Some time ago and still some companies does , During Single Board Computer System Design and Development, there was a clear seperation between projects developed for production and projects made on a development board.Development boards have always been a great way to test out individual parts of a project and once the all requiements met then Prodcution Board comes in picture. and Final deployment done on this Board.Prodcution Boards are generally customized and cost effective version of development borad.
But this process certainly takes more time to final product development and very costly process resulting in loss of Customer and Market Share.
Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi brought to market what is arguably the first single board computer that could reasonably be used in a commercial product. Previous SBCs were much more expensive or severely limited in functionality, but the Raspberry Pi was designed to be a powerful, low-cost device. The conversation around going to market with a pre-made device versus designing a custom circuit became more complicated. Even if you only intend to sell a few hundred units, the engineering effort to design down a development board into what you actually need almost always wins out over using a several throusand Rs not in several Lakh Rs SBC in every product. However, at 1000 Rs to 3600 Rs a pop, the Raspberry Pi and Orange Pi even lesser prices can be a cost effective base for products even at thousands of units. We are seeing more and more commercial products enter the market riding the wings of eagles in SBC form and performing quite well.
Cost will go down ..
The largest revisions in a product (both hardware and software) tend to occur between versions 1 and 2. While the prototype may go through dramatic evolutions in the lab, no one can really predict what the market wants from a product until it is released. It can feel risky to go to market with a “good-enough” product when you feel there is more work to be done, but experienced entrepreneurs see the first revision of a product as an extension of the prototyping process. It is often more important to get to market quickly than with the perfect product, so it may be wise to save costing-down you BOM with a custom board until rev 2 and just launch your first product exactly as prototyped – single board computer and all. This is probably not a long-term solution, and you should always do the math to decide the production volume threshold you would need to hit to make a custom board more cost effective. It is also wise to order all the boards you’ll need for a given run in a single batch to avoid variations, so if you are buying out a particular SBC every month, it’s probably time to redesign.
Ease of Testing at Mass Production
Development boards have always been a great tool for creating prototypes, but the product often has to be created piecemeal. The intention behind this sort of prototyping is to do a mass consolidation into a custom circuit before launch. Of course, at least a few things are bound to go wrong in the transition to a single PCB, the behavior may change a bit simply due to the different connections, and the debugging process could take weeks. Any development you do with the sensors, power, and processor of an SBC should carry over much more easily to a new board, and most SBCs have reference designs available to make picking and choosing the components you actually need as easy as possible. Cutting out the initial rat nest, even if you do not intend to go to market with the specific SBC, saves time and money on multiple fronts. Even expensive SBCs tend to cost less than the stack of development boards you’d need to get the same functionality, and the documentation all comes from the same source. This leads to cleaner code, better hardware portability, and much less frazzled engineers.
Community Support
Though the Raspberry Pi has the largest online community of any single board computer, any SBC is designed with the intent of being useful to a range of designers. Products like the BeagleBone have been used in everything from audio systems to robots, and people tend to freely share their code and design challenges.
Nothing happens in a vacuum anymore, and the best ideas can involve just looking at a common application through a different lens.
Ready to begin your SBC development
The best way to get started is to grab an SBC and start playing! We can help you get started on several boards, including the Raspberry Pi3 and Orange Pi Board. If you have a project you want to bring to market, see how Intime Information System can get you there even faster , Also you can write a mail to get supported at different Orange PI and Raspberry PI Board .