<story><title>Strato Pi – An Industrial Raspberry Pi</title><url>https://www.sferalabs.cc/strato-pi/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimbius</author><text>Ive worked in industrial manufacturing before, and I presently work as an engine mechanic in a small chain of midwestern diesel repair stores.  I use &lt;i&gt;regular&lt;/i&gt; raspberry pi&amp;#x27;s to pull data from ECU&amp;#x2F;OBD systems, and I even store that data on a PI server as part of a customers work ticket data.&lt;p&gt;the problem with anything thats &amp;#x27;industrialized&amp;#x27; is that so many companies use this as a chance to gin up the price and double down on rent-seeking behavior.  This thing takes a $45 pi and jacks the price up to $250USD.  Some of the goofier features include:&lt;p&gt;- on-board buzzer.  You know, because over the constant din of lathe, shave, and heat treat assembly line systems you&amp;#x27;re surely going to pay attention to the buzzer from something the size of a pack of smokes.  anything essential should be shown on the light tower or picked up by QA.&lt;p&gt;- standard RS-232 and RS-485 interfaces to the Raspberry Pi serial line, with opto-isolator and electrostatic discharge protection: Motoman, Fanuc, Mitsubishi, and almost every other automation hardware have used cat5 for a decade.  doesnt the pi have grounded cat5?&lt;p&gt;CAN network support - god no.  This jumps into the realm of medical systems, elevator controls, and passenger vehicles.  all of these are made of intrinsically isolated circuits and go through some of the most rigorous testing imaginable.  For example, RF leakage common in a PI could cause aberrant failures or signaling problems in robotics that arent expecting it.  CAN type controllers can withstand shock&amp;#x2F;heat&amp;#x2F;humidity many times that of what a normal computer can handle.  Introducing the PI as a CAN device is asking for grievous bodily harm as a service.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshvm</author><text>On the pricing front. I&amp;#x27;ve designed systems which use the RPi as a base and are sold for several hundred pounds (spectrometers).&lt;p&gt;The reason is basically margin and not going out of business. If you want to make any money, you need to sell at around 3x your BOM cost to compensate for distribution, optional sales events, labour, amortised certification costs and so on.&lt;p&gt;Working backwards, $250 means about $85 in parts. A custom printed DIN rail case probably costs $15-20 in small volume, the Pi is $45 and that only leaves $20 or so for the PCB and components which seems easy enough if they&amp;#x27;ve over-specced it for industry. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if this thing costs $100 to build; not including labour, packaging and shipping.&lt;p&gt;This is a classic &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m an engineer and could build this for 1&amp;#x2F;3 the price&amp;quot; - sure you could. But you couldn&amp;#x27;t sell it that cheaply and make a business out of it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Strato Pi – An Industrial Raspberry Pi</title><url>https://www.sferalabs.cc/strato-pi/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimbius</author><text>Ive worked in industrial manufacturing before, and I presently work as an engine mechanic in a small chain of midwestern diesel repair stores.  I use &lt;i&gt;regular&lt;/i&gt; raspberry pi&amp;#x27;s to pull data from ECU&amp;#x2F;OBD systems, and I even store that data on a PI server as part of a customers work ticket data.&lt;p&gt;the problem with anything thats &amp;#x27;industrialized&amp;#x27; is that so many companies use this as a chance to gin up the price and double down on rent-seeking behavior.  This thing takes a $45 pi and jacks the price up to $250USD.  Some of the goofier features include:&lt;p&gt;- on-board buzzer.  You know, because over the constant din of lathe, shave, and heat treat assembly line systems you&amp;#x27;re surely going to pay attention to the buzzer from something the size of a pack of smokes.  anything essential should be shown on the light tower or picked up by QA.&lt;p&gt;- standard RS-232 and RS-485 interfaces to the Raspberry Pi serial line, with opto-isolator and electrostatic discharge protection: Motoman, Fanuc, Mitsubishi, and almost every other automation hardware have used cat5 for a decade.  doesnt the pi have grounded cat5?&lt;p&gt;CAN network support - god no.  This jumps into the realm of medical systems, elevator controls, and passenger vehicles.  all of these are made of intrinsically isolated circuits and go through some of the most rigorous testing imaginable.  For example, RF leakage common in a PI could cause aberrant failures or signaling problems in robotics that arent expecting it.  CAN type controllers can withstand shock&amp;#x2F;heat&amp;#x2F;humidity many times that of what a normal computer can handle.  Introducing the PI as a CAN device is asking for grievous bodily harm as a service.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsync</author><text>&amp;quot;CAN network support - god no. This jumps into the realm of medical systems, elevator controls, and passenger vehicles.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;When I see &amp;quot;CAN network support&amp;quot; I am not thinking of &lt;i&gt;controlling&lt;/i&gt; those systems, but rather, having the ability to read those systems ... or in the case of a device like a VAG-COM, being able to set new values, etc.&lt;p&gt;I agree that I would not want amateur tie-ins to critical safety systems like elevators and bridges.</text></comment>