So in the meantime while I’m waiting for any news regarding the status of my order, I’ve made some purchases. I already have a monitor, spare mouse and keyboard lying around, so I decided to buy Raspberry Pi 5 and as a fun little exercise I wanted to find out if I could get comparable bang for my buck. Do keep in mind that the purchases were made in my local currency, and at the time of writing the exchange rate is 1 USD = 23.082 CZK
So my order breaks down as follows:
| Item | Price in CZK | Price in USD |
|---|---|---|
| uConsole Matte Black with CM4 104000 Lite | 4,362.50 Kč | $189.00 |
| 4G cellular module | 1,154.10 Kč | $50.00 |
| Shipping | 1,846.56 Kč | $80.00 |
| TOTAL: | 7,363.16 Kč | $319.00 |
This pretty much sets the budget right? I could increase it by adding the cost of batteries, but since those are supplied by third party and not ClockworkPi, and since I haven’t purchased those yet, I’ll exclude them for now. I placed my order in May 27th so the exchange rate might also offset the budget slightly.
What I should get is a neat little device with it’s own builtin keyboard, a 1280x720 display, that offers portability and enough power to do some retro gaming/game development on the go.
So with that in mind, I went ahead and visited my local e-shop that specializes on raspberry pi hardware. The main reason is that this shop ships almost immediately as long as the item is in stock, and usually arrives within 2 business days, bonus points for shipping costs being practically non-existent (at least they don’t specify that in my receipt which leads me to believe the shop raises the price of the items slightly instead).
So here’s what I got:
| Item | Price in CZK | Converted Price in USD |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 5 kit (8GB RAM) + Argon ONE case V3 + 32GB microSD | 3,375.00 Kč | $146.22 |
| HDMI to DVI-D cable | 139.00 Kč | $6.02 |
| Argon BLSTR DAC with soundcard with ground loop isolator | 818.00 Kč | $35.44 |
| Samsung 980 NVMe M.2 SSD 1TB | 2,299.00 Kč | $99.60 |
| Argon ONE V3 M.2 adapter expansion for NVMe | 569.00 Kč | $24.65 |
| TOTAL: | 7200.00 Kč | $311.93 |
Now there are things that I didn’t include in this calculation - mainly the peripherals such as monitor - I already have one on my desktop and it happens to have spare DVI-D port. Also I have wireless keyboard&mouse lying around since I recently “upgraded” my desktop with mechanical keyboard and fancier mouse - these could arguably exceed the budget by at least another $100.
What I’ve got? Well, suprisingly I did get rather decent desktop computer for roughly the same price - the Argon ONE case especially is very well designed - Made of Aluminium, features builtin fan, power button. Unfortunately in order for sound to work, you either need to drill a hole, or buy the mentioned BLSTR DAC expansion board. The NVMe expansion is also nice bonus as it extends the storage space way beyond the 32GB of the MicroSD card. Okay so apparently 1024 GB microSDXC cards exist. Which is kinda mindblowing Samsung MB-MC1T0SA/EU is a Class 10 card. How the hell did they manage to cram so much data into such tiny thing is beyond me… Technological marvels aside, Even a Class 10 can not compete with writing/reading speeds of NVMe M.2 SSD, and I’d personally question the reliability and longetivity of MicroSD card…
I’m running the vanilla Raspberry Pi OS on this thing with Nix package manager for packages that aren’t available in official repos - I’m considering switching to NixOS later down the line, but I’m not sure whether programs and documents are also available in other systems. Guess that’s another fun project for the next few months.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk 
