[bsder]

You can bitch about RPIs or you can go support something else.

Lots (9000+) of Beaglebone Blacks over here -> https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/BeagleBoard-by-Seeed-St...

TI documentation is stellar (except the graphics--which nobody documents) unlike the RPi or any of it's clones. The chips are all available at volumes less than millions. You don't have to sign NDAs in order to get stuff.

The Linux is standard Debian with everything upstreamed. You have lots more pins. You have two real-time units. It doesn't need special overpowered power supplies or heatsinks--USB 2.0 500mA works just fine even without a heatsink. And you have onboard eMMC so you don't have to wonder whether the craptastic uSD card that came with your RPi is causing those strange reboots.

And the folks doing it all are woefully understaffed and undersupported.

So, everybody can sit and complain about lack of RPi's. Or they can go support something that is actually open source, available and delivering.

Yes, they had their supply issues like everybody else. But TI is happy to actually move chips in ways that Broadcom simply isn't.

[TacticalCoder]

> You can bitch about RPIs or you can go support something else.

I will and thanks for your comment... I'm pretty much Debian and Debian derivatives only so you convinced me.

I've got eight Pi I think. I started with the "Model 1" (which wasn't called that back then), on which I was running RasPBX (Raspbian with FreePBX+Asterisk) hooked to a SIP trunk to power four Cisco VoIP phone at my wife's little SME. Worked flawlessly for years. My best one I'd say is in the vintage arcade cab, with a Pi2JAMMA hat bigger than the Pi (!). I've got three towered on my desk, two of them operational 24/7.

So early adopter and user as it gets, not the kind to let the Pi not powered up... But I think this headline and the troubles getting one convinced me and I'm done with that brand.

I'll order BeagleBoards now and run Debian on them.

[bsder]

Sorry I came across a bit salty. However, I've been banging on about this for ages.

The RPi foundation has been subsidizing board cost since practically the beginning. This is nice in that it puts boards in everybody's hands.

This is bad in that it sucks the oxygen out of the space since anybody who doesn't have a benefactor willing to throw cash to subsidize the cost gets pushed to the side. Then, when the money finally dries up (and it will always dry up), the space immediately becomes a barren wasteland because everybody else got driven off.

It's doubly bad since mere mortals couldn't actually get their hands on the SoC chip at the heart of the boards. So, nobody else could take over when the RPi foundation decided to bail out.

Which is where we are now.

[misiekman]

It's not perfect. There was (not sure if they fixed in subsequent hardware revisions) an issue with the ethernet not working about 50% of the time, and this required cutting the physical power to the device to fix. https://community.element14.com/products/devtools/single-boa...

I found this out the hard way after building an IOT vehicle logger using these boards, had to work in a hardware self-reset to rework the board.

[bsder]

Was that specific to the BBB industrial? That's a really unfortunate bug.

I agree, about the "nothing is perfect", though. The lesson when you do stuff in embedded really is "Trust nothing."

[joezydeco]

The cheap subsidized Broadcom part is a habit that's hard to break. I've stopped suggesting iMX or Sitara to people because they just can't get over what the real price of these things are. And it's not hundreds of dollars.