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by masoudd 2035 days ago
I've worked on a product that was based on Orange pi. The documentation was non existent and reliability was abysmal. The product was used in hospitals non the less. I still have nightmares about it. Granted, the functionality was non essential (it wasn't anything remotely related to life support. But still, it was used in a freaking hospital). I tried convincing the management to at least switch to RPi, but RPi was three times more expensive and according to my tests was not reliable enough to convince them. Cheap ARM boards are at best interesting toys and you should not even try to make any products with them. Ignoring this will be your downfall. The company was bleeding money left and right for fixing the already sold products. That's were I gtfo
1 comments

Really? Although I agree the OragePi far from great, I have one currently with an uptime of 116 days running various services and I have no issue for the pas 4 years outlasting the power supply. I'm wondering if most of the issues with Pi boards comes from bad SD cards and power supplies. I have also an Odroid C2 and a Raspberry Pi 1st gen running 24/7 with no issue.
I'm glad you've had better experience.

It was around 3 years ago. I haven't touched any ARM board ever since. We specifically used OrangePi zero. The armbian at the time had thermal management problems to the point the boards would straight up fry to a brick. I remember there was an update that fixed the thermal problem but it would corrupt the SD card once in about five reboots. And it really didn't solve the thermal problems. They'd get hot enough to be unresponsive. So the clever decision by management was to add a fully self designed avr based board to periodically poll the device on one of the GPIO pins and somehow reboot the OrangePi if it didn't respond. So reboots were common and SD cards only lasted 1 month tops.