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The mission of the Raspberry Pi foundation is to provide cost-effective computers for use in education. I suspect the foundation's non-profit status or at least

The mission of the Raspberry Pi foundation is to provide cost-effective computers for use in education. I suspect the foundation's non-profit status or at least community goodwill would be threatened if they decided to design and market hardware to industry. Moreover, Raspberry Pis were never intended to be used in industry, and obviously are not designed as such. They _happen_ to work in many use cases, yes, but they lack so much: reliability engineering, failure testing, ruggedness requirements, industry certifications, QA, I could go on. And, do you really want to be the guy who gets the call because failure of a $35 part stopped the production line at 2 a.m.? There is no lack of industrial computing gear on the market, even stuff that runs Linux. It will cost an order of magnitude more for the same computing power, but it is more rugged, integrates well with existing systems, and is sold by a vendor that you can actually get on the phone and hold accountable for some things. And most importantly, putting it into production probably won't get you fired.

dheera 7y ago
> but they lack so much: reliability engineering, failure testing, ruggedness requirements, industry certifications, QA, I could go on. Sometimes you don't need all that stuff. Sometimes it's as simple as using a neural net to count the number of people in a room at a given time, or get a sensor to publish data online, or provide a networking shim for a RS232 device that fits in a small space. There are also many use cases where having 10 working backup copies of a $35 device on a shelf that can be swapped in under a minute is a much better reliability guarantee than 1 $2000 industrial certified, QA certified, FDA approved, UL listed, GDPR compliant device whose tech support is in some other timezone, takes holidays, and isn't 24/7. It's just that the easiest thing that can fail on a raspberry pi in my experience is the stupid micro-B/USB-C connector, so fixing that, which would cost pennies to put a slightly more rugged molex or other connector on the PCB, would be a really nice addition. The rest of the Pi is actually pretty reliable in my experience. > stopped the production line at 2 a.m.? Production lines aren't the only use case for Raspberry Pis in industry. Many production lines also don't run at 2am.

dheera 7y ago

> but they lack so much: reliability engineering, failure testing, ruggedness requirements, industry certifications, QA, I could go on. Sometimes you don't need all that stuff. Sometimes it's as simple as using a neural net to count the number of people in a room at a given time, or get a sensor to publish data online, or provide a networking shim for a RS232 device that fits in a small space. There are also many use cases where having 10 working backup copies of a $35 device on a shelf that can be swapped in under a minute is a much better reliability guarantee than 1 $2000 industrial certified, QA certified, FDA approved, UL listed, GDPR compliant device whose tech support is in some other timezone, takes holidays, and isn't 24/7. It's just that the easiest thing that can fail on a raspberry pi in my experience is the stupid micro-B/USB-C connector, so fixing that, which would cost pennies to put a slightly more rugged molex or other connector on the PCB, would be a really nice addition. The rest of the Pi is actually pretty reliable in my experience. > stopped the production line at 2 a.m.? Production lines aren't the only use case for Raspberry Pis in industry. Many production lines also don't run at 2am.