10 ms·

Absolutely. As an embedded engineer, 90% of ARM boards (including and especially the popular Raspberry Pi) are complete dogshit. Barely (or not) functional, abs

Absolutely. As an embedded engineer, 90% of ARM boards (including and especially the popular Raspberry Pi) are complete dogshit. Barely (or not) functional, absurd design decisions, etc. A hilarious example - to deal with the poor reliability of the RPi, you might think to use its watchdog timer to reset the device if it locks up. But guess what? The WDT in the crappy Broadcom chip on the RPi doesn't work! It's supposed to be there, and it's exposed to the kernel, but it doesn't actually do anything.

my123 6y ago
There are reliable choices like boards using SoMs (from NXP or NVIDIA), or even the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. For example the Honeycomb LX2K at https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-workstation/ https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-works... or the NVIDIA Jetsons at https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded-computing https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded-computing. Those options have the advantage of using SoMs so that you can customise the boards for a higher-volume run too. The regular RPi on that point isn't exactly ideal, but depending on the use might be quite _okay_.
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  Here in Germany, Toradex ARM SoMs are quite popular for industrial applications. The hardware is reliable and the software for it (Windows whatever CE is called now and Linux BSPs for Yocto) is pretty good on release and well maintained for many years afterwards. The modules are not exactly cheap for the performance but also not super expensive, generally in the 50-150€ range.
  - varjag 6y ago
    Variscite has a great line-up of NXP based SoMs, at $25 and up. Quality BSPs and good support as well.
qz2 6y ago
Not sure why you’re downvoted. The Pi boards are terrible and the majority of the market objective appears to be trying to undercut them. Commercial embedded stuff is better but not without warts. A former colleague of mine sent me a rant a couple of weeks about one which I won’t name, but the board vendor couldn’t even get a Linux kernel to boot reliably on it when it was shipping to customers.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > The Pi boards are terrible Engineers and power users tend to forget that the Raspberry Pi wasn't designed for them. The target market for the Raspberry Pi doesn't care about reading the SoC datasheet or connecting the latest NVMe drive that costs several times more than the SBC. They just want a cheap, simple board that lets them start learning and tinkering with ample resources available on the internet. The $35 Raspberry Pi excels in this regard.
- dmos62 6y ago
  > one which I won’t name, but the board vendor couldn’t even get a Linux kernel to boot reliably on it when it was shipping to customers Please do! It would be very good to know that your vendor is doing that.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    The only reason an engineer wouldn't want to tell us who the vendor is, is if the vendor is their employer. ;)
    - loeg 6y ago
      Or any other form of NDA, which are extremely common in this space.
    - qz2 6y ago
      No not at all. NDA.
      - 6y ago
ckocagil 6y ago
Come on, you need to at least read the datasheet and errata of the Broadcom SoC. Oh... There isn't one... Unless you're purchasing millions of chips from them and signing an NDA. Seriously, why the hacker community even touches the RPi is beyond me. It is a ridiculously closed product.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Yeah RPi is a great toy but you should treat it like a chemistry set. Use it as a tool for learning but don’t build a product with it. The difference between a $24 board and a $200 board is often the level of support you get. The boards I’ve used in the past all have manuals down to the chip and I won’t touch anything that doesn’t.
  - whizzter 6y ago
    And with a 8x smaller price it's perfect for throw-away units. I've heard of people who use it for projects were you place things out in the environment where you really have no control over vandalism, animals,etc so just replacing a cheap unit here or there isn't a big deal.
  - detaro 6y ago
    On the other hand, a surprising number of companies decide they don't need that kind of dcoumentation and just ship Pis, and that often works fine too. Not for things with deep hardware integration, and not for mass-scale, but plenty things just want "linux in a box with some simple peripherals".
    - banana_giraffe 6y ago
      As the person tasked with debugging one of those "linux in a box with some simple peripherals", I'm not even 100% convinced they sell them with more than the intent of the consumer turning it on once, playing with for a few minutes, then forgetting it exists.
      - 6y ago
turbinerneiter 6y ago
Do you have any recommendations about good stuff?
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  Seconded. I have a rpi4 for a small home-automation project that I haven't really started. If anyone knows of an alternative that's in the $100 (US) price range, runs linux, and will make my life easier, I'm grateful for suggestions. Oh, and it needs to play nicely with a USB-to-ZWave dongle and one of the major open-source home-automation packages that can do lighting controls. EDIT: I forgot to mention that I want it to reside in a closet that has very little ventilation. So I'd be leery of deploying a cheap used x86 system, even if the price way right. EDIT2: Holy crap I'm being high-maintenance here. I should just do a damn Google search like everyone else.
