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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

My lack of imagination lacks the imagination to address this:

> They are still prioritizing OEM customers (who have built their products around the Pi)

OEMs use RPis? What are they using it for, does anyone know, got any examples? I've always assumed RPis to be a hobbyist tool. All the blog posts, documentation, examples I encounter are around the hobbyist's mindset. I've not encountered any "business" oriented documentation or examples or blogs.

Edit: Everyone, thanks for the examples. I'm going through each one. It's like a whole new world opened to me.

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For the market that I've seen, don't think "OEMs making products for the consumer market", rather "OEMs making solutions for the business market." RasPIs are huge in industrial automation for example. Sure, you likely won't find them at the Ford Motor Companies of the world, but at Tony's Midwest Hotel Supplying Baking Company? Absolutely, all over the place. Put together by crafty integrators at the lowest possible cost.

It's not always lowest possible cost for hardware, there are cheaper SBCs ;)

(edit for clarity)

Perhaps when you factor in development/engineering time. The machine is only a part of the cost of an automation project.

This is exactly it. I work at a company that has used raspi's in hardware.

There are cheaper alternatives, but there are not better supported alternatives. The most expensive rPi is a rounding error in terms of engineering time. Why bother saving ~$30 if you have to spend $1k worth of engineering time to diagnose a compatibility issue on some less well documented board.

"Support." Wake me up when one of the Rpi boards starts supporting basics like suspend to RAM.

Is that needed a lot in industrial apps?

Yes; not needing a full time Linux kernel developer and electrical engineer debugging your hardware and drivers because the SoC you're using was abandoned by the vendor 2 years after release is a big benefit.

Sorry Jeff, I mean Suspend to RAM :)

This is a drag on anything battery powered, yes.

> The most expensive rPi is a rounding error in terms of engineering time.

* depending on volume.

For a couple hundred/thousand devices doing industrial automation yes. For a million and up, it makes sense to pay an engineer 3 months to reduce the BOM by 10 cents.

Totally true.

Our volume would be well below 1 million at market saturation. More important for us to be able to iterate and customize.

I’m super curious, how do you solve for the issue where SD cards wear out in raspis reasonably quickly?

There's eMMC and SATA, even NVMe via PCI bus (with addons) as well as sd cards (hell even boot from usb now too).

You can also reduce your write wear with putting stuff like temporal logs in ram etc.

I looked into this for an industrial monitoring project. Its possible to configure the SD card as read only but kind of a pain to not be able to change anything.

This is purely dependent on what SD card you are using. If you use a random cheap SanDisk off of amazon it will probably corrupt and fail eventually. A SLC or pSLC industrial card has better ECC, write longevity and power recovery than a commodity card.

Right. But these come with all the paperwork and compatibility required for "serious" automation. Yes, then there are also cheaper industrial controllers, but they are probably much harder to use (if nothing else because the RPI's mind share is higher in some circles). This puts the Raspberry Pi in a pretty good spot for a lot of people.

I've written software for Pi based setups that measure something and are deployed in a few factories across the world.

Wouldn't use them for something mission critical but for statistics where you don't mind missing a few minutes like in this case they're ok.

Also I'm using a Pi to do some tests for a project that will run on custom hardware (not even Broadcom) eventually. Saves time when you don't have to deal with Yocto and editing dts files just to talk to something on spi and see if it can do your job.

Here are two

https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/wavestate/

https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/opsix/

Although that's with the CM3

the modwave too.

> OEMs use RPis?

Yes. As an example, we use RPi in MusicBox[0], together with HifiBerry[1] sound card, as a music player appliance.

In fact, you can still buy (well, you could, if you could buy any) RPi 1's, since OEMs tend to standardize and stick to a platform. Our base platform is 1B+, for example.

[0] https://musicbox.com.hr/ (Croatian only, sorry, it's for the local market)

[1] https://www.hifiberry.com/

> OEMs use RPis?

