The old adage “you win some you lose some” cropped up for me tonight as I lost out on a golden egg eBay auction. I had recently spotted some single board computers that I was interested in, and was keeping quiet on the chance I won them as I was wanting to do a surprise post at a later date for another project.
Unfortunately, I lost.
Basically I was searching some Raspberry PI Bundles on eBay. I was looking into building a computer cluster with something like Kubernetes, and wanted something to learn from and be powerful at the same time. I came across this eBay listing for some Raspberry PI 5. The summary on the auction was 25 x Raspberry PI 5 (16GB Models), that were all listed as damaged. Unknown condition
Now I thought to myself when I first spotted these, that RPI5-16GB are not only the latest models, but they’re also expensive due to semiconductor industry. In terms of retail price, a single Raspberry PI 5 – 16GB in working condition is around £100-£120 each. So this was potentially in the region of £2500-£3000 worth of product.
I was willing to take the risk, as experience with Raspberry PI is that they’re quite well built, so realistically there’s not much can go wrong so they are repairable. I thought sod it and put in a max bid of £300. Worst case I would lose £300 if all of them were trash, but it was an experience I wanted, as I had plans if possible to potentially repair them all and use them in a huge 24 node cluster (with 1 master). The potential for the experiments would be unreal. They use a Broadcom BC2712 Semiconductor which is 4 core each. So it’s potentially 96 cores of processing power with 384GB of RAM available to the project.
Now I did miss out on this golden egg. I didn’t want to spend money, but increased my max bid for the auction to £625 (approx 25% of its retail value). As potentially every single one could be irreperable, worst case I’d lose £600. If not, could have potentially broken even if I was lucky and could repair some.
It didn’t go to plan unfortunately, I was outbid in usual eBay fashion by someone who put in a higher bid. In usual fashion though, the auction went from £270 – £500 in the space of 2 mins. Whilst it’s not the end of the world, it would have been amazing to win that auction (for me personally). As there’s some large scale projects I want to experiement with (one of them being factoring RSA-2048), an impossible challenge by itself. I do however like challenges. You never know though, I may get a second chance offer since I was the next highest bidder
I’ve saved the seller anyway on eBay as there’s possibility there may be more things appear at a later date.
You win some, you lose some.
