Raspberry Pi for Industrial Uses

While a Pi might seem to be an attractive solution, I can't exactly advocate its use in true industrial circumstances for a number of reasons:

• Raspberry Pi is for the most part, a low-cost consumer product. While they could be applied in industrial situations, they're not designed to be as robust as true industrial solutions. When in industry, you might be controlling extremely expensive equipment, controlling something that could involve safety-of-life or you might be dealing with clients with high expectations, so failures are not acceptable. Further to this, the cost of providing support (e.g. a truck-roll to premises to fix the equipment) could very much outweigh any savings that you might get. Additionally, clients may demand systems which are built with reputable parts to alleviate risk regarding lack of support, satisfy their stakeholders that they're making an appropriate choice of equipment and allow service personnel from different companies to work on the equipment to bring it back into operation whenever a failure occurs.
• Consumer products typically do not cover the same level of operating temperature range, nor do they have things like conformal coatings to handle the dusty, greasy and sometimes humid environments encountered. They're also potentially not able to handle high vibration environments, along with potential voltage/current spikes/surges which can occur in automotive/industrial equipment settings. EMI from a heavy current-handling contactor could be sufficient to reboot or cause strange operating behaviour of microcontrollers/SBCs.
• Raspberry Pi SBC itself is very much "naked", so I suppose some of these points can be alleviated through careful treatment of the board with conformal coating, enclosure in an aluminium chassis for heatsinking and shielding, using specially designed HATs etc. But then that's a lot of work, it voids warranty and it's not guaranteed.
• Depending on how you utilise the Raspberry Pi - if you're just running a regular Linux OS, there are a few issues - for example:
  • It's a fully-fledged operating system, it takes a while to start up which can be unacceptable.
  • It also is based on open source code that evolves rapidly - this can break software as it is updated, and there can be security holes that need to be urgently patched at time without any centralized management mechanism.
  • It is a multitasking operating system - so the delay involved when servicing requests can vary depending on CPU load and how the I/O is being performed (e.g. interrupt or polled) which could be unacceptable.
  • The board itself also uses regular consumer RAM without any error correction - in case of memory corruption (which can happen organically due to charged particles, or due to power fluctuations), the board could crash or execute incorrectly - are there any failsafes that stop people from getting hurt or equipment from getting damaged?
  • The board is pretty sensitive to power - how are you going to supply good quality power to the board at all times and ensure that it never improperly shuts down (at the risk of corrupting the SD card requiring intervention)? Even having a UPS is no guarantee as batteries fail and servicing can be missed.
• You might need to develop your own software to network them "safely" - a lot of existing proprietary solutions have evolved over time which have helped their safety, but of course, some process controls stuff is not safe by design (e.g. vulnerable to replay attacks) and is only safe due to air gapping, but you'd always hope to advance the state of the art.
• SD card issues can be common. Early Raspberry Pis had contact issues with full-sized SD cards, whereas the later push-push type sockets with microSD generally work well, at least when not being vibrated. The big issue is the variance in flash memory quality - many consumer SD cards are TLC/QLC flash with very low endurance, meaning that they cannot sustain more than about 100-500 full cycle writes before they fail. Many are also optimised for large block writes rather than small block writes, making for a slightly reduced user experience when it comes to updating the OS for example. Opting for a high-endurance MLC industrial flash card is a better option, but these cards often have to be specially ordered at a higher price.
• Sometimes you can be caught out by unexpected issues - e.g. use a small microSD card with slightly wrong settings and you might find your system logs somehow fill up the storage, making the system completely unworkable. Besides, even things like system logs often will eat at flash write cycles whenever the unit is operational and something happens.
• Long term reliability is an unknown - I've had no major issues with well made boards, but early Raspberry Pi Model B boards had some BGA soldering issues, and some late boards are seemingly having some through-hole soldering issues with some Pi 3 B+'s failing randomly ... but since most of my critical stuff still runs on the original Model B, I've had very good luck with most of my Pis with the 5V supply failing frequently before the board does.

If you're looking to RPi as a money saving option, better think twice. In industry, the downtime could indeed eat up any savings, along with the need to engineer custom interfaces, treat boards specially, run updates, provide failsafes, provide documentation/support, ruggedize the unit and cover your legals.

- Gough

in one of my machine that utilize even industrial gadget, vibration cause the USB cable to loosen from its port. this problem will likely exist for raspberry pi too, now that it cramp four connectors onto such a small space. I have used those usb cable which has locking mechanism and only the industrial built quality items will have it

in one of my machine that utilize even industrial gadget, vibration cause the USB cable to loosen from its port. this problem will likely exist for raspberry pi too, now that it cramp four connectors onto such a small space. I have used those usb cable which has locking mechanism and only the industrial built quality items will have it