  - bsder 6y ago
    Beaglebone Black ($43) or even Beaglebone AI if you're willing to go to $127. The power system doesn't suck like the RPi series. The chips are all well-documented with the possible exception of graphics. It has eMMC so you don't have the microSD idiocies if you don't want them. And if you need genuine real time, it has two RISC cores (4 on the AI) that operate in actual real time as opposed to Linux kinda/sorta/when-it-works/maybe real time. "But the RPi is cheeeeeeaaaper!" <grumble>
    - skolng 6y ago
      > The power system doesn't suck like the RPi series Bullshit. The beaglebone can be permanently damaged (not just filesystem corruption!) BY BEING UNPLUGGED: https://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Improper_Power_Down....All_Revisions https://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Improper_Powe... Never had crap like that happen to a raspberry pi.
      - bsder 6y ago
        > Never had crap like that happen to a raspberry pi. Uh, yeah. A failure mode so rare that they can't isolate it. RPi--the system that overdraws every USB interface on the planet and requires special power supplies. RPi--the system that couldn't even get USB-C right. RPi--the system that shuts down when you fire off a flashbulb (not their fault--but still a power failure). RPi--the compact system that needs a heatsink or it shuts down. RPi has lots of things going for it. The power system is NOT one of them. (If you want to pick on Beaglebone power systems, pick on the PocketBeagle. It has some truly stupid failure modes.)
kingosticks 6y ago
Do you have any more info about the watchdog timer not working (anymore)? I used to rely on it (before it became bcm2835-wdt) and it did work.
- centimeter 6y ago
  Nothing specific - I noticed that it was broken, and then I did a google search and I found a bunch of people running into the same problem, with no one conclusively getting it working.
  - kingosticks 6y ago
    Right, I see. I know the old supporting Debian systemd service was broken in various ways for a while. In my experience the hardware works fine in this instance, at least on the older chip (and I doubt very much they changed it).
masoudd 6y ago
I've worked on a product that was based on Orange pi. The documentation was non existent and reliability was abysmal. The product was used in hospitals non the less. I still have nightmares about it. Granted, the functionality was non essential (it wasn't anything remotely related to life support. But still, it was used in a freaking hospital). I tried convincing the management to at least switch to RPi, but RPi was three times more expensive and according to my tests was not reliable enough to convince them. Cheap ARM boards are at best interesting toys and you should not even try to make any products with them. Ignoring this will be your downfall. The company was bleeding money left and right for fixing the already sold products. That's were I gtfo
- y04nn 6y ago
  Really? Although I agree the OragePi far from great, I have one currently with an uptime of 116 days running various services and I have no issue for the pas 4 years outlasting the power supply. I'm wondering if most of the issues with Pi boards comes from bad SD cards and power supplies. I have also an Odroid C2 and a Raspberry Pi 1st gen running 24/7 with no issue.
  - masoudd 6y ago
    I'm glad you've had better experience. It was around 3 years ago. I haven't touched any ARM board ever since. We specifically used OrangePi zero. The armbian at the time had thermal management problems to the point the boards would straight up fry to a brick. I remember there was an update that fixed the thermal problem but it would corrupt the SD card once in about five reboots. And it really didn't solve the thermal problems. They'd get hot enough to be unresponsive. So the clever decision by management was to add a fully self designed avr based board to periodically poll the device on one of the GPIO pins and somehow reboot the OrangePi if it didn't respond. So reboots were common and SD cards only lasted 1 month tops.
nottorp 6y ago
We're rebooting rpis every 3 hours... in production... Client bought too many to change.
- voltagex_ 6y ago
  Why? I know of a museum with a huge Pi deployment and they don't have issues like that at all.
  - nottorp 6y ago
    Museums tend to be climate controlled; factories... not so much. It's not like they overheat and lock up in 4 hours, it's more like randomly in a day or two. But since they're just monitoring stuff every couple min, it probably felt safer to reboot all the time. Not sure exactly about the decision process that went there, I just did part of the software running on them. But they definitely weren't stable long term.
    - kettro 6y ago
      When I worked at Garmin, a guiding principle was “reset, and reset often”. Embedded products that you have to push out the door quickly have too much internal state to track.
      - nottorp 6y ago
        And Garmin has some volume; I do custom industrial stuff that amortizes the software cost over a couple hundred devices at best.
    - neurostimulant 6y ago
      There was a parking kiosk machine near my house that was using a raspberry pi. I only know it was a raspberry pi because it's often stuck in the boot screen with the raspberry pi logo at the top. My pihole runs for months without issue, but this kiosk was down really often. I wonder why, maybe the sd card is not reliable enough, or maybe it's the climate fluctuation like you mentioned because the kiosk is outdoor?

