It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
So, what are the alternatives?
https://lemux.minnix.dev/c/sbcs
There are so many!
I got a ‘LePotato’ a few years back when Pi had stock issues, and it worked quite well as a Pi 4 clone.
I think Pine64 is pretty cool.
Unfortunately they use Chinese CPUs (made by Rockchip)
Okay, and?
Perhaps they’re worried about something similar happening.
Yeah, that’s certainly a thing, but I’d be surprised if China messed with something like Pine64, that’s a pretty low-value target to spend so many resources attacking. The bigger targets would be large corporations like Amazon and Apple, as well as military institutions and contractors.
It’s certainly a valid concern, but it’s also a pretty minor one.
Which Pi alternatives don’t?
There’s tons of similar SBC’s out there from Chinese manufacturers, like Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc; usually using mediatek RISC-V or rockchip ARM processors. They’re all poorly supported on the software and documentation side though and take more work to get going, which has always been where Raspberry shined- nobody else has made embedded computing so easily accessible with click and go OS options and continuous kernel maintenance.
Probably the only board closest to software parity is the pine64 boards… but it’s still not quite as good.
Orange pi is getting better and better. Far from raspberry though.
This is the key point for alternatives. None seem to have the community and support (docs, s/w quality etc) that is remotely close to that of the Raspberry Pi.
Guess the community for some of these is about to get much bigger. I’m not in the market for an SBC but this is a big negative against the Pi.