
Ask HN: Is Anyone Cloning the Raspberry Pi Zero? - tomcam
Like so many people, I&#x27;ve had difficulty obtaining a Raspberry Pi Zero. (Got one finally, thanks, Pi Hut!) It&#x27;s an open source design, right? Isn&#x27;t it easier to do a hardware startup these days, especially with no R&amp;D required? Why isn&#x27;t someone making a killing by cloning the Zero?
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schappim
>> Why isn't someone making a killing by cloning the Zero? Because at $5 it's
not profitable.

My company sells ~25-30% of the Raspberry Pis in Australia.

When we spoke to the manufacturer for our region they said they weren't
looking at manufacturing the Pi Zero V1.3 due to the economics. Their
inventory of the Pi Zero has also dried up (as they focused on the RPI 3 Model
B). When they did sell the the Pi Zero they sold it as a kit with marked up
micro HDMI and USB adaptors.

As @mmosta pointed out, the Raspberry Pi is heavily subsidised by sweetheart
deals from their manufacturers and component vendors.

This is all ok: The point of the Pi is to make computing accessible at a low
price, not to make money.

It will be interesting to see how the ecosystem as a whole plays out. It's
hard to tell. I haven't seen an unsubsidised/non-VC company put out a "cheap"
single board computer.

The Pi Zero's closest competition
([https://getchip.com/pages/chip](https://getchip.com/pages/chip)) has had a
round and I suspect is getting a nice deal from All Winner too!

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tomcam
Thanks for a fascinating and very informative reply. Answers so many
questions.

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mmosta
It really boils down to the deal the foundation has with Broadcom, even if you
could source the chip you would never be able to beat their unit price.

The "openness" is rather limited too, there are all manner of NDAs and minimal
order quantities associated with the parts in the BOM, nor are the gerbers
available. A real pain point for the bleeding-heart OSHW types.

~~~
tomcam
Well you just answered about 15 nagging questions I had. Thank you.

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TomWhitwell
I don't think that Raspberry Pi is open source hardware at all - the
schematics are public, the documentation is open, but I don't think the PCB
designs are.

~~~
tomcam
D'oh! Without access to the PCB designs it would be completely asinine even to
consider such a venture. Thanks.

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grizzles
Most businesses try to make a profit. In business, competing against a high
volume very low margin incumbent is pretty much #1 on the list of things you
should never ever do.

~~~
tomcam
Man, ain't that the truth. Any BOM I try to come up with doesn't get remotely
close to the Pi Zero's list price, but I don't know Shenzhen well enough to
understand if they could make it happen in quantities of, say, 10,000. But I'm
not a hardware guy.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
Why do you think that a hardware startup would do a better job of ramping up
production than the Pi people do now?

~~~
tomcam
Where did I say that?

