| I don't remember the name of the company, but it was a service you bought where you would get network monitoring by placing these small PoE powered boxes all over your offices. It would allow you to do network reliability testing, as well as get data back on Wifi AP's and some environmental data. Company I worked for had them spread out across all of their offices in various different locations, all of them reporting back to a central location. When we took apart the device we found a Raspberry Pi inside, with a PoE hat. It made sense for the use case, cheap devices, custom case, and MAC address that was set to the vendors MAC address range upon boot up. At the time I was helping with a security assessment, and being able to run our own software/tools on a device that would blend in was kinda nice ;-) "Embedded industry" is a VERY large segment. Here's a fun one for you. This was told to me by the person who helped build this project. Parallax makes a device they call the BASIC Stamp 2 (https://www.parallax.com/product/basic-stamp-2-microcontroll...). It is a very easy to use and develop for microcontroller yet it is incredibly capable. You program it in BASIC. The BASIC Stamp 2 was for the longest time used in a production sold to consumer timer clocks for turning solenoids on and off for sprinkler systems. At one point in time you could buy it off the shelf at Home Depot not knowing that the device contained a very simple BASIC Stamp 2 to do its functions. These devices end up in the weirdest places. You'd think a manufacturer would switch from a BASIC Stamp based product to spinning their own board + using a small embedded CPU instead, but the cost savings just weren't there. The RaspberryPi is likely used in far more places than you or I could imagine in ways that are considered "professional". That stuff gets hidden in little metal/plastic moulded boxes and for all intents and purposes disappears. |