Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Where Are the Raspberry Pi Zeros? (i-programmer.info)

Posted by timothy on from the hiding-with-the-other-zeros dept.

mikejuk writes: The Pi Zero was supposed to be available from November 26, 2015. It is now the start of February and all of the stockists, including the Pi Swag Shop, are still showing out of stock. That's two whole months, and counting, of restricted supply which is more than an initial hiccup. Of course you would expect enough to be made available initially to meet the expected demand. The Pi sells something in the region of 200,000 per month so what do you think the initial run of the Pi Zero actually was? The answer is 20,000 units. Of which 10,000 were stuck to the cover of MagPi and "given away" leaving just 10,000 in the usual distribution channels. And yet Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, commented: "You'd think we'd be used to it by now, but we're always amazed by the level of interest in new Raspberry Pi products," Well yes, you really would think that they might be used to it by now and perhaps even prepared for it. At the time of writing the Pi Zero is still out of stock and when it is briefly in stock customers are limited to one unit.
A victim of its own success, yes, but the real victims are the Raspberry Pi's competitors.

6 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. the Schedules by Dave+Whiteside · · Score: 5, Informative

    https://www.raspberrypi.org/fo...
    basically there are 2 re sellers in the UK and 2 in the US
    they get alternative deliveries

    --
    who where what when now?
  2. Re:I can understand small first batches by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 5, Informative

    The use case is much closer to that of an Arduino, than that of the Rasberry B. So, unless you are looking to do embedded type stuff, then you are probably not the right market.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  3. Nice non-sequiteur at the end by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A victim of its own success, yes, but the real victims are the Raspberry Pi's competitors.

    One might argue that if RPi are unable to deliver what's actually wanted, people will go to their competitors instead.

    So what the hell does this last sentence mean? RPi's competitors are "victims" because RPi has done well? Sorry, that's not how competition works. This isn't even a zero-sum game. RPi has created markets that its competitors failed to create, but are now selling into anyway. RPi's competitors have by-and-large received a massive boost from the existence of RPi. 12-year-olds are now playing with SBCs who would never have even heard of them if not for RPi, and they're not only playing with RPi SBCs.

  4. Re:I can understand small first batches by bangular · · Score: 5, Informative

    The zero is definitely in an awkward spot. It's so-so as a microcontroller replacement (no low power modes, limited number of analog inputs, inputs not 5v tolerant), but the price point makes it otherwise competitive. The ESP8266 is getting high level languages like Lua, micro python, and Basic and priced well. The "low power mode" sucks because it basically just resets the unit and doesn't have interrupt driven wake modes.

    I bought a zero and it will probably be my only purchase. It just doesn't seem to do anything special.

  5. Re:I can understand small first batches by bangular · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The ESP8266 seems to be the current competitor for "arduino with effortless network connectivity." They are about 5 dollars and actually available. Just as the pi, it has many limitations that dedicated microcontrollers solved years ago. I've been using a combination of ESP8266 and AVR lately instead of ESP8266 standalone.

  6. Re:I can understand small first batches by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 5, Informative
    The arduino fits this role perfectly. I have a few years experience building remote data collection sensors and very little computation ability is required You don't even need to do calibration, just record raw data. I was doing this on a TRS-80 100 in the 1980's with no problem collecting data (about 2 dozen sensors) over a few months time. Where the rpi would come in handy is its ease of use of large storage space. I think you can do that with the arduino also, but have not tried.

    One of the things I have planed to do with my rpi is to set up a remote station on a tall mountain about 12km from my house. I could set up a camera and talk to the whole thing over an xbee rs-232 tcp link (ppp) at 28.8kbaud. With a small solar panel this would run indefinitely and provide me with weather data and a view of the whole area.