Sourcing Raspberry Pi in Bulk

Hi Evan, and welcome.

I can't answer your question about sourcing in bulk, but I would like to give you encouragement in your project.  The PRISM issue has been gaining much attention recently, but really the problems of privacy invasion and general loss of personal freedoms through service centralization have been getting worse over many years, and projects like Eben Moglen's FreedomBox and various privacy networks have been appearing to fight it.

Both Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black (BBB) have a price sufficiently low that decentralized solutions for social networking and for all other Internet services no longer have a significant price barrier.  Anything that encourages people to get out from under the centralized control at places like Facebook and Google+ and Twitter is a good thing, not only for them but for the health of society generally, because doing nothing just leads society ever closer to a corporation-led 1984-type scenario.

Where we're currently heading is the exact opposite of the IETF's Mission Statement, which encourages interoperability and massive scalability through decentralization and federation of Internet services.  Instead, the megacorps want complete centralization, block federation at every opportunity (Google recently blocked federation in their XMPP Chat), and continually create proprietary enclaves like app stores instead of defining interoperable services that anyone can federate.  The technical term for this is "bad".

I'm looking forward to seeing your solution, although I'd want to see it not on R-Pi but on BBB, as this board is in the same price niche but works better for networking.

All the best!

Morgaine.

Morgaine, thanks for the encouragement!

I think FreedomBox is a great project, but bigger in scope than what I'm thinking. I really want to keep it simple.

I'm shooting for a price point of about $100 or less, which I think RazPi + accessories (case, cables) can meet. BBB starts at $99 retail, which I think would put the device around $200. Possible, but it's more of an investment for people.    

You must have looked up the original BeagleBone from a year ago (now often referred to as "BeagleBone white"), not the new  BeagleBone Black.

BBB costs the same as Pi if you include SD storage and USB cable in the price of both.  (Pi comes without accessories, BBB comes with integrated eMMC and a USB lead.)

BBB has a nominal price of $45, but with the extras I mentioned included so it's easily in Pi's price niche.  I buy my BBBs for  £27.87 from CPC (UK).

The integrated eMMC will save you money in your application since you will not need to supply an SD card.  Its 2GB is easily enough for a Linux with pump.io, and the eMMC is at least twice as fast as an SD card so it'll work better.  In addition, the BBB's ARM Cortex-A8 is significantly faster than the Pi's ARM11, and the Ethernet NIC is native in BBB instead of sharing bandwidth over USB as on Pi, both of which give BBB better performance in a networked application.  Since there is also a microSD socket on the BBB, users are not disadvantaged since they can expand storage with their own card if they wish.

Morgaine: that's a great answer, thank you! I've reached out to CircuitCo to see what we can do.

Evan Prodromou wrote:

 

Morgaine: that's a great answer, thank you! I've reached out to CircuitCo to see what we can do.

Woohoo!

Btw, my first reply contains a couple of links to the BBB Discussion areas here in Element 14.  The BBB Discussion activity is split at the moment owing to some system changes at E14, but if you have questions about BBB then we can probably help at either of those places.  Or if the pump.io topic is common to BBB and Pi then here would do just as well.

I can certainly imagine that some people will already have a Pi or a BBB on which they'd like to run your kind of application image, and while it wouldn't add to your sales, it would certainly add activity and synergy to the pump.io community.  After all, it's not really about boards, but about independence.

Evan Prodromou wrote:

 

Morgaine: that's a great answer, thank you! I've reached out to CircuitCo to see what we can do.

Woohoo!

Btw, my first reply contains a couple of links to the BBB Discussion areas here in Element 14.  The BBB Discussion activity is split at the moment owing to some system changes at E14, but if you have questions about BBB then we can probably help at either of those places.  Or if the pump.io topic is common to BBB and Pi then here would do just as well.

I can certainly imagine that some people will already have a Pi or a BBB on which they'd like to run your kind of application image, and while it wouldn't add to your sales, it would certainly add activity and synergy to the pump.io community.  After all, it's not really about boards, but about independence.