Posted by ingve 5 hours ago
Are they seeing a worthwhile niche for the tinkerers (or businesses?) who want to run local LLMs with middling performance but still need full set of GPIOs in a small package? Maybe. But maybe this is just Raspberry jumping on the bandwagon.
I don't blame them for looking to expand into new segments, the business needs to survive. But these efforts just look a bit aimless to me. I "blame" them for not having another "Raspberry Pi moment".
P.S. I can maybe see Frigate and similar solutions driving the adoption for these, like they boosted Coral TPU sales. Not sure if that's enough of a push to make it successful. The hat just doesn't have any of the unique value proposition that kickstarted the Raspberry wave.
But now if I want some low power linux PC replacement with display output, for the price of the latest RPi 5, I can buy on the used market a ~2018 laptop with a 15W quad core CPU, 8GB RAM, 256 NVME and 1080p IPS display, that's orders of magnitude more capable. And if I want a battery powered embedded ARM device for GPIO over WIFI, I can get an ESP32 clone, that's orders of magnitude cheaper.
Now RPi at sticker price is only good for commercial users since it's still cheaper than the dedicated industrial embedded boards, which I think is the new market the RPI company caters to. I haven't seen any embedded product company that hasn't incorporate RPis in its products they ship, or at least in their lab/dev/testing stage, so if you can sell your entire production stock to industrial users who will pay top dollar, why bother making less money selling to consumers, just thank them for all the fish. Jensen Huang would approve.
I'm also currently building a small device with 5" touchscreen that can control a midi fx padle of mine. It's just so easy to find images, code and documentation on how to use the GPIO pins.
Might be niche, but that is just what the Pi excels at. It's a board for tinkers and it works.
How much cheaper then 50 bucks can a tablet get? With the pi I can quickly in a hacky way connect rotary encoders with female-female dupon cables, use a python GPIO library made for raspberry pi.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1461079634354639132...
I can also use it for Zynthian. And if I'm done with it, I can build a new printer :P
It's 10 bucks more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Still half the price that I see intel NUCs for sale. Which of course are way more capable. But still, I don't mind the price that much.
I could go with a cheaper alternative, but then AFAIK you might have to fiddle with images, kernel and documentation. For me that is worth 10 bucks.
I don't really care how it compares to past models or inflation to justify its price tag. I was just comparing to to what you can buy on the used market today for the same price and it gets absolutely dunked on in the value proposition by notebooks since the modern full spec RPi is designed to more of a ARM PC than an cheap embedded board.
60 Euros for 2GB and 100 for 8GB models is kind of a ripoff if you don't really need it for a specific niche use case.
I think an updated Pi-zero with 2GB RAM and better CPU stripped of other bells and whistles for 30 Euros max, would be amazing value, and more back to the original roots of cheap and simple server/embedded board that made the first pi sell well.
The mobile and embedded X86 chips have closed the gap a lot in power consumption since the PI first launched.
Now you can even get laptops with broken screens for free, and just use their motherboard as a home server alternative to a PI. Power consumption will be a bit higher, but not enough to offset the money you just saved anytime soon.
What prices are you using for the 3b and 5 to get this percentage? The lowest percentage I got from available data is a 57% increase ($35 -> $55)
I noticed I can do 90% of the stuff I'd use an Arduino for with a RPi, except I had the full power of an internet connected Linux machine available. The Arduinos are still collecting dust somewhere =)
But now we have the ESP32 filling the same niche along with the Pi Zero W, so I don't really understand the purpose of RPi 4 and 5. They're not cheap compared to the price nor very powerful in any measure.
You don't even need a full laptop, any Chinese miniPC will blow the RPi5 out of the water AND some of them have expandable storage+RAM, while also having 5-20x more CPU/GPU oomph. They do consume a few watts more power, so there _might_ be a niche for the Raspberry Pi, but it's not a big one.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-500-plus/
I can't justify it though as I've no use for it.
However I think it is way closer to their original vision than anything else, i.e. It is a lot like the 1980s computers, the magic they were trying to capture.
For 100€ that would be something I'd buy for every niece and nephew to play with. For 200€ it's not even for me, I'd rather buy something like the uConsole RPI-CM4: https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/uconsole-kit-rpi-cm...
And the thin clients when they are for sale tend to have their SSDs ripped out by IT for data security, so then it's a hassle to go out and buy and extra SSD, compared to just buying a used laptop that already comes with display , keyboard, etc.
* https://tweakers.net/nieuws/80350/verkoop-goedkoop-arm-syste...
I'm in the market to replace my aging Intel NUCs, but RPi is still cheaper.
What moving parts do competitors have to be less mechanically reliable?
In fact, a NUC or used laptop would be even more reliable since you can replace NVME storage and RAM sticks. If your RPI ram goes bad you're shit out of luck.
>RPi will still have lower power consumption and is far more compact.
Not that big of on an issue in most home user cases as a home server, emulator or PC replacement. For industrial users where space, power usage and heat is limited, definitely.
>I'm in the market to replace my aging Intel NUCs, but RPi is still cheaper.
Cheaper if you ignore much lower performance and versatility vs a X86_X64 NUC as a home server.
I don't think I could a RPi as cheaply once parts and power supply etc are taken into account.
But it won't be as reliable, mostly motherboards won't last long.
