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points by bArray 2 days ago | 0 comments

I really hope they can keep the cost down, it needs to be in the "it's so cheap just hack on it" price range for not just engineers but kids too. I'm excited to see low-cost hardware put in the hands of kids with LLMs in their sails.

[–] kristopolous 2 days ago

I've personally stopped believing we will ever return to a world where anything computer isn't at extortionist nosebleed prices as if they're made by Patek Philippe.

[–] filcuk 1 day ago

An ESP-C3 costs about £1.50 and runs my terrarium automation with web portal for data logging and scheduling

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

Where can you get a EPS-32 for 1,50, with shipping, taxes and duties included?

Because in the EU whether it's amazon or AliExpress, the cheapest I can get one now would be 4,50 Euros a piece, and that's only if you buy them in bundles of two or more.

Or is it that the UK lacks the lunacy parcel taxes and duties of the EU so things are much cheaper over there?

[–] myrmidon 1 day ago

The bare SoC you can get for ~1.20€ in Germany:

https://www.reichelt.com/de/en/shop/product/esp32-c3_soc_wif...

But even paying 5-30€ for a devkit still seems insanely cheap to me; that's like several bars of chocolate at current prices, even kids can afford that (or make someone buy it for them).

[–] megous 1 day ago

There's no escaping the fact that EU fucked the hobbyists that previously were able to ship stuff not even made or available in EU at sane prices from china. I f I were to buy things I did in last 12 or so years based on current rules, I'd pay like 200% on customs/taxes and bullshit charges like 3+EUR per made up category on invoice or whatever it's now.

Hopefully, it will put a downwards price pressure on middlemen/resellers, now that buying directly is prohibitively expensive.

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

>There's no escaping the fact that EU fucked the hobbyists that previously were able to ship stuff not even made or available in EU at sane prices from china.

EU doesn't care about hobbyists, it cares about protecting the interests of the monopolies of the major retailers who lobby the politicians, who disliked that people could order the same Chinese shit they sell at 100x markups, directly from China, and cutting them off as middle-men.

But don't worry, in their heads, this way we'll get to on-shore our HW/electronics manufacturing industry back. Any day now. I can already see the factories pumping out ESP32s "Made in the EU", popping up everywhere across the EU, creating jobs and a competitive electronics industry. Alarm clock buzzes

[–] sunaookami 1 day ago

>bullshit charges like 3+EUR per made up category

Add 2€ to that for the new handling fee from 1st November onward.

[–] gorbypark 22 hours ago

"Fun" fact, they charge VAT on top of the new "handling fees" (aka tariffs). Each item category is now 6.05 euros extra in Spain (5 euros + 21% VAT).

They also seem to have no way to really tell item categories apart, so it's effectively a fee per single item. You can buy multiples and only get the extra charge once, however for example, if you order one ESP32-C3 and one ESP32-C6 from the same vendor, you will likely be hit with 2 * 6.05 even though technically they'd fall under the same item category.

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

It would be cool if the EU would also find ways to add value to the economy, instead of just adding more taxes that extract value from it.

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

>The bare SoC you can get for ~1.20€ in Germany:

Obviously, in the context of hobbyists at home, we were talking about the ESP32 SBCs, and not the bare solderable chips themselves.

>But even paying 5-30€ for a devkit still seems insanely cheap to me

Yeah but I wanted to know if the 1,50 price is realistic since it's quite a big difference, 200%+, between those two price ranges.

If price differences didn't matter for hobbyists, then Arduino wouldn't have been killed, and ESP32 taken over the world.

Clearly both people and businesses are highly price sensitive, especially in the current economy.

>that's like several bars of chocolate at current prices, even kids can afford that (or make someone buy it for them).

Needless whataboutism straying from my point, as with such line of reasoning, you can justify anything that's bad: "Getting punched in the balls isn't so bad, because you could always get cancer which is much worse."

[–] andruby 1 day ago

Not exactly £1.5, but you can get them just under €3.0 shipped (with duty etc) to EU when ordering a bundle of 10 on Ali.

In November last year I could still buy them for €1.57 each.

https://files.catbox.moe/1i7z4q.png

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

>In November last year

A lot of things have changed since then: EU taxes and duties, AI-induces HW shortages and price hikes. For example RPI prices today are untenable compared to a year ago.

That's why I asked about the prices of today. Whatever people paid in the past, is not necessarily applicable anymore.

[–] andruby 23 hours ago

Yes I know, and agreed. <€3.0 is still cheap enough to buy a dozen and keep in a drawer for a bunch of applications

[–] stkdump 20 hours ago

Glad I stocked up on them before the tariffs took effect.

