Raspberry Pi ... What's happening?

[Yves Martin]

Hi,

I've ordered 6 months ago 2 Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB, and they are still BO, and the price triple since! It looks like, it becomes very difficult to get this board now at a reasonable price.

What model of motherboard with how much memory on it, do you suggest for weewx? I have here an old version (Raspberry Pi 2B 1GB) and it works well but the board is 4-5 years old. It is time to upgrade. What is your suggestion?

Ref : https://ymartin.com/meteo/about.html

PS: I'm using an old version of weewx (v3.9.2), and I want to add a AirQuality device to it, so I need to upgrade... 

Regards,

YMartin.com/meteo

[David Lang]

when covid hit, the Pi foundation made the mistake of thinking that demand would
drop, and so they reduced their fab orders (and then the fabs had outages,
causing the chip shortages)

Instead, demand spiked, and they have spent the last couple of years scrambling
to re-establish volume production. They opted to prioritize business bulk
purchases over retail use, and even then were in the odd position of trying to
sell as few to each buisiness as they could (to be able to provide a steady
supply to all their corporate buyers).

The supply has started to recover, and they expect full recovery in the last
half of 2023 (and have put off any Pi5 development until 2024)

As for what you want to use, if the Pi 2 1G was happy running it, it's still
supported with software updates, so there's not a big reason to replace it. But
if you want to replace it, anything new with similar specs will do the job.

David Lang

On Wed, 29 Mar 2023, Yves Martin wrote:

> Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2023 07:24:44 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Yves Martin <ve2...@gmail.com>
> Reply-To: weewx...@googlegroups.com
> To: weewx-user <weewx...@googlegroups.com>
> Subject: [weewx-user] Raspberry Pi ... What's happening?

>
> Hi,
>
> I've ordered 6 months ago 2 Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB, and they are still BO, and
> the price triple since! It looks like, it becomes very difficult to get
> this board now at a reasonable price.
>
> What model of motherboard with how much memory on it, do you suggest for
> weewx? I have here an old version (Raspberry Pi 2B 1GB) and it works well
> but the board is 4-5 years old. It is time to upgrade. What is your
> suggestion?
>
> Ref : https://ymartin.com/meteo/about.html
>

> *PS: I'm using an old version of weewx (v3.9.2), and I want to add a
> AirQuality device to it, so I need to upgrade... *
>
> Regards,
>
> YMartin.com/meteo
>
>

[Greg Troxel]

Yves Martin <ve2...@gmail.com> writes:

> What model of motherboard with how much memory on it, do you suggest for
> weewx? I have here an old version (Raspberry Pi 2B 1GB) and it works well
> but the board is 4-5 years old. It is time to upgrade. What is your
> suggestion?

I am using a 3B with 1 GB of RAM, and it works fine. 4-5 years is just
not that old for a computer. If it's reliable, and you aren't running
out of cpu cycles, there's no need to change anything. If anything, you
might want to use a USB SSD as your system and data disk.

Also look at low-power server-type x86 boards. Possibilities include
pcengines apu2 and protectli.

[Peter Fletcher]

I would endorse the 'if it aint broke, don't replace it' approach. I have a 1 GB 3B running the latest version of weewx and a number of other services for home control, and there would still be plenty of spare capacity if I could think of something else I wanted to do with it. An 8GB 4B would be extreme overkill unless you have some other specific reasons for needing a Pi with all that power.

[Yves Martin]

Hi,

Thank you for all these point of view and advices.

Because I am using an old kernel of Linux and Python, I have to upgrade the OS to be able to use the last version of WeeWx and add my Air Quality sensor (supported now!) and also the size of my micro-SD (from 16GB to 32...).

WeeWx works fine since 2014 and I hope this will continue. This soft is a rock!

I will continue with my actual board because it works fine and from your messages, I don't need to change this.

Regards,

YMartin.com/meteo

[vince]

Which Air Quality sensor do you have that is 'supported now', and why do you think you need to upgrade your os or kernel ?   Weewx just requires a minimum python version, and you can always compile python3 on an old os as needed.