Subj : Re: Raspberry Pi in commercial products
To   : Nightfox
From : tenser
Date : Tue Dec 12 2023 05:35:47

On 10 Dec 2023 at 09:29a, Nightfox pondered and said...
 
 Ni>   Re: Re: Raspberry Pi in commercial products
 Ni>   By: tenser to Nightfox on Mon Dec 11 2023 05:17 am
 Ni> 
 Ni>  Ni>> Over the years, I've become more and more of a believer in what you 
 Ni>  Ni>> do with open-source stuff.  Something I was wondering about recently
 Ni>  Ni>> I wonder why Raspberry Pi boards (and similar, I suppose) aren't bei
 Ni>  Ni>> adoped & used more for commercial products.
 Ni> 
 Ni>  te> Well, what would that look like?  Would these be things that end user
 Ni>  te> would run on devices that they own, or would the Raspberry Pis be use
 Ni>  te> only as a development/testing/deployment platform for hosted software
 Ni> 
 Ni> I was thinking something that end users would run - But I was thinking
 Ni> mainly of applications where the end user might be someone inside a
 Ni> company doing something for the company, rather than a home user.  For
 Ni> instance, I've worked at a couple high-tech companies that make devices
 Ni> that take a silicon wafer and scan it with a laser & such to generate an
 Ni> image, so you can look closely at the surface for defects.  They often
 Ni> use a PC with Windows, with their own custom software, to interface with
 Ni> the wafer scanner to collect data.
 Ni> 
 Ni> Another software project I worked on was working on a Windows program to
 Ni> interface with a medical cart (to manage drawers and user access).  It
 Ni> interfaced with the cart via a serial port.
 Ni> 
 Ni> These are things I was thinking could probably done with a Raspberry Pi
 Ni> running Linux, rather than a PC running Windows.

Honestly, any "Pi-like" ARM SBC would likely be too unreliable
for something like that.  I don't see why you couldn't run Linux
on an inexpensive x86 (or workstation-class ARM) machine and
reap many of the same benefits, though.  Again, it's about the
TCO over the lifetime of the device, not just the initial capital
cost; for both of these applications, I imagine that the cost of
the computer is a fraction over the overall cost, anyway.

 Ni>  te> There are also issues of volume.  RPis were pretty unavailable due to
 Ni>  te> pandemic-related supply-chain issues over the last few years.
 Ni> 
 Ni> Yeah, that's definiately a problem.  But there are also similar things
 Ni> available that are comparable to the Raspberry Pi (which is why I said
 Ni> "and similar" in my original post).

Again, it comes back to TCO, support, etc, over the life of the
device, and if the "computer" part of it is a small fraction of
the overall cost of the project, it's a lot less compelling.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

.