[–] graemep 1 day ago

Prices seem about the same here with delivery. I have not yet checked very extensively though.

[–] jon-wood 1 day ago

This is the way forward these days. In my opinion the situations in which a Raspberry Pi is the right answer are vanishingly small these days - for interacting with physical things like relays or LEDs use an ESP or similar, run Micropython on it if you're not into writing C and the like, or ESPHome if you want something dead simple.

If you need an actual computer there are so many options along those lines now, and almost all of them are better than a Raspberry Pi in various aspects. Finally, if you just want to put some stuff on a screen then most TVs already have an operating system and a web browser on them, target that and you can get rid of the computer dangling off the back entirely.

[–] everforward 1 day ago

I’ve said this other places but an x64 processor is probably better value these days unless you need video and GPIOs on the same device for some reason.

Even then, you can get a USB to GPIO adapter. I don’t use RPis much these days and it’s kind of a shame because RPi + Python usually has a quicker dev loop than C + esp-idf. I need 5 of some of them though, and I’m not buying a dozen RPis these days.

[–] rbanffy 1 day ago

> most TVs already have an operating system and a web browser on them, target that and you can get rid of the computer dangling off the back entirely.

Would be super cool if TVs (or monitors, that also have some brain and an OS running on a small SoC) could be flashed with an X terminal.

[–] asymmetric 1 day ago

OT but I would love to see your terrarium build!

[–] _spduchamp 1 day ago

Yeah! Let's see that!

[–] Joel_Mckay 2 days ago

It is a cycle, and one may bet millions of annoyed nerds will invent something other than ddr dram... after all they always have in the past.

Blitz-scaling LLM for fictional future revenue assumes competing technology will remain immutable. It is a false premise with dire consequences for the credulous.

China is already filling the vacuum within the flash/ddr/cpu/gpu market, and quality/speed will rapidly improve with domestic use. We are already seeing blank label storage clones emerging in international markets. =3

[–] kristopolous 17 hours ago

It's cartel price fixing.

Other datacenter prices aren't up 500%. CPUs, tape storage, mainboards, racks, cases, PSU, infiniband hardware, HVACs, all price stable.

But consumer grade RAM? Up 500%. USB disks? They're hundreds of dollars.

Also low density platter is up 2-300% as well. Don't tell me people are building out datacenters with 16tb spinning disks, I don't believe you.

It's companies that have price fixed doing it again.

Their EPS are up like 60x. Their stock is up like 10x and we're supposedly like "well I guess this thing you could sell for profit at $20 is now $960, cool"

And what's micron doing with it? $35 billion stock buy back. Alright. Asshole prices it is.

Prices of cheap 10 year old tech continues going up at crypto asshole speeds. Everyone should be insanely angry.

These prices aren't going to stop until either a non cartel player enters the market or there's a DOJ that's not just a bunch of kalshi and crypto scam bros.

We'll see what happens when everyone hears "black Friday? Nah, bro, prices are up another 20%, lol"

[–] Joel_Mckay 14 hours ago

>Everyone should be insanely angry.

Micron made the mistake of letting the dog drive, and ultimately tied their brands fate to a dubious high-risk/high-reward market. The dram situation has already hit SSD/HDD, ram, and PC sales... as consumer dram chip supply chains are choked off by the hyper-scaling hardware investment loop demands.

"Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall." (proverb 16:18)

>Don't tell me people are building out data-centers with 16tb spinning disks

Inexpensive JBOD HDD storage is still around $25/TiB, and while higher than tape ($7/TiB) it remains viable. The dram cache chips on the HDD PCB are likely more expensive than the old hardware now.

Personally, I have gone with old 25GB BD-R ($21.50/TiB for Ridata disc) for archival storage. It is janky, but the lowest cost cold-backup solution at the moment for home-scale projects. The 7 year disc MTBF should push past the 2032 estimated hype-bubble supply chain DDoS.

BD-R are slow to burn/access, hard to auto-load, and not a viable option for LLM/bitcoin project folks. I thought the tech was EOL 10 years ago, and yet here we are. =3

[–] close04 1 day ago

The prices will come down eventually, even if not all the way down.

But I'd be more concerned about computing staying open in general - not only as open source but at least open and accessible standards, interfaces, open to individual development, open to tinkering.

I see a concentrated push from almost all sides to lock down any platform, lock the hardware and build black box devices, lock the software under layers of attestation and certifications, all in the name of "security". I use the quotes because I don't believe security is the top concern, or even a concern at all, it's about taking the control away from users.

For now the open-computing world is still bustling and accessible but the intention to curtail this is there, with technical or legal measures.

