specification which doesn't matter initially when you start a project of any kind. I don't give a bananas what the Pi does on paper, only if it fits the requirements for the project compared to other devices.

Hell the last embedded thing I worked on an AVR was sufficient and the AVR-gcc toolchain is a lot less of a pain in the ass than even bootstrapping an STM32. But I've seen someone ram a raspberry pi in the same requirements hole and run 8 lines of python on it at the cost of a 100x fold in complexity and power requirements :-//

It's popular because it's cheap. It's not. The cost comes later.

bd139:
ebay. There's a metric shit ton of them NOS on the market thanks to the collapse of the POS market in the last couple of years.

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