Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi 5's custom I/O chip, the RP1, is the result of $15M in investment over seven years. It unlocks far more data and storage capabilities in the single-board platform. (credit: Raspberry Pi)

Nearly everything on the Raspberry Pi 5 has improved over the 4 model, particularly the way you can buy it. In a first for the single-board company, the 5 is available for preorder today from approved resellers , before it's generally available by the end of October.

Perhaps most importantly, the 5 is being prioritized for individual buyers rather than commercial partners.

"We’re incredibly grateful to the community of makers and hackers who make Raspberry Pi what it is; you’ve been extraordinarily patient throughout the supply chain issues that have made our work so challenging over the last couple of years," writes Raspberry Pi founder and CEO Eben Upton. "We’d like to thank you: we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry."

Enlarge / Pis at the factory. (credit: Raspberry Pi)

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton has been saying for months that 2023 would be a "recovery year" for Raspberry Pi supply—the single-board computer, once known for its easy availability and affordability, has been hit with supply shortages for years. Hundreds of thousands of Pi boards were still being manufactured every month, but many were going to commercial buyers rather than retailers and end users.

More recently, those manufacturing numbers have climbed from 400,000 monthly units to 600,000 to 800,000 to 1 million , a level that Upton says can be sustained "for as long as is necessary to clear our remaining customer backlogs and return to free availability."

We're now seeing very early signs that supply is returning to normal, at least for some Pi models. UK-based Pi reseller Pimoroni announced today that it was lifting some purchase limitations on 2GB and 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 boards and Pi Zero W boards (not, apparently, the more recent Pi Zero 2 W ). The rpilocator stock tracker account has also noted that its number of automated stock alerts has decreased recently "because Pis are staying in stock longer," noting that Pimoroni and The Pi Hut had (and still have) multiple Pi 4 variants in stock.

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B isn't in-stock at any official Pi resellers as of this writing. (credit: Getty Images)

There will be a 1 million unit stock of Raspberry Pi products available in the month of July and every month onward until consumer backlogs are cleared, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton told hobbyists in a recent community newsletter.

As reported by Tom's Hardware on Thursday, the newsletter, said to be an "update from Eben" (screenshot via Tom's Hardware here ), promises to assuage customer demand after small businesses were favored over individual consumers during the pandemic-fueled silicon shortage.

Upton's message reportedly reads:

Enlarge / It's hard to recover from a shortage, especially when buyers take on stockpiling habits, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton said in a recent interview. But the British company is on track to return some stock to individual buyers. (credit: Raspberry Pi)

Having to make the pandemic-pressure choice to either disappoint hobbyists and educators or let small businesses built on his company's platform falter was "the single hardest decision I've had to make in my business career," Raspberry Pi co-founder and CEO Eben Upton says in a new video interview .

Jeff Geerling, having flown to Raspberry Pi's headquarters in Cambridge, England, with his supporters' backing, digs in on Upton's "Supply chain update" from December 2022. Upton said then that by the third quarter of 2023, "hundreds of thousands" of mainstream Pi units should be available, with Zero units, then 3 and 3B models, then 4.

Upton told Geerling that "we are where we said we'd be in December," with a "lousy first quarter" of 750,000-800,000 units produced due to shifting production for the Christmas period. But now real progress on backlog-filling and availability is being made. Upton expects to move 2 million Pis in the second quarter, then "unconstrained" third and fourth quarters of 2023.

Enlarge / Messaging in the front, GPIO playground in the back (classic yellow/silver battery included, but not shown). (credit: Beepberry/Beeper/SQFMI)

Some people, for whatever reason, don't always love having their messages arrive on the same device that's also their bank, their news source, their subway fare, and their camera. For those people—and for those who just love a bizarre little computer—Eric Migicovsky has "a little side project" for you: Beepberry .

Beepberry is the fusion of a backlit BlackBerry Classic keyboard (with the logo button and all) and mini-touchpad, a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and a Sharp Memory LCD 400x240 screen—the kind of e-paper e-paper-like screen you'd commonly see on programming calculators. It's meant to be used with Beeper , the all-in-one chat service that can also relay SMS, including iMessage (typically through signing in to a Mac server remotely; more on that in Beeper's FAQ ). It's available now for preorder for $99 if you want a Pi Zero W included and for $79 if you already have one you're willing to fuse in. You'll also need an SD card.

All the nifty stuff accessible on this $80/$100 devkit device. (credit: Beepberry/Beeper/SQFMI)

In a Twitter thread , Migicovsky, co-founder of Beeper and creator of the pioneering Pebble smartwatch , wrote that he wanted a "weekend device" that kept him in touch but didn't lead him into typical smartphone distractions. " I imagined a tiny, hackable e-paper screen with a physical keyboard, powered by a Raspberry Pi, useful to chat around my home…and pretty much nothing else," Migicovsky tweeted .

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

David Hamp-Gonsalves had two things quite a few people have these days: old phones lying around and a slowly building desire to get another Raspberry Pi for a quirky personal project.

The project this time was a personal music streaming server (detailed in full on GitHub ). While Pi inventories are slowly improving , they're still not quite what they were, as a glance at rpilocator shows . What is far more readily available is the old Samsung Galaxy S7 phone in your drawer. Hamp-Gonsalves had one with a broken charging port, and a friend had another one with a bad battery, and one transplant later, he had a test model.

You can read David's full post for the details (which we first saw at Hackaday ). The gist is that he tried three solutions, with varying degrees of fiddling and success, to get the Navidrome personal music service running:

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 variants. Green are standard, black are infrared. And it's implied that this photo is showing off some of the HDR prowess of the new Camera Module 3 itself. (credit: Raspberry Pi)

Raspberry Pis will soon have many more camera-based projects available to them, as the newest Camera Module from the single-board computer maker allows for autofocus, high dynamic range, lower-light photos, and more.

The Camera Module 3 , starting at $25, lets you take "crisp images of objects from around 5cm out to infinity," Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton wrote in a blog post announcement . Standard field-of-view (FoV) camera modules cost $25, while wider-FoV models are $35 for the "more complex and expensive optical stack."

The sensor comes from Sony and uses a back-illuminated IMX708 that provides a 12-megapixel resolution, larger (1.40μm) pixels, and support for HDR. Among other improvements from the Camera Module 2 released in 2016, this model allows for finer image details, 16:9 HD video, and better low-light sensitivity. The standard models capture a 66-degree field of view, similar to the previous module's 62. The wide-FoV models capture 102 degrees at a slightly lower angular resolution but allow for new uses, including digital panning.

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton said in a recent interview that next year is a time for Raspberry Pi, and the whole industry, to recover from the supply chain problems of the past two years. (credit: Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Few who have tried to buy a Raspberry Pi in the last year may be shocked, but Raspberry Pi's CEO has an update on the next Raspberry Pi model: it's not arriving next year.

In an interview with ExplainingComputers , Eben Upton reviews the supply pressures that have impacted the single-board computers' availability. Eighteen months into "restrained availability" of the device, Upton says the company is positioned to set aside hundreds of thousands of units for retail customers . He notes that the companies primarily taking up the existing supply of Pi units are not gigantic companies but "mom-and-pop operations" that have based their hardware products on the Pi platform and buy a few hundred Pis for their needs.

"We don't want people to get on a waiting list," Upton tells ExplainingComputuers. "We want people to wake up in the morning, want a Raspberry Pi, then get one at 9 am the next morning."