Official, Customized Raspberry Pi Versions Coming Soon (linuxgizmos.com)

DeviceGuru writes: The immensely popular Raspberry Pi will soon be offered in customized versions, through an exclusive arrangement between Raspberry Pi Trading and Element14. According to the companies' announcement, Element14 will provide design and manufacturing services to OEM customers to create 'bespoke designs' based upon the Raspberry Pi technology platform. That's weird U.K. English for saying that contracts for creating customized Raspberry Pi SBCs will entail substantial NRE fees and 3,000 to 5,000 unit orders, depending on the nature of the customization. The tweaked Pi's are likely to have revised board layouts, additional or alternative functions, interfaces, connectors, and memory configurations, and more. A handful of unsanctioned Raspberry Pi knock-offs have already appeared over the past couple of years, including various Orange Pi and Banana Pi flavors, which certainly didn't involve any 'bespeaking.' More info is at Element14's CustomPi page.

Comments

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

They definitely have my interest, we're buying Pis and knocking off the USB connectors and replacing them with header pins for internal sensor gear that we're repackaging into a small container to resell. Thing is, right now we're moving dozens of the things (they are pretty specialized), we'd probably never be able to sell 5000.

Re: Finally!

[spire3661]

Buy an Intel NUC if you want that. The latest 14nm NUCs are $140 on amazon right now. I have one setup using just bare OpenElec running 2 GB of Ram for $160 total. To get an RPi to that point i would need the PI, a NICE case, a power supply, SD card, IR receiver, Bluetooth and Wifi modules. Best case scenario for the PI is $30+15+7+10+8+10+10=$90 for a vastly inferior machine. Dont get me wrong i LOVE the PI 2 i have. I have 3 of them with the official Pi touchscreens, i jsut understand its limitations. They are for making terminals, not servers (for the record i ran a static website with a year uptime on an Pi no problem), For $70 more a NUC makes a VASTLY better choice.