[–] Tepix 2 days ago

The most amazing thing about the Zero was that it was 5€

Even at 10€ it was tantalizing. Please, give us something in that price range.

[–] locknitpicker 1 day ago

> Even at 10€ it was tantalizing. Please, give us something in that price range.

A few years ago we could get our hands on a Orange Pi Zero, with wifi, Ethernet, and 512MB of RAM, for less than $10. I think I bought mine for slightly over $5.

Now they sell for a tad over $30. What a shame.

We now have the ESP32 line of microcontrollers. That should scratch some of the itches.

[–] Den_VR 1 day ago

Is that a change in the valuation of the pi or of the dollar?

[–] overfeed 1 day ago

Covid shortages and RAMageddon changed the valuation.

[–] locknitpicker 1 day ago

> Is that a change in the valuation of the pi or of the dollar?

I believe that revenue maximization plays a role. So it's inflation in a way, but not the kind where bom costs are forwarded to consumers.

[–] close04 1 day ago

The dollar had just over 30% inflation since the start of COVID. But not all prices increased equally, for anything with RAM or NAND they skyrocketed in the past year.

[–] nar001 1 day ago

Are they as well supported as the RPi? I heard software support was bad compared to the Raspberry Pis

[–] sthlmb 1 day ago

Your best option is to look into Armbian (https://armbian.com/) for these, they do the Lord's work when it comes to making sure these alternatives aren't destined to be ewaste when vendors abandon them. I'd say Radxa are probably in 2nd place after Raspberry Pi when it comes to support, but Armbian still makes that a lot better.

[–] lp92 1 day ago

They are two different things. You're not running a full blown Linux OS on the ESP32. But many of the simple projects people used the Pi for can be done with the ESP32.

[–] wltr 1 day ago

Got mine for circa $7 a few years back. Absolutely best tiny computer I ever had. It sips power, and is rock stable for me. Only one issue: it doesn’t reboot for some reason, it shutdowns. I can tolerate that for $7. Apart from that, I’m very happy with that tiny beast. Got three of them. And at that price, I’d buy 10 more and give them for free for friends, already setup with some services. I just hope they’d go really cheap at some point, once the bubble bursts or something.

[–] silveira 1 day ago

Right now, I think the sweet spot is getting a Raspberry Pi 400 for USD$50 ( Microcenter).

A Pi400 is a very capable 4GB ram Linux machine, working out of the box. I have a few, each doing a different job. I just ssh to them with a beefier machine plugged on LLMs tools, and it's really fun and exciting.

Then Mini pcs, you can get a good deal here and there, for a more capable machine with a little bit more flexibility.

ESP32s are also awesome and I have been playing with them but not as a replacement of these light linux servers.

[–] bArray 20 hours ago

> Then Mini pcs, you can get a good deal here and there, for a more capable machine with a little bit more flexibility.

This has been my hack for a while: eBay "NUC", reduce the price slider, select 'But it now' and get one with all internals included. But even that has now dried up.

An old Workstation I purchased for £400 2 years ago now sells for ~£1.5k. The old GPU [+] I purchased on Amazon for £45 now sells for £3k.

There is 100% a need for cheap Linux SBC's with enough compute to cause some trouble.

[+] Top top tip: For old GPU cards with old CUDA, just get <insert favourite LLM> to rewrite the CUDA stack for older CUDA. Fun times.

[–] ProllyInfamous 1 day ago

Was at Microcenter, yesterday.

Marietta's did not have any Pi400s for sale (I love mine, with its built in keyboard; it is my main Kali hackbox) but did have lots of Pi5 (4gb was ~$100 IIRC; 1gb was ~$40).

I've picked up two 7" touchscreens, which seemlessly integrate into any Pi project (mine are both now installed on Pi 3b+ PiHoles, to display realtime DNS traffic 24/7); if you buy the returned/open-box, each screen is less than $50 (no more fumbling for HDMI cables).

----

Unrelated: the RTX5070Ti (purchased May 2026 for $999) is now $1449! The 5060 (purchased July 2026 for $329) is now $459; no 5090 in stock (of course).

[–] lichenwarp 1 day ago

A few, that's 3 to me so what kind of jobs are they doing? I'm always interested in this stuff but never know what my use case would be. Can you explain what I'm missing?

[–] dzhiurgis 2 days ago

That's what esp32's are for. $5 and uses fuck all power.

[–] devmor 2 days ago

Those are entirely different operational models.

While people do often use pis to do things you could do with an esp32, an ESP32 cannot do the majority of things a Pi can do.

