Hacker News Reader

Comment by dividuum | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with something like the Raspberry Pi? I'm working with it professionally (see my profile) and am very successful at using it in "production". Right now I don't have the need to build a custom board but if I should ever decide to take that path, there's the compute module which was designed for that. It is successfully used by NEC and at least one other display vendor that have a dedicated compute module slot. Also the Pi is still backwards compatible with even the first released Pi. Unlike other platform it's slow moving and you have some guarantee that your investment isn't wasted once some new shiny "board of the week" appears.

View on HN

OK, I'll bite: "What's wrong with RPi?"

* Expensive

* Physically large

* Sucks power like crazy

* Slow

* Hardware is unreliable and inconsistent

* Constant hardware availability issues

* Form factor changes on every release

* CPU changes on every release

* I/O is adequate if you're building a PC replacement. It doesn't have the right sort of I/O for embedded tasks (multiple SPI buses, multiple serial buses and so on).

The RPi is a fine learning tool, but don't treat it as production-ready. I strongly recommend the BeagleBone Black instead.

Thanks for your feedback.

> Hardware is unreliable and inconsistent

That's not true from my experience. I'm running a digital signage service based on the Pi. So far all devices are very reliable. Of course that depends on other factors such as SD card or power supply. If you don't try to save money on those, Pis run for many years without a single problem.

> CPU changes on every release

Some chipset revision changed (I would have to look up details), but they are all more or less compatible if you don't go too low level. I have no problem running the same build of my software on all Pi revisions. Of course you can benefit from NEON or multiple threads on later versions, but that's all optional.

+1 for the BBB

Depends on what the definition of production is. Sourcing all the components for 10,000 units and building a reasonable BOM that business will accept is a typical type of production I see... not something that you can do with a Pi.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com