Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1.
Why develop on a platform that you can never put into production? I don't even mean producing "x million units", I'm saying you won't even be able to buy 30 of them for an internal company project.
I understand that RPI mission is education and thats admirable - however they should be completely upfront on their product pages about this....each should state "DON'T USE THIS IN A PRODUCT" across the top.
Secondly the pi line, like the Arduino line, along with everything else of that nature, are 'development platforms.' You don't buy a developer kit in mass intending to resell as an end product...
The pi, Arduino, beagle, etc have an excessive number of Io pins, often a variety of sensors, multiple options for power source and corresponding voltage regulators and other features useful for development. When you take your design to market, you simply draw your own schematic/PCB layout and place an order for a board without the unused sensors, io's, regulators, etc. The schematics provided for the pi and other platforms are quite modular and easy to understand. One can simply remove all the io's, accessories from busses, regulators, clocks, and whatever else isn't required. One can then tweak the PCB layout to fit their form factor, power requirements, component tolerances and whatever else to suit their exact use case, to minimize cost.
Beaglebone black-like system boards are used for both development & production. I almost shipped a system like this personally. With the BBB, you can get slightly modified versions, in bulk, and with enough availability to satisfy purchasing. Even if you couldn't, the SoC on the BBB can be bought from TI. I imagine there are similar things for more modern, powerful SoCs. Many companies like isolating the complicated timing sensitive board design (as needed for NAND and off chip memory) from the rest of their design, and don't necessarily have the skills in house to do that type of layout. Pre-made boards like the BBB provide a lower cost option than a completely custom board.
With the RPis, you can't even buy the SoC. I'm not aware of anyone you can buy slightly modified (ie: unneeded components pulled) boards from in bulk.
That's correct. Autodesk uses a modified Beaglebone Black for its reference "open" * 3D printer design Ember:
https://beagleboard.org/blog/2015-09-29-autodesk-ember/
The Ember retails at $7495, but one can experiment with the modifying firmware with a standard Beaglebone Black.
* "open" as defined by Autodesk.
The number of people who view PCB design as simple is significantly smaller than the number of people who develop for the Pi.
Complaining on HN is not the right solution here; if you genuinely want to fill a production run of thousands of devices with embedded Pi, speak to the foundation directly.
Making your own ARM board is fairly expensive for one-off things, but for volume it's not a huge obstacle. There are any number of vendors capable of producing these for you to almost any specification.
Edit: Looks like Farnell UK doesn't sell the Zero or Zero W, and any store that does is limiting themselves to 1 per customer.
It might be different in other countries, but I have to imagine that anyone in the US could get their hands on a Zero if they wanted one.
1 at $5.00 each, 2-5 at $9.99 each, 6+ at $12.99 each
A zero, sure. But I want like 20, haha. Unfortunately my nearest Microcenter is 600 miles away. If I can't get 20 for $100, they're not really $5 each.
Mandate a slightly higher cost-per-unit (5% or somesuch) and sell it as the Raspberry Pi Zero Commercial. With (critically) guaranteed compatibility with the consumer model. I can't imagine there wouldn't be Chinese factories lining up for the opportunity.
Then use the licensing revenue to help fund Raspberry Pi's mission.
I work in electronic device design. On a good project designing a complex device, 2/3 of the work will be iterations of design (software, electronic, mechanical, industrial). When you've finished designing it you've then got another 1/3 of getting it manufactured at a decent cost with a decent yield. And that's assuming that you have an existing relationship in China with a high end manufacturer. Weeks and weeks of trips out, production runs, implementation of QA.
Given that, how would you go about ensuring that what's coming out of a factory in China is actually up to scratch?
And even if you did, the processor on the Pi uses an unusual chip-on-chip technology that most board makers don't have the capability to build.
The difference here is that this is an already proven design? Have a competitive bid process for the right to market under the trademark, eliminate factories you flat out don't trust, then require ability to randomly sample and test on Pi's side.
If pass rate drops below agreed parameters, revoke the trademark and pick another factory. Then let the factory self-QA or face the consequences.
I can't imagine there are no factories in China that can make a profit on a chip that's being made profitably in the UK.
The only argument I can see against it would be that a commercial market doesn't exist in any volume. But I can't imagine there wouldn't be decent profit vs {insert lower priced Pi clone here}.
