Comment by ChuckMcM
17 days ago
This is spot on. There is a market for small SBCs that spans from weapons to washing machines. When the RPi was introduced it threw a huge wrench into that market because it came in, with an operating system and storage, at under the price for the typical enclosure, much less the board itself of the existing systems. Look at PC104 systems for example.
The two pieces that have to be in place, as 'threshold' requirements are
1) The SBC exists and is available from a manufacturer
2) The same manufacturer provides an OS for that board and its associated board support package (BSP) which is drivers for all the I/O and system support functions.
The industry is full of people who went out of business because they chose Vendor A's SBC and Vendor B's OS, only to fail to deliver when it didn't work with Vendor A and Vendor B point at the other saying it was their problem. So people just don't do that any more.
What most vendors in the SBC space, prior to the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, didn't have was 20 to 30 thousand programmers writing random bits of code. What that meant was the Pi's feature set exploded rapidly, what's more there were lots of free tutorials on programming it.
In the SBC space before Pi that "Programmer Training" was one of the ways the vendor made better margins at $500/hr for a class of "up to 15 students" at our facilities.
So before, higher priced SBC + BSP, and you had to send your programmers on a road trip to the vendors facility to get the hands on training, and then you had to pay every time you made a service request.
After, cheap SBC + BSP!, a bunch of different programming videos on the web for free! Program doesn't work? Just ask the community of enthusiasts what they think!
We are not surprised a whole lot of the smaller SBC vendors closed down after that.
I recently sat through a demonstration from Arduino, they're trying to get into that space with a "Pro" line of SBCs and enclosures.
https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/pro-family
Yup. That is where the money is, it isn't in "hobbyists".
It will be interesting to see if the RISC-V efforts will allow for vendors to supply "50 year" SBCs (which is to say they are guaranteed to have pin-for-pin and bug-for-bug replacement SBCs for the period of 50 years.) That was a weapon system requirement back in the day that got waived for electronics because vendors couldn't "force" chip makers to keep making the chips they would need for repairs when there was no volume. But if you can define a socket/footprint and then drop in an FPGA "core" which can evolve but always appears to the circuit to be the same processor, that will be an interesting evolution point.
Another thing is that Arduino is focusing on is going for the mechanical engineers. This is a very lucrative market for electronics products. Just ask National Instruments and every other company that makes a PLC.
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