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by retrocryptid 1187 days ago
Happy that yours works well. Many problems don't show up until you hit larger numbers.

We deployed over 1k RasPi's for a particular customer. We averaged about five reboots per day. On top of that I had to deal with the RasPi Organization's insistence that they were not an ODM. Though these were the RasPi B's and RasPi2 B+'s. I'm sure the reliability has gotten better over the years.

I'm not a big TI fan, but everything I needed I got in a BeagleBone: they're more reliable than RasPi's, you can actually get the firmware source code and they have a "normal" returns process.

I don't have the data for the BBB based cube-sats running Kubos (which was the project after the RasPi project) and there were less than 50 deployed, but I've never heard of any of them rebooting themselves unless the ground told them to do so or there was a battery failure.
4 comments
olabyne 1187 days ago
Raspi's are stable if you respect 2 things :

- avoid writes to sd card too much (log2ram mitigates this, alpine in read-only solves this)

- plenty of power (the recent 3 and 4 have huge sipkes of current draw !)

Do you know the reason for your reboots ? Also before the 3+, the die have no RF shield. The B and 2 B+ are exposed if you don't use a metal case with a seperation from the PSU.

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magicalhippo 1187 days ago
> plenty of power

Actually this is a good point I forgot about.

I had one Pi which would reboot or hang every week or so. Dismissed it for a while but then decided to troubleshoot it. I had a USB cable tester, and quickly found that the USB "charging cable" I had bought from a local shop had a 1 Ohm resistance! Threw it away and replaced it with a good one and never had an issue again.

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retrocryptid 1187 days ago
Yes. RasPis are stable except when they're not.
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magicalhippo 1187 days ago
Ok 1k is certainly a sizable fleet, and I only got 3B's or newer.

Nobody imports BeagleBone here so have to get it through DigiKey or similar, which means prices are way higher.

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appleiigs 1187 days ago
> We deployed over 1k RasPi's for a particular customer

Is that the proper tool for the job?? I just read an article saying "Unpopular Opinion: Don't Use a Raspberry Pi for That" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35260322)

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outworlder 1187 days ago
... what were they doing with 1k Pi's

Please tell me they were using the GPIO pins for something.

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retrocryptid 1187 days ago
Of course. GPIO is the simplest way to get a blinky light.

Seriously though, we used a GPIO pin to stroke the watchdog.

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