Your Breakdown of Raspberry Pi Customization

You might have just seen the official joint announcement from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and element14 regarding an exclusive new customization service for the Raspberry Pi, and we'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Bulk Customization Services

The facts are these:

You can now open a dialogue with element14 about creating a Raspberry Pi that's tailored to specific needs, on orders of 3,000 units or more. You can reconfigure the board, add new functionality, add or remove features, change the memory configuration; pretty much anything besides tinkering with the GPU and related software. A full breakdown of the service can be found here: Raspberry Pi Customization Service

Cooking Up a Custom Raspberry Pi

Clearly this is aimed squarely at OEM manufacturers, suppliers and bigger companies due to the minimum order quantity, but such places are still populated by engineers and makers who'd be the ones that determine just what a customized Raspberry Pi would require for specific needs.

So we thought it'd be valuable to get the element14 community's opinion on this new service.

Will companies find a lot of use for it, and what might they need a custom Pi for?

Which kinds of customization are likely to be the most popular? Expansion of the device, or minimization?

Give us your predictions on the future of element14's Raspberry Pi Customization Service below, and who knows how it might evolve.

spannerspencer over 10 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

Hey, that's an interesting notion though, Enrico. What if someone started a Kickstarter campaign to have a batch of 3,000+ customised RPis put together (using the crowd's bulk buying power), and then effectively making them available to users in much smaller (even single) quantities. It'd be no small task, as you point out, but it's an intriguing thought, eh?
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e14 Contributor over 10 years ago in reply to spannerspencer

The trick being to find the modification to the Pi that will gather enough buyers for 3000 Pi's of a brand new design. I'm not sure if it will sell when everyone wants something slightly different.

Lets imagine two Modded Pi's:
Super Pi: As normal Pi + Arduino, RTC, DAC, Relays.
DAC output at 0-10v, Arduino analog inputs able to accept 0-10v or 4-20mA at 10v, relay outputs safe for use at 240v 10A.
Cost £100?

Slim Pi: Normal Pi with reduced height by: Swapping double height USB sockets for single height, GPIO pin header not soldered on (user can then solder to individual through hole pins or add a header as they choose). True Powerdown facility added (so when you tell the Pi to turn off, it actually stops using power) with through hole power on/off pin headers so you can add an external switch.
Cost: a little more than a normal Pi?

Each of those cases would appeal to a market, but would that market be large enough to support 3000 purchases?
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gadget.iom over 10 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

Doug Jefferies wrote:

I'm not sure if it will sell when everyone wants something slightly different.

Lets imagine two Modded Pi's:

Super Pi: As normal Pi + Arduino, RTC, DAC, Relays.

DAC output at 0-10v, Arduino analog inputs able to accept 0-10v or 4-20mA at 10v, relay outputs safe for use at 240v 10A.

Cost £100?

Exactly!

You'd get "What about a DDR3 Socket", "What about SATA sockets", "Can it have a VGA and DVI sockets", "Where's the WiFi", "Bluetooth?", "NFC", etc etc.
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e14 Contributor over 10 years ago in reply to gadget.iom

Precisely,

Anyone doing a Kickstarter would have to find a market niche that the Pi variant will fill, a niche big enough to support 3000 sales whilst being adaptable enough to absorb the inevitable requests for slight variations and still be cheaper than other existing products.

I hope we see some of these come to life, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Perhaps the Element 14 team will have lower prices for open designs than proprietary ones?
This would make sense as a broad library of decent open designs will allow for cheap modifications in the future.
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gadget.iom over 10 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

I imagine most of them will be private customisations for companies to integrate with their products.
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rolandl over 10 years ago

2 things that would improve our beloved Pi would be WiFi and getting rid of the sd-card.
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SGarciaV over 10 years ago in reply to rolandl

Why, regarding the SD card? What alternative do you see for the SD card?
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balearicdynamics over 10 years ago in reply to SGarciaV

Internal flash memory, that is what the SD card replaces respect a normal Linux embedded device.
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gadget.iom over 10 years ago in reply to rolandl

I believe the SD card satisfied the education sector, where students could swap-out their work for shared classroom devices.
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rolandl over 10 years ago in reply to gadget.iom

It did. This thread however is about customization of the Pi and if I were to change it I'd get rid of the Sd card in favor of something that is soldered onto the PCB and it would include Wifi and removal of the ethernet connector for my application.
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