Hi Amit,

While I can understand your objections and believe you probably have more experience than me, I stand by my words. I especially do not concede that they are in any way misleading.

The amount of professional projects that exists and are successfully developed with a Raspberry Pi does not change the points I’m making: the Raspberry Pi is fundamentally a learning toy (which I love); it can be used for more serious applications, but to do so its shortcomings must be somehow fixed.

You said yourself the SD card is not the ideal residence for an embedded OS; while it is true that it can be made to last much longer — using the precautions that I listed in the article — a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian with a Desktop Environment and that is abruptly turned off a couple of times per day has a non-negligible chance to corrupt the file system in a few months of usage, and that is not and acceptable cost. Is this not a fair assessment?

I am aware of the ever-growing effort from the Linux community to improve support on every aspect. A few years ago these problems were much more serious; still, downloading an off-the-shelf distro and stripping it down is not the correct way to go when developing most embedded solutions, even if it can be made to work.

Working with Buildroot for the Raspberry Pi is an absolute pleasure, nothing to add on that. I’ve done it, and I’m quite content with the result.

I also mentioned other shortcomings, like its weak power supply, GPIO line and lack of peripherals (1 single UART is by no means enough). I find it hard to believe a bare Raspberry Pi can be used in a professional solution; you need to add external filtering and support for almost anything, treating it more like a SoM than a SoC. If that is the case, why not using an industrial grade System on Module?

The reason is that the Raspberry Pi is impossibly cheap. Sure, there is also a lot of software support, but in the end that’s not what drives the product choice.

My point here is simple: can the Rasperry Pi be used for professional solutions? Yes, with a lot of tweaking. Was it meant for that? No, absolutely. Why is it even an option then? Because of its low price and availability, but that is not a good enough reason — in my opinion.