>if you ever want to convert your project to something commercial

Surely at that point you would just treat the SBC as a reference design and fab your own boards?

A lot of commercial projects based on SBCs are relatively niche. It's very common to see things like lighting controllers, hobbyist stuff, etc, that's in the run size of 500 at the very most, basically be a raspberry pi with a custom hat in a custom plastic case. That can sustain a medium sized business.

Designing and fabbing your own boards doesn't always make sense until you're on a version 2, or 3.

use CM4 modules with your own carrier board makes sense when you're building 500+.

I read somewhere if you're building more than 10,000 devices, it's better to design the whole PCB board on your own. Before that volume, using SOM modules for time to market could be more reasonable.

10.000 probably isn't even enough to get Broadcom to reply to your emails. Good luck getting your hands on the required documentation, let alone the actual chips!

true,never liked Broadcom myself,wish RPi picked some different cpu from companies that are more open source friendly.

I wonder how that compares to Expressif.

I would tend to agree, but the supply limitations of the Pis has made me re-think that. I've heard with commercial agreements you can sometimes get Pis easier, but for launching a new product I'd be terrified that my growth would be hampered/limited by availability of the Pi

I have had zero problems getting pis for the past 3 years, but we generally pre-buy supply in bulk (500+)

Out of curiosity, what is the channel for making a purchase like this? I am in that ballpark in terms of supply for CM4s.

We use Insight.

I feel like there are ton of SBC designs out there. Many are still in Kickstarter/Launch phase. Others are sold-out. And the few that aren't sold out are selling for much higher than their reference price.

> if you ever want to convert your project to something commercial, I would still consider raspberry pi and beaglebone

Last time I checked, Broadcom forced you to integrate their compute modules into your product because there was no way they would sell their CPUs alone, no matter how many of them one would be willing to buy. That is not normal in the industrial world. As an example, the Allwinner H3 used in a lot of boards is $5 each for 1000+ pieces at Alibaba, or $10 at Olimex in the EU in single quantity. It's also well documented. https://linux-sunxi.org/H3

Things may be different with the RP2040, which is a very interesting part, but that chip has nothing in common, except the name, with the ones running the bigger Linux capable Raspberries.

I will just use SOM modules from RPi for products, carrier board is relatively easy to design

Also, depending on your designs, certifications may already be taken care of for WiFi, BT, etc by integrating it on the module.

It depends on your definition of "normal". A lot of high-end chips are completely unavailable on the open market, with manufacturers often not even willing to publish a product brief - let alone a datasheet. Try finding a Displayport MST hub chip, for example!

Things are indeed very different for the RP2040. They are widely available in both small and large quantities, and have excellent documentation publicly available. Alas, they are not SoCs!

> I wish there are some i.MX SBC

You can buy a Toradex, Variscite or PHYTEC module and pop a binary distro like Debian in there very easily.

Disclosure: I work for one of the companies above.

I wish those SOM vendors can produce smaller and cheaper carrier boards with their popular SOM installed, basically becomes a SBC with SOM, so I can start with them before buying more SOMs down the road.

RPi did the right way in my opinion: its (cheap) SBC format gains attention widely, then it started to sell its own SOM in large volumes.

We (as an industry) do produce some smaller SoMs. Long are gone the days of gigantic EVKs with a thousand interfaces, but it's costly compared to RPi, because of scale and all the certifications we make our hardware go through.

>if you ever want to convert your project to something commercial, I would still consider raspberry pi and beaglebone instead based on software maturity and community support and their ecosystem at large.

Seconding this for the Beaglebone Black (including the Industrial variant). FreeBSD support and onboard Ethernet set it apart from some alternatives.

There are quite a few manufacturers who offer NXP ARM SoC based modules. Variscite, Compulab, and SolidRun just to name a few.