| 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. |