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Comment by gregwebs | Hacker News Reader

> While it was easy to get a (RPI) solution up and running in a short time, over time we got a lot of problems resulting from using the Pi. A key problem of the Pi's design is, to rely on an SD-card.

> after some months the SD-card broke and the application crashed. High-end industrial SD-card lasted longer, but finally still broke.

> So we made the decision, to build a replacement, which is focused on high-reliability, but still enable the use of Raspberry Pi universum of add-ons, like HATs and enclosures. We choose the ESP32 dual core, 2x240MHz WROVER module with 8MB PSRAM and 16MB Flash. The EsPiFF, the Esp32 in Raspberry Pi Form Factor was born.

> After the EsPiFF is now mature enough, we we are preparing a campaign at Crowd Supply.

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They decided to design this whole thing instead of just going with a read only SD partition or one of the CM4 docks with eMMC?

Don't get me wrong, the end result is really cool and if just an ESP can cover their entire use case then the Pi was definitely overkill, but it just seems like inventing a flying car because you once got a flat tire.

We also depend on RPys.

Right now the supply chain problems RPys are so big,that they are reselling RP 4s for over 300 euros!!

Imagine that over night the price of cars go 3x and you have to wait a long time for them.

Different people are finding different alternatives. We also created a very convoluted solution.

The problem here is, that an esp32 is not an alternative for a RPi,... it's a totally different kind of a device, that is only suitable in cases, where rpi was a clear overkill. This is like replacing a truck with a bicycle... if a bicycle was enough in the first place, there's no point in even using a truck for such a simple task.

The real alternatives are many other linux-based single-board computers (from <other fruit>Pis onwards)... sadly most of them come and go, and trying to find a recent OS image (with working binary blobs) for eve a 6 months old devices is proving to be hard.

> if a bicycle was enough in the first place, there's no point in even using a truck for such a simple task.

Right, but people still use the truck, because it's what they know, and maybe because they like the form factor. A lot of Pis are overkill for the projects they're used in. If those projects could start using this, freeing up Pis for projects that actually need them, that would be helpful.

I think form factor and reliability account for a lot... I've tried using other arm boards, and they just haven't been as reliable in terms of support/drivers/reliability as the RPis have been in general... With the inflated pricing, I've actually just jumped up to the tiny intel systems, since I'd usually be getting a separate enclosure and ssd anyway. I can see others going to esp32 if their original use was a bit overkill, if easier to work against.

The other fruit pis also have supply issues and the boards themselves can be quite buggy. Design your own with parts you can get in sufficient quantity seems to be the way, unfortunately.

Where the price of the truck is almost the same as the bike

I think that when the dust settles RPi will have lost a lot.

Lots of alternatives available and superior for most specific use cases, which people are discovering and/or transitioning to because of RPi's availability issues. Once this happens it'll be difficult to win those people back.

Depends on how well those alternatives bank on the situation. I've always been disappointed by the lack of support and functionality on any non-Pi board I bought.

That's understandable, but has nothing to do with what the poster was saying.

For most, I'm sure the WiFi integration was the main driver for rpi, which was just plain easier to use than Arduino+wifi thanks to python on-device.

That's probably why the esp series caught on so quick: way cheaper than rpi, Arduino+wifi, way smaller than both, and still had int wifi.

They saw this, and the RPI2040 has all of the above. Python, low power, low cost, integrated WiFi.

The smaller BOM should also make this less likely to sell out permanently.

...or a case with a place for an ssd an a usb3.0->sata or whatever interface...

RPi4 supports usb boot for some time now.

Yeah, but it's not something you'd really want to use in production though.

It's both many times faster than booting from microSD, and unless you buy the absolute cheapest SSD from a no-name manufacture, many times more reliable.

Additionally, if you have a good power supply and don't write tons of data on a daily basis to the microSD card, it will be quite reliable as long as it's a name-brand, high quality card.

Source: I've deployed about 50 RPis in various conditions, all but two booting off microSD cards, and have only had one failure requiring swapping in a new microSD card, over the past 8 years of use.

Industrial microSD cards are especially robust and are now available from a variety of manufacturers with environmental and wear ratings that rival decent SSDs.

It's not so much about the SSD, but the USB cable being quite easy to unplug accidentally, though I suppose if you used something like one of those short Samsung Fit drives or a NVMe dock and had a custom enclosure that holds it in place after the Pi is screwed in, then maybe yeah.

Why not? There are plenty of RPi enclosures that will bridge to USB and hold the SSD for you. For me, the cost of an RPi 8gb + enclosure + ssd + power is now close to the micro intel boxes.

The campaign is at: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mdc-service-wittenburg-gmbh/espi...

Personally I'm interested in running ADC daughter boards on it. Current solution is to hook an eMMC Pi-clone to a separate co-processor board, but having both on a single board is easier. An alternative would be to run a RTOS on the Pi-clone, but I don't know any that support clones with eMMC (I have Tinker Boards and RockPis)

I try to never rely on the Pi's SD card. Either I use a system which uses RAM disk like Alpine Linux or a modified Raspbian. You can even PXE boot with later Raspberry Pi3b+ and 4

But yes, then you need network storage or USB SSDs or something

Yeah I also though the same : this justification is the wrong one (just configure your system or use a distro doesn't log on disk... e.g. OpenWRT doesn't log on NOR/NAND flash !). Regardless of logs, I totally understand that SD-cards are often unreliable (noting that RPi CM4 and also some alternatives such as some Orange Pi include an eMMC which is a bit more resilient). More generally, other justifications (more convincing than this logfile-on-SD issues) could be 1°/ the power consumption of the Pi, 2°/ the complexity of a Linux system (hence vulnerability / attack surface), 3°/ the supply chain shortages on Pis (and costs)...

Anyway, kudos to this board designers ! :)

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