Comment by bArray
11 hours ago
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.
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.
An ESP-C3 costs about £1.50 and runs my terrarium automation with web portal for data logging and scheduling
OT but I would love to see your terrarium build!
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Is that a change in the valuation of the pi or of the dollar?
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That's what esp32's are for. $5 and uses fuck all power.
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.
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.
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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.
In many cases that’s an advantage. Tiny (or no) attack surface, less power, etc
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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.
> 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.
The original Pi Zero was $5, although it probably uses more power than an esp32.
IIRC that was the MSRP but you could never find them at that price.
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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.