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Raspberry Pi is for hacking. It's not really a commercial platform. You can technically use it as such, but it's more cost-effective to design your own boards a

Raspberry Pi is for hacking. It's not really a commercial platform. You can technically use it as such, but it's more cost-effective to design your own boards at that point.

alanfranzoni 8y ago
If you've got enough users. I argue that, for a (possibly initial) batch of less than 1000/2000 boards, a rpi (either the zerow, or the 3) are simply great.
fhood 8y ago
Meh. That is true if you are selling thousands or more of an item, but for small companies, custom boards can be a nightmare. I worked for a company once that put literally two full weeks of debugging into a problem caused by a flaky diode batch.
- nottorp 8y ago
  I'll raise you two full weeks of debugging and then the project got canceled because redesigning the board was needed and it was too expensive ;) I'm doing quite a few of low volume (mostly bussiness/industrial helpers) arm linux projects on Pis now. Some of them stay on Pis, if rebooting the board every 2 hours is feasible, some move to custom boards after the prototyping is done. Still, it's very nice to have an off the shelf documented board to start stuff on.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
    What issues have you seen that require a 2-hour reboot? Stability was one of my concerns with my last Pi project, so during development I basically never powered it off or rebooted (except to test power-up behavior) so I could see if I encountered any problems. No problems came up, but others' experiences are always good to learn from.
    - nottorp 8y ago
      Was it a project in a climate controlled area, like your home? Mine were in a factory, and after a while the stuff that they were supposed to connect to over USB simply vanished. A reboot (of just the Pi, not the other device) fixed it. So we just scheduled a reboot in 2 hours when the Pi started up.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
        More or less: at home, but in a basement room with temperature swings. For the application it was fine: it was going to be used in a temp controlled environment anyway. My current project I'm thinking of using BeagleBone because I trust their temperature range specs. Is it possible your Pi was suspending USB as part of power management? I've had that problem with some other devices.
    - fhood 8y ago
      In my stuff we never did a two hour reboot, but we did do a daily one. Sometimes you just run into memory leaks some of which aren't even your fault.
      - nottorp 8y ago
        I don't know if they needed a two hour reboot, but the customer wanted to be sure. For sure they stopped seeing usb devices after less than 24 hours. It helped that they were just reading and transmitting some values every 10 minutes or so, the reboot didn't hinder that.
stefan_ 8y ago
That's true for the Arduinos of the world. But you need very very high volume to make designing a PCB with a complex BGA like the Pi worth your while. The industry standard is to use a system on module, and there are plenty of those from a long list of manufacturers. The Pi foundation has one too, what they call compute module.
HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
Depends. I shipped an RPi-based project a few months ago that was a one-off. Could have been done with Arduino, but it was far easier (read: less expensive to develop) on a Pi because it needed a touchscreen UI. I'm unlikely to ever build more than one more unit like it. I'm currently quoting a design I'd like to use the Pi on because it will need to be connected to WiFi or Ethernet and I doubt I will build more than 20 or so. No way in hell I could make back the board design cost at that quantity. Were it not for the networking, it wouldn't even need a CPU! RPi and BeagleBone hit a sweet spot for a certain type & quantity of designs that nothing else (of that popularity) meets.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  For wifi-connected IoT thing I really like the ESP8266 chip. You can get it in a small form-factor board such as the "Wemos Mini D1" for approximately €3.0. Programmable via the arduino-studio, widely-supported, and very reliable. I've built a bunch of projects with them, and couldn't be happier.
- douglaswlance 8y ago
  Those aren't commercial products by colloquial definition. Sure you made money, but they're not up for sale with thousands of customers.

Raspberry Pi is for hacking. It's not really a commercial platform. You can technically use it as such, but it's more cost-effective to design your own boards at that point.

alanfranzoni 8y ago

If you've got enough users. I argue that, for a (possibly initial) batch of less than 1000/2000 boards, a rpi (either the zerow, or the 3) are simply great.

fhood 8y ago

Meh. That is true if you are selling thousands or more of an item, but for small companies, custom boards can be a nightmare. I worked for a company once that put literally two full weeks of debugging into a problem caused by a flaky diode batch.

nottorp 8y ago
I'll raise you two full weeks of debugging and then the project got canceled because redesigning the board was needed and it was too expensive ;) I'm doing quite a few of low volume (mostly bussiness/industrial helpers) arm linux projects on Pis now. Some of them stay on Pis, if rebooting the board every 2 hours is feasible, some move to custom boards after the prototyping is done. Still, it's very nice to have an off the shelf documented board to start stuff on.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  What issues have you seen that require a 2-hour reboot? Stability was one of my concerns with my last Pi project, so during development I basically never powered it off or rebooted (except to test power-up behavior) so I could see if I encountered any problems. No problems came up, but others' experiences are always good to learn from.
  - nottorp 8y ago
    Was it a project in a climate controlled area, like your home? Mine were in a factory, and after a while the stuff that they were supposed to connect to over USB simply vanished. A reboot (of just the Pi, not the other device) fixed it. So we just scheduled a reboot in 2 hours when the Pi started up.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
      More or less: at home, but in a basement room with temperature swings. For the application it was fine: it was going to be used in a temp controlled environment anyway. My current project I'm thinking of using BeagleBone because I trust their temperature range specs. Is it possible your Pi was suspending USB as part of power management? I've had that problem with some other devices.
  - fhood 8y ago
    In my stuff we never did a two hour reboot, but we did do a daily one. Sometimes you just run into memory leaks some of which aren't even your fault.
    - nottorp 8y ago
      I don't know if they needed a two hour reboot, but the customer wanted to be sure. For sure they stopped seeing usb devices after less than 24 hours. It helped that they were just reading and transmitting some values every 10 minutes or so, the reboot didn't hinder that.

stefan_ 8y ago

That's true for the Arduinos of the world. But you need very very high volume to make designing a PCB with a complex BGA like the Pi worth your while. The industry standard is to use a system on module, and there are plenty of those from a long list of manufacturers. The Pi foundation has one too, what they call compute module.

HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago

Depends. I shipped an RPi-based project a few months ago that was a one-off. Could have been done with Arduino, but it was far easier (read: less expensive to develop) on a Pi because it needed a touchscreen UI. I'm unlikely to ever build more than one more unit like it. I'm currently quoting a design I'd like to use the Pi on because it will need to be connected to WiFi or Ethernet and I doubt I will build more than 20 or so. No way in hell I could make back the board design cost at that quantity. Were it not for the networking, it wouldn't even need a CPU! RPi and BeagleBone hit a sweet spot for a certain type & quantity of designs that nothing else (of that popularity) meets.

stevekemp 8y ago
For wifi-connected IoT thing I really like the ESP8266 chip. You can get it in a small form-factor board such as the "Wemos Mini D1" for approximately €3.0. Programmable via the arduino-studio, widely-supported, and very reliable. I've built a bunch of projects with them, and couldn't be happier.
douglaswlance 8y ago
Those aren't commercial products by colloquial definition. Sure you made money, but they're not up for sale with thousands of customers.