Raspberry Pis have commercial and industrial use cases so they can have pretty good reliability. There’s an official “for industry” page [1], and there are PLC products made with the Pi [2]. I’m curious on why do you think the Pi (including the Pi Compute Module)’s form factor make it unsuitable for consumer devices that need computing power a SBC offers?
Generally, actual industry would use the pi compute module instead of the pi itself, and you plug the compute module into a carrier board with better power, storage, and IO options (i.e., rs485, 24V DC, eMMC instead of SD, etc)
Having your power connector come loose on a vibrating machine or having your SD card die is a serious problem when you're trying to use a machine to make money reliably and consistently.
Anyway that's unrelated to GP really, raspberry pi sucks too much power for playdate, I think.
> Having your power connector come loose on a vibrating machine or having your SD card die is a serious problem when you're trying to use a machine to make money reliably and consistently.
Hah, I’d never thought of the power connector coming loose but I can see how it will be a real issue in an industrial environment, or on vehicles. I’ve also heard a lot of stories of the Pi’s SD card corrupting or dying, though I agree that actual products might use eMMC instead.
I think the Pi is better suited for less portable products like NAS, or TV boxes, although we already have popular inexpensive SoCs for those.
> unsuitable for consumer devices that need computing power a SBC offers
PLC is not "consumer". "for industry" devices often have service contracts and dedicated staff whose job it is to ensure reliability and spares, and vastly different requirements than a plug and play "consumer" device.
You've compared two very different use cases as if they were alike.
Consumer devices actually have much stricter reliability requirements than many industrial applications - if you look at margins, you'll see that any return is a huge dent.
Versus industrial, where swapping out a $50~ sbc part once a year is still vastly cheaper than "high reliability" solutions which cost into the thousands. Maybe you lost half a day of work, but that's probably acceptable for a small shop running a lathe that saved $$$$ on upfront capex.
And, there's no way anyone's using raspberry pis for high availability, such as in manufacturing.
But back to those consumer requirements - there's a lot of software and hardware requirements that you get "for free" with more expensive, traditional solutions. For example,
- verified boot (pre-boot checksum/signing verification, and chain of trust)
- multiple boot partitions with fallback to prevent against bad updates
- image based updates and recovery
- out of band network recovery modes
- guaranteed flash failure rate and yield
- minimal form factor with reduced components for unneeded features
and a bunch of other small stuff that all shaves off failure rates by .5% here and there, and yet is completely worth it to anyone deploying consumer devices. Some of that you could probably implement yourself, but make a mistake versus using a tried and tested solution... well, that's more margins and profit lost.
By the way, in another comment you said "Pi is better suited for less portable products like NAS, or TV boxes". Well, yeah, 'cause it's basically a set-top box SOC that was put into a hobbyist board. ;) The Pi has a TON of "undocumented" features and modes around being a set top box. Broadcom will sell you basically the same GPU/CPU package with a lot of those features listed above.
[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/
[2]: https://www.industrialshields.com/industrial-plc-raspberry-p...