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.
#2. Sadly this fact undermines the real utility of RPI for development.
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.
The pi zero was sold at a loss... It is/was a marketing manuever to absorb more of the diy iot market share; which is the reason there is a 1 per customer limit. As well as the reason microcenter requires in person purchase and not online.
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.
> You don't buy a developer kit in mass intending to resell as an end product
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.
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.
If you're producing a product where you need thousands of something maybe getting a custom-built ARM board is a better plan than using a Raspberry Pi.
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.
He's not talking about creating a commercial venture that would necessitate thousands of devices. He's talking about an in-house project on the scale of dozens. Would contacting them directly get me that quantity at that price?
I could walk in to Microcenter right now and pick up basically as many as I wanted. I know everyone doesn't have a Microcenter within a few miles of them, but they've had them in stock continually since about three months after the release.
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.
> 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.
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.
Their Orange County/Tustin location is the only one left in California, apparently. I built my "graduation present" PC with parts from there in 2008. They've apparently got about 2 dozen locations around the country, along with the web store.
Also, why for the love of god can't they just license the name to some secondary source w/ quality control stipulations?
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.
You are dramatically underestimating the complexity and difficulty of "w/ quality control stipulations".
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.
> 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.
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"
Picking a manufacturer is a several month-long process by itself, and would require building out an operations/production engineering team for ongoing production.
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.
> 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.
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.
Their initial scale at the first launch was too small to work with UK manufacturers, a bit later with the first version they were able to order large enough runs to have production in Wales iirc.
Is it hard to guess why designing electronics could possibly be good/interesting work? It involves programming, design, physics, math, and making real things we use everyday - medical devices, cars, satellites, cameras, etc
They weren't trying to convince you that it's a pleasant occupation. I'm sure that the content of the comment would have a different emphasis if they were.
He was describing why doing QA is hard, and I'm suggesting (not to you clearly) some good reason for doing it still exists or he wouldn't be in that business.
"Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1."
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.
esp8266 is not even close to being a replacement for rPi. The specs are orders of magnitude worse. 160KB RAM, 1MB flash, 80MHz CPU, no GPU. None of the builtin modules for networking, wifi, etc.
I think I agree that there really isn't a comparable competitor to rpi .. rpiZero W offers a lot for an iot module at such a great cost. maybe something like the CHIP, but not even?
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.
> Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1.
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.
But the problem is you can only buy one. We use Pi 2Bs for some commercial projects and it's ok because in principle we could order in 1000 next-day from RS (currently 12k in stock) or Farnell without restrictions.
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.
You are lamenting that a product released today is not available in sufficient quantities to be used in your commercial product? Sounds like an unreasonable expectation.
To counter: the Pi Zero is coming on for 18 months and is still regularly sold out.
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.
Not only does Broadcom refuse to sell chips to companies wanting to make Raspberry Pi compatible boards, but the PCB design is not public and the license on the closed-source binary blob required to boot the thing forbids use with non-Raspberry Pi boards.
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.
The closed design and closed-source kernel blob are troublesome. We need a completely open source board design similar to the Pi that manufacturers are free to produce without licensing. We could have an organization that does QA and vets individual manufacturers for quality and compliance/conformance with the board's design. The RPi Foundation's choice to remain so closed-source is a bit confusing and puzzling, considering their non-profit and educational mission and goal.
> We need a completely open source board design similar to the Pi that manufacturers are free to produce without licensing.
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
> The RPi Foundation's choice to remain so closed-source is a bit confusing and puzzling, considering their non-profit and educational mission and goal.
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...
Look into the Next Thing Co GR8 -- it's a vaguely similar SOC (the thing in the Chip Pro) but is (in theory - I haven't investigated) available in small quantities and with an accessible datasheet.
The latter. Their chips aren't sold through distributors, and they'll pretty much only give the time of day to high-volume OEMs. They stonewall companies that are big enough to get in-person visits from sales engineers from other major vendors (TI, Freescale, Xilinx). Raspberry Pi cofounder Eben Upton was a technical director at Broadcom, so he had inside connections.
They normally deal in massive quantities. Asking for a couple thousand units just isn't worth the effort. That's what makes the RPi Foundation unique -- Broadcom _does_ deal in small quantities for them in support of the mission.
>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. [emphasis added]
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.
Capital is more than just cash. There is land, buildings, and equipment. I honestly don't know any details about the group's situation, but I am put in mind of a story: doubling the order cost four times the price for the simple reason that the supplier could handle the smaller order with the existing factory. In order to meet the larger order, however, he would need to build a new factory.
The natural word for that is "capacity" rather than "capital".
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.
I suspect the reason is quite obvious. They are losing money on every unit produced.
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.
I'm a bit confused as to what happened here, were you trying to conduct a multi-million dollar deal through their community forums?
> 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?
It's exactly economies of scale and support. Pi is still pretty tiny as a business and benefits from community goodwill and input. Only now are they achieving the millions of units shipped which are needed to achieve good economy of scale.
To be fair, the tinker board is only 50% more and does include additional features (some extra speed and GbE). The US release is happening right now, so that could affect availability worldwide as Asus tries to launch with sufficient quantities. I somehow was able to order one, sold by Amazon US no less, and get it last week; there's not even a listing anymore.
Not too bad for a product that was announced late January.
That doesn't explain the zero's price. They are making a loss on those, and a quite big one at that. It is not possible to make something like the Pi Zero for less than double it's retail price.
I think it is the same problem that is facing the likes of mobile phones, economics of scale. The factories basically need a minimum number of units before it is worth setting up the production line.
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 ordered mine sometime last year, and was able to get them fairly quickly when they finally delivered. Guess they couldn't keep up with demand after initial backers.
Still, if there were more commercial players, there wouldn't be such a frenzy around the few offerings..
That will be perfectly fine just as soon as I can buy more than one at a time.
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.
I would guess that they were one at a time because demand has been so high. By the time I was finally able to order a zero I lost interest in it and started using other boards. The question is if you want to get it into as many hands as possible or to people that are going to use a lot of them. But also people bulk order and sell at a markup. Stuff like this[1] still isn't uncommon ($23 for a pi zero on Amazon). At that markup I'd rather just buy a pi, arduino, or whatever. At $5 if it is a zero vs a msp430 I'm getting the zero for ease of use.
There was a brief period at my local Microcenter, after the supply started to catch up with demand and before the "limit 1 at $5" policy. I bought five of the hundred or so in the locked plastic box. I think I could have bought twenty, all at $5/each.
Marc - I've had so much fun with Raspberry Pis! Really appreciate the work you do. Have you considered setting up a kickstarter-style pre-order system? I think a lot of people would sign up and it might give you guys more predictability.
> 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.
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.
IMO this is an area where something like kickstarter might come in handy.
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.
> too many partial brits here [...] Seriously, shame on you. Just go brexit yourself
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.
Well, okay. I can agree that the "go brexit yourself" was too much. I'm sorry about that. Noone should be accused of that kind of stupidity.
(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)?
Directing a pejorative at an entire entity (org or individual) is probably name-calling, which the HN guidelines ask you not to do, but I'd say it depends on the context. If it's embedded in a clearly thoughtful comment, it might be fine. If it's embedded in a ranty-indig comment, it's a problem. The first three bits of your comment are the latter, so even without the swipe at the end, it's still a bad HN comment.
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.