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Comment by blamazon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

(edit for clarity)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

"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.

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