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SBCs take a hit

There was a time when anyone with a hankering for tinkering could pick up a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer (SBC), spend a few hours on a keyboard and create a wonderous thing.

Imagine, having a computer with the power of a Cray supercomputer that is about the same size as a deck of cards and which costs just a few tens of dollars.

Yes, this little cluster of electronic components can do magic and it can (I mean "could") do so for little more than the price of a takeaway meal.

Oh, how times have changed!

For years, Moore's Law had brought us ever more powerful SBCs at ever lower prices.

The first Raspberry Pi was a breakthrough, albeit it's a wimp by today's standards.

It boasted just a single-core CPU and just 256MB of RAM, a paltry amount yet so much more than other SBCs like the Arduino had offered before it. Even better, there was an HDMI output, USB connectivity and even a network interface. This really was a single board "computer" rather than just a microcontroller.

Rather than requiring some esoteric scripting language, the RPi ran Linux and could be programmed in a wide range of languages including C, C++ and Python. Wow, now you could create real-world devices without getting tangled up with low-level coding.

Over the years that followed, the RPi got more powerful with extra CPU cores, higher clock rates, more RAM and faster interfaces.

Life was good for those who love these SBCs and use them in a myriad of bespoke designs.

Then came the RAMpocalypse and it all changed.

Now, that cheap SBC is horrendously expensive. Prices have jumped to two, three or even more times what they were -- driven primarily by the scarcity and price of the RAM used.

There's simply no real value-case for buying a 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 today because it will cost you around NZ$650, an outrageous sum.

Even opting for the 4GB model will still set you back nearly NZ$250.

This is not the low-cost SBC we used to enjoy and it makes me so happy that I was smart enough to snap up a bunch of these things about a year ago.

Clearly there are probably not a lot of people prepared to pay these extortionate prices for SBCs and that's starting to have an effect. Pine 64 has halted production of its RPi-like SBC, citing the price-surge caused by the AI bubble. I suspect we'll see similar announcements by other ARM-based SBC vendors in the near future.

Where does this leave the avid hobbyist who's looking for a platform on which to base their next cool project?

Well it's starting to look as if smaller/cheaper is better. Microcomputer boards are likely to be replaced in the heart (and wallets) of hobbyists by microcontroller (MCU) boards.

Modern MCUs are now getting so powerful that they're already up to the task of rendering 3D graphics while costing only a tiny fraction of a full-blown SBC.

Even Raspberry Pi themselves have players in this field with the Raspberry Pi Pico, a very competent and affordable MCU that I've already used in quite a few really cool projects (such as the strobing red/blue LEDs on my "police drone"). The ability to write code for this MCU using micro-python means it's no harder than writing code for a full-blown Pi.

The Pi Pico is available locally for about $10, more than an order of magnitude cheaper than the RPi 5. In fact if you by one of the multi-unit packs (as I tend to do) the price drops even further.

Sure, these Picos don't run Linux (they have no operating system at all -- you're working with the bare metal) but they're multi-core and have the option of WiFi and even RISC-V cores as well as ARM Cortex ones. The RAM is only a quarter or half megabyte but that's generally more than enough because it's *all* for your program due to the lack of OS overhead. Having up to 2MB of onboard nonvolatile (program) storage is also more than adequate.

Programming these things is kind of like going back to the late 1970s or early 1980s where storage and memory are orders of magnitude less than we're used to today but somehow, it doesn't seem to be much of a limitation.

So, I'm loaded up with RPis and Picos so am still enjoying many hours of tinkering and code-cutting at very low cost... while so many others gripe and grind their gears because they can't afford a few more GB of RAM or a faster GPU.

Suffer in your jocks!

Carpe Diem folks!

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