Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
Hobbyist rejoice! During an interview with Jeff Geerling, CEO of Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton said that the elusive Raspberry Pi SBC 3B and 4, along with the compute modules should be available to everyone in Q3. Since the height of the pandemic, component shortages made it all but impossible for hobbyists and educators to procure the full blown single board computer and compute module form-factors.
The folks at Raspberry Pi decided that they needed to prioritize business orders, since those companies were facing a very real operating crisis when they couldn’t source the necessary parts, while the average hobbyist can wait a bit to build that cool garage door opener/NAS/crock-pot monitor. They also decided not to significantly raise prices and to actively fight hoarding and unauthorized resellers.
According to Upton, Q1 of 2023 was their worst first quarter in a long time, but the parts they rely on are once again available and they are ramping up to ship millions of the tiny devices in Q2 and Q3. As someone who is sitting on an empty Turing Pi 2 board with nary a compute module in sight, I’m pretty pumped to hear this news and I appreciate their approach. Check out the whole video interview if you have some time.