The ticking timebomb lemons with reliability or design issues, will just die in the first 2-4 years like clockwork, but if they've already survived 6+ years without any faults, they'll most likely be reliable from then on as well.
Ok, let us say they ll last 4 more years, so 10 years total lifespan.
A PI would last a lot longer.
Why not 50 more years if we're just making up numbers? I still have an IBM thinkpad from 2006 in my possession with everything working. I also see people with Macbooks from the era with the light up apple logo in the wild and at DJs.
>A PI would last a lot longer.
Because you say so? OK, sure.
One might get lucky with such a laptop, but I won't count on it.
3-5 years of office use for a Pi. [1]
Sure, there's other numbers to find as well, but I'd suggest that they're pretty comparable in the way they handle environments. If one would fail, so would the other.
[0] https://pcpatching.com/2025/11/extend-your-pcs-life-how-long...
[1] https://raspberrypicase.com/how-long-does-a-raspberry-pi-las...
- I can boot it w/o having to learn about custom U-Boot implementations
- I, as a consumer or small business, can buy
- Can not only buy today but also still buy in 2 years
- Doesn't cost a small fortune
- Can be tugged away behind TVs and other small niches
https://www.gmktec.com/products/nucbox-g3-plus-enhanced-perf...
If ARM is a requirement, then RPi is your only option that I know of.
RISC-V is going through this exact same problem right now. All of the current implementations have terrible documentation, and tailoring Linux for each of these is proving to be difficult. All of these vendors include on-board devices that have terrible doc and software support.
Awful how? A SBC can take advantage of many software written from the dawn of x86.
As someone else mentioned: if the hat could efficiently be leveraged with the YOLO models on Frigate for a low volume camera setup that could be a nice niche use case for it.
Either way I hope the RPi org keeps dropping things like this and letting the users sort out the use cases with their dollars.
The Picos are great for the smaller stuff, new Pis are great for bigger stuff, and old Pis and Zeros are still available. They've innovated around their segment.
The AI stuff is just an expression of that. People are doing AI on Pi5s and this is just a way to make that better.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ai-hat-plus-2/
It's no more "made by a third party" than any other electronics device made by a contract manufacturer.
I don't think you will find anything on the market enabling you to create your own audiophile quality AMP, DAC, or AMP+DAC for a pretty attractive price except a Pi 3/4/5 with a HifiBerry (https://www.hifiberry.com/) HAT.
That said, more options at the (relatively speaking) low end of the AI hardware market probably isn't a bad thing. I'm not particularly an AI enthusiast generally, but if it is going to infest everything anyway, then at least I would like a decent ecosystem for running local models.
OTOH with ram prices being where they are and no signs of coming back down in the foreseeable future a second hand pi 4 may be a very wise choice.
Not true, you're thinking about earlier models.
Of course, Raspberry Pi just like everyone else has their custom patches, but at least to my knowledge you can use a straight Linux kernel and still have a running system.
I wouldn't dare suggest that. The RPi was never for everyone yet it turned out it was for many. It was small but powerful for the size, it was low power, it was extremely flexible, it had great software support, and last but not least, it was dirt cheap. There was nothing like that on the market.
They need to target a "minimum viable audience" with a unique value proposition otherwise they'll just Rube-Goldberg themselves into irrelevance. This hat is a convoluted way to change the parameters of an existing compromise and turn it into a different but equally difficult compromise. Worse performance, better efficiency, adds cost, and it doesn't differentiate itself from the competing Hailo-10H-based products that work with any system not just RPi (e.g. ASUS UGen300 USB AI Accelerator).
> the idea of miniaturising
If you aren't ditching the laptop you aren't miniaturizing, just splitting into discrete specialized components.
Almost nothing useful runs in 8.
This is the problem with this gen of “external AI boards” floating around. 8, 16, even 24 is not really enough to run much useful, and even then (ie. offloading to disk) they're so impractically slow.
Forget running a serious foundation model, or any kind of realtime thing.
The blunt reality is fast high memory GPU systems you actually need to self host are really really expensive.
These devices are more optics and dreams (“itd be great if…”) than practical hacker toys.
That said, perhaps there is a niche for slow LLM inference for non-interactive use.
For example, if you use LLMs to triage your emails in the background, you don't care about latency. You just need the throughput to be high enough to handle the load.
They seem very fast and I certainly want to use that kind of thing in my house and garden - spotting when foxes and cats arrive and dig up my compost pit, or if people come over when I'm away to water the plants etc.
[edit: I've just seen the updated version in Pimonori and it does claim usefulness for LLMs but also for VLMs and I suspect this is the best way to use it].
8GB RAM for AI on a Pi sounds underwhelming even from the headline
My impression so far was that the resulting models are unusably stupid, but maybe there are some specific tasks where they still perform acceptably?
The vision processing boost is notable, but not enough to justify the price over existing HATs. The lack of reliable mixed-mode functionality and sparse software support are significant red flags.
(This reply generated by an LLM smaller than 8GB, for ants, using the article and comment as context).
I buy a raspberry pi because I need a small workhorse - I understand adding RAM for local LLMs, but it would be like a raspberry pi with a GPU, why do i need it when a normal mini machine will have more ram, more compute capacity and better specs for cheaper?
I daresay they could charge more than a comparably specced computer (if they don't already) and they would still be a viable purchase.
Unless i'm missing something - which is where i'm like why not just buy a NUC with similiar RAM for far less.
