[hatthew]

Huh. I had a work project a decade ago where we were evaluating SBCs as drivers for kiosks. At that time, the prevailing wisdom was that the Pi was specifically not for industry, as its main advantage was the strong community to provide support for DIYers. Competitors like PINE64 and Orange Pi were the same/better specs at half the price.

[milanove]

The Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms weren't meant to power commercial-grade products, nor be cost effective at scale compared to raw/custom ARM and AVR devices. However, they've become ubiquitous in education, which I imagine has impacted industry. Similar to how software companies give out free student licenses so that upcoming engineers become familiar with their software for when they start working, an entire generation of embedded systems engineers were taught on official (or compatible) Arduino and Raspberry Pi devices. While these platforms aren't meant for commercial products, I imagine engineers in industry might use these platforms to prototype or work with subcomponents, before they integrate it with a raw/custom AVR or ARM platform. After all, when prototyping, it's easier and faster to get up and running when you have a massive collection of libraries and tutorials online to use, which RPi and Arduino offer, versus doing it all yourself with raw AVR and ARM.

[DanielHB]

Raspberry Compute Module (basically a normal raspberry without built-in I/O) is widely used in the industry at large. What they are not meant to be is the lowest cost per CPU/GPU flops so they are mostly used in high-value-add / low-volume / gen-1 products.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...

I personally worked on a system with raspberry compute modules 3 and 4, the total system cost was in the ~million dollar range. This was definitely a commercial product with dozens of engineers doing R&D, not a hobby project.

We were looking into smaller systems with lower profit margins (~20k USD) and for those we were considering moving away from raspberry CMs because of cost.

The main advantage of the raspberry CM ecosystem is just how widely popular it is and how cheap and available "dev boards" are (just grab a non-CM raspberry and it is almost the same thing). Most of these types of systems don't really have the I/O that makes testing and developing a lot easier.

Being popular is quite important because firmware issues are notoriously expensive to troubleshoot and fix often requiring the manufacturer help. Said manufacturer does not give a damn if you are a low-volume customer. More popular systems have more information available online and are less likely to have bugs (or at least the bugs are known).

I remember one of our other systems bluetooth module had a weird edgecase bug that caused the module to shutdown after several days of it being powered on. It took multiple engineers >1month of work to basically go "yep nothing we can do about this and manufacturer is not helping"

I know they are being used in Ukranian drones and some police-car systems in some cities (although this was hearsay from a coworker and I don't remember the city). But those are just the examples I heard of.

[voakbasda]

As an example, I believe the tear-down of one of the now-defunct electric scooter rental company’s units revealed it contained a RPi. IIRC, the commentary lambasted them for using it, because it’s not really rated for that kind of job. But a significant portion of the peanut gallery understood and rationalized the decision. I expect fewer folks would question this choice these days.

[wtallis]

When people talk about whether something like a Pi is aimed at industrial customers, that is largely not a statement about the cost vs specs, nor about the level of engagement with the DIY community. It's usually about having a suitable supply chain and long-term support and stable BOM and a mature software platform for customers to start building on.

[hatthew]

Our logic at the time was that the relatively fixed cost of figuring out the hardware and developing device-specific software was less than the variable cost-per-board delta of like $20.