Raspberry Pi 4 availability

[awawa-dev]

Source: https://rpilocator.com/?instock&cat=PI4

It seems that the situation with the availability of Rpi4 has improved especially in Europe (and Rpi4 are now arriving in the US). It is possible, however, that the Raspberry Pi Foundation made a few mistakes earlier, the situation on the market has changed perhaps irreversibly and the unavailability of these units at least recently was not due to the unavailability of components but focusing on commercial customers at the expense of the community.

The choice between Rpi4 and thin clients, e.g. from Dell or HP, you have to decide for yourself because they often offer a similar power consumption under load, a much faster processor and more capabilities, a similar price (for used units) and HyperHDR does not require the presence of GPIO because it can be replaced with many other cheap external LED controllers, some of which have built-in 3.3v to 5v level shifter.

Raspberry Pi 4 is already a 4-year-old design, which has not undergone any innovative changes during this time, and the price has increased significantly, but it still offers very good support for USB3.0 which is crucial to ensure high performance if we use USB3.0 video grabber.

⚠️ Note that the latest 1.5 revision of the Raspberry Pi 4 uses the infamous PMIC DA9090, which cannot be replaced in case of damage due to lack of spare parts. Always use the original dedicated Raspberry Pi 4 usb-c power supply (under no circumstances power the Rpi via GPIO) and minimize the risk of shorting the GPIO pins to 5V by using an external LED driver (e.g. HyperSerialPico, preferably rp2040 version with built-in level shifter)⚠️