First Raspberry Pi Powered Ultra-Small Form Factor Rugged for Defense, Aerospace
curtisswrightds.com
curtisswrightds.com
Raspberry Pi's are undeniably the easiest SBC to work with, and for a huge portion of industrial, defense, and aerospace products and devices are a near ideal choice except for their "hobbyist" level attributes.
A robust Pi4 clone that supports nvme drives, has no Bluetooth or Wifi by default, and has something like ISO9001 certification to check the boxes for big enterprise contracts would sell like hotcakes. It's somewhat surprising to me that the Pi foundation hasn't made something to this tune yet (the Pi CM4 may as well be vaporware - they're basically impossible to find anywhere even in single-digit quantities).
That's near as damnit true for _all_ Raspberry Pi products right now. You can pretty much only buy any of them in single unit quantities, and it's like buying concert tickets, you need to keep your eyes open to find out exactly when someone has some for sale, and you need to jump on them before they sell out.
I managed to snag a Pi Zero 2 W a week or so back, had to get it shipped from Spain to Sydney which cost more than the Pi. I was limited to a single one at checkout.
I just discovered my local RPi distributor has the 4B-2G in stock. (one less now, even though they're charging what looks like a fair but more than the usual "in stock in Australia" surcharge...)
Before that, I'd honestly like to see TPM 2.0 support baked in first.
> has no Bluetooth or Wifi by default
Alas, not the case here[1]. Genuinely looks like they just stuffed a consumer RPi CM4 on a custom carrier board wrapped in metal, pushed through the easier boilerplate environmental checks like all their other SBCs, then put out a press release.
Not sure how I feel about the interconnect choice; power via Omnetics proprietary (28 VDC input, but nothing assertive in datasheet on satisfying 704 requirements) and everything else via Glenair proprietary (with roughly half a quarter physical clearance between them) in what appears to be the equivalent of 38999 service class F finish (which won't survive 500-hr dynamic salt spray). I also do wonder if mechanical engineers would raise a nit at the countersunk retaining of enclosure top.
The hardest thing to swallow here is having to pay an undisclosed MIL premium for what will fundamentally be constrained by its consumer RPi CM4 core. Even if Curtiss-Wright lifetime buys for a gratuitous 10-yr support posture, it's hard to imagine how liabilities like tin whiskers can be pragmatically avoided, or what that means in terms of MTBF post-fielding.
This will probably fill someone's niche, but I agree that what's really missing is a robust RPi4 clone.
[1] https://www.curtisswrightds.com/products/computing/systems/s...
Maybe they could keep the price down by having a TPM connector and add the pinout for it, or even reuse some of the GPIO pins for it?
Another possibility is that these are modified CM4 boards where parts were removed and resoldered using lead solder. The Broadcom chip is really the most critical component as you cannot buy them off the shelf but everything else could be purchased new and installed onto a stripped board or a brand new one made using the CM4 design files using lead solder.
Precisely how effective do you think that'll be when your core packages are fine grid BGA?
> Another possibility is that these are modified CM4 boards where parts were removed and resoldered using lead solder.
This is the only long-term and standard solution I see, including package reballing. However, the fundamental problem with this approach is that the underlying PCB substrate is consumer grade that isn't designed for rework.
Not even new metal: for good or bad, this “DuraCOR Pi” appears to be repurposing the chassis of the DuraNET 20-11 Ethernet switch: https://www.curtisswrightds.com/products/networking/switch-r....
Exemple: powercut and memory cards corruptions, etc...
So, if I had to design for military specs, I would probably bet on some other more robust platform.
And sdcard don't like at all sudden loss of power in the middle of a 'write' or 'refresh' command.
Cards death or corruption happened to me a lot even when taking care with rpi but never when using beaglebones.
Thankfully you can boot from those on the Pi.
The case study that I learned in my Numerical Analysis course was the patriot missile incident, which lead to 28 death in the early 90s. Essentially, there was a timer implemented that used floats, and due to the inherent rounding error of floats, after enough iterations this caused the missile to miss its target by miles. There were some operational errors involved, such as leaving the missile "turned on" for longer than was suggested by the manufacturer, but still, these types of incidents should not happen.
Even with double precision, there are errors. For instance, 0.3 is actually represented as:
0.299999999999999988897769753748434595763683319091796875
If you want a company with a long history of making industrial computers then Onlogic[1] just released a raspberry pi box.
Onlogic used to be called logicsupply and they've made industrial and fanless computers for rough operating environments for many years.
> The unit meets stringent MIL-STD / DO-160 environmental standards (MIL-STD-704F, MIL-STD-1275D, MIL-STD-461F, and RTCA/DO-160 for civil and military use)
These are legitimate standards that have strict specifications.
They literally make black boxes (crash recorders) for planes, for example.
1: https://www.esa.int/Education/AstroPI/What_is_an_Astro_Pi
There’s plenty of “oh we’re not using a raspberry pi, that’s a kids toy” in the industry, so I’m finding it difficult to find the niche this product satisfies, when there are plenty of more powerful/established options.
Make no mistake, Glenair proprietary interconnect is used here. See this[1] for some sense of why this subtle distinction matters.
[1] https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-...
The argument that civilian technologies shouldn’t be used to accelerate military development assumes military is way ahead. This is no longer the case and a new thinking is needed.
(OT & mini Ask HN: I was told this from a right-leaning friend, who I suspect was just replaying a lecture or an essay. And basically I am too, shamefully. Have anyone heard a similar blurb somewhere?)
implementation: Using cheap, off the shelf parts: raspberry Pi (such as this one in the post), camera, GPS...
It allows operator to choose a tank target and then this bot self-drives in front of a track.
The only way a tank mine can detonate is if a tank rolls over it. So as long as you are not a tank.. this little bot would be pretty safe.
Would possibly be a game changer for the ukraine war if these could be made en masse cheaply.
The Broadcom BCM2711 is already rated -40 to +85C which is considered industrial or rugged. I have no idea what the rest of the components on the Pi board are rated for though.
[0] I'm not sure what's the best place to anonymously host PDFs but this is what I got from google: https://docdro.id/MTN8qAT I can upload somewhere else if anyone has a better suggestion.
MIL-STD-167: is a test method standard for mechanical vibration of shipboard equipment
MIL-S-901D: is a Navy test specification for shock to simulate explosions in the water next to a ship or submarine.
For the curious, you can grab PDFs at: https://cp-techusa.com/knowledge-zone/military-specification...
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Parvus DuraCOR Pi
* Raspberry Pi CM4, model CM4108032.
* Low-SWaP IP67 rugged chassis
[...]
* MIL-STD-810, DO-160, MIL-STD-461 qualification (EMI, thermal, shock, vibration, altitude, humidity, etc.)- https://www.curtisswrightds.com/products/computing/systems/s...
Amazon did one on their Snowball server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__ooXhq5gZ4
Even though the board can be hardened, and temperature ranges of the Broadcom seem acceptable, what bothers me is that the Broadcom still boots via unauditable "mystery" code in the GPU. Am still correct, or has that changed?
For example, operating in a temperature controlled environment at various extremes, being put on a precisely controlled vibration device for a certain amount of time, being exposed to RF or radiation, etc.