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Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by dokem on Friday March 12, 2021 @11:46AM (#26437708)
Raspi really needs to come out with a 'pro' model. I guess they kind of did with the compute module but raspi's are used a lot professionally in industry, probably more than they are used as a tool to get kids and developing nations into computer science.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by barkingcat on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:00PM (#26438690)
Raspi doesn't "need" to do this at all.

The main goal of their foundation is to support education, not to satisfy a "pro" market.

Just because people use them as tools doesn't mean they change the charter of their non-profit foundation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation

I'd say the other way around: the "pro" people should go find another board to use, of which there are many.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by geerlingguy on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:04PM (#26438757)
Just noting that according to the Pi Foundation/Pi Trading, they do sell 44% of their boards to industrial customers[1], so education is definitely a primary goal, but they do have a much broader audience, and I'm sure that influences some of the decisions about what hardware and price points to target.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/for-industry/

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by justin66 on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:17PM (#26438918)
That figure is amazing.

I interviewed in person at a leading industrial automation company over five years ago. They were looking for someone to work on ARM stuff and I was (naively) proud of the work I'd done with the original Raspberry Pi in school. The hiring manager had never even heard of the Pi...

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by HeyLaughingBoy on Saturday March 13, 2021 @09:05PM (#26452118)
Things have changed a lot since then. One of the well-known names in industrial automation, Opto-22, now has adapters to connect their hardware to raspberry pi. And they're not the only one.

http://developer.opto22.com/pi/

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by willis936 on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:22PM (#26438986)
They don’t need to, but the desire to see it is understandable. Raspi is the de facto ARM linux box. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, it’s performant. If you have a niche interest then the platform that it’s been developed and tested on is raspi. That’s far more valuable than a $10 savings on a $30 computer.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by varispeed on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:10PM (#26438822)
I don't understand this divide. Why people shouldn't have access to "pro" level tools for education? I had plenty of instances in my life when I tried to do something with consumer tools only to be disappointed and giving up, but later on re-discovering the topic with better tools that lead me to some great results. Cost of low end nvme drives is getting closer to more expensive SD cards now (which are not meant to be used as a hard drive). I see no reason why RPi shouldn't release an update with nvme slot and even dropping SDCard slot altogether.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by ClumsyPilot on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:40PM (#26439217)
We used terrible and old tools at uni, so the value of the degree is questionable
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by mdtusz on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:11PM (#26438836)
The "pro" models exist - they're just not Pi's.

Industrial IoT does use Pi's a fair bit, but this is IMO a misuse (I'm guilty of it too) and in the long term can be a disservice. The Pi is a great platform for a go-to-market product, but they have many shortcomings that for most use-cases in industry are showstoppers (most notably, Pi's will often fail without warning, or their "disk" will become corrupt). More expensive industrial products are out there and typically are more robust, and designed in a way that they can be more seamlessly integrated to a product - once the upfront costs are paid (both in development and dollars).

What really needs to happen is other manufacturers making the development on their hardware more straightforwards. What the Pi foundation has done is shown that companies and developers want to just be able to run a widely available and minimal linux distribution and not have to muck about with proprietary and poorly documented SDK's behind closed doors.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by deckard1 on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:49PM (#26439334)
> Pi's will often fail without warning, or their "disk" will become corrupt

You get what you pay for. But this is beating a tired horse that I'm skeptical was ever true to begin with. Are the people with SD card corruption just using crap cards to begin with? I've used a pi4 and rock64 and neither had any disk corruption. Plus you can boot on USB today. And fail without warning? Is that really a thing? No sensor saying there is a heat problem?

You can definitely reach for an industrial product with similar specs. But just keep in mind that niche products may have even less market testing than a Pi. There is some truly crap hardware and software out there that people suffer with simply because it's the only player in the niche.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by alyandon on Saturday March 13, 2021 @11:33AM (#26447641)
Indeed - you do get what you pay for. I've personally had one 2nd gen rpi fail without warning and have also had several instances of SD card corruption.

The SD card is probably crap like you say but it can be formatted and passed read/write verification testing when connected to a PC which is a bit weird.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by sam_lowry_ on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:41PM (#26440631)
rock64 has eMMC ;-)
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by dokem on Friday March 12, 2021 @04:28PM (#26441192)
PIs are used in industry when possible because so easy because unofficial documentation and community is so large to the point where practically every use case has already been documented.

It's much easier for Raspi foundation to release a more industrialized version than it is for another manufacturer to create this support and community. They could still operate on their non-profit mission with the profit.

Industrial microcontroller and embedded companies do need to also make their software and docs better. There seems to be some modernization but it's slow.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by joezydeco on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:24PM (#26439011)
The "pro" models exist - they're just not Pi's.

Ssssh. That's blasphemy here.

Any other ARM platform mentioned here gets downvoted and shouted down with "But it's not $40!". Let them play with their toys and leave them alone.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by dendrite9 on Friday March 12, 2021 @04:46PM (#26441369)
I'm curious about this as someone who keeps eyeing the Pi's for a solution to a few problems customers have brought up. It looks like there is a pretty big cost jump to get something equivalent, but I may just not know where to look.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by joezydeco on Friday March 12, 2021 @05:08PM (#26441574)
There are places outside HN where ARM-based product developers are happy to talk about this stuff and share their knowledge.