
Ask HN: Where to find raspberry Pi zero or alternative under $15 - bedros
I need about five for a diy project at home, but every where I look online you can order only one per customer, with $10 shipping per unit
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zapt02
Unfortunately the CHIP ($9) hasn't shipped for a couple of months while they
revamp their CPU. I have a few and they truly are exceptional hardware and
probably better than the Zero for your needs due to onboard wifi, bluetooth
and 4GB of storage.

[https://getchip.com/pages/chip](https://getchip.com/pages/chip)

Its big brother CHIP Pro ($16) can be ordered in any quantity but you will
need to solder your own headers. Depending on what you want to do it might be
a good fit:

[https://getchip.com/pages/chippro](https://getchip.com/pages/chippro)

Pine also has a $15 board that seems to be shipping:

[https://www.pine64.org/?product=pine-a64-board](https://www.pine64.org/?product=pine-a64-board)

~~~
jakobegger
I found the CHIP to be a bit unreliable (eg. only one of half a dozen Micro
USB cables I have works for flashing)

Then again, I don’t have a lot of experience with these DIY things, maybe
random issues with everything are just to be expected.

~~~
zapt02
Flashing can be a bit iffy, it being made as a Chrome extension is a weird
choice. I never had any big issues with flashing, and once the device is
running, I find it more stable than any of the Pis that I have, as the Pis
always tend to get a corrupted filesystem within 6-12 months. They can blame
SD all they want, there's something wrong with the chipset.

------
brookish
I have had really good luck with these boards. [http://nanopi.io/nanopi-neo-
air.html](http://nanopi.io/nanopi-neo-air.html)

$20 but they do not need a permanent SD card and they need a heat sink. The
Allwinner CPU's seem to get much hotter than the Raspi Broadcoms. The issues I
have experienced really have been nuances of the Linux distros but very
workable.

~~~
bedros
they look great, do they have usable I2C, GPIO libs with support for python of
I'm assuming they support some version of ubuntu/debian

------
bigiain
While I understand the Pi Foundations "one per order/customer" rule - I share
your frustration. There's a bunch of ideas I've got where 10 or so Pi Zeros
would be both useful and affordable @ $5 ea or even $10 for the ZeroW, but I
just can't buy them like that...

I wanted to make a "real working" diagram of our standard AWS platform as a
wall chart - with 3 ELB load balancers, 5 autoscaling ec2 instances (3
"active" and two "spares"), and 3 "multi-az" RDS db servers - each represented
by a Pi Zero, with ws2811 led strip running between them representing the
network which lights up animating packet/data flow. It'd have big red
killswitches next to everything, so you can push buttons to kill off bits of
infrasructure and visualise how the platform responds (with the spare ec2
instances autoscaling in to replace dead ones, ELB and RDS traffic auto-
rerouting). And I'd use this to run our "standard" backend, so people could
connect with their phone (with a browser or test app) and "see" their own
network traffic and watch how it still works even if you kill any 2 and up to
8 different parts in the right combination.

I think that'd be a really useful way to demonstrate to non-technical
stakeholders why if they want better response times that "we'll get to that
Monday morning" when something breaks after 5pm on a Friday - I'm going to
charge them _way_ more to support their site if it's running on a $5 or $10
per month VPS than if they spend $120/month or so on AWS to host it.

(Oh, and I second zapt02's recommendation for the NextThing CHIP - I've got
half a dozen of those, and they're working out really well in other projects -
but I've also got another 5 on order and have been waiting several month for
em...)

