[onebot]

Didn't say Raspberry products aren't viable. I have shipped over 50k units with Raspberry Pi across three products. But the margins are terrible and many times a loss when you factor in user acquisition costs.

RPI0W is now double the price at $10. You still need to add power (lipo and/or charger), enclosure.

With Raspberry Pi stuff 1.) There is nearly 0 (max I have seen is $2 off) price break at volume. 2.) You have essentially one vendor (that uses distributors) 3.) When a new version launches, the older version inventory gets very constrained. 4.) You can't customize the PCB 5.) You can't get any support from Broadcom

I mean a lot IoT problems/solutions seems all about tiny things running on coin-cell batteries for years.

I guess the point is that there is a huge difference between hobbyist and commercial viability. It is a significant gap in terms of engineering effort and target BOM costs between the two. Have seen countless products fail because people with no commercial hardware experience tried to launch a product with hobbyist tools and components.

But, again, as a hobbyist it is fine. If you are considering commercializing your hobby project one day, then I would think about it differently. At least consider Rockchip. You can get a Raspi clone for less money and can work with them to customize if needed. If it runs on batteries in a small form factor, would reconsider using linux.

[ricketycricket]

A recent episode of the Smartlogic podcast[^1] interviewed the Nerves team and discussed this a bit. Their example was something like: you wouldn't build a smart lightbulb with nerves, but you might build the smart bulb hub with it. I think that makes a lot of sense and still fits a very good use case: something low power, but internet connected and possibly serving a UI over a browser or an API to a mobile app. There are a great number of IOT or IOT-adjacent projects that are a good fit for something like this, even if it isn't necessarily appropriate for everything.

[^1] https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s4e13a-dojo/