It is used in a lot of products, specially legacy products that have been given a “facelift” to switch from buttons + screen to touchscreen.

I’ve been always against it when it comes to the non-CM versions.

The foundation receives donations, both private and public, and works as a non-profit with the original goal of giving every kid a computer, and now more broadly to teach through their platform. Having private companies leeching off it for me is very much scummy behavior.

A company I worked for used the 2B, 3B and 3B+ in a bunch of products. My complaints were dutifully archived in the trash.

>Having private companies leeching off it for me is very much scummy behavior.

The private companies are funding the foundation. It’s hard to call it leeching when the pi is a comparatively expensive board compared to alternatives

> The private companies are funding the foundation.

Except that if you look at their financials, it’s clear that they make very little on them. The sales of Rpis are not how they keep going, it’s all the other activities around it.

> It’s hard to call it leeching when the pi is a comparatively expensive board compared to alternatives

It’s not only about COGs, support is a big ticket in this area, and one that most manufacturers are way behind. Also, yes, there are some cheaper SBCs, but most of them are sold at “ask us for price”, and they aren’t any cheaper, especially at low volumes.

> Except that if you look at their financials, it’s clear that they make very little on them.

As opposed to losing money, which is what happens with consumer sales with at least one model, hence limiting to one per customer

I don't get your argument, something tells me we are talking past each other..

If you are using a model from Raspberry from which they have a margin (essentially all the things on the Compute Module line), that's fine by me, it's great that the foundation can use that as an income stream.

I feel very differently when you use models that are obviously sold at a loss to pad the margins on your product.

> OEMs use RPis? What are they using it for, does anyone know, got any examples?

Korg released a few new digital synthesizers in the past couple of years: Opsix, Wavestate, and Modwave. They are all running Raspberry Pis inside.

I understand, but why?

Texas Instruments has a big catalog of cheap and DSP-capable chips.

For astrophotography ZWO has a custom distro for pi and extra hardware for custom, wireless control of an astrophotography setup, telescope, tripod, camera and all.

https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asiair-plus

The compute module is specially made for companies to integrate into products. Around the time they introduced the first compute module years ago they split Raspberry Pi into a formal company (with CEO etc) and a non profit charity/foundation. You've seen a lot of what the foundation has done but there's also a profit seeking company behind Raspberry Pi too.

I believe companies use them in tools like air quality monitors, time lapse cameras in construction and other small batch boutique hardware.

I believe most of them don't advertise the fact they use Raspberry Pis as it might cheapen their offering in the eyes of customers

Not sure if this counts, but Gardyn[1] uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W in their second-gen system. (Can't speak to the first-gen.)

They leave an SSH port open (found with nmap) and I've asked support if I can have the password, but they won't give it to me. >:(

My system is now currently powered down. I think it'd be cool if someone were to reverse engineer it and write their own FOSS firmware for the system. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

[1]: https://mygardyn.com/

> uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W in their second-gen system

(assuming it's a standard version and you haven't already)

Couldn't you just grab the SD card out of it and inspect the file system, then try to get the password through that? You'd have to spend some time bruteforcing it most likely, but it should eventually (tbh, seeing solutions like this I'd expect quickly) give you the password.

Wow! What a great idea! I definitely would never do that because it'd violate their TOS. Don't ask me how I know that it's a Zero W in the first place because opening the thing up is a big no-no. Yup. Would never do such a thing… Never ever… No way… Nu-uh… Nope nope nope the land of ten thousand nopes…

When first reading this it sounded really strange. Buying a device and TOS don't really fit.

Checking the website it seems to be a kind of PaaS, plant as a service. Am I reading that website correctly? They are offering remotely-managed plants for rent?

Can you provide a review of their product? Is it any good? What do you actually get out of it?

