Last December we wrote about the mysterious shortage of BeagleBone Blacks. Many of you have asked us for an update so here it is:
Sorry, the [non] update is that the world is still short of BeagleBone Blacks. Here's a picture of how the stock moved on Octopart over the past few months:
There was a small blip in January when Avnet had over 500 units in stock, and another more recently mostly coming from Chip1Stop, but it looks like hungry hackers quickly descended upon them.
Jason Kridner, the wonderful community evangelist for BeagleBoard tells us that over 140,225 units of BeagleBone Black have been shipped (source):
Where did they all go?!
Hypotheses:
- We're not showing the whole picture. Octopart lists over 200 distributors, 10 of which sell BeagleBone Black - but we may be missing some. (If you know who they are, please tell us.)
- They're just flying off the shelves! Georgia Tech's immensely popular Control of Mobile Robots MOOC ran from January to March, and some subset of the 30,000 sign-ups would have been hunting for BeagleBone Blacks to follow along. (More on that in this blog by Rowland O'Flaherty, who managed the hardware component of the class). We sample historical stock data periodically, so it's just possible that if a distributor had it in stock for a very brief period (like Avnet did in January) we might have missed capturing it at all.
- Some one learned a lot from Control of Mobile Robots and is hoarding the world's supply of BeagleBone Blacks for a nefarious army of mobile robots.
If you're the mastermind behind #3, please contact us and let us know what your plans are so we can help source some of the other parts. If you're a harmless hardware hacker, our friends at Adafruit still appear to have a few in stock right now so you better go get one while they last.
Update: And Adafruit is out. Read their excellent blog giving more context around the shortages and why they're only offering one unit at a time.
Update II: The trusty team at Makezine tells us that a BeagleBone Black clone is now on the market! Before you get too excited, it looks like it's already out of stock, just shy of 24 hours after the news. COME ON, robot overlords! Give the rest of us a break.