pelya

There is a whole lot of demand from industrial equipment manufacturers. When you attach a computer to your twenty thousand bucks robot arm or CNC drill, you need it small, reliable, readily-available, and brand-new, so you slightly overpay for Pi 5 for $200 and an SSD drive for another $200 to not rely on faulty SD cards, and if it breaks you can buy and replace it in 15 minutes, and future Raspberry Pi 6 will most probably boot from the same SSD and work with zero modifications, even contacts placement will be the same. Does it need 16 GB? Probably not.

Also, drone manifacturers. 16 GB RAM is just enough to run a computer vision AI model, and you won’t haul a used HP laptop on a drone.

THE SKELETAL HAND!

And the veiny hand. Looks like there are several imaging modes.

But, but, eighty bucks! TI boards are seriously overpriced.

Yup, it would be super convenient to have one or two pins for ADC. Technically you have a DAC on Pi 4, if you repurpose the analog audio output, but on Pi 5 all you have is digital HDMI audio.

Oh well, an AD7705 voltmeter board costs only $2, and uses only six wires for SPI connection, including one of two precious precious 3V3 pins. And you’ll also need around three days to dig Github to find a working Python driver for it. But at least you don’t have to worry about burning your 3.3V Raspberry pins with 5V input voltage.

And at this point you are asking yourself - why not pay $3 for an ESP32 or a STM32? you can program it to use just three wires - power, ground, and UART TX, and you don’t need to read it 500 times per second like AD7705 and use 25% CPU of your Raspberry Pi Zero, you can program it to calculate an average RMS voltage once per second, and you can read a total of six ADC channels on ESP32, and on STM32 half of all the pins can be configured as ADC, and it’s also quite precise and low-noise, while on ESP32 ADC is more … consumer-grade.

Their original goal was to provide an affordable and customizable computing device with generic IO ports for a classroom, which they very much did.
14 years later, classrooms have a crapload of alternatives, ranging from $3 ESP32, which you can literally solder and throw away, to $500 Jetson, and all Raspberry Pi clones, like NanoPi or OrangePi, all with GPIO, UART, SPI and I2C ports, for all your microcontroller needs.

As for the embedded developers community (or ‘makers’ as kids call themselves nowadays) - these are the kind of people who dump two thousand bucks for a 3D printer and then use it twice a year. I think they will survive raising Raspberry Pi 5 price to $45.

And Raspberry Pi foundation pivoting towards business is a predictable move - those kids who used Raspberry Pi 14 years ago in a classroom are now business owners or technical leads in many businesses.

Y’all need a price chart. You are literally getting what you are paying for.

Raspberry Pi 5, 16 GB RAM

• Price: $205 (don’t trust the price on RPi website, no way you are buying it for $145).
• Generic desktop PC: runs Blender and video editors.
• AI agent: yes.
• Computer vision: yes, with face recognition and real-time AI filters.
• SDR signal processor: you can broadcast an HD TV station on it.
• Servers: whatever you want, can host Amazon and Netflix.

Raspberry PI 5, 1 GB RAM

• Price: $45.
• Generic desktop PC: you can edit office documents.
• AI agent: lol no.
• Computer vision: a movement sensor for your surveillance camera.
• SDR signal processor: you can broadcast FM radio.
• Servers: home file server and torrents.

Raspberry PI 4, 1 GB RAM

• Price: $35.
• Does everything that Raspberry Pi 5 does, but 0.6 GHz slower.
• Does not throw a tantrum when your power supply outputs 4.999 volts instead of 5 volts 5 amperes.
• The ultimate Raspberry Pi for all your hardware projects.

Raspberry PI Zero 2, 512 MB RAM

• Price: $15 on a website, $19 in shops.
• Generic desktop PC: probably runs Solitaire.
• AI agent: dream on.
• Computer vision: a movement sensor for your surveillance camera, and it won’t support HD cameras.
• SDR signal processor: you can record FM radio, not much else.
• Servers: online garage door opener.
• Ethernet adapter sold separately, if you don’t want your garage door opener to drop offline at random because of unstable WiFi.

Raspberry Pi Pico, 264 KB RAM

• Price: $4.
• Generic desktop PC: nope.
• AI agent: absolutely impossible.
• Computer vision: nope.
• SDR signal processor: nope.
• Servers: unsecure garage door opener.
• Ethernet adapter requires soldering skills.
• You don’t need 40 programmable pins to control one garage door.
• Just buy ESP32 instead.

ESP32-C3-Zero, 400 KB RAM.

• Price: $3.50.
• Does everything that Raspberry Pi Pico does, but better.
• Works for a year from three AAA batteries.

Raspberry Pi Zero is still very much available, and costs less than the original Pi 1/2/3/4. It’s enough for most microcontroller tasks, if you want cozy Linux with Python and don’t want to dive into RTOS and C microcode.

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