my123 6y ago

There are reliable choices like boards using SoMs (from NXP or NVIDIA), or even the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. For example the Honeycomb LX2K at https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-workstation/ https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-works... or the NVIDIA Jetsons at https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded-computing https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded-computing. Those options have the advantage of using SoMs so that you can customise the boards for a higher-volume run too. The regular RPi on that point isn't exactly ideal, but depending on the use might be quite _okay_.

ahartmetz 6y ago
Here in Germany, Toradex ARM SoMs are quite popular for industrial applications. The hardware is reliable and the software for it (Windows whatever CE is called now and Linux BSPs for Yocto) is pretty good on release and well maintained for many years afterwards. The modules are not exactly cheap for the performance but also not super expensive, generally in the 50-150€ range.
- varjag 6y ago
  Variscite has a great line-up of NXP based SoMs, at $25 and up. Quality BSPs and good support as well.

qz2 6y ago

Not sure why you’re downvoted. The Pi boards are terrible and the majority of the market objective appears to be trying to undercut them. Commercial embedded stuff is better but not without warts. A former colleague of mine sent me a rant a couple of weeks about one which I won’t name, but the board vendor couldn’t even get a Linux kernel to boot reliably on it when it was shipping to customers.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> The Pi boards are terrible Engineers and power users tend to forget that the Raspberry Pi wasn't designed for them. The target market for the Raspberry Pi doesn't care about reading the SoC datasheet or connecting the latest NVMe drive that costs several times more than the SBC. They just want a cheap, simple board that lets them start learning and tinkering with ample resources available on the internet. The $35 Raspberry Pi excels in this regard.
dmos62 6y ago
> one which I won’t name, but the board vendor couldn’t even get a Linux kernel to boot reliably on it when it was shipping to customers Please do! It would be very good to know that your vendor is doing that.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  The only reason an engineer wouldn't want to tell us who the vendor is, is if the vendor is their employer. ;)
  - loeg 6y ago
    Or any other form of NDA, which are extremely common in this space.
  - qz2 6y ago
    No not at all. NDA.
    - 6y ago

ckocagil 6y ago

Come on, you need to at least read the datasheet and errata of the Broadcom SoC. Oh... There isn't one... Unless you're purchasing millions of chips from them and signing an NDA. Seriously, why the hacker community even touches the RPi is beyond me. It is a ridiculously closed product.

jschwartzi 6y ago
Yeah RPi is a great toy but you should treat it like a chemistry set. Use it as a tool for learning but don’t build a product with it. The difference between a $24 board and a $200 board is often the level of support you get. The boards I’ve used in the past all have manuals down to the chip and I won’t touch anything that doesn’t.
- whizzter 6y ago
  And with a 8x smaller price it's perfect for throw-away units. I've heard of people who use it for projects were you place things out in the environment where you really have no control over vandalism, animals,etc so just replacing a cheap unit here or there isn't a big deal.
- detaro 6y ago
  On the other hand, a surprising number of companies decide they don't need that kind of dcoumentation and just ship Pis, and that often works fine too. Not for things with deep hardware integration, and not for mass-scale, but plenty things just want "linux in a box with some simple peripherals".
  - banana_giraffe 6y ago
    As the person tasked with debugging one of those "linux in a box with some simple peripherals", I'm not even 100% convinced they sell them with more than the intent of the consumer turning it on once, playing with for a few minutes, then forgetting it exists.
    - 6y ago

turbinerneiter 6y ago

Do you have any recommendations about good stuff?

