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posted by martyb on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the homemade-pi dept.

Raspberry Pi has launched a program for approved design partners to help businesses integrate Raspberry Pi into new products:

As it has its best ever year for sales, Raspberry Pi wants to do more to help businesses that want to integrate its tiny computers into their devices.

The Cambridge-based single-board computer maker has sold seven million Raspberry Pi units during 2020. In March, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton said it had its second highest monthly sales ever, reaching 640,000 units, with sales accelerating as people sought cheap computers for learning during lockdown.

[...] But a big chunk of its sales are destined for industrial applications. Raspberry Pi estimates 44% of the computers are sold to the industrial market each year. It bases this figure on the observation that large numbers of older models continue being bought after sales of the latest Raspberry Pi decline.

[...] To support industrial customers, Raspberry Pi has launched an Approved Design Partners program that other businesses match up with if they want to integrate the Raspberry Pi into their products.

It's also published a new 'for industry' website with resources for those who want to integrate the Pi into their products. The primary model for that is the Compute Module 4, which lacks the usual USB and HDMI ports and is compact enough to fit in small products.

Blog post.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Raspberry Pi: Ten Years of the Forum and Blog 29 comments

Although initially expecting to only sell a few thousand units, the Raspberry Pi has sold more than 40 million computers to date. Over time it has developed quite a fan base. Part of cultivating that base has been through a dedicated blog and help forum. The Raspberry Pi blog and forum have now turned 10 years old.

We’ve kept every single blog post we’ve ever written up on this site, starting way back in July 2011. Ten years is a long time in internet terms, so you’ll find some dead links in some earlier posts; and this website has undergone a number of total redesigns, so early stuff doesn’t tend to have the pretty thumbnail associated with it to show you what it’s all about. (Our page design didn’t use them back then.) But all the same, for the internet archeologists among you, or those interested in the beginnings of Raspberry Pi, those posts from before we even had hardware are worth flicking through.

There are two organizations involved. Raspberry Pi Trading makes the hardware, the magazines, the peripherals, etc. The Raspberry Pi Foundation runs the charitable programs.

Previously:
(2021) Raspberry Pi Begins Selling its RP2040 Microcontroller for $1
(2021) The Ongoing Raspberry Pi Fiasco
(2021) Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS
(2020) Raspberry Pi: We're Making it Easier to Build Our Devices into Your Hardware
(2020) Raspberry Pi 400: Its Designer Reveals More About the Faster Pi 4 in the $70 PC's Keyboard


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:34PM (9 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:34PM (#1088653) Journal

    Rather than link to an M$ spam site like ZDNet, use the source at the Raspberry Pi Foundation's own blog: Supporting Raspberry Pi’s industrial customers [raspberrypi.org]. If you're not an M$ partner then ZDNet has no added value and can only obfuscate the original message or put a bad spin on it. Anyway, with 44% of their sales being industrial, they are really ramping up their industrial support. Among other things they now have an industry-oriented section on the official web site [raspberrypi.org]. Primary sources are better than secondary, especially antagonistic or hostile secondary sources.

    I hope the Raspberry Pi Foundation / Raspberry Pi Trading don't lose sight of their original goal of bringing both general purpose and physical computing to incoming generations of kids. So even if they bring in a lot of money from industry and some hobbyists, I hope they keep their focus on helping get their computers into the hands of kids. It's a low-yield approach. For every hundred or thousand kids that get hold of a unit, one or two will take to it and really learn. However, that may be enough to allow society to progress.

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    • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:37PM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:37PM (#1088657) Journal

      I reloaded the summary and now see the official site. Thanks.

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:47PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:47PM (#1088662) Journal

      I added the blog link before you finished your comment.

      The CM4 form factor change seems to be going over well. And options for 1/2/4/8 GB of RAM allow a lot more use cases to be targeted now.

      I hope the Raspberry Pi Foundation / Raspberry Pi Trading don't lose sight of their original goal of bringing both general purpose and physical computing to incoming generations of kids.

      They publish books, bundle educational software with the OS, do outreach on the blog, etc. But the biggest thing lately is the Raspberry Pi 400, which is basically intended for kids and school environments [raspberrypi.org]. It bodes well for the educational mission.

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    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:48PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:48PM (#1088663)

      Back in the '80s the odds of kids learning "the computer" given access were better than you are stating, at least in our school. We had 1200 students, and of each group of 1200, at least 2 went on to high competence in technical careers.

      As for officially supporting their industrial 44% - that has the potential to grow their industrial adoption 5-10x, which would mean that industrial share could become over 90% of Raspberry Pi sales, and that's O.K. - even if their educational sales remain flat, it could fund grant programs with free hardware and/or instruction for schools - and above all else, it keeps the volumes up which ensures their future viability.

      I think the Pi 400 should go a long way towards breaking down adoption barriers in education, it's more plug and play than anything they've done yet and it remains 100% compatible with the more embedded/tinker oriented Pi 4. Personally, I remote into my Pis to do development work, but that's a much more complex/expensive setup. A kid can get started with a Pi 400 and if their hardware aspirations take off, they can buy Zeros or Pi 4s very affordably to make stuff with, stuff they develop the software for on their Pi 400.

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    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2020, @02:48AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2020, @02:48AM (#1088749)

      This may be the first time I see an admission of raspis used in industrial settings. I run them near industrial in an academic setting. Besides the sd card eventually getting corrupted, before I made the image read only, they have been rock solid compared to the old and expen$$$ive pc 104 boards we started with.

      I just bought three more 3+ boards; my concern is they'll eventually go too much in the direction of desktop replacement, wasting power.

      • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday December 18 2020, @07:44AM (2 children)

        by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 18 2020, @07:44AM (#1088813) Journal

        The Raspberry Pi Foundation's blog post features the compute module and generally in an industrial environment you would use a compute module form factor instead. Or I gather that you can buy a license and design a custom board using either the normal form factor or the compute module as a start. They've even done that in-house with the 400 versus the 4B.

        Depending on how you are using them in teaching you might be interested in the Turing Pi 2 [turingpi.com] for teaching parallel processing. It might be ok as a smaller NAS, too.

        My concern with them heading in the direction of a desktop replacement is that it takes them out of the SBC and industrial market. As long as they were "isolated" in that market they were not encroaching on M$ territory and were somewhat left alone by the Cult of Bill. By entering into the new market they risk ending up like OLPC because now if M$ has resources for infiltration and attack, they will go all out to defend what remains of the productivity suite file format monopoly. The desktop monopoly seems like it might be broken now, due to so many schools using Chromebooks and so many other people doing most of their activities on mobile phones, but M$ is all about the data formats now and that mostly relies on Windows still. As for funding, M$ just got a $2.4 billion handout from Trump this summer, so they can continue to lose more money on Windows and Azure for a while and still underwrite attacks.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2020, @12:39AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2020, @12:39AM (#1089116)

          I think windows runs on raspi though? Not sure why MS would attack them.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @05:43PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @05:43PM (#1089621)

          I need USB, ethernet and bluetooth though.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2020, @05:13PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2020, @05:13PM (#1088931)

      Primary sources are better than secondary

      Please tell that to Wikipedia.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @01:24AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @01:24AM (#1089471)

        Wikipedia is a tertiary resource. Their purpose is to provide a broad overview of a topic and provide access to resources to get more detail. From their point of view, secondary sources are better because they already have narrowing and summarized specific issues by subject matter experts, rather than the writer of the Wikipedia article having to synthesize such information themselves in a more dubious manner.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:51PM (6 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:51PM (#1088665) Journal

    Compute Module 4 is thinner without the need for a SO-DIMM connector. It could show up in some handheld gaming devices, maybe a phone?

    I predict that when they finally make a successor to Raspberry Pi Zero, it will be quad-core [linuxgizmos.com] with 2 GB of RAM, and will have 3-4 USB Type-C ports (used for power, display, and data transfer).

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 17 2020, @11:03PM (5 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday December 17 2020, @11:03PM (#1088697)

      One of the things I'd like to see the Pi Zero keep is its low power profile. It can already playback HD video, I'd be much happier with a 75% reduction in power consumption in the Pi Zero than a 4x increase in "compute power" on a flat power budget. The Pi 4 and similar are driving up the compute power curve, but at what point is it "enough," particularly when a large number of Pi projects amount to a relay controlled by a timer?

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      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday December 17 2020, @11:09PM (3 children)

        by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Thursday December 17 2020, @11:09PM (#1088700) Journal

        when a large number of Pi projects amount to a relay controlled by a timer

        That's wrong platform chosen for the task. You don't need whole operating system for that.
        Tiniest Arduino would be sufficient enough.

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        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 18 2020, @02:58AM (2 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday December 18 2020, @02:58AM (#1088755)

          Tiniest Arduino would be sufficient enough.

          Yes, and no.

          Thing I like about relays on a timer on RPi is that you start in Raspbian with a decent suite of peripherals, so when you want to add a WiFi http interface to your timer it's no big thing.

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          • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday December 18 2020, @07:48AM (1 child)

            by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 18 2020, @07:48AM (#1088815) Journal

            The Arduino can still do that. The difference being that you have to decide in advance about the hardware. It sounds like you might do some proof of concept work on the Raspberry Pi, or even a full-size Arduino with stick-on peripherals. Then when you have settled long term on the hardware capabilities, spend the $15 on one of the specialized Arduinos. You can get models with WiFi and there is just (barely) enough processing capability to also run TLS.

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            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 18 2020, @03:17PM

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday December 18 2020, @03:17PM (#1088883)

              For me, $10 vs $15 vs $20 per copy really isn't nearly the consideration as is the mental work of maintaining two development environments.

              If you're really optimizing cost, a wifi connected http interfaced relay with a timer can be retailed in consumer friendly packaging for $10 a copy - indicating an electronics BOM cost under $4. I might make 6 copies of a really "high volume" hobby project, most only one or two - the hours spent on multiple environments just aren't worth it.

              Having said that, I respect the people who know Arduino and make things work in that world. I just prefer Pi because of its very close similarity to Ubuntu on Intel, like most of my code is actually developed in Ubuntu on Intel and directly deployed on Pi from the same git repo with zero changes, not even cross compiled - just using the same dev suite.

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      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 17 2020, @11:34PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday December 17 2020, @11:34PM (#1088708) Journal

        More performance at the same wattage would be fine. You can underclock or even disable cores for battery-powered applications.

        a large number of Pi projects amount to a relay controlled by a timer?

        This (among other reasons) is why I don't think Zero will get an update for a long time. They are committed to producing it through at least January 2026, maybe they overhaul it in 2025 on a better node than "40nm".

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2020, @06:05AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2020, @06:05AM (#1088797)

    Any info about temp ranges? I just clicked some random links in the official pages in... and bad luck or not really supplied. Because industrial should mean industrial (-40C to +85C seems to be the standard), not repurposed commercial (0C to +70C). Searching says the SoC is -40C to 85C... but what about the rest?

    Oh, from the search https://www.element14.com/community/thread/18726/l/operating-temperature-range [element14.com] old range had non-industrial parts.

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