... The other argument would be if Pi has an exclusivity agreement with Sony UK (who I believe is the majority manufacturer) that precludes this kind of deal in exchange for pricing?
> "unusual chip-on-chip technology"
You mean the package-on-package mounting of the SDRAM on top of the BCM2835? Defer to your experience, but if Raspberry Pi is doing this then how expensive/rare is the investment?
I'm honestly trying to reconcile the following statements: "They're hard to manufacture" + "We make a profit on each one sold" + "We can't afford to make them at commercial scale"
Imagine producing 50,000pc/mo and having to do in-depth quality inspection on an sample size of, say 500pcs. Who is going to do the inspection? That's a lot of Pis.
How do you distribute? Do you ship a box of 50,000 to your warehouse and then mail them out 1 at a time to customers? Do you form retail partnerships?
How do you front the money for a 50,000pc order? Say they cost $3 per board, that's $150,000 up front in capital tied up for, say, 1 month of lead time, 2 weeks of transit time, and 1 month until you get paid by the customer - that's $425,000 at any time tied up in inventory (150k*2.5months). Do you negotiate payment terms with the supplier? It's difficult to negotiate terms without a history. Who does the negotiation?
What do you do when your box of 50k has an defect?
None of these issues are insurmountable, but there is a lot of necessary overhead that comes with mass production of anything. Deciding to MP Pis is an organizational decision that requires significant changes to company structure and resource allocation.
One of their aims was to produce things in the UK. They didn't meet this initially, but with scale managed to bring production at least largely within the UK.
Why?
What I'm getting at is, while QA might be hard I'm sure doing hard things might pay off some way instead of no way at all.
- Iterating through a project and seeing new functionality implemented can be rewarding
- The chase of business negotiations and inter-personal problem-solving can be rewarding
"Why" just strikes me as an off-topic, unspecific, and weird question to ask.
I apologize for striking you as off-topic.
Have you considered that the foundation's goals don't necessarily mirror yours?
Only true for Pi products. If you're willing to spend $7 you can get esp8266 nodemcu hardware delivered from amazon prime in arbitrary quantity.
Theres a problem where no matter how many times its stated, "you can buy ONE if you pay six times MSRP or live within driving range of the one retail store on the continent selling them or if you import from the UK or eastern europe" vs I need six for an IoT experiment involving micropython and I2C environmental sensors. I can't buy six $5 pi or even six $10 pi but I can have six ESP8266 boards by thursday afternoon for $35 total. Which is less than single pi zero plus "development kit of parts" costs, ironically.
A $5 computer that's impossible to actually purchase is much less useful in practice than a $7 computer delivered in two days by amazon prime in any quantity I'm willing to pay for.
Its interesting that above $40 or so there is an infinite supply of rasp pi 3 and beaglebone blacks. Everything is widely available except for cheap pi.
I'm currently working on an agriculture sensing iot platform and going to try to use rpiZero W with the current spectrum sensor from nanolambda. http://www.nanolambda.net . luckily they have the rPi api,sdk already.
It's quite possible to get more, if you need to (though probably not multiple ones at the same time). Just use the shops the the RPi foundations recommends and choose to be informed via email when this shop again has some in stock. Then as soon as possible buy one.
Practically the Pi Zero-W would fulfil all our system requirements, it'd probably be better because it's smaller. However, we can't risk it because the supply chain isn't there yet.
I'm not expecting mass quantities on release, but the problem is that you can only buy one which makes development difficult. And if it's anything like the original zero, we'd have no idea when it will be available in quantity. Often it's useful to have more than one board e.g. one bare dev board, one in an enclosure/prototype. Having a month or more lead time for a replacement isn't practical.
because what your saying isn't actually true: https://www.nec-display-solutions.com/p/hq/en/news/dp/Produc... but they aren't the only people
Secondly, have you placed an order with them directly? Have you talked to a reseller?
the point still stands, have they talked to the rpi foundation about it?
You're far better off going with one of the Allwinner-based boards like the C.H.I.P if you intend to do this at some point in the future.
Unless I'm mistaken, the Beaglebone Black uses chips that are available for purchase from TI (and from which I think you can get datasheets, even as an individual), boots the mainline kernel, and provides CAD files for the board: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Hardware_Files
Their founder and key personnel was/are employed by Broadcom. IIRC, essentially Broadcom thought of the Pi as a fun side project and were completely blown away by the demand.