[–] Rohansi 2 days ago

Over time the Raspberry Pi use case shifted more and more away from GPIO. They all still have it but probably most of them are used as a Linux computer without ever touching the GPIO now. The people who do use GPIO on a Raspberry Pi are often better off using an ESP32 because they have better control of GPIO, consume far less power, and are actually cheap.

Personally I use ESP32s for GPIO to control things around the house and have one Raspberry Pi acting as a hub.

[–] hellweaver666 1 day ago

I've been doing home electronics projects since around 2013, I used to use Raspberry Pi's for everything from lighting control to robots, camera projects and lots in between (I even had a mechanical keyboard with a Pi inside) and a massive collection of hats and addons. These days, I can do 99% of what I need with tiny little ESP32 variant boards for a fraction of the cost and significantly less complexity. Hell, you can even get esp32's with really nice touch screens attached for dashboards / animations. I built a whole cyberdeck using an ESP32 and no computer in-sight.

[–] alextheparrot 2 days ago

their RP1 IO chip is such a disappointment for high performance GPIO use cases as well, literally can’t trust any IO decision they make after having hacked on that chip

[–] bdavbdav 2 days ago

The full size Pi has less and less of a niche. GPIO / low power edge? ESP32s are great. Signage? The pi isn’t really all that great, and is expensive, get a cheap N100/150. Hacking on Linux? Literally anything else.

[–] bdcravens 2 days ago

In many cases that’s an advantage. Tiny (or no) attack surface, less power, etc

[–] slow_typist 2 days ago

The attack surface maybe smaller but less eyes on the firmware images for sure.

[–] ehnto 2 days ago

At least most my ESP32s are off any net, and pretty low stakes applications.

[–] Tepix 1 day ago

There is some overlap, see FUZIX for the RP2040 for example.

[–] dzhiurgis 1 day ago

Most of the time it's some UART or BT proxy for me, maybe toggle a light, etc. Sometimes it's all of that in one. Plenty of power for it lol.

[–] locknitpicker 1 day ago

> Those are entirely different operational models.

In some of the tinkering applications, RPis are shoehorned into the very operarional model that is followed by ESP32s.

ESP32s may be harder to debug but they allow us to remove a big chunk of the complexity that lies between our code and what we want the device to do.

I think your criticism is more in line with "they are not exactly the same as RPis". And that is fine.

[–] devmor 1 day ago

> I think your criticism is more in line with "they are not exactly the same as RPis". And that is fine.

I chose my wording very intentionally. My criticism is exactly what I said.

It’s like comparing a bicycle to a light duty farm truck.

[–] locknitpicker 1 day ago

Yes, ESP32s are not exactly like RPis. And that is fine.

Do you need a full blown Linux desktop to blink a led light? Or drive a servo? Or even have a HTTP server? No.

[–] devmor 19 hours ago

I am not sure why you think those are the only things a cheap entry level computer for young hackers should be able to do.

[–] nfriedly 2 days ago

The original Pi Zero was $5, although it probably uses more power than an esp32.

[–] jszymborski 2 days ago

IIRC that was the MSRP but you could never find them at that price.

[–] officeplant 17 hours ago

The original pi zero even had $0.99 price moments at Microcenter with a limit of one per customer.

[–] overfeed 1 day ago

> you could never find them at that price.

Microcenter sold it for $5, limited to 1 per customer. Additional ones were $15 each.

[–] aimor 1 day ago

And on Pi Day they were $3.14. I'd go every year, it's a neat little machine.

[–] ssl-3 1 day ago

For awhile, I picked up yet-another Pi Zero W every time I went into Microcenter for $5.

It was a wonderful time to live nearby.

[–] dansquizsoft 2 days ago

Yeah the price was always a bit of a con (even if it was a great product!)

[–] Beached 2 days ago

it is also more capable than an esp32. Im dinking around with both. esp32 is very restrictive in its compute capacity. It isnt multifunctional at all either.

A pi zero is to play with, an esp32 is so tiny, that it is more of a build for a single thing, and then set it and forget it doing that single thing.

You cant really stack more and more cool stuff onto it and keep building on it.

[–] everforward 1 day ago

That’s why esp-idf has components. I have a bunch of components that are basically “compile if this SDK config is set, otherwise pretend you’re an empty file” using macros.

Then I just pull in all my components. The ones I use will get compiled, the ones I don’t won’t.

Mostly works fine. Eventually you will run out of NVRAM to save binaries on, but another esp-32 is like $3.

[–] laweijfmvo 1 day ago

raspberry pi has turned into a rich nerd “gotta collect them all” scheme, not a cheap entry level computer for young hackers.