It's certainly easy to use. I got it at a steep discount, so that was nice. Otherwise, I'd consider it to be rather expensive. It puts out a ton of light, which can be very nice in the right room. (We liked it.) The app sucks, and the subscription is very expensive for getting more plants than you'll be able to use. (I don't have a subscription.)

There's some CAD models for various parts; I'd rather 3D print some of the e.g. rockwool baskets and caps rather than buy from the company. If you get one, make sure you stay on top of root maintenance. You could also certainly find the plant food for cheaper.

It can produce a ton of lettuce if that's what you want to grow. We liked trying different greens. I grew some nice jalapenos as well. Can't recommend much other big fruiting plants though—they're trickier to take care of.

Massive user base, great documentation, they're supported for 10 years, Have industrial cases and a plethora of accessories (not cheap, some of them), easy to swap compute units.

I have a MarineTraffic antenna at home, and it uses a Comar AIS receiver. The first one I got was a purpose-built device, but they later sent me an "upgraded" version from this series: https://comarsystems.com/product-tag/intelligent/

I opened it up and I can confirm it has a Rpi inside.

It's not the biggest OEM marketplace by a longshot (more of a boutique marketplace), but there are a few modules for modular synthesizers that use RPi's inside. The two I can think off off the top of my head: Sleepy Circuits Hypno and Erogenous Tones Structure, both video synthesis modules.

A project I led shipped a system based on multiple RPi's used basically as web kiosks to drive large TV's monitors. We also built another Pi-based system used for monitoring equipment remotely, but I wasn't part of that effort.

I've come across a commercial HVAC system (like the big units on top of office buildings) based on the RPi Compute Module. Actually seen that from two different companies.

There was a subreddit that's now subsumed into /r/Raspberry_pi that was all about sightings of Pi's used in commercial products like airport displays, billboards, kiosks, etc.

Some TVs user RPis:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/tv-thats-not-necs-pi-...

Probably should look into what TVs were using Pis a couple years ago, buy them refurb/2nd-hand and resell the Pis at profit.

Huh. Wished I had known about that. I built a system for a customer that used RPi 4 to drive a few large TV's in this size class.

ISTR that Wyse Technology (fond memories of their WY-60 terminals) made thin clients out of Raspberry Pis.

Stratodesk makes them now:

https://www.stratodesk.com/solutions/raspberry-pi-thin-clien...

How Good is the new Raspberry Pi 4 as a Thin Client? (2019)

https://www.stratodesk.com/how-good-is-the-new-raspberry-pi-...

Industrial automation is one use case: https://revolutionpi.com/

Soma Shades used to have a "Soma Connect" device whose sole purpose in the world was to communicate with their shade controllers via Bluetooth and make them controllable over WiFi or ethernet. Just checking their website just now, it is now a strictly bring-your-own Pi arrangement, presumably because they can't get them, either.

We use a CM3 in our Blackboard Classic control surface:

https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/control/range_cn/index...

I could see it being folded into custom IoT / home automation setups where a relatively low-power controller is used just to coordinate signals across a network. Or how they are often used as dashboard-machines for home infra like solar panel setups.

Futurehome did use Pi's inside their hub, but may have moved to a custom board with the latest version

https://futurehome.io

Many go into service as Home Assistant servers (and Nabu Casa is even making their own product for this purpose, the Home Assistant Yellow: https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow).

There are also hundreds of boards that work with the CM4 to build different types of systems or integrate into automation, industrial gear, and commercial products—this is a tiny listing that doesn't even cover stuff that uses the Pi 4 or older Pi models: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

Look like you can get one inside of a DevTerm:

https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-cm4-ser...

I know for sure that anti-icing system of thr Crimean Bridge is running on raspberry pi, for example.

Smart lockers, for one. Though we’re getting rid of the Pi ASAP in part due to these supply issues.

I think this is referring to OEMs like ClockworkPi, Pi-Top, and Kano.

Analog Devices uses it to build osciloscopes or clock generators.

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