0x0018 - Raspberry Pi Famine Alternatives
There is currently at this time November 2022 - a world-wide shortage of Raspberry Pi's. According to this article Raspberry Pi CEO Ebem Upton expects the supply to be resolved within a year. But what about a number of alternatives?
- ODROID (https://www.hardkernel.com/product/)
Coming in at very close price points to the Raspberry Pis, and of interest of how they have CPU cooling fans - they are completely capable of running Ubuntu latest versions! This video showcases that they are a powerful alternative to the Raspberry Compute sets:
2. Rock Pi / E (https://rockpi.org)
Hexacore micro-boards at crazy price points? Whats not to love! It seemed a bit counter-intuitive of where to find these to buy them. But https://wiki.radxa.com/Buy looks to be the supplier location. Also check https://ameridroid.com/ which seems to host a lot of different boards etc.
Once you actually dig around many of the boards have not even been manufactured yet - but when they do become available they are going to have rocking price-points. Note the built-in EMMC 32GB, that is effectively the same as a SSD drive in your laptop. At $86.96 for the 4G / 32GB EMMC with Wifi, AND the Hex-core 64-bit RK3399 chipset that is some impressive specs.
3. NanoPi (nanopi.io)
I was totally blown away by what these guys are accomplishing. Check out what they are doing with the NanoPi 2 - Fire specs at $22.99 for a quad-core gumstick with full Ethernet/wifi and USB connectivity - insane! - Or is it?
Clicking on the links shows you end up pushed to a third-party site: https://www.friendlyelec.com/
We then discover that these are also sold out - and cost more - but for the price/power point that is still incredible value for something that is about the size of a remote control for your TV.
Clicking around the site we can see that they do have some items in stock and they are impressive - the NanoPi R6S selling at $119.00
4. ASUS Tinker-board (https://tinker-board.asus.com/index.html)
Available on Amazon (at of course higher prices) they are presented as edge-computing devices and they promote their 99.7% facial recognition accuracy.
5. Libre Compute Boards (https://libre.computer/)
Found on Amazon at very competitive pricing, and marketing itself as open computing. It looks to be another stron contender in the micro-board / SOC category
To buy these we go over to loverpi.com and they have many modules designed to directly complement/compete with Raspberry Pi 3/4 series.
