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.

gadget.iom over 10 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

Hi Roht Kadecha

The best place to get started is here The specified item was not found.
There are a series of getting started videos available on the top of the page, links to suggested parts, and discussions from fellow starters.
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e14 Contributor over 10 years ago

Dear friend,
I need schematic for what you suggested to refer to me. In that "Get Started With Pi" , their its mentioned for a kit but from where can i have its schematic?
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clem57 over 10 years ago

spannerspencer
Does this apply to new Pi 3?
Thanks,
Clem
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clem57 over 10 years ago in reply to wesleyfurr

So Broad-com is under the thumbs of a certain person in the news today? Makes me wonder who.
Clem
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e14 Contributor over 10 years ago in reply to clem57

our biggest issue - industrial user - is that we need a minimum five year life. Any component would require OEM driver support for that period, and that would have to be built into the contract for the customisation.
Should Broadcom decide to pull support for the specific chip used on whichever flavour of Pi used, Element14 would have to support it anyway, for that lifetime - same for any ancillary components.

Is that an issue?
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rdibened over 10 years ago in reply to rolandl

I don't know about totally getting rid of the SD card. I have had a lot of problems with SD cards on my RPi's. I presently have a RPI-2 and use the SD card to start the boot process and boot from a small (32GB) SSD drive connected via a USB adapter. I would love to see an on-board SATA interface. The drive I am using has the root partition and also a swap partition. I am running Ubuntu and the unit is solid, I just with I could get the drive connected directly to a SATA interface instead of using a USB adapter.
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florinj over 9 years ago in reply to rdibened

Maybe you should explore a new configuration: a SD card + SO like a live CD - that lives entirely in RAM with regularly sensor/proces data back-ups on SD card. But I think it works only with 512MB RAM variant of PI.
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florinj over 9 years ago in reply to e14 Contributor

Yaaa... Some 90 degree lateral socket. Imagine the possibilities you may have with 8GB of RAM... Loading the SO entirely in RAM and having /tmp folder and SWAP running entirely in RAM. That configuration can give a long lasting life to the SD card. This kind of customization can become very popular. It is a better solution than soldering some industrial SLC FLASH on board - more reliable. But of course will be relatively hard to achieve because of the inherent complication of PCB - all those pads must be connected to the CPU... I think that can be achieved with a new additional layer to the PCB.
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