Products > Embedded Computing

Alternative product to Raspberry.

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luiHS:
 
Hi.
Since the Raspberry are completely sold out everywhere, in all models, I would be interested in some other alternative product. I have seen some, but they do not work well and there is no support, neither from the manufacturer, nor from a community that maintains it.

My application is simple, but still I don't know if there is something serious alternative to Raspberry that works. I just need to receive commands through the serial port and play videos for playback according to the command I receive.

Something so apparently simple, it took me a long time to do it on Raspberry, make the serial port work, cancel running videos to launch a new one, configure the boot to have a black screen and optimize it for a fast boot. Having to start everything over again in another system can be a nightmare, but if there is no stock of Raspberry or expected date, something will have to be thought about.

Regards

Foxxz:
From what I've read any raspberry pi production is going to their industrial customers. What a great way to monetize thank the community that maintained code and made them popular in the first place.

DC1MC:
Most of the whining, wailing and teeth gnashing are not coming from the poor kids that could not buy a RasPi for their little school project, but from bottom rung companies that are buying them by the hundredths, or thousands, to do "cost effective" projects:
- Advertisement displays and other commercial signage projects.
- Home automation
- Even car charging controllers and other industrial projects.

And what separates the bottom feeder from real companies: the ALL use education and academic intended RPis and not Computing Modules, intended for commercial projects, they couldn't care less if a student or a school could not get them, if they got an order of 100pcs of their crap, they will raid all distributors and empty the stock. As long as there is profit to be made because of the price difference between educational and industrial boards, fuck the kids, I want my profits.

One also sees them trawling the support forums and asking "innocent student homework" questions, like:

"I need for my school project to display 4K videos on a large panel using a Raspberry Pi, via a remote controlled app that should download the videos using a secured remote database using a cheap 5G LTE modem,  based on a subscription plan, it should be an easy project, teeheee..."

Once the forums start ignoring them, they move freelancer.com and start "I want a simple Rasberry Pi "script"...", and because they pay the most rancid peanuts price, they usually got the most miserable app that could only be used on RPi and then the tragedy strikes: NO MORE CHEAP SHITE PIs,  :scared: :scared: :scared: and even worse, no more reasonable priced CMs and the shit app that they have can't be easily ported to an NXP iMX 6/8 board or other equivalents. also the community there is less willing to be suckered in providing free support and the freelancer and Odesk people start charging more, oh, the humanity !!!

Oh yes, one more specific characteristic of these bottom feeders: egal if their crappy project bring 1K, 10K, 100KK or whatever, they never keep any stock or invest in researching any replacement for their critical hardware or software, it "wastes" money, all this shortages and "chipagedeons" will pass like everything else, but the survivors will never learn their lesson. Personally, I enjoy seeing the squirming more and more  :popcorn:

For the OP, that I'm sure that is not one of the above described cases, there are a lot of RPi equivalents, all of them considerably more expensive (actually the truth is RPi was very cheap to begin with, because edu).
Besides the original Chines <Fruit>Pi, like Orange Pi (my favorite), BanaPi, LicheePi and so on. there are the newer Rockchip (RockPi, Pine64) boards that started to have good support and, as I've mentioned, a plethora of NXP iMX boards, including a direct RPi replacement (Identical form factor) made by Geniatech: https://www.geniatech.com/product/xpi-imx8mm/ The NXP community, while consistently small as the RPi one, is actually pretty friendly and supportive.

I hope this helps a bit.

Cheers,
DC1MC

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: Foxxz on May 29, 2022, 01:54:22 am ---From what I've read any raspberry pi production is going to their industrial customers.

--- End quote ---

Do you have proof of that? That'd be interesting. I think that would kinda be against the RPi foundation's goal.

DC1MC:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 29, 2022, 06:41:08 pm ---
--- Quote from: Foxxz on May 29, 2022, 01:54:22 am ---From what I've read any raspberry pi production is going to their industrial customers.

--- End quote ---

Do you have proof of that? That'd be interesting. I think that would kinda be against the RPi foundation's goal.

--- End quote ---

There it "almost true", the fact is there is a shortage of materials that are common to both the RPi and the CM, the industrial customers made contracts with defined quantities and delivery deadlines. Consequently they have priority for existing stock and less or nothing is going to the distributors.

I have have strong doubts that a school or academic institution will have issues to order directly a few for education purposes, the general availability is gone (no contract, no parts), that exposed bottom feeders that don't keep stock at all for some hardships.

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