The other problem is that people have written stuff, and loads of that, specifically for the Pi CPU/GPU - which makes a move away from BCM next to impossible:
- anything involving accelerated video isn't easily portable (e.g. omxplayer)
- anything that relies on a given special function of the CPU mapped to a specific GPIO pin might break with another CPU (e.g. extension boards)
- anything that relies on other rpi-specific hardware features (CSI, DSI) will be hard to port, but then again you don't really have a choice with non-usb/i2c camera or display modules...
> https://getchip.com/pages/chippro
who comes in question as manufacturer of the SoC (hint: Broadcom is not among them). Also according to
> https://github.com/NextThingCo/CHIP_Pro-Hardware/blob/master...
it uses a Mali400 GPU (not a VideoCore IV as the RPi).
Because of the cost? Or do they refuse to deal with small companies?
Rather: originally in support of the mission. :-)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-a-custompr...
This is not true. If it were true, they would welcome a mass payment up-front as this would solve their "do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront" issues which you cite. Instead, I was banned from their forum (forever) despite being a contributor in good standing, for wanting to arrange such an up-front payment with others who were interested, even though I already removed any Raspberry Pi branding from my bid (i.e. the bid would be in generic terms), meaning they would be free to consider the bid but do not have to accept, and even though I greatly limited discussion to just a few posts in their off-topic forum and was clear that they did not officially sanction such a bid from us. (My bid also would have been for lower specifications and a higher per-unit price than the official raspberry pi zero specifications and price, to further make fulfilling it easy.) Their official reason was that I was generating too much mod mail for them to deal with (even though throughout the site they encourage people to message the mods about anything and everything), since hundreds of people were extremely interested in ordering mass quantities. I feel I went out of my way to be extremely fair and transparent, did not make any sort of misrepresentations, or imply they supported me, etc. I went out of my way not to talk in terms of their competitors as well but to support Raspberry Pi in every way possible.
So there is huge demand, but, no, capital constraints are not the reason that the Raspberry Pi Trading foundation does not wish to make x million raspberry pi zero type devices upfront - even if it would further their cause.
I don't have additional visibility than the above and have shared what I know.
For what's it's worth we targeted between 1 and 10 million units as a one-time bid (without them having to continue to guarantee availability ), and also targeted a ridiculously long fulfillment period, like a year - which would be enough to build any capacity they want, to fulfill that one bid. With the understanding that in the meantime (while the bidders' wait the year or however long) a newer version could be announced, no harm no foul and the bidders would not get that, and also that this is a way for the bidders to support the foundation, without getting support (such as supplier support) in return.
Finally, we thought that Broadcom might not want to flood the market with cheap chips, so we positioned it as a genuine set of orders around 1000 pieces, by entrepreneurs. (For real.) This would then lock these small-time entrepreneurs in with the Broadcom family (there are other ARM suppliers), and Broadcom could therefore upsell them on the rest of their full production solutions, since the small sellers would not have unlimited access to more chips and if their small marketing takes off they will want to place large orders for chips that are actually available, on their custom PCB.
At any rate, whatever the issue was, it wasn't capital.
This is a "loss leader" strategy to get devs committed to the Broadcom platform only to find out "actually $5 computers don't exist, they are really $35".
Go to Mouser / DigiKey and put in the part number for the Broadcom chip, choose a very high number as quantity - look at that price.
Further contact a PCB and Assembly outfit and get a quote from them for a small board with a 100 or so SMD placements. You will see that $5 is complete fantasy.
RPI Foundation could've just marketed this as "cheap development platforms for you to try out your code, but only 1 per customer". Instead they've tried to maintain that this is some sort of "real product" that is commercially available at otherworldly low prices.
> My bid also would have been for lower specifications and a higher per-unit price than the official raspberry pi zero specifications and price, to further make fulfilling it easy.
Higher or lower, different specifications would have meant a lot of overhead in designing, testing and certifying a new design.
> Their official reason was that I was generating too much mod mail for them to deal with (even though throughout the site they encourage people to message the mods about anything and everything), since hundreds of people were extremely interested in ordering mass quantities.
