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Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

My engineering sense says RPi isn’t a good choice here, there’s a lot of potential failures that could happen, from a corrupted sd card, to overheating, harsh environment, among others, an industrial mini PC with proper protection and resources as well would be far better.

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I keep my rpi in a pelican case that I modified to include an opening port for the NMEA connection. It gets all its power/data from the single connection which has a mechanical connection as well.

I have over 5000 nautical miles logged (thanks to a very nifty influxdb integration as part of open plotter) using this set up since ~2021, and so far it’s held up better than I could have guessed. I keep a spare pi and sds on board but have never actually needed them. My use case is long distance races, mostly in sub tropics/temperate areas, and I’ve had limited exposure to really hot air temp (say 90F and up in the tropics which is where I could see SDs starting to fail)

you and I built very similar devices. Mine is on a 34ft sailboat. It has held up tremendously with zero issues for 4+ years and many miles.

the best part? it cost very little. Worried about redundancy? Build two, keep the SD cards backed up. Problem solved.

cheers.

Signal K server is platform agnostic and runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Also available on Victron’s Venus devices, if you want off the shelf rugged hardware.

https://www.victronenergy.com/live/venus-os:large

They are heavily invested into using GPIO: https://openplotter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started...

I wonder if industrial-strength RPi clones / variants exist. The demand is certainly there.

As I said in the other comment, there are already industrial PCs equipped with GPIO, and some models even include an integrated screen

SBCs are good in conditions where reliability is not the primary concern - scenarios where frequent restarts are needed, change sd card, room temperature etc.), but in a boat? I don’t know anything about marine conditions but having a malfunctioning in SD cards and overheating is not uncommon in robotics and especially in drones (where it’s harder to use full fledged PC), few times actually the SD card died midair, no crashes thankfully.

I agree that a proper ruggedized industrial PC would fit better (and cost only a few hundyed more). If their software could work on it, or could be adapted / ported, that would be a great choice. But I suspect that what they have now is mostly married to Pi.

Power is also a concern (at least for sailboats). While there are certainly other 12v computers, that is one of the pluses for rPi in this.

I've worked extensively with NXP's IMX6 hardware installed on carrier boards from a few different vendors. If you're looking for something bulletproof for long-term installation, I'd definitely recommend looking through their product lines.

Seco: https://edge.seco.com/usa/ and Variscite: https://www.variscite.com/products/system-on-module-som/?cpu... are two of the vendors I've worked with and had great experiences with.

OnLogic Factor.

The pi foundation supports this in the compute module, which has an emmc variant. However that requires that you make a supporting PCB. (Or buy one from someone else)

If you are buying loads of them they will also customise the pi for you (although I think that's contracted out)

There are multiple sources of industrial-strength RPi-based systems for different environments. Including railway-certified devices, industrial controls, etc.

Often coupled with RPi "hat" interface used to attach isolated industrial I/O (24V/analog/4-20mA, etc) or other interfaces.

I was thinking the same thing, but then realized they may be using the GPIO pins. Even then you could get away with a usb wired micro.

> then realized they may be using the GPIO pins

A lot of industrial ones come with GPIO built in, some even follow the same rpi pinout.

Right, the rpi has the GPIO pins because they are a common feature on the microprocessors in the space.

Do you have any models to recommend? Especially some that could last in harsh environments (dust, high temperature, insects, ...).

> Do you have any models to recommend?

That depends on a lot of variables: what kind of IOs you are looking for? Do you need them isolated (DIO vs GPIO), Does it need DIN rail? Integrated screen? What connectivity is needed (wifi, cellular)? Or resources (ram, cpu, etc.)? What’s the power delivery requirements?

So there’s a lot of factors that only you can answer given you know the application, but since you are looking for dust proof, then you should look for fanless AND ventless one, and one that’s vibration resistant (obviously with an SSD), and most of them can survive high temperatures, but personally I would even add it in a panel to provide extra protection, with a fan and proper ventilation just in case.

I did try some of them, like onlogic (1) and arestech (2) among others, and don’t restrict yourself to the brands, some Chinese (mostly cheaper) ones are good enough for the job like GigaIPC (3) and others too.

(1) https://www.onlogic.com/pub/media/resources/Brochures/LogicS...

(2) https://www.arestech.com.tw

(3) https://www.gigaipc.com/en/index.php?action=products2&cid=2&...

> My engineering sense says RPi isn’t a good choice here, there’s a lot of potential failures that could happen

Amen to that.

I blame the YouTube influencers posting all the RPi content that would make you believe you can run the world on RPi. Some of the shit they post is truly dumb ... Ceph clusters on RPi ? Rather you than me !!!

I once experimented with Pi's just for a fun unimportant home-server project. I got sick and tired of all the dumb failure modes, even when I expressly went out and bought high quality industrial SD cards, went above and beyond to minimise SD card IO etc. And that was just the SD card issues.... Never again.

This was precisely my experience too, and as someone who's got a plural of decades farting around with low level Linux, this was not a fun experience. I wonder how many people got jazzed about, then turned off of Linux because of such experiences?

Just anecdote, but I haven’t had SD card issues in 6-8 years, and my RPi usage has gone up a lot. That includes a setup with very read/write-heavy process that ran for 2+ years without issues. It filled up the SD card every 45 days, and only had reliability problems when I forgot to transfer data and it filled up the card.

That was just a decent consumer-grade SD card.

I’m not sure your experience happens to most people, at least not recently.

Compute model 4 then?

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