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
Seconded. I have a rpi4 for a small home-automation project that I haven't really started. If anyone knows of an alternative that's in the $100 (US) price range, runs linux, and will make my life easier, I'm grateful for suggestions. Oh, and it needs to play nicely with a USB-to-ZWave dongle and one of the major open-source home-automation packages that can do lighting controls. EDIT: I forgot to mention that I want it to reside in a closet that has very little ventilation. So I'd be leery of deploying a cheap used x86 system, even if the price way right. EDIT2: Holy crap I'm being high-maintenance here. I should just do a damn Google search like everyone else.
- bsder 6y ago
  Beaglebone Black ($43) or even Beaglebone AI if you're willing to go to $127. The power system doesn't suck like the RPi series. The chips are all well-documented with the possible exception of graphics. It has eMMC so you don't have the microSD idiocies if you don't want them. And if you need genuine real time, it has two RISC cores (4 on the AI) that operate in actual real time as opposed to Linux kinda/sorta/when-it-works/maybe real time. "But the RPi is cheeeeeeaaaper!" <grumble>
  - skolng 6y ago
    > The power system doesn't suck like the RPi series Bullshit. The beaglebone can be permanently damaged (not just filesystem corruption!) BY BEING UNPLUGGED: https://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Improper_Power_Down....All_Revisions https://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Improper_Powe... Never had crap like that happen to a raspberry pi.
    - bsder 6y ago
      > Never had crap like that happen to a raspberry pi. Uh, yeah. A failure mode so rare that they can't isolate it. RPi--the system that overdraws every USB interface on the planet and requires special power supplies. RPi--the system that couldn't even get USB-C right. RPi--the system that shuts down when you fire off a flashbulb (not their fault--but still a power failure). RPi--the compact system that needs a heatsink or it shuts down. RPi has lots of things going for it. The power system is NOT one of them. (If you want to pick on Beaglebone power systems, pick on the PocketBeagle. It has some truly stupid failure modes.)

kingosticks 6y ago

Do you have any more info about the watchdog timer not working (anymore)? I used to rely on it (before it became bcm2835-wdt) and it did work.

centimeter 6y ago
Nothing specific - I noticed that it was broken, and then I did a google search and I found a bunch of people running into the same problem, with no one conclusively getting it working.
- kingosticks 6y ago
  Right, I see. I know the old supporting Debian systemd service was broken in various ways for a while. In my experience the hardware works fine in this instance, at least on the older chip (and I doubt very much they changed it).

masoudd 6y ago

I've worked on a product that was based on Orange pi. The documentation was non existent and reliability was abysmal. The product was used in hospitals non the less. I still have nightmares about it. Granted, the functionality was non essential (it wasn't anything remotely related to life support. But still, it was used in a freaking hospital). I tried convincing the management to at least switch to RPi, but RPi was three times more expensive and according to my tests was not reliable enough to convince them. Cheap ARM boards are at best interesting toys and you should not even try to make any products with them. Ignoring this will be your downfall. The company was bleeding money left and right for fixing the already sold products. That's were I gtfo

y04nn 6y ago
Really? Although I agree the OragePi far from great, I have one currently with an uptime of 116 days running various services and I have no issue for the pas 4 years outlasting the power supply. I'm wondering if most of the issues with Pi boards comes from bad SD cards and power supplies. I have also an Odroid C2 and a Raspberry Pi 1st gen running 24/7 with no issue.
- masoudd 6y ago
  I'm glad you've had better experience. It was around 3 years ago. I haven't touched any ARM board ever since. We specifically used OrangePi zero. The armbian at the time had thermal management problems to the point the boards would straight up fry to a brick. I remember there was an update that fixed the thermal problem but it would corrupt the SD card once in about five reboots. And it really didn't solve the thermal problems. They'd get hot enough to be unresponsive. So the clever decision by management was to add a fully self designed avr based board to periodically poll the device on one of the GPIO pins and somehow reboot the OrangePi if it didn't respond. So reboots were common and SD cards only lasted 1 month tops.

nottorp 6y ago

We're rebooting rpis every 3 hours... in production... Client bought too many to change.

voltagex_ 6y ago
Why? I know of a museum with a huge Pi deployment and they don't have issues like that at all.
- nottorp 6y ago
  Museums tend to be climate controlled; factories... not so much. It's not like they overheat and lock up in 4 hours, it's more like randomly in a day or two. But since they're just monitoring stuff every couple min, it probably felt safer to reboot all the time. Not sure exactly about the decision process that went there, I just did part of the software running on them. But they definitely weren't stable long term.
  - kettro 6y ago
    When I worked at Garmin, a guiding principle was “reset, and reset often”. Embedded products that you have to push out the door quickly have too much internal state to track.
    - nottorp 6y ago
      And Garmin has some volume; I do custom industrial stuff that amortizes the software cost over a couple hundred devices at best.
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    There was a parking kiosk machine near my house that was using a raspberry pi. I only know it was a raspberry pi because it's often stuck in the boot screen with the raspberry pi logo at the top. My pihole runs for months without issue, but this kiosk was down really often. I wonder why, maybe the sd card is not reliable enough, or maybe it's the climate fluctuation like you mentioned because the kiosk is outdoor?