Were you trying to corral hundreds of people into making a single bulk order of a new pi, but without the pi branding? That sounds like an enormous headache with regards to delivery, liability, etc. Also you say hundreds, hundreds of people buying need to be purchasing tens of thousands each before you're talking about x million devices. Were the hundreds of people all realistic purchasers with $100-200k ready to put down in advance?
> This is not true. If it were true, they would welcome a mass payment up-front as this would solve their "do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront" issues which you cite.
That would be just pre-ordering, which has other costs to a community. Letting the first people buy 10 for various hobbies probably doesn't help the community as getting the new device into 10x as many hands.
I have to say, somewhere industry must have dropped the ball if a small company whose focus isn't even consumers makes such an impact.
Where are the commercial offerings?
Maybe CHIP will take this space, but electronics industry has really neglected hobbyist electronics. Maybe there's a reason, e.g hostility to the idea of hobby electronics disrupting industry?
There is e.g. the Asus tinker board which is twice the price and out of stock. https://www.asus.com/uk/Single-board-Computer/TINKER-BOARD/
Not too bad for a product that was announced late January.
It's called a BeagleBone Black/Green. I can buy 1000 of those tomorrow off of Mouser. And I can go talk to TI to get a volume discount if I'm buying bunches.
The RPi is a neat toy good for one offs and the community is excellent. The $5 is cool marketing, but it's vapor when you go to fab it.
However, when I need to support something commercially, I need datasheets and customer reps. I get that for the Beaglebone while the situation for the RPi is laughable.
I can get a Raspberry Pi 2/3 for $35. That's a real price that reflects the Bill of Materials.
However, I still can't get a datasheet or support from Broadcom. That's a dealbreaker.
Feel free to use RPi's in your projects or for small volume. But if you need real volumes, use a Beaglebone Black/Green.
Still, if there were more commercial players, there wouldn't be such a frenzy around the few offerings..
As long as the sales are one offs, its not a $10 device yet. I hope it will be. There was something decidedly fishy about the "$5" Zero that has never ever been available more than one at a time.
I'm not saying that there was a secret conspiracy, but if you happen to be a distributer who makes his margin on each transaction, not each unit, and your source is chronically short, a de facto Zero situation emerges where you make far more on the limited supply available by forcing extra transactions. Sadly this largely negates the purpose of offering an ultra-cheap item in the first place.
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Raspberry-Zero-v1-3-Development-Boa...
It is too bad that this can not be partially remedied in some fashion. Of course you need to ensure you do not over estimate demand, but if you can sell for sure X number of devices in the launch period, you should be able to find capital somehow to be able to pre-made them to ensure reach your potential.
Let some hackers who are willing to wait a bit pay the cost a while before anything ships so they have a somewhat guaranteed amount of purchases before they even start.
Of course that introduces other problems (like making it harder for the "target audience" of people learning to get ahold of), and you still need to do a lot of work to make sure you don't over/under charge, but it's an option that seems like it could work well for them.
Surely you know that you can't comment like this here. This is a bannable offense. Even without this your comment broke the guidelines by name-calling, but this bit is beyond the pale. Please don't do it again.
(To clarify: I really, really did not mean "exit yourself". I did mean go do something stupid and self-destructive - but not lethal - like Brexit.)
But is it really too much to call a particular company/organization incompetent (in this particular issue it was implied that the incompetence was in terms of sales forecasting, marketing promises and logistics abilities)?
You clearly have a substantive point based on experience, which you could phrase thoughtfully if you wanted to. Then it would be a much better contribution—readers would learn more and you wouldn't be starting a fire. I realize that putting aside the pyrotechnics takes away some of the fun of the internet but (a) there are compensating rewards and (b) it's a tradeoff we all have to commit to in order to keep HN alive.
1. Raspberry Pi Trading use UK based manufacturing facilities, so yes, it costs a little extra to ship outside of the UK.
2. Raspberry Pi Trading do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront. So supply will always be limited for devices like the Zero, while demand is high.
3. The profits from the sales of all Raspberry Pi devices are used to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We do charitable work to further Computer Science education around the world. The target audience is educators and children, and that will always be the focus. That it happens there are hackers out there that want to use the device is great, but not the priority.
4. The popularity of the Raspberry Pi range is mainly down to the amazing community we have and the huge support available from that community.